ABSTRACT
Since the early decades of the nineteenth century, peoples on opposite sides of the Pacific have come to regard each other with paradoxical mixtures of admiration and disgust, curiosity and aversion, spiritual selflessness and basic economic greed. Their cultural collisions have been punctuated by intermittent warfare. The threatening gunboats of Commodore Perry’s black ships off the Shogun’s port of Uraga, the march of US marines to capture Beijing from the Boxers and the bloody colonial struggles of American colonialists in the Philippines were climaxed with the titanic sea, air and land battles of the Second World War – only to be followed by more war in Korea and Vietnam. Yet throughout the past half century American technology acted as a spur to the world’s second industrial revolution in East Asia, while American consumers stood happily in line to buy the resultant Asian products. Americans proved alternately fascinated and repelled by traditional ‘exotic’ Asian cultures. Yet the echo of 1776 and America’s own enlightenment revolution served to inspire young Asian revolutionaries to modernize, while their intellectuals continued to deplore the assertiveness of American ‘individualism’.
