I really enjoyed the three readings for Friday, especially the “Chinese Histories on Japan” because seeing a different perspective on Japanese history was really interesting. One question that I had was about the discussion question “How do the Chinese people look at the Japanese?”. For the most part, I read the source as the Chinese seeing them as inferior to them. For example, they point out that the Japanese do not have a written language, and the Emperor especially seemed very against their religions. One part that really stood out was when the Japanese sent a letter saying “The Son of Heaven in the land where the sun rises addresses a letter to the Son of Heaven in the land where the sun sets. We hope you are in good health”. The source then says, “When the emperor saw this letter, he was displeased and told the official in charge of foreign affairs that this letter from the barbarians was discourteous”, showing that the Emperor thought of the Japanese as barbarians. However, in the part in the reading that talks about the consequences for things like murder and thievery, etc, it says, “The people are gentle and peaceful. Litigation is infrequent and theft seldom occurs”. Is the thought that the Japanese are barbarians just that of the Emperor and there is disagreement within the Chinese people, or are both of these thoughts aligning with each other in a way that I am not understanding? Because in my mind they seem to contradict each other but I could very well be misunderstanding.
The other readings were also very interesting. I sometimes struggle with figuring out exactly what I do not understand until I am being questioned or in a discussion which is when I realize that I did not understand something, so I am not sure I understood everything in the reading. In the “Reform Edict”, what I gathered was that the land ownership was very unequal, with some of the population having an abundance of land and others barely having any, and the solution was for a centralized force to control the ownership of land to make it more equal, as well as having taxes for amount of land owned, but I am not sure that is correct. Overall, I think I got at least the big picture of the readings.
