The Cultural Foundations of the East Asian Classical World: A Program for Graduate Study  
  This workshop offers a view of the classical world of East Asia as a cultural sphere based on a common educational foundation. This is not the preconceived traditional China-centered view of center and periphery, but a framework of classical East Asia as a unified world in which each region, distinct in language and culture, also shares with the others common cultural foundations based on communication through common written characters (kanji) and a common written style (classical Chinese or kanbun). It is in fact within this broader East Asian cultural world that distinctive conceptions of culture in each of these regions developed. Such a world cannot be analyzed through a paradigm that treats the classics of every country from separate ethnologic and national perspectives (as with the study of classical Japanese literature in Japan, or of classical Chinese in China and Korean literature in Korea). This workshop is part of a larger project that aims to rethink classical Japan within the framework of classical East Asia. An additional goal is the creation and promotion of a corresponding educational program that seeks not only to foster new academic viewpoints but also to cultivate the basic practical and technical skills of philology and interpretation required for East Asian studies. Papers will be presented in Japanese with English translation.  
 

Kônoshi Takamitsu

  
  ■ The Problematic of the East Asian Classical World.  
    I will introduce our research project as a response to the current situation of the study of the East Asian classics in Japan, and highlight two issues of particular importance: First, the perceived "crisis" in learning of the classical Chinese language (kanbun) at high school and university, and second, the increasing need to transcend the national frameworks of literary studies. I will give an example from medieval Japan that will demonstrate how the presence of common knowledge from the East Asian world affected the themes found in various texts of the Japanese intellectuals of that period.  
   

Tokumori Makoto

  
  ■ Rethinking the Common Aspects of Education in the East Asian Classical World.  
    The cultural basis of the East Asian classical world was formed through educational and learning practices. Chinese dictionaries and classified encyclopedias played a key role in that process of formation. Moving away from the traditional emphasis on the Four Books and Five Classics, this paper argues that our own educational programs require a double focus on the actual texts that were used for educational purposes throughout early and medieval East Asia, as well as the various autochthonous educational texts that were created in different regions of East Asia. A partial draft of a textbook based on this approach will be presented as part of the talk.  
   

Kônoshi Takamitsu

  
  ■ The Plurality of Readings in the East Asian Classical World.  
    While the Chinese characters that circulated throughout the East Asian classical world conserved their Chinese readings (on) to some extent, the actual pronunciation of the characters varied greatly according to period and region. Similarly, the classical language written with these characters, while originally read according to Chinese readings (on), was also adapted to the languages of different regions so that various forms of reading such as idu and kundoku developed. It was this plurality of readings for the same script that made possible the formation of East Asia into one loosely connected cultural world. With this in mind, my talk will propose an approach to the classics that takes this plurality of readings into account.  
   

Saitô Mareshi

  

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