| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Harvard University; Hilary Conroy, Cameron Hurst III, and Frederick Dickinson, University of Pennsylvania; John Hall and James Crowley, Yale University; Marius Jansen, Princeton University; and Peter Duus, Stanford University contributed to these Japanese studies.
In Chinese studies, American scholars mainly concentrated on the study of Chinese modernization, nationalism, revolutions, including the Taiping millenarian rebellion and the Communist revolution, the prehistory of China, and why the Chinese fell behind on the way to modernity. However, half a century after World War II, we have not overcome the colonial legacy. Professor John King Fairbank of Harvard University, in his book, China: A New History, contends: “The path of historical wisdom is to find out what issues are in dispute, to identify major current questions, rather than to try to resolve them here and now. Our libraries are littered with the pronouncements of writers who knew all about China but could not see how much they did not know. The expansion of our knowledge has expanded the circumference of our ignorance.”13 Fairbank argues: “If we wish to understand the social and human factors in China's falling behind the West in the modern period, we must look more closely at her Korean history, classical thought, and many other features of her high civilization to see how they all may have played a part.”14 However, there are few scholars who have paid attention to ancient Korean history, classical thought, and civilization, which were actually an important part of Chinese prehistory.
Ancient Korean history was based on the millenarian doctrine. Without ancient Korean millenarianism and history, we cannot understand true social, religious, political, and human factors not only in China but also in Japan and Asia, including the Taiping and the Tonghak millenarian movements. After the Second World War, the United States helped the colonized nations recover their territories. However, American scholarship of Asia has not overcome the influence of a colonial legacy, even though more than half a century has passed since the War. One of the most important tasks of scholars is to find and write on the truth of human affairs from a colonial legacy or distorted historical accounts. Three or four days before General