Sagacious Monks and Bloodthirsty Warriors

Although China and Japan have had virtually uninterrupted contact going back over many centuries, the lion’s share of works addressing both China and Japan’s overseas contacts—cultural and political—have concerned the West. Before the twentieth century, however, Western contacts with Japan were infrequent at best.

Throughout the centuries before the twentieth, Chinese culture in the form of books, art objects, religious items, and the like flowed into Japan in great quantity. Within the scholarly community, some attention has focused on Japan and the Japanese elite’s reception of the cultural flow and their response to it. By contrast, little if anything has been written about how the Chinese saw the Japanese. By addressing this glaring lacuna, the essays in this volume make a unique contribution.