Who am I and Why am I doing this
I’m Claire Li from Qingdao, China.
Since the very young ages of my life, I’ve been told that my hometown is rich in Chinese cultures. Shandong Province, the province of my city, is the birthplace of Confucius, the founder of Confucianism, one of the most important ideologies of both ancient and modern China; Lao Shan (崂山, Mount Lao), the mountain that I live by, lives one of the 21 most important Taoist temples, Tai Qing Gong (太清宫, the Tai Qing Temple), in modern China.
But when things are so mingled together with my life, I never learned to treasure them. Although Chinese was my favorite subject in primary school, I did not think I would someday live without it by any chance. After middle school in an international school, I came to the U.S. for high school as a freshman from China. Everything was great— friends were friendly, teachers taught knowledge, but something felt like missing inside of me. I could FaceTime my parents, but I could not not miss the culture I was nurtured within and was then fading away. Changes were good, and I loved experiencing what life is like in another part of the world, but I do not want to abandon the unique memory my culture gives me.
The sudden attack of the COVID-19 pandemic consolidated such thoughts. In this tragic yet precious opportunity to re-experience Chinese cultures, I found out interesting phenomenon: Due to events such as the Cultural Revolution in contemporary Chinese history, China is now losing a lot of the precious philosophies and cultures, especially that in the religions. Many, including me a few months before, consider China as an atheist country, regardless of the rich cultural impact laying within the religions. Japan, on the contrary, preserves cultures well. Since ancient China, Japan has been one of the regions being impacted by Chinese culture, and they do a good job maintaining the essence of what they have yet at the same time incorporating them into more acceptable and modern ways of inheritance, such as anime. Anime can be said to be the most impactful medium of cultural exports in East Asia. Japanese cultures are also being exported to China as well, including many elements of cultures we have forgotten to preserve. Their work in globalizing their culture is more successful than that of any other East Asian entertainments. Thus, I will investigate how both Chinese and Wester religions and philosophies impacted Japanese culture, how and why can Japanese preserve cultures well, and how did they export their impacts back to the world.