GILBERT ROZMAN OPENED the third session by describing a research
project he has been engaged in during the past three years with a number of
faculty and graduate students at Princeton University together with some
outsiders. The objective of the project has been to identify a systematic way of
approaching the topic of cultural identity. The project, which will result in a
book, has ended up emphasizing three themes. First, in an introductory
section, the issue of what international perspective one might take on the East
Asian region, viewed as one of three regions of rapid modernization in the
world -- the West, the "North" (the Russian tradition and the socialist path to
modernization which grew out of it), and East Asia. Rozman's group sought
to specify historical characteristics of each of the three types of modernization
and their combinations.

The second, and core, section of the volume deals with the Confucianization
of each of the three major East Asian areas. Patricia Ebrey wrote on Con-
fucianization of China, emphasizing the further spread of Confucian ideas into
social behavior in the late imperial era, especially from the Song to the Ming
dynasties. JaHyun Kim Haboush wrote an account of the Corifucianization of
Korea, and Martin Colcott did a paper on the Confucianization of Japan and
its limits, emphasizing the transition to the Tokugawa era. An attempt was
made, albeit imprecisely, to measure the degree to which the societies in
question had become Confucianized.

In the process the group became very aware of the extent to which the term
Confucianism encompasses many different meanings. Accordingly, in the final
part of the book, especially, an attempt was made to distinguish types of
Confucianism. This section deals with the transition from the nineteenth
century into the modern era, with one chapter comparing China and Japan
and another (written by Michael Robinson) focusing on Korea. Since this
classification seems to fit in well with the earlier discussion of types of discourse,
Rozman considered it especially appropriate for the workshop's attention. He

-39-