What makes Asia Asia?
Definitions of Asia have long been a question of ambiguity. No single assumption could be reached, for Asia, of great complexity, has been multifaceted. Takeuchi, in his speech, emphasized the extreme difficulty to see even just Japan and China “collectively as one cultural entity extremely difficult to see them outside of their resistance to Europe” amid their extensive cultural exchanges (Calichman, 2005). Sun Ge, on another touch, pinpointed that Asia is “not only a geographic location, but also a measure of judgement” (Chen & Chua, 2009).
Instead of being a geographical attribute, Asia has been a concept, created by the Ancient Greek (Asia, n.d.), in opposition to Greek itself, and later the whole Europe. The term appears to confine a plurality of nations to an ambiguous single entity in which Eurocentrism is, inevitably, rooted, and concealed. Even Edward Said in his book, Orientalism, said the “symmetrical” reciprocal of the notion of Orientalism, a distorted rendering of the Land of Sunrise created by Western academics, named Occidentalism, does not exist; a similar idea, the West, is, in fact, omnipresent in Asian history.
However, the idea, in Asia context, does not merely limit itself to the dichotomy…
