showed some signs of producing proto-feudal conditions. But even at this time and still more during later periods of barbarian invasions, the tremendous mass of the Chinese population apparently outweighed the tribal invaders too heavily to be permanently affected. The tribesmen and their tribal organizations were gradually absorbed into China, and the centralized bureaucrat state continued.
In Korea the balance between the two forces was more nearly equal. The ancient Koreans, who had much the same aristocratic, tribal organization as the early Japanese, also adopted Chinese political and economic patterns, not only by imitation, as the Japanese did, but also as a result of repeated Chinese conquests of the peninsula. On the whole the Koreans were more successful than the Japanese in making the Chinese institutions work, but for a long time, roughly between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, it looked very much as if the Chinese system in Korea would degenerate into something like feudalism, as it did in Japan. It was only after the thirteenth century that the Chinese centralized pattern won out completely, perhaps because of the close land connections of Korea to China and the very strong political hold China had over the peninsula throughout most of this period.
Such examples—and many more, no doubt, could be found between the Far East and Western Europe—do not invalidate our theories about the origins of feudalism but tend to confirm the assumption that this peculiar system is the product of a rather unusual mixture of cultural forces in the crucible of history. In any case, I trust that you will agree with me on the basic point that feudalism is no inevitable step in human development, and that we would therefore do well to drop the notion that all history is necessarily embodied in our familiar ancient-medieval-modern progression or in the Marxist variant of this scheme.
So much for the origins of feudalism, which may seem at best a rather remote problem today. Let us turn for a moment to the possible results of feudalism, which, as we shall see, involve us today much more directly.
Anyone who looks seriously at Asian history will be struck by the extraordinary fact that Japan, the one Asian country that shared Europe’s feudal experience, was also the Asian country that reacted most rapidly and successfully in the nineteenth century to the challenge of a capitalistic, nationalistic, and industrialized West. One wonders at once if there can be any significant causal relationship between these two seemingly unrelated facts. Any close study of Japan’s recent history, I believe, will reveal that this causal relationship does in fact exist and
