TOK situations from East Asia
Where a case comes from changes what it can show. These are the situations in the library drawn from east asia.
- East Asia
Recognised as indigenous, at last
Japan legally recognised the Ainu as indigenous only in 2019, after generations of assimilation policy that had suppressed language and practice while…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- East Asia
Move 37
In its 2016 match against Lee Sedol, AlphaGo played a move professional commentators initially called a mistake and later called beautiful, a line no human…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Interpretation
- Explanation
- East Asia
The hand that knows the stroke
Chinese and Islamic calligraphic traditions both train through years of copying masters, and both hold that a stroke's quality reveals the writer's state of…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- East Asia
Simplifying the characters
Mainland China's simplified characters raised literacy while severing visual links to older texts that Taiwan and Hong Kong retain, so the same classical…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- East Asia
Restoring what you cannot see
The Mogao cave paintings at Dunhuang have been repainted, damaged, removed to foreign museums and digitally reconstructed across centuries. Conservators must…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Objectivity
- East Asia
An alphabet designed for everyone
King Sejong's fifteenth-century promulgation of Hangul gave Korean a script learnable in days, against the years Chinese characters demanded, and literate…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- East Asia
Grams of asteroid, years of travel
Japan's Hayabusa2 spent years travelling to asteroid Ryugu to bring back a few grams of material, though telescopes and spectra had already characterised it…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Justification
- East Asia
The cloning papers that unravelled
Hwang Woo-suk's celebrated human cloning results, published in a top journal and backed by national pride, were exposed as fabricated partly through anonymous…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Responsibility
- Objectivity
- East Asia
Inheriting an actor's name
In kabuki, actors inherit stage names through lineages stretching back centuries, and taking the name signals that the performance knowledge of that line now…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Culture
- East Asia
Why did the treasure fleets stop?
Zheng He's fifteenth-century fleets dwarfed anything Europe would float for centuries, then the voyages ceased and records were neglected or destroyed.…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Explanation
- East Asia
One singer, eight hours, no script
Korean pansori transmits epic narratives through a single singer and drummer over many hours, with each master's version differing in wording, ornament and…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- East Asia
Mountains that were never seen
Classical Chinese shan shui painters often worked from memory, canonical models and philosophical principle rather than from a particular view, producing…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Interpretation
- East Asia
One event, two national textbooks
Japanese and Chinese school treatments of the 1937 Nanjing atrocities have differed for decades in wording, casualty figures and space allotted, and textbook…
Enduring · History
- Perspective
- Power
- East Asia
A malaria cure found in a fourth-century text
Screening traditional remedies, Tu Youyou found a fourth-century Chinese text describing cold extraction of sweet wormwood, adjusted her method accordingly,…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- East Asia
Who influenced whom
Japanese woodblock prints reshaped late nineteenth-century European painting, and the story is usually told as European artists discovering Japan. Told from…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Perspective
- Power
- East Asia
The instrument that felt distant earthquakes
Zhang Heng's second-century seismoscope reportedly indicated an earthquake in a distant province before messengers arrived to confirm it, using a mechanism…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Explanation
- East Asia
A national border for information
China's filtering infrastructure produces an internet where searches, encyclopedias and archives return different results than elsewhere, and a generation has…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- East Asia
The exam that defines what counts
China's gaokao channels millions of students' entire schooling toward one sitting, and whatever the exam rewards, memorisation, speed, model essays, becomes…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Values