"...those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exceptions to their existence in all ethnographically or historically recorded human societies..." (MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science)
A couple of bits from miscellaneous Web sites:
"...Confucius' prescribed formula for being a good Chinese girl is to obey one's parents and husband and to never question what they say...""...I had always been very intense in my studies, being a good Chinese boy and trying to please my parents and get into an Ivy League school..."
Koreans
A Korean Identity?: The Three Kingdoms Revisited (Paul Yunsik Chang)Forging a new identity ("Korean art is torn between establishing its place in the international world and re-constituting Korea's own traditions...")
City of Silence A day in the life of Pyongyang
Kimilsungism: the Juche Idea
JUCHE "...is a philosophical idea that man is the master of everything and decides everything. In other words, the idea that man is the master of the world and his own destiny. It is said that this idea was rooted in Baekdu Mountain which symbolizes the spirit of the Korean people." (a Tae Kwon Do site)
Juche! Kim Il Sung (The book from which the following selection is drawn was first published in 1975)
THE JUCHE PHILOSOPHY IS AN ORIGINAL REVOLUTIONARY PHILOSOPHY Discourse Published in Kulloja, Theoretical Magazine of the Central Committee of the Worker's Party of Korea KIM JONG IL
Juche Ideology history
Juche Ideology in 1955-66 had been a mere political catchphrase to support political campaigns designed to prevent theinfluence of the de-Stalinization movement from infiltrating into North Korea, to spur the people to harbor the spirit of self-reliance in coping with the economic difficulties after the suspension of aid from the Soviet Union, and then to justify Pyongyang's stand to conduct equidistant diplomacy toward Beijing and Moscow, while the two allies were engaged in disputes. At the same time, North Korea began to use the catch phrase to intensify the personality cult of Kim Il-sung and to justify his monolithic leadership.Juche: A Christian Study of North Korea's State Religion by Thomas J. Belke
Correlation between Juche Ideology and Political Prison Camps in North Korea (Haruhisa Ogawa)
Minjoong Art in Korea (= 'populist')
Images of Dissent: Transformations in Korean Minjung art BY FRANK HOFFMANN (HARVARD ASIA PACIFIC REVIEW, vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 44-49)
Korean Aesthetic Consciousness and the Problem of Aesthetic Rationality Kwang-Myung KIM
Japanese
Making Raku Tea Bowls and Searching for Wabi-SabiTranslation problemsJapanese Aesthetics, Wabi-Sabi, and the Tea Ceremony
summary of the major principles of Japanese aesthetics adapted from Keene, Donald. "Japanese Aesthetics." The Pleasures of Japanese Literature. New York: Columbia University, 1988, 3 - 22.
Teaching Japanese Aesthetics Whys and Hows for Non-Specialists (Mara Miller)
Chushingura
Chushingura
"...certain aspects of classical Chinese poetry are basically untranslatable...""Chinese verbs bear no change of tense; the same words in the poem can have many interpretations..."
Why there is no Catechism in Japanese Conflict over translation has delayed publication for eight years by Francis Mutsuo Fukushima