Perspective

What one can see depends greatly upon where one stands.
And upon what optical enhancements one uses.
And upon what one is expecting to see.
But one never sees it all.

And so it will be with our efforts to comprehend the vast complexities of East Asia as a human arena. The German geographer Albert Kolb identifies East Asia as a Cultural subcontinent:

...a region of subcontinental proportions, whose culture has a common origin and which displays a unique combination of natural and cultural elements, with its own climate of thought and social order, and a common history. The important point is that all the cultural elements must in some vital way be linked --even those whose effects are not apparent in the pattern of landscape. certain elements, not necessarily material, may of course have a much wider range, extending to neighboring regions and forming part of their cultures...
from East Asia pg. 1 (DS509.3 .K6313 1971)

So one element of our perspective is that East Asia is an entity, that its component societies are at least entangled with one another, by historical relations and in the contemporary world. Another element is that any landscape, physical or metaphorical, is a palimpsest, carrying vestiges of former patterns and processes which can be teased out and used to illuminate the Tales we construct to explain what we see on the landscape; corollary to this is the importance of temporal structure --seeing the present as an evolution from the past. Still another element is the notion of hierarchies of scale, from the very local to the synoptic, in which we assume that localities are participants in regions, regions are elements of macroregions, and that economic and political structures like nations and empires are composed of interdigitated regions.

Temporal structure may be thought of as having levels as well. Fernand Braudel puts it nicely in his preface to The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in dividing the book into three parts:

The first... is ...a history whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man in his relationship to the environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles. [the second concerns] economic systems, states, societies, civilizations and ...warfare [and the third is] the history of events: surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.
(adapted from a quotation in Robert Marks' introduction to his Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and economy in late imperial South China, pp. 4-5 (HC427.6 .M37 1998)

It's also worthwhile to keep an eye on nots:

East Asia is not eternal and unchanging --in fact, quite the contrary, in things great and small, and we'll be considering quite a few of them. 'Stability' is the exception in human societies, even those which seem (and/or affect) to have venerable traditions.
East Asia is not uniform and homogeneous --in fact quite the contrary. The impulse to speak of "the Chinese", "the Japanese", "the Koreans" is hard to resist, but anthropology ought to provide us with the tools to avoid overgeneralization.

There are probably other nots that we'll discover as we explore, which we might add to this list for the future. For the moment I'll also observe that we're looking for dimensions of variation, and regional structure will often prove to be a recognizable and important one.

The Evolution of Chinese Characters (from Humboldt State)