GREEK LOVE IN THE FAR EAST
Of all the regions into which this website has, on cultural and geographical grounds, divided the world for study of the history of Greek love, the Far East is very easily that in which its history has been happiest.
Japan had for some thousand years a pederastic culture as strong and idealistic as that of ancient Greece, and without the latter's contradictions that were partly responsible for its demise. Pederasty was generally ubiquitous in China too, and for longer there than is recorded for any other country in the world. Though not nearly as common in Southeast Asia, or as well understood as a distinct form of love, it appears generally to have been well tolerated there also.
Even the incursions of the hostile Abrahamic religions into the extremities of the region from the late thirteenth century onwards seem to have had little impact. It was only with growing pressure to adopt the values of the colonial powers, whether from those powers themselves or in order the better to be able to resist them, that things began to go wrong in the late nineteenth century, the Meiji reforms in Japan being the first brutal set-back. Elsewhere in the Far East, pederasty continued to flourish much later. China succumbed suddenly to the worst sort of European sexual puritanism with the triumph of communism in 1949, and initiated a ludicrous official pretence that homosexuality, rather than the new ideology, was a foreign import. In Southeast Asia, pederasty continued to be tolerated into the last decade of the twentieth century, only finally succumbing to the newly-militant cultural imperialism of the United States and its cronies that followed the end of the Cold War.
There are articles on the practice of Greek love for the following Far Eastern countries:
Far Eastern Siberia
Japan
China
Burma
Vietnam
Cambodia
Siam (Thailand)
Malaya
Singapore
Sumatra
Borneo
Java
Bali
The Philippines
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