East Asia or Eastern Asia is the eastern subregion of the Asian continent, which can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms. Geographically and geopolitically, it covers about 12,000,000 km 2 (4,600,000 sq mi), or about 28% of the Asian continent, about 15% bigger than the area of Europe.sing the UN subregion definitions, East Asia ranks second in population only to Southern Asia. Historically, many societies in East Asia have been part of the Chinese cultural sphere, and East Asian vocabulary and scripts are often derived from Classical Chinese and Chinese script.