“保守” and “传统” are one of the key words in study from the view of historical progress. By summarizing the semantics from the journals and dictionaries during Modern era, this article aims at analyzing the semantic change of these two words and their circulations within East Asia Region. “保守” and “传统” were used as strings instead of a set compound word in Chinese classical literatures, despite the fact they all originated in Chinese. “保守” refers to the action of “protecting or guarding to keep”. Back at the time, the word transited into the new meaning as “conservatism” and “conservative”, which was firstly shown in 哲学字汇 1881, refered to “maintaining or keeping the existing convention, system, organization, and methodology”. Not until the 1908 Bilingual Dictionary, “保守” was presented only with the original meaning at the 19 century edition. In Korean, the word presented as parallel (coordinative) verb in ancient literatures. Interestingly, Korea and China had slightly different understandings about “保守” compared to Japan. During the early period of Korea and China, “保守” somehow embedded with “obsolescence and degeneration”, which is more negative view compared to Japanese which stood out the “conservative attitude when things go evolving or revolutionary”. “传统“ got its translation as “tradition” was about 1900 in Japan. The neologism of “传统“ was presented on the stage after 1900 in both Korea and China. The 1920’ explanation was more about “feudalism, self-blocked, and conservative”, which is quite similar to “保守” at the time. While things changed in 1930 with more “pride” attached. Nowadays, “传统” are more often indicating the inherited culture in either Japanese or Korean and Chinese.