From Korea to Kyoto— Counter-histories

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One of the features of working in Japan is the availability of local writings about the local situation. Visiting members of the local Korean population who were active in counter-practices to the institutionalized exclusions of Koreans, it was not unexpected to also receive pamphlets and books they have authored. However, those who have not acquired a position in the community where they are active (and authoring/authoritative) also tend to not openly express any opinion at all, even offu reko (off the record).

One aspect of the local critique of “Japaneseness” is the rewriting of accounts of the history of events and migrations between Korea and Kyoto or Japan. In their post-colonial moment¹, Koreans in Japan (and elsewhere) face a recent history that was once used to justify their domination. Not surprisingly, counter-colonial historical writings find arenas where histories constructed in Japan during the colonial period did not record the breadth of perspectives available. And so new voices and novel thinking about the historical relationship between the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago are emerging.

The current, problematic presence of “Koreans” in Kyoto is simply the latest go-around in a millennium of migration between this region and the nearby Korean Peninsula. The official story of the history of Japan may today foreground the isolation of the archipelago from the mainland until the “opening” of Japan in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, this notion of Japan’s closed—and thus independently developed, and so, unique—cultural history is itself a product of the nineteenth century, and, in any case, most accurately describes the immediate, premodern (1639²-1868) period of Japan, while hiding several centuries through which the intercourse of persons and objects between Japan and its neighbors was active on many fronts. From the “Silk Road” that brought goods from the Levant to Kyoto, to religious institutions and pilgrimage to the mainland, to military incursions on the Korean Peninsula, movements across the narrow stretch of water between these two places were regular and extensive. A shared legacy of writing, literature, architecture, cuisine, philosophy, religion, military and agricultural technology, and biological and social heritage connected Japan with the mainland long before the Tokugawa shoguns shut this off in the seventeenth century.

It is useful to consider in what ways the Korean Peninsula and the Southern and Western parts of the nearby islands that are now part of Japan may have once constituted an informal social/economic/cultural entity, within which the islands and the mainland were simply internal destinations. For those centuries before the advent of the Yamato polity in what is now Kyushu and Kansai Japan we have archaeological³ records that suggest a continuum of farming and craft techniques between the Peninsula and the Archipelago, but how far should this suggest a shared social community?

“Korea:
A rich peninsula extending out one-thousand, two-hundred kilometers from the Eurasian Continent, this is the bright sunrise of the East, and the grand country of the Han. The people living there are the closest neighbors of the Japanese. There, the ancestors of the people of the Republic of Korea and the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea created a wonderful culture [subarashii bunka].
Stand on a street corner in Seoul today and look around: it is easy for a Japanese to think they are not on a street corner in a foreign country. The features and figures of the people and their fashions are all similar to Japanese, and the food, although a little salty, is delicious to us. There is a draft sake called Makkari, and a brand of shochu [rice brandy] called Jisoro, and the beer also tastes like Japanese beer....”
(ZenChoKyouKyouto 1993, 108).
This retelling of Kyoto’s history with Korea by Koreans in Kyoto begins with the commonalities of the present, and then details the many connections of the past.

Geographically, from the peninsular shoreline to the island shoreline, merchants, migrants, and mendicants might have traveled by boat without considerable linguistic or bureaucratic difficulty. Beneath the political intrigues and military moves, we can imagine that a wide range of travel and trade occurred. What had not yet occurred was the creation of a Japanese or a Korean “nation-state,” and yet these more modern configurations tend to color our perceptions of the early history of the area.

This situation between the Peninsula and its nearby islands (now Japan) persisted in some always changing complexity from the earliest known migrations (and so earlier, as we have little reason to assume our knowledge is complete) through the time of the founding of Kyoto (794) and in the centuries following, when island powers attempted to shift the center of this away from the mainland. But this move by shogunal powers in Kyoto (and elsewhere) mainly served to increase the influence of China on the Korean Peninsula, as Hideoshi Toyotomi (a Shogun ruling in Kyoto) discovered in the late 16th century. His failing and enormously costly military adventure on the Peninsula, repelled by combined Korean and Chinese troops, was abandoned at the time of his death.

A short excursion into the history of the area will allow the reader to glean additional dynamics of the evidence of a shared history from local perspectives in Kyoto.

¹The deconstruction of the dominant colonial history is a task that all scholars in and of the region need to pay heed to, and so this is one area of constructive collaboration between local historians in Kyoto and students of Asia across the globe.

²Ironically, the very idea of isolationism was borrowed from the Ming Chinese, who instituted a similar policy after 1433 (Sansom 1963, 229).

³Because so much of the imperial-family archaeological and textual evidence is either unexamined, or covered already with narratives that speak a whole story, it is proving difficult to renarrativize this story without simply “taking the other side,” which is what Prof. Hong from Seoul University (1994) has done by proclaiming the Paekche origins of much of modern Japan. Should enough scholars find clear reasons to doubt the existing narratives, this might help to convince the Japanese Imperial Household that it no longer has an advantage in withholding archaeological evidence.