From Korea to Kyoto— the nation story

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The importation of peoples and skills also fostered avenues of local embellishment and innovation that produced the contents of what is now regarded as classical Japanese culture. There came a point, however, where the “foreign” roots of these localized cultural institutions became perceived of as a liability for the creation of a sufficiently credible national narrative. This point arrived at a time when other, non-Asian influences were also arriving: the mid nineteenth century.

Nationalist narratives inscribed over the last hundred and fifty years in Japan have overcoded the more complex historical circumstances between peoples and cultural institutions throughout the region, fashioning a narrative of national unity and of separation from the continent.
Koreans in Kyoto point to a counter-history: one of connections and mutual borrowings.

Unable to effectively hide the external cultural influences on its long history, Japanese cultural chauvinists (such as scholars who wrote works about kokugaku [“nation-knowledge”]) in eighteenth- and nineteenth century Japan still sought to find an essential Japanese culture within practices they claimed predated later Chinese borrowings. This extended to efforts to find pure Japanese words and meanings from within a language that had, for several centuries, borrowed not only its writing system, but also its entire literary and institutional vocabulary from Chinese¹. It is precisely this early modern re-imagination of Japan’s national past that has created both the ground for subsequent misrecognition of historical circumstances, and fostered much of the misunderstanding between peoples living in the islands and those dwelling on the Peninsula, and those who move between these artificially separated spaces.

The history of an early and continuing contact between Korea and Kyoto is a history of peoples living in close proximity across a short stretch of water (the coast of Korea is nearly as close to Kyoto as is Tokyo) for several centuries. The present obscurity of this history, particularly the details of its premodern scope, is a tribute to more modern political projects. And one of the projects of some Koreans living in Kyoto today is to rearticulate this history, not so much with a mind to show the primacy of Korean culture, but rather to mark as exceptional the current lack of contact, and lack of respect, between these peoples.

The Korean Peninsula, with its long coastline, and its position between China and Mongolia and the islands that have since become Japan, is one of the world’s social midlands—a position that is a blessing when there are new knowledges and skills to be had, but a curse when these travel by conquest. As with the Benelux or Cambodia, being in the middle often means getting caught in the middle.

¹Institutions on the Korean peninsula also took advantage of the Chinese writing system (and with it Chinese as a court language), and were at times under direct Chinese domination. This serves to help conflate the origins of texts and other influences from the Korean Peninsula with those from China. Since before WWII the Asian cultural influences upon Japan have been almost entirely classified as Sinitic. Against this background, claims of Kyoto’s early Korean influences might be perceived as exceptional; when these influences were, if anything, mundane.