David Strzeminski

Introduction

Korea and Japan have an interesting relationship, due to the Korean peninsula being one of the closest pieces of land to the Japanese island. They have had a history of war and communications going back all the way to the original Three Kingdoms (57 BCE to 668 CE, see also chapter 5). This chapter focuses on the Joseon kingdom’s (1392-1897) interactions with kingdoms on the Japanese island, using Koreans’ essays about Japan, first person accounts from the Imjin War (1592–1598), and papers analyzing the movement of Korean goods into the Japanese island. General textbooks have a tendency to paint country relationships as black and white, especially in the pre-modern era. However, nations’ relations are complicated due to the fact that individual people with different viewpoints make up a nation. The research presented here shows that the contradictions between the relationship between Japan and Korea, often defined as bad, can be seen as much more grey. In the context of this chapter I will be defining a nation as a group of people under a common ruler; for example, Joseon is a nation, Ryuku and Tsushima will be their own nations.

Positive views from the Korean perspective

Many of the positive views from Korea come from Tasan Chŏng Yagyong’s essays on his travels to Japan, which were translated and analyzed by Don Baker. Tasan (1762–1836) was a Korean writer who was held in high regards during his lifetime. In comparison to a lot of his peers, Tasan had much more positive views on the nations in Japan. The origin of the negative views of Japan are most likely due to a century of prejudice following the Imjin War, and a social ranking system that focused on how much a nation adopted Confucian ideals, or in other words, mirrored the Chinese society that was copied by Korea.

To be considered Confucianized, and therefore civilized, a country had to have a strongly centralized government that was stable. It had to have a clearly defined political and social hierarchy. It had to value scholars over warriors. It had to give priority to Confucian rituals over Buddhist and folk rituals. And it had to show that its people had good manners, with good manners defined by Chinese Confucian rules of etiquette.^[1]

The island nation of Tsushima, located in the Japanese archipelago, was viewed as barbaric and was ranked extremely low by the Korean elites. Elites in this case were high ranking officials and the wealthy, who had the ability to read and write. The most credit that was given to the nations of the Japanese isles was the kingdom of Ryuku, which was almost equal to Korea. What’s important about this ranking is that the Korean elites were able to admit that a nation on the islands could compete with Korea in terms of their level of societal Confucianism.

Japan, according to these criteria, ranked below Korea, and Tsushima ranked even lower. However, the Ryūkyū kingdom ranked almost as high as Korea. ^[2]

Even though much of their formal contact with the Ryūkyū kingdom was through Japanese intermediaries, Koreans did not think of the people living on the Ryūkyū islands as Japanese. They were seen as a very different people, a people who were much more civilized than the Japanese because they had formalized a tributary status with China within the Sino-centric world order…Koreans regarded the people of Tsushima as dangerous barbarians.^[3]

The Koreans viewed Japan as multiple nations sharing islands, which played an important role in how the views of the islands as a whole developed. If you were to lump in the barbarians of Tsushima and a civilized kingdom into one group, the view of barbarians being present will definitely lower the view of the overall group in the eyes of an outsider; especially in a society in which the groups that were judging the nations had never visited the places that were being judged. However, Tasan actually traveled through Japan. He interacted with Tokugawa Confucians, men who practiced the Kogaku (Ancient Learning 古學) school, which allowed Tasan to give the “Japan and Japanese culture a much higher evaluation than had been granted by Koreans before him.”^[4]

Because of the interactions that Tasan had, he was able to see how much different Japan was compared to the observations made by his peers; conclusions that they drew from sources and accounts rather than experiencing the nations for themselves like Tasan had done. Tasan’s essays show that in order to truly judge a nation, there has to be one-on-one interaction to fully understand the people that live there. He helps to show that it is dangerous to make beliefs around records that could contain bias, which is what happened with many of his peers.

Negative views from the Korean perspective

Most the negative views I was able to collect were from a diary account of a Korean elite member, Kang Hang, who was taken hostage during the Imjin War. Hang was a political writer according to Haboush’s introduction and it is stated that he had an unwavering loyalty to the Joseon government. This allowed his family to be wealthy and reach to the elite level in Joseon society. He is also described as an elite by his captor in an earlier chapter based on how he is dressed. A lot of the writing is filled with anger and hatred; it allows us to understand where the Koreans who worked with Tasan got their views from. Not only does the diary provide stories of the prisoner but first person accounts of Japan after he was released from being a prisoner.

Look at this repugnant place where teeth are blackened! These slit-eyed ones are genuinely of a different race! This is a place not yet graced by King Yu’s influence, where even the cart wheel is different from that of the Zhou.”^[5]

There’s a lot of anger here; he outright calls the Japanese people “slit-eyed”. Another important point from this short quote is that Japan hadn’t been graced by King Yu’s influence; this allows the idea of the Japanese being barbarians due to the fact that they aren’t exactly like the Koreans to start to become manifested with the Koreans. An important note in the verbiage of Hang’s outburst, he recalls the great King Yu and the early (Western) Zhou dynasty (1046-771BCE), this helps to reinforce the idea of judging a people by their ability to implement Chinese culture into their own society.

The evil ruler of the thieving Japanese, Hideyoshi, is a repulsive insect-like thing full of the evil designs of a panther or a wolf. Exploiting his lazy old master, he transformed himself from insect to tumbler pigeon. Then, “like the praying mantis that waved its arms angrily in front of an approaching carriage,” he dared shoot a poisoned arrow into the sun.^[6]

The leader of the nation reflects how outsiders will view you, and it’s clear that the level of disdain Koreans had for Hideyoshi also reflected on the Japanese as a whole. His disdain for Hideyoshi, the leader who attacked his nation is understandable. However, Hideyoshi is known as the second great unifier of Japan: he helped bring together the scattered domains into his own single nation. There is touch of irony here because Hideyoshi was working on creating a society in mainland Japan that reflected the Chinese ideals that the Koreans sought from others.

Let us speak of what they did to earn the undying enmity of our own people. They burned our family shrines and disinterred our ancestors; they raped and assaulted our women, old and young, and bound and seized our brothers and children.”^[7]

I found the hatred harder to analyze because the words really speak for themselves. Also it was harder to find pieces of hatred during my research, but if there are more first person accounts like this, then the lesser view that Tasan’s peers had more than a century later makes sense.

Trade between Korea and Japan

Commerce and trade is something valued between any two nations; simply having this going on shows that there can’t be total hatred between the nations because they’re willing to contact each other to exchange goods. In the case of Japan and Korea I’m going to focus on the exchange of books and tea bowls.

Before the capture of Seoul, it is most likely that the books and treasures had been taken from the sago (record office) at Sŏngju [Seongju] and from government offices in Pusan [Busan], but [Ankokuji]Ekei provides no details.^[8]

The war at hand is the Imjin War^[9]. Japanese would steal books as a treasure for whatever reason that might be, but because of this, the use of Korea to bring in books to the islands really started here. Ekei was a Japanese Rinzai Buddhist monk who was praised highly by Hideyoshi, the de facto leader of Japan at the time. Ekei was also a major writer of the time. Stealing the books allowed for the spread of culture and literacy throughout the islands.

It is important to note that the majority of the Korean editions that reached Japan before 1600 were texts of Chinese authorship”^[10]

It was established before that Koreans viewed the level of developed society based around on how much they adopted Chinese values. By providing books of Chinese authorship to the islands of Japan early on, the Japanese had the ability to not only study Chinese culture and understand what was occurring outside of their islands, but they also had the ability to implement the same value and lifestyle into their society that the Koreans highly valued.

As early as 1629, barely thirty years after large numbers of Korean books had been looted, a Japanese embassy led by Genbo traveled to Seoul and requested not only medicines and musical instruments but also books.^[11]

During the Edo period twelve Korean missions traveled to Japan, and there were doubtless some opportunities for books as well as poetry to be exchanged.^[12]

There were commercial relations between Japan and Korea after the Imjin War. What’s vital here is that the interactions were not between smugglers, but trips to Korea led by a Japanese embassy and vice versa.

The smuggler relationship is a lot different from monitored travels. Monitoring the travels shows how both nations are willing to work together, and an attempt to fully understand each other, which is exactly what happens between Japan and Korea during the 1600s. So although the kingdoms on the Japanese islands that the Koreans visited might not have had the society the Koreans had hoped to see, like an older brother teaching a younger brother how to act the Koreans had the opportunity to provide the Kingdoms with knowledge from the mainland.

In Choson [Joseon], they were simply cheap, crude bowls produced in local private kilns and used by commoners as containers for rice, salted vegetables, soup, wine, and the like. In the Choson [Joseon] period Koreans did not much practice the custom of drinking tea. Japanese tea masters who prized rustic Korean bowls and used them as tea bowls classified them into between twenty and fifty different categories based on their shape, pattern, design, glaze type, type of clay, and/or origin.^[13]

This provides some background knowledge to the types of bowls that Japan loved; these bowls were clearly nothing special, but Japan had a high respect for the craftsmanship, which shows that they were also capable of respecting Korean art, which further erases that “bad” relationship label that is vaguely tagged on to Korean-Japanese relations.

The earliest example of Korean tea bowls being used in the Japanese chanoyu is found in a tea gathering held in 1537, as recorded in the Matsuya kaiki…Pirates, merchants from Ryukyu and northern Kyushu, and people from Tsushima saw an opportunity to make a profit and so began to smuggle these bowls into Japan.^[14]

The origin of the bowls come from smugglers; smuggling is only needed when the countries don’t want trade going on. This helps to create the grey area between Japan and Korea prior to the Imjin war. This also counters the ideas established by the trading of books. It almost sends a message that Korean government was attempting to shape Japanese in their image without letting the common folk interact. The leaders of the Korea might have wanted nothing to do with the bowls, but the common man in the country didn’t care who made the tea bowl, they just thought it was amazing craftsmanship. The smugglers’ relationship with commerce shows how important it is to look as a nation as a larger group of people with their own core beliefs rather than one autonomous mass.

Over time, Korean potters gradually came to learn that their products were highly valued in Japan, even though they had no direct access to what was occurring in Japanese markets. For their part, traders and merchants, mostly from Tsushima, encouraged Korean potters to make tea bowls and other ceramic items that would be particularly attractive to Japanese tea masters.^[15]

I thought it was pretty cool how there was a “secret” society of tea masters and tea bowl makers going on in two different nations separated by a body of water, and it further reiterated the point I made above that nations are full of individuals that do what makes them happy rather than following what the government wants them to do. In this case the Korean potters would much rather be a part of the relationship with Tsushima smugglers to make profit from Japanese tea masters than completely close off their talents from Japan.

Conclusion

Overall, the relations between Korea and Japan between 1500-1800 AD are a lot more complicated than general textbooks make it seem. These relations were was plagued by war and the judgments that follow a conflict, yet even through this, there was an opportunity for individuals to trade and interact with one another to create a “grey” relationship. Of course, trade isn’t enough to prove that there was a good relationship between the two nations, just as war isn’t enough to prove there was bad. Grey is an important phrasing in history because it emphasizes the complexities that come when you try to understand the feelings of many individuals under the umbrella of one large group. We focus too much on trying to understand the past interactions between nations as one large movement between one large mass of people working with or against another. However, a nation is made up of many individuals with their own opinions and ideals. With this in mind, the relations between the kingdoms of the Japanese islands and the Korean Peninsula can be described as grey.

Bibliography

Baker, Don. “Confucianism and Civilization: Tasan Chŏng Yagyong’s Views of Japan, the Ryūkyūs, and Tsushima.” Korean Studies 40, no. 1 (2016): 43–57.

Hur, Nam-lin. “Korean Tea Bowls (Kōrai chawan) and Japanese Wabicha: A Story of Acculturation in Premodern Northeast Asia.” Korean Studies 39 (2015): 1-22.

Kim Haboush, JaHyun, and Kenneth R. Robinson, eds. A Korean War Captive in Japan, 1597–1600: The Writings of Kang Hang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Kornicki, Peter. “Korean Books in Japan: From the 1590s to the End of the Edo Period.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 133, no. 1 (2013): 71-92.

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