Frontier Contact Between Choson Korea and Tokugawa Japan

James B. Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135795986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

East Asia from 1400 to 1850 was a vibrant web of connections, and the southern coast of the Korean peninsula participated in a maritime world that stretched to Southeast Asia and beyond. Within this world were Japanese pirates, traders, and fishermen. They brought things to the Korean peninsula and they took things away. The economic and demographic structures of Kyongsang Province had deep and wide connections with these Japanese traders. Social and political clashes revolving around the Japan House in Pusan reveal Korean mentalities towards the Japanese connection. This study seeks to define 'Korea' by examining its frontier with Japan. The guiding problems are the relations between structures and agents and the self-definitions reached by pre-modern Koreans in their interaction with the Japanese. Case studies range from demography to taxation to trade to politics to prostitution. The study draws on a wide base of primary sources for Korea and Japan and introduces the problems that animate modern scholarship in both countries. It offers a model approach for Korea's northern frontier with China and shows that the peninsula was and is a complex brocade of differing regions. The book will be of interest to anyone concerned with pre-1900 East Asia, Korea in particular, and especially Korea's relations with the outside world. Anyone interested in early-modern Japan and its external relations will also find it essential reading.

1
INTRODUCTION

Reconstructing the past and constructing the future

Although many speak of sincere relations, the great majority do not understand the meaning of the word. Sincerity [means], with a true heart, avoid deception, avoid strife, and engage each other with the truth. This is sincerity. If you were actually to consider practicing sincere relations with Korea, then you would completely stop sending envoys. It is impossible to speak of true sincerity when [my lord] is constantly a burden on that country. If we were to look at that country’s books, then this fundamental idea would be clear. Nevertheless, achieving [sincerity by ceasing to be a burden, i.e. by changing things] is not easily done. Because [Korea] may not be expected to speak easily of changing the way things have been done up to now, practice [religiously] the customs as they have come to be. [In that way] I hope that [my lord] will not lose any more sincerity [than has already been lost].

(Amenomori Hōshū, 1728)¹

In May of 1990, the former President of the Republic of Korea, Roh Tae-woo, followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, Chun Doo-hwan, and visited Japan as a guest of the Japanese state, banqueting with the Japanese Emperor. During his speech to the assembled notables of Japan’s political, economic, and social worlds, President Roh Tae-woo welcomed the new Japanese era, Heisei, as a time when the Cold War had ended and Korea and Japan had a particular leadership role to play for the new age. But, he cautioned, Japan had to re-assess realistically its own history to appreciate the sentiment of its neighbors. As an example of sensitivity towards others, particularly Japanese sensitivity towards Korea, the President recounted the following:

[Some] two hundred and seventy years ago, Amenomori Hōshū, concerned with Korean relations, left to [you], as an article of faith, [the injunction to practice] “sincere relations [with Korea.]” His opposite number in Korea, Hyŏn Tŏk-yun, built the Sŏngsin-dang (Hall of Truth and Sincerity) in Tongnae and entertained Japanese Envoys. Similarly, with that sort of mutual respect and understanding, the relations between our two countries hereafter should develop [based on] the identification of mutual ideals and interests.²

Roh’s olive branch was perfectly expressive of a Confucian view of history, capable of locating a golden age in the past sparkling with potential for present and future emulation. Roh was thereby able to capture the Japanese popular mind, which has been desperate to find some form of relations that neither disparages Korea nor demands incessant Japanese expressions of breast-beating guilt. The style of the early modern period answers that need. Moreover, Roh was able to deliver his message by drawing on a bit of Japanese history not known to most Japanese, thereby demonstrating the breadth and depth of his knowledge (or his advisors’) about Japan and the history of Korea–Japan relations. The suggestion of a golden age as a metaphor for the present and the future was a diplomatic coup.

The Japanese public was stunned, since Hōshū was then known to but a few Japanese. A sudden boom in studies of Hōshū’s “cosmopolitanism” ensued. Most of these popular works were didactic in nature and concerned more with what modern Japanese can learn from Hōshū’s attitude towards foreigners and less with what marked Hōshū as a man of the early eighteenth century. Usually, they were even less concerned with what concrete problems Hōshū had to face as Confucian advisor to the Sō lords of Tsushima. The most famous in this genre is Kamigaito Kenichi’s Amenomori Hōshū: Genroku Kyōhū no kokusaijin (“Amenomori Hōshū: a cosmopolitan of the Genroku and Kyōhō eras, 1688–1735”), publication of which actually preceded Roh’s visit by six or seven months, but which quickly experienced an enormous sales boost and numerous reissues.³ Hōshū quickly became the officially preferred interpreter for Korean–Japanese past, present, and future relations.

Roh Tae-woo’s message came at a time when the Japanese academy was ready. Over the period from the late 1970s to the present, the traditional scholarly position that Japan was “isolated” during the Edo period has been nearly universally rejected. Even those scholars who still use the sakoku model spend their ink discussing how it worked in practice to regulate trade and contact with the outside, rather than how it excluded that contact. Trade and contact with the outside was never actually denied; but what is now passing for consensus is that previous estimates of the range and depth of the contacts have been too conservative. In particular, information on the magnitude of the Korean connection, ignored or even suppressed by Imperial Japan, is now flooding the academies and the museums with new questions about the extent of Edo-period Japan’s intercourse with the outside world. Such intercourse was economic, political, and cultural-intellectual. The extensive revision of views on Edo-period contacts with Korea is one way for modern Japan to re-join Asia with a respectable history of relations that requires no apologies. From the Korean point of view, early-modern contacts serve to remind Japanese of the grand civilization of Chosŏn Korea and of its “civilizing” mission towards the Japanese islands.

In sum, the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century saw the initiation of a slow healing process possible only through the creation of a common discourse. For a Korean leader to identify a good Japanese is a significant step, but the genius was to find him in a period removed yet close, in a time before international complexities intruded on a stable, cordial, equal relationship. Chosŏn–Tokugawa relations were just such a period. Chauvinistic nationalism had yet to rear its ugly head. Imperialism, fueled by technology, capitalism, and some specious civilizing mission, was in the future. From 1600 to the 1870s Japan did not prey upon Korea militarily or economically, and the Confucian ideal of a self-sufficient, communal society pursuing the arts of civilization stood dominant in East Asia. We can only applaud the new discourse inaugurated by Roh Tae-woo for the diplomatic and historical creativity it revealed and the plain desire in Korea and Japan to put the twentieth century in some sort of perspective and to find common cause for the future based on a vision of a dignified past.

Politicians have immediate agendas and cannot be concerned with the complexities and ambiguities of historical moments. They have time only to loot the past for the materials to create visions of the future. Historians have different concerns. We would ask, what then characterized the mental apparatus of this so-called golden age of relations? To write the “biography of an idea,” as Arthur O. Lovejoy puts it, is to skate on the near edge of disaster, since one’s enterprise may “easily degenerate into a species of merely imaginative historical generalization . . .”⁴ Lovejoy enjoins us with several principles to guide such a dangerous undertaking and the one we should particularly look to here demands that our “specific unit-ideas” be a “part of the stock of many minds,” not just something held to be true by a “small number of profound thinkers or eminent writers.”⁵ We cannot assume the Platonic and metaphysical existence of ideas, but neither can we assume that a common idea exists only for a fleeting moment at the chance intersection of two subjectivities. The obvious problem that emerges is to demonstrate an idea’s wide dissemination. Ideally, we should find our theme in many texts and discourses: literary, philosophical, scientific, and artistic. For example, Jacob Burkhardt surveyed politics, scholarship, education, literature, art, society, and religion from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century in Italy and argued that the modern world began with the rediscovery of the individual.⁶ Lucien Febvre focused on Rabelais to argue that sixteenth-century France had no concept of atheism.⁷ Erwin Panofsky argued that the central tenets of High Scholasticism, such as clarification and homology, were expressed in High Gothic cathedral architecture.⁸ Since our concern will be to discuss mentalities, our “problem,” to borrow Febvre’s favorite methodology, is: what did the Koreans think about the Japanese during this relatively harmonious period? We can identify four sites of production of the Korean mentality regarding the Japanese: the ideas elaborated by Korean intellectuals, the reports left by the Korean Embassy to Edo, the treatment of castaways, and the Korean experiences surrounding the Japan House in Pusan. Information on the last three can only be found in the impressions and ideas formulated by direct experience and are our concern.

The writings of Korean intellectuals take us into realms beyond the scope of this study. To examine Korean intellectual discourse on Japan would, by necessity, require that we concern ourselves more with the minutiae of the intellectuals themselves than with the minutiae of Korea–Japan relations. We would have to pose broad questions, such as what they thought constituted civilization, what they thought constituted a reasonably functional society and/or polity, or what philosophical congruences or influences existed between Korean intellectuals and Japanese intellectuals. Since few of the writings left to us by Korean intellectuals betray a first-hand knowledge of direct contact with the Japanese, to pursue intellectual discourse would take us rather far from our main concern.

Moreover, there are a number of good studies of this intellectual discourse. Ha Woo Bong has offered us an excellent, comprehensive study of the sirhak scholars’ views of Japan.⁹ Abe Yoshio, Kang Chae-ŏn, Mark Setton, Willem Jan Boot, and others have offered us approaches to philosophical congruences and influences.¹⁰ Moreover, Etsuko Hae-jin Kang has attempted to summarize and to interpret the ideological prejudices of Korean and Japanese intellectuals.¹¹ Although Etsuko Kang goes the farthest in claiming the effects of intellectual discourse on the actual workings of relations, she ignores trade and frontier contact in favor of analyzing the symbolic diplomacy between Hansŏng and Kyoto or Edo. Kang’s study reifies the writings of capital intellectuals with the result that interpretive schema seem designed to find the origins of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century “national” views in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. In order to find these origins, the pluralism of agents, ideas, levels of interaction, and spatial considerations are set aside.

The power of ideas, though, seems undeniable, and it would be naive to dismiss a concern with “national” views or nationalism. The hot and cold industrial wars of the twentieth century were, in many ways, confrontations of nationalisms and abstract ideas, and these industrial wars depended on the mass mobilization of troops and laborers.¹² Mobilization was made easier by ideas that constructed national identities. Of course, nation building in Europe relied on identity construction from before the twentieth century, but large-scale industrial war proved its virulence. We have conventionally referred to identity construction as the central project of nationalism, and lately, debate has raged over whether identities are ancient (primordialists) or constructed (instrumentalists).¹³

Anthony Smith, representative of the primordialist school, seeks the roots of national identity in a plethora of continuous identities that link pre-modern agricultural societies, even ancient societies, to modern industrial societies.¹⁴ Smith argues that almost all successful nations have clear ethnic identities that have allowed them to mobilize vast numbers of people in the industrial age and form nation-states. The nation-state is a recent phenomenon, Smith concedes, but the pre-existence of ethnic identity allowed it to emerge and that pre-existing or latent ethnic identity was often the necessary condition for the success or failure of the nation-state.

Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson represent approaches from modernist and materialist perspectives, and they emphasize the development of new technologies and colonial expansion as creators of new social arrangements and world-views.¹⁵ The shift of industrial production towards “semantic” or literate labor and print capitalism threw up discontinuities between the agricultural and industrial worlds. Industry needed literate labor. Mass education and the creation of a market for the mass circulation of newspapers, magazines, and books enabled an elite culture – a cult of particularity – to be established as the measure of identity. The rising use of vernaculars in combination with print capitalism allowed the creation of common time and a sense of common destiny. In short, industrial production created both the need and the means for the mass production and consumption of intellectual conformity, something that had been the monopoly of a narrow elite. Gellner concedes that some nations have ancient ethnic identities while others have none, but he strenuously argues against Smith and asserts that the vast majority of nationstates have invented identities because the conditions of modernity require this. For Gellner and Anderson, mentalities arise from the material conditions of the modern world: industrial production, mass literacy, mass markets, and colonial models that affect the metropole society.

Thongchai Winichakul offers a similar approach that focuses on the conceptual moment and the technological means of national construction.¹⁶ Like much of Southeast Asia, pre-modern Siam had frontiers but lacked boundaries. To preserve its integrity from the predations of European imperialism, the Siamese court was forced to adopt a geographical or topographical world-view that constructed space using a European cosmology based on mathematics. The technology was cartography and the result was the map with meridian lines. Such a map matched European constructions and implied a full and even exercise of sovereignty over the land between specified boundaries, a view that nineteenth-century Europe was also developing. With this, the “nation” as territory could be visually presented, thereby legitimating all the necessities of a “modern” defense of those borders.

Liah Greenfeld separates national identity from any system of production or technology and focuses on political history and the literary production of capital elites caught in various crises of identity.¹⁷ Individual states of mind – dissatisfied states of mind – led to action that created social structures and ideas, which produced further states of mind, which produced new social structures, and so on. For example, in the English case, the original dissatisfied state of mind was the desire by English elites to separate England from Catholic Christendom, the identification of Protestantism with nation, and the loyalty of newly created social groups to the opportunities for social mobility opened by the Tudor seizure of Church estates. Dissatisfied and newly emergent literate elites were the creators of mentalities. Nationalism appeared first in the English form as “individualistic-libertarian” and then later in the French, Russian, and German forms as “collectivistic-authoritarian”. In all situations, the appearance of a national consciousness elevated the entire (literate) populace to become the possessors of legitimate sovereignty and that created the basis of modern democratic governance. This is modernity, and it was created by literate urban elites.¹⁸

These few paragraphs are nothing more than brief notes on a few recent approaches to the question of identity construction and maintenance, but they serve to illustrate a problem common to such discussions: they discuss the development of political, economic, and cultural cores by assuming that the boundaries and frontiers of countries were passive and receptive vessels.¹⁹ Cores do mobilize wealth and power and seek self-definition, but cores inevitably have peripheries and frontiers; some of them are interior and some of them abut other countries. In addition to focusing on developments at the cores, be they cartographical (Thongchai), technological (Anderson), social (Gellner), or intellectual (Greenfeld and Smith), we might also consider the boundaries and frontiers for expressions of identity. Here, the core’s “mode of production” or the “orthodox discourse” takes second place to the day-today interactions of one people with another. Fredrik Barth’s paradigmatic essay on ethnic groups and boundaries focuses squarely on engagement at the boundary in contrast to abstracted thinking from the remove of the center. Barth writes, “I would argue that people’s categories are for acting, and are significantly affected by interaction rather than contemplation.”²⁰

Barth is concerned with ethnicity. He separates ethnicity from culture and concentrates on ascription to an ethnic category. He argues that what usually passes for a discussion of culture is really no more than a catalogue of traits. These traits or institutional forms change over time and they change with ecological niche. Therefore, ethnic groups are best thought of as groups that identify themselves to be different and groups that are identified by other groups as different. In both cases, the purpose of identification is to engage in interaction with other groups. The cultural content that identifies ethnic groups is composed of “overt signals” (dress, language, food, life-style) and “basic value orientations: the standards of morality and excellence by which performance is judged.” The main activity that ensures continuity of the ethnic group, the activity that gives it its existence, is the maintenance of the boundary or the structured and rigid practice of overt signals and the application of standards to judge the performance of its constituency. The boundary defines the group, “not the cultural stuff that it encloses.” Finally, boundaries are maintained between groups by interaction that is structured to allow the persistence of difference. This implies rigidity of interaction, but it also allows for the permeability of ascription. If one acts in accordance with the group’s value orientations and adopts the group’s institutional forms, then one can claim membership. Of course, this also implies that two groups will accent their differences for easy mutual recognition. In short, at the boundaries we can expect to find the clearest definition of group membership, since it is there that differences matter the most.

Barth was unconcerned with the state...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• FIGURES
• MAPS
• TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 TSUSHIMA’S IDENTITY AND THE POST-IMJIN WAERAN JAPAN HOUSE
• 3 THE DEMOGRAPHIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE JAPAN HOUSE
• 4 THE ECONOMIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAEGWAN
• 5 THE POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAEGWAN
• 6 LEAKY ROOFS AND OTHER MATTERS
• 7 PÉNÉTRATION DU CORPS SOCIALE
• 8 CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX A
• APPENDIX B
• GLOSSARY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY