As Professor Fessler wrote in her most recent post, starting next semester I will begin to offer a 300-level EAS course (also cross-listed in History) entitled "Japan-Korean Relations: 1592 to the Present." Unsurprisingly, the class will proceed in a generally chronological fashion and take an approach that weaves together elements of diplomatic, social, and cultural history in order to attempt to discover precisely what kinds of relationships have been forged among people living in Korea and Japan over the past few centuries and how these relationships have changed over time. What may be less clear, however, is why one would specifically choose to make 1592 the starting point for such a course.
A variety of answers are possible to this question and many will become readily apparent once the syllabus for the class is made available online after the Fall Schedule of Classes is officially released. But in the meantime, let me provide you with one clue courtesy of a single person and a single historical source: Wakita Naokata (脇田直賢) and his autobiographical Kaden (家伝).
In recent times in Japan resident Koreans, most often referred to by the labels "zainichi kankokujin" and "zainichi chōsenjin," have often been singled out for discrimination once their identities have been uncovered, resulting in name-calling, ostracism, and worse. It is therefore easy to assume that this has always been the case, and that the only way for Koreans to gain acceptance into mainstream society has been for them to hide their family backgrounds and renounce any and all connections with Korea.
Which is what makes Wakita Naokata's account so remarkable. Naokata, along with at least 50,000 of his countrymen, was imprisoned and brought back to Japan as a result of the two invasions of Korea commanded by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1592 and 1597. Famously, a number of potters were captured during these campaigns and put to work crafting many fine ceramic wares highly valued by practitioners of the tea ceremony. Naokata, however, was not a potter or a craftsman of any sort. Rather, at the time of his abduction, Naokata was a young boy only seven years old.
Even so, he was more fortunate in his circumstances than many. For instead of ending up sold into slavery, he was taken into a well-to-do warrior household and raised as an adopted son. He records that he was brought up with compassion and that, in later years, acquired the connections necessary to gain employment under the Maeda daimyo family of Kaga. He served initially as a page but, as time went on, gradually rose in status until he was ultimately issued a 1,000 koku stipend and appointed as a town magistrate for Kanazawa, one of the five largest cities in Japan during the Edo period.
We should note here that Naokata was a samurai, and a remarkably successful one at that. At the same time, however, he did not deny his background or hide his family origins. Instead, in the Kaden he proclaimed them openly, declaring in the very first sentence of the text that "I was born in the capital city of Korea" (生國朝鮮帝都) and noting that his father's family name was Kim (金) and his mother's Yeom (念). He also indicated that his father - who was killed as a result of the fighting - had been a noted scholar, no doubt a point to which he was also justifiably proud.
So what can we take away from this largely unknown and admittedly isolated story, and why is it particularly relevant to the course that will be offered for the first time this upcoming fall? This account involves a number of larger military and political developments but, as is the case with the vast majority history, it is also a story of the thoughts and actions of real human beings who are at times all too easy to overlook in the rush among historians to discuss larger issues and trends. To be sure, the experiences of Wakita Naokata were hardly the norm, and many of the Koreans who found themselves living in Japan during the Edo period were not nearly so well off. Yet, while their lifestyles varied greatly depending on the social class to which they belonged (samurai, peasant, artisan, merchant), there is little to no evidence to suggest that they were singled out for special treatment because they were from Korea, or that they were obligated to hide this fact in order to survive. Moreover, a similar situation prevailed for "outsiders" - including persons from Japan - in Chosǒn Dynasty Korea as well.
This is a point all too easy to miss when one focuses solely on the largely antagonistic relationship between the governments of Japan and Korea during the twentieth century or, even more problematically, when one simply assumes that the two countries - and their peoples - have been perpetual and unyielding adversaries for simply too many centuries to count. Instead, I would argue that setting out to take a closer look at the history of the changing relationship between Japan and Korea - not only in terms of diplomacy, but also in terms of people and ideas - allows us to arrive at a much more complicated and meaningful understanding not only of the past, but also the present.
So, who's up for the journey?
