Koreans in Japan Circa 1600

Well, the secret is out.

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?

To kanji or not to kanji, that is the question

Brendan wrote a comment on the "Hiragana and Katakana" post that I thought deserved a more considered response in the form of a separate post. He writes, "I was wondering if someone might be able to answer why so many Japanese words are [not?] written in Kanji? I understand about タバコ、but it seems to me that certain other words, like ニンジン, are never written with kanji, and I can't figure out where they might be from. Are these just more loan words, or are the kanji so obscure they go unused, or is there another explanation?" Assuming I got the omission of "not" correct, let me try to answer this.

First, don't fool yourself--I see the kanji 人参(にんじん) written in grocery stores all the time. You may not have noticed because, as often happens, those kanji you don't know blend into a blurry background and are in effect invisible. I was amused in Kyoto two years ago to see one grocer label his potatoes 馬鈴薯(ばれいしょ) instead of じゃがいも. I'm sure I had seen that 20 years ago when I was a college student in Kyoto, but then I only knew the word じゃがいも, and ignored the sign with 馬鈴薯 on it. But, I digress.

The real question is, why do some words for which there are perfectly good kanji get written in kana? It doesn't have to do with whether a word is a loan or not, even if we consider Chinese words loans. Rather, it has to do with who is writing and when. As I wrote earlier, women in the classical era (Heian) wrote mostly in kana with a little bit of kanji sprinkled in. If you look, for example, at the Tale of Genji you'll see a good example of this. But, some men of the time, such as Ki no Tsurayuki who was composing waka and of course Tosa nikki was using a similar style. So, to make a broad generalization (never a safe thing in academe!), at that time if one were writing in Japanese then the amount of kanji was relatively small. Why? Well, to be entirely academically irresponsible and write off the top of my head, I'll conjecture that part of the reason was that composing in Japanese (not Classical Chinese) was only a few centuries old, and it took a while to blend kanji into the fold. The problem with this guess is that, of course, the first texts in Japanese were written in man'yogana, which was, in effect, kanji that was proto-kana. Man'yogana--named for the Man'yoshu--were kanji used for their phonetic value, not their semantic value. Eventually the cursive form of those kanji evolved into kana, et voila!, a phonetic system was born. Man'yogana was/is notoriously difficult to navigate, and mere mortals don't do it. Maybe the swing to mostly kana usage (once kana were established) was a psychological reaction to the torture of reading Man'yogana. Just kidding. Sort of.

Moving forward, we see that over the next nine or ten centuries kanji became more common in Japanese writing, for more reasons than I can list, including the education of the author and the audience to whom he/she was writing. Perhaps the pinnacle of kanji (although, again, I have not studied this properly) comes in the Meiji Period, when people were using kanji for words like kore and sore, and even for exclamatory particles at the end of a sentence like ya. Perhaps they thought it made their writing look more sophisticated, perhaps it was just what everyone else was doing, perhaps it is what they were taught in school (none of these are mutually exclusive). This was also the period when the common practice for printers was to provide a phonetic gloss (furigana) on all words in a text, almost in a nod to the difficulty of reading it, but not really. For example, I have a volume of the Natsume Soseki complete works that has every single word glossed. It was certainly not a book printed and marketed to an illiterate audience! Rather, there is some arcane beauty to the printed word in this form, and Soseki (and his contemporaries) recognized that. For those of you taking EAJ411 next term, we'll be reading some of these texts so hang on to your hats.

Then, as we progressed through the 20th century that trend was reversed and slowly kanji usage diminished, although it has never gone to the "extreme" of Korean, where kanji (hanja)have been eliminated almost all together. The cynic in me wants to say that the culture is being dumbed down, thus less kanji, but that seems a bit harsh. But, the truth is, often writers will choose kana over kanji for their own inexplicable reasons. In EAJ410, we recently read an excerpt of a Mishima novel in which he uses kanji for a word in one sentence, and then in the next paragraph opts for kana for the same word. In these cases, all we can do is chalk it up to artistic license.

With the advent of text messaging, keitai shosetsu, etc., maybe we'll see even more changes in the near future. I can't hazard to guess what those will be, though. I mean, typing in Microsoft Word which handily and quickly finds the right kanji for me when all I have to do is enter the kana has made me more likely to use the kanji than in the "bad old days" when I would have had to pull out my (non-electronic) dictionary. The downside is that my calligraphy has suffered; really, my handwriting was much better 15 years ago than it is now. Maybe I should take Kaya-sensei's summer course on calligraphy as a refresher!

A Very Brief History of Tobacco

Judging by the direction taken in the responses posted to Professor Fessler's recent blog entry concerning katakana, there appears to be a related interest that has arisen concerning the history of tobacco.  Or, more accurately, how the word "tobacco" made its way into the Japanese language and when it was first used - in hiragana, katakana, or any of the numerous incarnations out there which involve kanji.

Thus, to chime in for a moment as the resident Japanese historian in the department, I want to make clear that the word "tobacco" does indeed date back to the late sixteenth/early seventeenth centuries in terms of its usage in Japan.  It is not found among the words listed in the first major Japanese-Portuguese dictionary published around 1600, the Vocabulario Da Lingoa De Iapam, probably because it was not a "foreign" word to the Jesuit missionaries who compiled this text.  But the word "tobacco" is attested to elsewhere.

One good example comes from an early seventeenth-century law code issued by the Uesugi family (上杉氏), the daimyo in charge of Yonezawa domain (米沢藩).  The code, promulgated in the eighth month of 1612, contains an article that states the following:

"It is strictly prohibited for those serving under a lord to smoke tobacco in the courtyard of his residence." (たばこ．．．主人の供仕、門庭において飲候事、一切停止之事)

A couple of points about this passage and the larger code:

1) "Tobacco" is written in hiragana.

2) The verb that is used together with tobacco here is nomu (飲む).

3) The remainder of the law code also makes clear that one is additionally to refrain from smoking around both the sick (病者) and the elderly (老人).

It therefore seems likely that it was indeed the sound of the word "tabaco" in Spanish and Portuguese that was first converted into hiragana before various ateji (当て字), or variants, using kanji were assigned/invented thereafter.

It is also probably worth noting that, back in 1612, there were already lawmakers who realized that tobacco is bad for your health...