View of the frog out of the well

By Mark Peterson

• Published Jul 2, 2018 5:08 PM KST
• Updated Oct 25, 2018 3:08 PM KST

In this series of articles, I will be sharing my perspectives on Korean culture and history ―what I've come to call the view of the frog that came out of the well. Implied in that term is a criticism of the standard views of Korean culture and history is that of a frog in the well ― a limited perspective.

One of my perspectives that is the most different from the standard Korean perspective is that of the question of invasions. In my view of Korean history, there have been remarkably few invasions. Korean history is remarkably stable and peaceful. But the standard view of Korean history is the opposite ― that there were multiple invasions from many countries.

This, of course, is a product of the 20th century. People tend to see history in the light of the current situation. For Korea, the 20th century was tumultuous.

Korea was victimized repeatedly ― first by the Japanese, then by the United Nations, then by internal war (that was a product of the international Cold War), and at the end of the century, Korea was still divided. Korea felt powerless, thus the expression ― given as an “old saying” when it probably was only coined at the time ― that “when whales fight, shrimp get their backs broken”.

It's typical to think of history in terms of the present. When the present is tumultuous and chaotic, history explains how that condition came about. Thus, a history of Korea written in the 20th century could only be one of chaos and victimization.

However, the 21st century for Korea is very different. South Korea is no longer the poverty-stricken country of the 20th century, and the history is being rewritten from a more positive perspective. More about that later.

Concerning invasions, in the late 1970s when I was working on my Ph.D., I was introduced to a man who I remember was a retired high school teacher who was renowned as a specialist on the invasions Korea has suffered.

He lived in the Gangneung area and I had the privilege of visiting him in his study in his home. He had gone through all the histories he could find, which must have included the Sillok (the official annals of the Joseon court), yasa (unofficial histories), munjip (anthologies of prominent scholars), eupji (gazetteers for local counties) and I'm not sure what else.

He concluded there were over 9,000 invasions. He had an exact number, like 9,284; I can't remember the exact number, but it was precise and he had the documentation for each one.

The problem, from my perspective, is that to find so many invasions he had to count every pirate raid and border skirmish he could find. It doesn't seem to me that one should count a pirate raid where a single ship of Japanese pirates comes ashore and steals a bag of rice, a pig, and maybe kidnaps a young girl as an invasion.

A pirate raid is a pirate raid, not an invasion. The same thing for a border skirmish. If one counts every pirate raid and border skirmish as an invasion, the term invasion soon loses all its meaning.

I want to offer another perspective, one that de-emphasizes the invasions and the idea that Korea is a place of chaos and turmoil. I want to suggest Korea has had only two major invasions ― that of the Mongols in the 1230s and that of the Japanese in the 1590s. All else pales in comparison.

Those two invasions resulted in the loss of more than a million people ― we estimate between 1 million and 2 million for the Mongol invasion and between 2 million and 4 million for the Japanese invasion. We don't have precise figures, but these estimates are probably fairly accurate. No other invasion comes close to these two.

Even so, we must quickly point out that the ultimate winner in both of these wars was Korea. The Japanese invasion was so destructive that one tends to think Korea lost the war, and one is constantly reminded of the destruction when one travels around Korea ― so many historical sites have sign boards that explain that the building was destroyed by the Japanese but rebuilt on such-and-such a date.

Yet, the Japanese were defeated and left after seven years, and Hideyoshi died a failure and his son, Hideyori, couldn't hold on to power and was deposed, but the Korean court and the Joseon Kingdom continued on in power.

The Mongols were more successful, but the Korean court made a peace treaty with them and worked out a system where the king stayed on the throne. We don't have a defeat like those in China where foreign powers rule ― the Yuan Dynasty of the Mongols or the Qing Dynasty of the Manchus.

Mark Peterson (

markpeterson@byu.edu

) is associate professor of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.