Correcting Korean history

I really don’t like the title I just gave you — “correcting.” The word implies a right-or-wrong interpretation of Korean history, But it’s more complicated, more nuanced than that. Elsewhere I’ve criticized a slogan I pulled off a Korean government website that said, “Correct History.” The problem is that history is a moving object and subject to multiple interpretations, all of which can be “correct.” However, having said all that, there are some aspects of Korean history that have been widely misinterpreted.

I realize I’m walking a fine line between saying that there is not a “correct” history and saying that some interpretations are just plain wrong. Let me see if I can set out some examples.

Overall I think the problem is 20th-century historiography that was greatly, and negatively, influenced by Japan. That with the fact that Korea was subjugated and oppressed by Japan. There are two factors — Japan-era historians writing history from a Japanese perspective, and Korean loss of self esteem and a general attitude of defeat and self-blame for having lost their nationhood.

In other words, much of the corruption of the Korean narrative — yes, let’s use that word rather than correct and incorrect — was rooted in Japan’s view of Korea, that indeed many Koreans had adopted. And much of the corruption was rooted in Korean self-deprecation and an evaluation of Korea as a lesser country.

Of course, Japan thought of itself as superior. And many Koreans accepted that point of view. This was unavoidable given the facts in front of them through the first half of the 20th century. For example, Japan put forward its “superior” history by lauding the Japanese institutions of feudalism and the samurai. These were seen as dynamic and powerful and the basic reasons that Japan was able to take over Korea. And this went so far as to assume that Koreans should give up their culture, their language, and adopt Japanese language and the cultural heritage of Japan.

I cannot imagine how painful it must have been for Koreans who loved their surnames, and their heritage, to give up the power of a single syllable — Kim, Yi, Bak, Choe, Jeong, Gang, Jo, Yun — to adopt the sloppiness of the multiple syllables of Japanese names — Akutagawa, Kawashima, Shimagawa, Mitsubishi, Higashiyama. Some Koreans who were Andong Kim or Andong Kwon took the name Ando. Some of the Kims took their name for “gold” and adopted the Japanese word for money, “kane” to become Kanegawa, Kanemori, Kanegetsu or whatever. These were feeble attempts to try to preserve some of their identity as Koreans.

But abandoning their names was symbolic of abandoning their culture and history. For example, for many Koreans even today, it is axiomatic to say that Korean dynasties lasted too long and were ineffective and corrupt. It is axiomatic to say that the Joseon Dynasty should have fallen in the middle of its 500-year reign, and created a new and dynamic dynastic somewhere in the middle. It’s axiomatic to denigrate the Joseon Dynasty overall as a bad case of world history and today, the term “hell Joseon” is used, not to criticize the Joseon Dyansty, but to say that life today is awful — but doing so in a way that assumes Joseon was a bad era.

I sometimes think I am a lone voice in the wilderness saying that the long stable dynasties of Korea were a positive attribute of Korean history. In this regard, look at the survey I set up on my YouTube channel — where I asked which county has the longest dynasties. With over 7,000 who took the survey, only 60 percent said that Korea has the longest dynasties — others said the Ottoman Empire, Japan or China.

I suppose the tendency to avoid glorifying Korea is worthy humility. And, indeed, when I write of the glory of various aspects of Korean history, I am sometimes accused of being “gukppong” — a kind of ultra-nationalism. In other words, self-deprecation is built in to the Korean view of Korean history. Still, I am hopeful of a transition in the general view of Korean history that is more positive.

The tradition of long dynasties — the longest in world history — 1,000 years, 500 and 500, should be a source of pride.

On the other hand, there are those ultranationalists out there who go too far in praising Korean history, to overcompensate for the negative traditions that have grown out of the Japanese era. This faction of history has all kinds of extreme claims — that early Korean history was really set in China, that Koreans invented Chinese characters — seriously, those claims are out there with some nationalistic groups.

Ultimately, balance is the key. We need to get rid of the negative viewpoints that are leftover from the Japanese era, but we can’t fall off the balance beam by accepting the ultranationalistic claims that are currently in circulation among the nationalistic factions. Balance is the key.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is associate professor of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.