It was not the wars

By Mark Peterson

I need to follow up from last week's article about Korea's penchant for stability in spite of wars and the social change that takes place, not as a result of the wars, but afterward unrelated to the war. I think it's true of the Japanese invasion of the 1590s and the Korean War of the 1950s.

The point is I think we have evidence of tremendous resilience and creativity in Korea. We know about the recovery from the Korean War. We know that Korea developed rapidly from a country with virtually no infrastructure or industry and a per capita income of less than $100 per annum, to the economically powerful and individually wealthy country we know today.

I think the same thing was in operation after the Japanese invasion of 1592. The loss of life is estimated to have been close to one-quarter of the population, maybe four million people. Destruction of property was nearly total.

One can seldom find a building, even a Buddhist temple in a remote mountain, that was not burned by the Japanese. Land was laid waste. And following the Japanese invasion the Manchus invaded. That invasion was for a political purpose ― the recognition of the new Qing Dynasty prior to their move into China and the takeover of the Ming Dynasty.

The Manchu invasion was not as destructive of property nor did it cause such a wholesale loss of life but it did damage the esteem and prestige of Joseon ― it had to recognize a barbarian state and stand by to witness the destruction of a civilized, even the most-civilized, state, Ming China. Joseon bristled at having to bow down to the Qing and to accept the Qing calendar and other symbols of dominance.

But the key point is that Joseon restored itself to what it was before the wars. The king had run off in the face of the Japanese invaders, and the common people pelted his palanquin with rocks as he fled Seoul. Yet he returned to his throne and oversaw the government and the society's return to the status it had held before the invasion. The court officials returned to their positions. New appointments were made for those who had died. Farmers returned to farming and to restoring the economy shattered by the invasion.

And most surprisingly, slaves returned to being slaves. Slaves who had fought the Japanese invaders were honored for their valor. And they were returned to their position in households and government as slaves. It was a moment of chaos that could reasonably have been seized to seek liberation. But that did not happen. Slave-holding continued as it had before the wars. This perhaps is the greatest measure of the stability-seeking nature of Korean society. Slaves were honored for fighting the Japanese, some were honored in monuments erected for them, but they were not freed.

Stability was sought. And stability was achieved. The "status quo ante" was achieved.This achievement and culture value should not be glossed over and lost in the false claim that it was the wars that caused the Confucianization of which I've written "oft and o'er."

The wholesale social change, male dominance, the disinheritance of women, the establishment of the "jongbeop" ― the dominance of the "lineage heir" and the male-membership lineage group, genealogies excluding the female descendants, marriage and residence only at the husband's village, formation of the single-surname village ― these changes did not occur on the heels of the war. Recovery was the goal after the war. It was after recovery was achieved that social change evolved, nearly 100 years after. I wrote last time that it was Korea that oversaw its own change; Japan and its chaos do not get the credit.

What were the social forces that caused the change, then? Such forces are often invisible and only seen in analysis after the change occurs, and thus it seems to me that population pressure was a major force. We see this in other countries that similarly move from equilateral inheritances, or "partible" inheritance practice, to a single heir. Often the heir is the eldest son ― "primogeniture" ― but in other cases, it is "ultimogeniture" ― the youngest son, or daughter. Matrilineal societies pass property through females. Korea never saw a matrilineal society.

We often hear that before the patrilineal system of recent traditional Korea, well-known in Korean by the term "bugye sahoe," there was a matrilineal system. This is absolutely false. Prior the "bugye" system there was equal divisions of inheritances. There never was a matrilineal system, a "mogye sahoe"!

In addition to population pressures, economic pressures were growing in the late 17th century. These pressures pushed social actors to look at options. Property divided and divided and divided again left landowners typically owning small sections of land scattered across several counties and provinces.

Rather than continually dividing land between all the heirs, there grew a desire to keep an estate intact. And Confucianism provided the rationale ― the texts spoke of the eldest son as the heir. And that was the solution. Confucianism did not cause the change, but was the vehicle for how to make the change. It's interesting that for over 1,000 years Koreans read texts that were based on a Chinese primogeniture system, but they ignored that part of it, since their society was balanced between sons and daughters as heirs. But it was the population and the economic pressure of the late Joseon Kingdom, not the chaos of the wars, that brought Korea in line with orthodox Confucian practice.

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