Through Seokguram, the Hunminjeongeum Haerye, Korean celadon, Shinpei Ogura, and Yukichi Fukuzawa, this essay examines the formation of modern Korean culture and language and the role Japan played in that process.

August 21, 2020
The following is a continuation of the preceding chapter.
“Korean Tradition” Dates from the Modern Era
I will say this deliberately: Korea is the country in the world most similar to Japan.
Since the modern era, it has continuously adopted Japanese institutions and culture, and Japanese influence has extended into every corner of society.
Japan fought the Sino-Japanese War and made Korea independent, but it can be said that the Korea that emerged as a result of that war not only acquired the status of an independent nation but also became a country entirely different from the old Korea that had existed before.
Independence from China, the establishment of Korean as a language of culture, and the modern academic study of Korea—the core issues that led to the emergence of the Korean nation—were, for the most part, accomplished by Japanese.
Many people may find this surprising, but much of what is now called “traditional Korean culture” actually appeared only after the beginning of the modern era, or had its significance discovered during that period.
In that process, it was Japanese who played the leading role.
Originally, the people of the Korean Peninsula had little interest in their own distinctive traditional culture.
In the realm of consciousness, “things Korean” scarcely existed at the time.
The frontispiece of Korean history textbooks contains a photograph of the Buddhist statue in Seokguram Grotto in Gyeongju.
It is a magnificent Buddhist statue created during the Silla period.
It was discovered in 1909.
This was before the annexation of Korea by Japan, but Korea was already under the protection of the Japanese Residency-General.
A Japanese postal worker who entered the cave to take shelter from the rain discovered the Buddhist statue, which had been left exposed to the elements, causing a great commotion.
An investigative team was dispatched, and because it was judged to be extremely valuable, the Government-General subsequently undertook large-scale construction work and devoted considerable effort to its preservation.
Some people may regard this as only natural, but one should remember that the Joseon Dynasty was a rigid Confucian state hostile to Buddhism, where many Buddhist statues were destroyed as soon as they were discovered and discarded without even leaving records.
In 1940, the Hunminjeongeum Haerye, a fifteenth-century work explaining the circumstances surrounding the creation of eonmun—Hangul—was discovered.
It was found being used as scrap paper in a private home in North Gyeongsang Province.
Today it is a national treasure, but had this been during the Joseon period, it would probably have been treated as little more than waste paper.
It came into the light of day precisely because an age had arrived in which Hangul was regarded as a valuable cultural heritage.
It was also Japanese who discovered the beauty of Korean ceramics.
In old Korea there was little custom of treasuring antique ceramics as precious objects, and apparently little consciousness of preserving tradition; the techniques of celadon production had disappeared long before, and no one was able to make it anymore.
Gisaku Tomita, a businessman with a discerning eye, invested his private fortune and spent ten years reviving it.
The celadon sold today in Korean department stores and souvenir shops is not produced by a continuously transmitted traditional technique, but by the methods that Tomita restored, as is generally acknowledged.
It is an ancient yet new art that had once disappeared from Korean soil and was brought back from beneath the earth by a Japanese man at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Shinpei Ogura is another person who deserves special mention.
Originally an assistant at the University of Tokyo, where he studied such subjects as the writing system of the Man’yōshū, he decided to go to Korea and began studying the ancient Korean language, particularly hyangga.
Hyangga means “songs of the countryside,” and refers to songs composed during the Silla and Goryeo periods, of which only twenty-five had survived.
To the Confucian scholars of Korea, they were little more than relics from an insignificant age of barbarians.
Documents written in ancient Korean were themselves virtually nonexistent, and no one even knew how they should be read.
While serving as a lower-ranking official of the Government-General, Ogura began studying old Korean words, and during his holidays he rode a donkey into the provinces to collect dialects.
Old forms of language often survive in regions far removed from the center.
That was what attracted his attention.
It was a field in which neither Koreans, nor the Government-General, nor even the Japanese linguistic establishment showed much interest, and surrounded by indifference, he continued his research alone.
That the Korean language acquired a foundation for scientific study was entirely the product of his devoted efforts.
In other words, efforts to recognize the value of “things Korean,” which the literati of old Korea had ignored, and to rediscover and revive those traditions, began after Japan came to govern Korea and were carried out by Japanese.
It is no exaggeration to say that the nation of the Korean people was born through its “encounter” with modern Japan.
“The leading actors in colonial Korea during the first half of the 1940s continued, even after the declaration of independence in the latter half of the decade, to play leading roles on the stage of the new country.
Formally speaking, because the country set out as an independent nation, there should have been a major change, but in fact those who had accommodated themselves to Japanese imperial rule participated in the U.S. military government and played a role in building the new state.
In terms of human composition, there was no substantive change, and one has no choice but to conclude that the new country was built directly along the historical line of the first half of the 1940s.”
(Modern Korean History under Japanese Imperial Rule, Song Geon-ho)
The Korean Language Was Created by Yukichi Fukuzawa
The person who played the decisive role in the establishment of modern Korean written in a mixture of Chinese characters and Hangul was Yukichi Fukuzawa.
For some time, he had hoped to create allies for modernization among Japan’s neighboring countries, but because China had nothing resembling Japanese writing mixed with kana, he believed that educating the general population would be difficult and had largely given up on the idea.
Then, one day, he learned that Korea possessed a script called eonmun, which resembled Japanese kana, and conceived the idea of publishing a newspaper in Korea in order to spread new knowledge.
He commissioned the Tsukiji Type Foundry to manufacture eonmun type at his own expense and sent Kakugoro Inoue to Korea carrying it.
Inoue was a student living in Fukuzawa’s household and was twenty-three years old at the time.
Thanks in part to the prestige of Fukuzawa, who was regarded as a guiding figure of Japan’s modernization, Inoue was immediately appointed an adviser to the Korean government, and three years after his arrival in Korea, in 1885, he succeeded in launching the Hanseong Jubo, a national-language newspaper written in a mixture of eonmun and Chinese characters.
The Korean language of that time lacked the vocabulary necessary to describe international politics, economics, or modern academic disciplines, so there was little alternative but to use Japanese as a model.
The use of different types of script together, sentence structure and usage, writing style, punctuation, and quotation marks were also transferred from Japanese.
The new Korean language was created rapidly in the image of Japanese in order to meet the immediate objective of publishing a newspaper.
The consciousness of creating a language for a new nation did not arise internally.
Modern Korean was born as the realization of the ideals of a Japanese Enlightenment thinker who sought to bring Korea into the circle of modernization.
Japan created the foundation for the formation of the nation.
In that sense, Korea itself may be said to have begun with Japan.
“Modern Korean was formed with Japanese as a ‘facing mirror.’
Beginning with the structure of the unification of spoken and written language, many elements at the levels of expression and prose, vocabulary, and forms of expression were borrowed from Japanese.
Although the expression may be somewhat misleading, the Korean language used by Koreans today is substantially different from the Korean language of the Joseon Dynasty.
If anything, it may be closer to Japanese.
It was newly reconstructed using modern Japanese as a model, through adaptation and translation, and through the creation of a unified written and spoken style modeled on Japanese prose.”
(The Colonialism of Literature — Landscape and Memory in Modern Korea, 南富鎮)
No matter how one looks at it, it is impossible to derive a modern written language directly from the classical Chinese of the Joseon era.
Even though there were Hangul novels such as The Tale of Chunhyang, they were far too marginal to constitute a tradition, and no matter how much one reads their prose, consisting largely of strings of the sounds of Sino-Korean words and Chinese expressions, it is difficult to find anything directly leading to modern Korean.
Kim Dong-in, one of the representative writers of modern Korea, wrote his first work in Japanese and originally composed his literature in Japanese.
One day, when he decided to write in Korean and sat down at his desk, no words came to him at all.
That was only natural, because at the time there was no ready-made literary vocabulary, and he later wrote that his mind went completely blank.
Having no alternative, he first constructed his sentences in Japanese and then converted them into Korean to create his work.
His writing, liberally sprinkled with words borrowed directly from Japanese, initially sounded extremely strange and unnatural, but eventually those expressions became established and developed into the Korean language of today.
It is often said that Korean and Japanese were in conflict with one another, but this is simply the framework of the language struggles that raged in nineteenth-century Europe being applied wholesale to Korea; no such reality existed there.
At the beginning of the modern era, the Korean language that existed was still at a stage that could almost be described as a vernacular, and it was in no position to compete with Japanese.
Only through its encounter with Japanese did it begin to develop into a language of culture, and for Korean, Japanese was something like a foster parent.
This kind of transformation occurred throughout the culture as a whole.
There was a change resembling a complete remodeling of civilization, and as a result, it seems difficult for Koreans today to understand the culture of the old era intuitively or to appreciate its virtues.
Intellectuals in earlier times must have been able to read classical Chinese and feel its beauty, but people today can no longer relive that experience.
Therefore, from a cultural perspective, a different country was born around the end of the nineteenth century.
In other words, it may be said that the internal history of Korea as Korea began around this time.
To be continued.