This article introduces Yōjirō Satō’s essay “The Japanese Ruled the Ancient Korean Peninsula” and develops a critique of conventional views on ancient Japan-Korea relations, the Korean embassies to Japan, the so-called “toraijin” narrative, and historical programming by NHK Osaka.
The writer challenges the common assumption that culture and advanced technology flowed one-way from the Korean Peninsula into Japan, and argues instead that Chinese, Korean, and Japanese historical sources, together with material evidence, suggest that ancient Japan exercised strong influence over the southern Korean Peninsula.
It is a text that raises questions about the Korean embassies, the “toraijin” concept, ancient history, Japan-Korea relations, and NHK Osaka’s historical perspective.

2019-03-13
NHK Osaka’s intellectual decline is excessive, as it continues to broadcast the claim that the Korean embassies brought culture to Japan.

It Was the Japanese Who Ruled the Ancient Korean Peninsula.
Yōjirō Satō.
Writer.
Professor, College of Art, Nihon University.

Even while growing weary of Korean exaggerations and falsehoods, there are still not a few Japanese who remain under the impression that much culture was transmitted to the Japanese archipelago by way of ancient Korea.
Do not be misled by the newly coined term “toraijin.”
The blood of the Wa people flowed in the royal house of Silla.
This is a continuation of the special April issue of WiLL Rekishi Tsū, a book that every Japanese citizen ought to read.

The sorrow of being caught between two great powers.

From ancient times Korea sent tribute and hostages to both China and Japan, and when the Qing overthrew the Ming, Korea sided with the Qing, but afterward the Qing demanded tribute even harsher than that required by the Tokugawa shogunate.

“Each year the following shall be offered in tribute.
One hundred ryō of gold, one thousand ryō of silver, ten thousand bundles of white rice, three hundred bolts of silk cloth, ten thousand bolts of ordinary linen, one hundred bolts of fine Korean cloth, one thousand rolls of large paper of twenty sheets, one thousand sheets of small paper, two thousand sharp swords, one thousand buffalo horns, fifty patterned mats, two hundred kin of dye, one hundred measures of pepper, one hundred tiger skins, four hundred otter skins, two hundred blue rat skins, and so forth.
These offerings shall begin in the autumn of the kiyō year, that is, 1639.”

With a population estimated at around seven million, Korea could never have increased its national strength under such conditions.

When one reads passages like this, one can see the latent anguish of Korea, which had to be mindful of both Ming China and Japan, and can also glimpse how heavily the lives of the subjects were burdened.
Korean history is filled with the sorrow of having to survive only by constantly taking account of two stronger powers.

As for Ming China, it is written as follows.
“Whenever the king of Korea was newly succeeded, he had to dispatch a special envoy to seek the emperor’s approval of his accession.
The envoy also had to report all matters concerning the royal house and all major incidents that had occurred in Korea.
On the other hand, because almost all Chinese envoys ranked above the king of Korea in court precedence, when receiving them, the king had to go outside the walls of Seoul and bow reverently, and moreover, after the envoys entered through one gate, he himself had to enter the city through a different gate.”

From the standpoint of present-day consciousness, even more humiliating matters are written there.
It can hardly be said that Korea was treated as an independent state.
This is utterly different from what one sees in television dramas.
The fact that NHK and the television networks continue even now to broadcast Korean dramas far removed from historical fact is one proof of how postwar Japanese media have kept circulating a one-sided historical image.

Would people really have come “across” from such a country bearing culture and technology.
It is self-evident that both economy and culture flow toward the side with greater national strength.
Moreover, the historical records of China, Korea, and Japan all record that the Japanese mainland was never once attacked from the Korean Peninsula, and that from ancient times it was Japan that launched incursions one-sidedly.

I trust the Chinese historical records that say Japan ruled the peninsula, and I also believe from the written traces and material evidence that the southern Korean Peninsula and part of Kyushu were the land of Wa, and so I regard it as entirely natural that people at the time used such words as “kika” and “kichō,” meaning a return or submission to the homeland.
At the very least, so far as one can trace the surviving written evidence, I do not believe that advanced technology or culture came into Japan from the Korean Peninsula.

NHK Osaka’s intellectual decline is excessive, as it continues to broadcast the claim that the Korean embassies brought culture to Japan.