2021-12-31
It Was the Japanese Who Ruled the Ancient Korean Peninsula
Yōjirō Satō, author and professor at Nihon University College of Art
Although many Japanese people are exasperated by the Korean propensity for falsehoods, there are still quite a few who assume that a great deal of culture reached the Japanese archipelago by way of the ancient Korean Peninsula.
Do not be misled by such a newly coined term as “torai-jin.”
Wa Blood Flowing Through the Silla Royal House…
This is a continuation of the article in Rekishitsū, the April special edition of the monthly magazine WiLL, which is essential reading for every Japanese citizen.
“Quick-Tempered and Filled with a Desire for Revenge”
Transportation in those days was by sea.
Much of the Korean Peninsula consists of poor soil.
I have been to Jeonju in China and have visited South Korea more than twenty times, but Japan’s land is still more fertile than South Korea’s.
Japan’s climate is also milder.
Isabella Bird, the British woman travel writer born in 1831 who wrote Korea and Her Neighbours, said that “Korea is unmistakably a mountainous country” and has no “plains worthy of the name.”
A prosperous country’s population increases, and its national power naturally grows.
Japan continued attacking the Korean Peninsula because it possessed such overwhelming national power.
Alternatively, Japan could repeatedly attack because Wa or “Mimana” actually existed on the peninsula.
Is that not the natural conclusion?
Declaring from the outset that it never existed cannot be called scholarship or research.
It cannot be helped if such an approach is regarded as abandonment from the beginning.
Is it not the role of historians to investigate and determine whether it existed?
“Mimana” appears frequently in the Nihon Shoki and also appears in the Hizen Fudoki and Shinsen Shōjiroku.
Its existence is also recorded in the Records of the Three Kingdoms, the Book of Song, the Book of Liang, and other works.
South Korea alone lacks such documents.
The absence of references in South Korean historical materials does not prove that it did not exist.
Groundless objections from those who rewrote or erased history serve only to demean history itself.
As I wrote at the beginning, “history” can be traced backward through surviving written records.
There is also abundant material evidence in the form of keyhole-shaped burial mounds unique to Japan.
There is also the Gwanggaeto Stele inscription.
When written records and material evidence correspond, on what grounds is everything denied?
Unless they present their own words and material evidence in response, their objections cannot become constructive research.
Are not South Koreans the ones who are falsifying history by destroying keyhole-shaped tombs, erasing words disadvantageous to their country, and presenting distorted interpretations?
The Chinese Book of Sui also repeatedly contains similar descriptions, including “使持節都督新羅仟那加羅秦韓慕韓六国諸軍事安東大将軍倭国王,” recognizing the King of Wa’s right to rule the Korean Peninsula.
The early seventh-century Account of the Mission to Silla also states, “新羅百済皆以倭為大国球物並敬仰之恒通使往来.”
Silla and Baekje recognized Wa as a great power.
Nevertheless, it is claimed that people came to the country as torai-jin, bringing culture and technology to a nation they revered.
Many other accounts of Japan also appear in China’s History of the Northern Dynasties and Book of Wei.
Japan was recognized from an early period.
On what grounds can superiority be claimed over a country that received hostages and tribute and possessed the power to rule the entire Korean Peninsula?
An examination of the Korean Peninsula’s history quickly reveals that its tragedy and suffering arose from being caught between the great powers of China and Japan.
This continued throughout recorded history and remained unchanged until the modern period.
The French priest Charles Dallet, who lived from 1829 to 1878, compiled materials collected by Bishop Daveluy and others who were executed in Seoul into Histoire de l’Église de Corée.
He wrote: “Had Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s death not caused the Japanese forces to abandon the territories they had conquered and withdraw, Japan would probably have subjugated the whole of Korea.”
Isabella Bird also wrote: “There are only two classes in Korea—the robbers and the robbed.
The official class recruited from the yangban are licensed vampires, while the lower classes, who easily constitute four-fifths of the population, are literally lowly people whose reason for existing is to provide blood to the vampires.”
She continued: “Everything in Korea exists at a low, impoverished, and wretched level: class privilege; exploitation by nobles and officials; the complete absence of justice; the instability of income, which bears no relation whatsoever to labor; a government that has repeated the worst conventions relied upon by the governments of unreformed Eastern countries; scheming, thieving officials; and a government weakened by confinement within the royal palace and its small inner court” (Korea and Her Neighbours).
The country had decayed from within and collapsed as a state.
Dallet’s Histoire de l’Église de Corée states: “They are quick-tempered, but are equally filled with a desire for revenge.
For example, forty-nine out of fifty conspiracies are exposed in advance by some of the conspirators.
These exposures are almost always intended to satisfy a personal grudge or to retaliate for some slightly bitter words spoken in the past.
If they can bring punishment down upon the heads of their enemies, it means nothing to them that they themselves will be punished.”
It also states, “Koreans are generally stubborn, difficult, quick-tempered, and vindictive,” which sounds as though it were describing contemporary South Korea.
Park Geun-hye said, “Even after one thousand years, the resentment will not disappear,” but when the nation’s highest leader possesses such an outlook, it is obvious what the future will bring.
A country that once imitated Japan under its enormous influence now repeatedly alters, fabricates, and distorts history, ignores written and material evidence, and voices resentment.
The 1996 edition of South Korea’s high-school textbook National History, Volume I, states: “We were able to achieve victory in the Japanese invasions because of the superior potential of our people.
In other words, although our national defense capabilities at the level of the government forces lagged behind Japan’s, at the level of the entire people we surpassed Japan.”
That is not the case.
The historical fact is that Korea relied upon Ming reinforcements to fight.
Reliance upon China remained unchanged into the modern period.
Isabella Bird observed: “For centuries, Korea was a vassal state of China and had no relations with other countries.
China’s influence upon Korea in religion, civilization, thought, and customs was therefore extremely great.”
The Korean people of that period diligently studied Chinese culture and education.
They themselves desired assimilation.
She continued: “They manufacture matchlock guns that appear fairly durable.
Although this country possesses copper of extremely high quality, everything they use is brought from Japan.”
“Yet strangely, despite this, the army is generally extremely weak.
Whenever they perceive even a serious danger, they think only of abandoning their weapons and fleeing in all directions.”
There is far too great a divergence between the missionaries’ testimony and their historical understanding.
They lacked technological capability.
The exploitation and oppression of the people weakened their loyalty to their rulers.
Moreover, the yangban—the aristocracy—were the first to flee.
Was it not because Hideyoshi’s forces knew this that they were able to occupy the country in the blink of an eye?
To be continued.