Seoul Journal of Korean Studies

Introduction

Japanese-language scholarship has long played a vital role in developing historical scholarship in Korea. Despite its nonpareil role, most non-Japanese scholars struggle to trace the direction of specific debates and developments in historiography, sometimes resulting in partial misunderstandings of scholarly debates in Japan. This review article is a collaborative effort by five Japanese scholars and one American scholar of Korean history of the Joseon period to showcase five specific examples of such historiographical debates and developments to an international audience.

This work follows the format of each scholar discussing one senior scholar's major work on Korean history and evaluating it in its scholarly context and debates. The five senior scholars from Japan discussed here are the following: Professors Kawachi Yoshihiro (b. 1928), Takahashi Kimiaki (b. 1949), Fuma Susumu (b. 1948), Kitajima Manji (1934–2018), and Terauchi Itarō (b. 1948). [End Page 655] Their works on Korean/East Asian history and the academic debates they spurred through their work constitute indispensable aspects of the Japanese academe's work on Korean history in the postwar period. By following the historiographical debates and developments discussed here, one could gain invaluable insights into the Japanese research on the history of Joseon Korea, which could benefit any student of Korean history.

Historiography is a product of a particular time and place. Modern Korean historiography in Korea has been a collective effort at intellectual decolonization, with many scholars openly attacking what they deemed to be aspects of colonialist historiography in positioning their work. As many Japanese scholars before 1945 often accentuated Japan's outsized historical role in narrating the history of Korea, many Korean scholars did the opposite after 1945 by underscoring how Korea independently charted its historical path. Since the 1990s, the rise of China as a potential hegemon and the growth of economic ties between China and South Korea also spurred historical research that sought to reconcile the said emphasis on autonomy vis-à-vis Korean submission to late imperial China, often depicting the Sinocentric political and cultural order as universal and at times even benevolent towards Korea.

The Japanese scholarship developed in a different milieu. As the research works and debates collected here show, scholars from Japan explored aspects of Korean history away from the abovementioned metanarratives that depicted Joseon Korea as somehow fully autonomous while increasingly tied to Beijing at the hip. Instead, many explored the tensions between the ramifications of Korea's political or ideological submission to China vis-à-vis Korea's own interests and agendas concerning its relationships with the neighboring Jurchens and the Japanese. The debates reviewed here by Yagi Takeshi and Kimura Taku precisely explore this tension between Joseon Korea as a country with its own national identity, history, and geopolitical interests separate from China vis-à-vis the perception of Joseon Korea as China's obedient vassal, inseparably tied to the Chinese Empire through ideology and learning. Contrary to the recent trend in Korean-language scholarship, Japanese scholars show that the Joseon submission to China was not total and continued to generate disputes and tensions in shaping Korea's foreign policy.

Kimura Kanako's review approaches the problem of tension between universalism and particularism from a different angle. Focusing on Fuma Susumu's work, she first shows how Fuma's work revealed the practical limitations of late imperial China in its dealings with maritime nations such as Ryukyu and Japan, effectively exposing the pretensions of the Ming and even the far larger Qing as almighty universal empires. The Chinese Empire and Joseon Korea could only [End Page 656] maintain the fiction of Beijing's absolute regional dominance by "conspiring" together and maintaining a façade of universal order.

Nishijima Sadao's (1919–1998) thesis on the "Sinocentric world order" has transformed the field by showing how a "Sinocentric world order" based on the system of investiture and tribute was formed in ancient times (Nishijima 1983). But scholars have questioned the applicability of this thesis vis-à-vis the later periods, and Fuma's work is a...