Left Flank

Northeast Asian relations, between ancient China, Japan, and Korea, have forced me to appreciate the permeability of human memory, and in this case, history. Ampontan writes about when Japan and Korea were one, and now the peninsula-centric history I had accepted after years of conflicting northern and southern Korean interpretations is again only an hypothesis.

Japan is the only Northeast Asian country to have had a continuously open and free political system since the end of the Allied occupation in 1952. It is the only country to have held free elections throughout that period with no interruptions. It is the only one to have maintained freedom of speech, and the only one not to have imposed martial law. It is also the only one not to have mustered out the army to butcher its own citizens in the street

Nevertheless, many in the West too often tend to accept the interpretation of regional historical issues from those in countries where deviation from the nationalist narrative is tantamount to professional suicide, rather than from Japan, where one can walk into any bookstore and find plenty of reading material that is brutally honest about the country's past.

Fine.

Prof. Che says the dynasty turned the Korean Peninsula into an isolated backwater, as the ruling elites oppressed the common people, made no effort to improve the infrastructure, and created an unfriendly environment for commerce and industry. The people at the top ate, and everyone else starved. The rulers were somewhat strange and paranoid, shutting off the country from the outside world.

Anti-intellectuals, they prohibited the use of the Hangeul script–one of the peninsula's landmark cultural achievements–and those authors who did use it were executed. It was common practice for the rulers to execute not only the criminals, but their families as well.

The professor is the first to admit that accurate statistics are impossible to obtain, but argues that the overall population under dynasty control fell from 1770 to 1910.

He makes the intriguing observation that most of the above characteristics closely resemble today's North Korea under the Kim Family Regime. That comparison is interesting on several levels. When comparing themselves to the South, the North Koreans claim they are the ones who maintain the true traditional Korean spirit, and that the southerners are too influenced by foreigners. Today's northerners certainly behave as if they are the heirs of the Korean «Hermit Kingdom» of the past.

Again, nothing too controversial. It's the one sentence about the pre-Choseon period, and the less than 100 pages of the same period in Korea, Old and New: A History (1990) by Carter Eckert and Ki-baik Lee, where the divergent nationalist claims both fail to convince. As a matter of fact, Eckert and Lee et al assert the "pivotal"role of China during the Three Kingdoms period (p. 30), and the Chinese and other mainland groups during the Koryo period (p. 76). There is no mention of Japan.