Korean nationalist historiography
Starting in the 1860s, a series of rebellions caused by excessive taxation and misgovernment threatened the reigning dynasty, while foreign powers — mostly western countries, but also Meiji Japan — used military force to try to open Korea to trade.
[6] Despite Joseon's status as a tributary of Ming (1368–1644) and then Qing (1644–1911) China — which implied the sending of tribute missions and a ritually inferior position of the Korean king vis-à-vis the Chinese emperor — Korea could also dictate both its domestic and foreign policies, creating an ambiguous situation that frustrated western powers.
[16] The most representative silhak historiographical work is Seongho Yi Ik's (1681–1763) Dongsa Gangmok ("Essentials of the History of the Eastern Country"), which although written in a neo-Confucian framework, demonstrates a more critical than apologetic tone towards the early Joseon dynasty and its establishment.
Based on the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki chronicles, the Kokushi gan asserted that the legendary figures Susanoo, the brother of Emperor Jimmu, and Empress Jingū had ruled or invaded Silla (Korea).
[29] Saitō Makoto, the Japanese Governor-General of Korea, targeted Korean ethnic nationalist historians (minjok sahakka) such as Shin Chae-ho, Choe Nam-seon, and Yi Kwang-su, as part of a "cultural containment" policy since the March 1st demonstrations for independence in 1919.
[31] The polemicist Shin Chaeho (1880–1936) found both Confucian historiography and Japanese colonial scholarship unsatisfactory on political, rather than academic, grounds, and proposed instead the Korean "race" (minjok) as an alternative subject of analysis.
[35][36] Among the new intellectual currents influencing Koreans during Japanese rule, a version of Social Darwinism promulgated by the Chinese historian Liang Qichao was influential among nationalist journalist-historians like Shin Chaeho, Choe Nam-seon, and Park Eun-sik.
[37] The themes of struggle for existence (saengjŏn kyŏngjaeng), survival of the fittest (yangyuk kangsik) and natural selection (ch'ŏntaek) inspired not only Shin's own historical views, but also those the Korean "self-strengthening movement" (chagang undong), which operated in similar terms to that in China and in Japan.
[44] The fellow historians Park Eun-sik (1859–1925) and Chang Chi-yŏng likewise attempted to rectify the "slave literary culture" (noyejŏk munhwa sasang) of the yangban to reflect historical Korea's supposed martial tradition.
[46][47] Shin Chaeho often revised existing history and mythology to support his ideal of historical Korean autonomy, and where he could not find it, or where there were contradictions, blamed it on "lost" or "falsified" records, a technique which he accused Kim Bu-sik of.
[53] An Hwak (安廓), another Korean nationalist, inverted Japanese historiographical tropes, such as by arguing that the supposed factionalism of the late Joseon was an embryonic form of modern party politics.
[59] On the other hand, the New Nationalists included figures such as Chŏng In-bo (鄭寅普) and An Chae-hong (安在鴻), the first of which had a classical Chinese education, rather than at a social science department at a university in Korea or Japan.
At first, Marxist historians focusing on class analysis dominated historical writing in the north, whereas Syngman Rhee's staunchly anti-Communist government (1948–1960) also made the notion of minjok less central to historiography in the south.
[62] In South Korea, the fall of the Rhee regime in 1960 and the anti-Japan protests triggered by the normalization of diplomatic ties with Japan in 1965 also reinstated the minjok as a "unifying framework" for developing an anti-colonial historiography.
[68] North Korean history of Kim Il Sung's exploits in Manchurian exile contain omissions, implausibilities, and forgeries, as well as a subtext of wandering and salvation (of the minjok) that has been compared with Christian and Greek mythology.
The normalization of China–South Korea relations and visits to Koreans in China have increased interest in the region, although efforts at "Recovering the Ancient Lands", as one irredentist author puts it, are marginal in the public sphere.
[83] The official History of the Republic of Korea portrayed the Korean people as center-stage in their own "liberation" against a small number of collaborators, giving the Allies of World War II a peripheral role.
[86] From the 1980s to Kim Dae-jung's presidency in 1998, most South Korean historians of collaborationism agreed with the idea that "the nation's history was kidnapped" at independence "by a clique of pro-Japanese stooges", who were shielded by the United States Army Military Government in Korea and Syngman Rhee from the Anti-Traitors Investigation Committee.
[85] Cumings recalled facing heavy resistance to his revisionist historiography including, "that the mere mention of the idea that Japan somehow 'modernized' Korea calls forth indignant denials, raw emotions, and the sense of mayhem having just been, or about to be committed.
[94] Shin's later work, from the Chosŏn sanggo munhwasa, showed more critical evaluation of primary sources, using methods from archaeology, epigraphy, and comparative linguistics, and relying less on Daejonggyo (Dangun-worship) scripture.
"[100] Nationalism has so pervaded mainstream historical scholarship in South Korea that Chinese characters, used exclusively to write the Korean language until recently, are relegated to footnotes in academic journals or excluded completely.
The story of how he brought poetry, music, medicine, trade, and a political system to the Korean peninsula was conceived similarly to the proposed Founding of Rome by the Trojan refugee Aeneas.
[115] The Chinese civilizational connection to ancient Korea continues to be attacked by North Korean historians, who allege that the history of Gija Joseon was "viciously distorted by the feudal ruling class, the sadaejuui followers, and the big-power chauvinists".
[120] Shin Chaeho strove to make "Korea" a primary, bounded unit of East Asian history, which he believed had been distorted by Confucian historians who measured Koreans by a graduation between Chinese and barbarian.
[111] Shin Chaeho's work shows the influence of Social Darwinism by portraying history as a racial struggle between the "Buyeo" (Korean) minjok with that of the Xianbei, Chinese, Mohe, and Jurchen over territory.
[114] Na Se-jin, Korea's most quoted physical anthropologist, asserted in 1964 that Koreans are superior in "looks, brains, bravery, stature, and strength" to the Chinese and Japanese, and resemble Europeans more than "Mongoloids", reflecting nationalist historiography's fixation on prehistorical racial roots.
[112] However, the conception of a Korean nation as being bounded by the Yalu and Tumen rivers was reinforced by Confucian histories of Joseon that did not confer legitimacy on dynasties that held such extreme northern territory.
[133] In the 18th century, the divide was such that the scholars Seongho Yi Ik and An Chŏngbok adamantly refused to consider Balhae part of Korean history, while Sin Kyŏngjun and Yu Deuk-gong fully incorporated it.
[66][75] The demonization of Japanese historical and archaeological findings in Korea as imperialist forgeries owes in part to those scholars' discovery of the Lelang Commandery—by which the Han dynasty administered territory near Pyongyang—and insistence that this Chinese commandery had a major influence on the development of Korean civilization.
Colonial Japanese scholars such as Iwakichi Inaba, Shiratori Kurakichi, Torii Ryūzō, Imanishi Ryū, and Ikeuchi Hiroshi declared that there was one unified "Manchurian-Korean history" (Mansen-shi).
