No modern country wishes to understand itself through its remote past more ardently than does Korea. Nineteenth- century Korean nationalists were anxious to trace their state back to a mythical semi-divine hero, Tan’gun, who founded Korea in the third millennium BC. (Koreans will probably be irritated if it is suggested that this resembles Japanese eagerness to trace their imperial family back to an Emperor Jimmu, about 2,500 years ago.)
The communists enthusiastically join this hunt for origins. When the ‘Great Leader’, the late Kim Il Sung, dictator of North Korea, wanted to propose a federation of the North with the South, he suggested that the name for the united country should be Koryo, after a state that had existed from the 10th to the 12th centuries. The present ‘Dear Leader’, Kim Jong Il, claims to have been born on the sacred mountain, Paektu-su, which gives him divine status. About ten years ago archaeologists in the Stalinist state announced triumphantly that they had unearthed the bones of Tan’gun and his queen. Kim Il Sung did even better when he dug up the bones of another great hero who had been born from an egg on the banks of the Yalu river.
All this reflects anxieties about identity and legitimacy. Japanese nationalists used to claim that Koreans are anciently of Japanese stock, and that along with the Manchurians they should all live under One Roof, i.e. the Japanese Emperor. Some Koreans hoped that a tomb of a princess opened some years ago in Korea might prove, on the contrary, that the Japanese imperial family had Korean ancestry.
By contrast, most of the world is aware of Korea only through its recent history, the immensely destructive war of 1950–53, the Tiger economy of the South from the 1970s, the current nuclear weapons programme of Kim Jong Il. Its ancient and complex culture, by comparison with that of China and Japan, is virtually unknown.
The cause of that is not hard to find. In 1910 the Japanese annexed Korea, with the tacit consent of Western powers, including Great Britain. There began a process of forced assimilation, which eventually led to the attempted suppression of the Korean language, and Koreans having to take Japanese names and worshipping at Shinto shrines. Some years ago I was in Seoul when a famous philosopher, a pupil of Bertrand Russell and a nationalist, died in his nineties. This man had given all his lectures illegally in Korean. One day the Japanese Inspector-General of Education arrived to inspect Seoul University, and descended on this philosopher’s lecture-room. He knew that if he lectured in Korean he would be dismissed and probably imprisoned. He was determined not to speak Japanese. So he gave his entire lecture in German, of which his students understood not one word. The Inspector-General assumed that this was normal for philosophy, and took no action.
The Koreans are determined to exorcise all traces of the Japanese occupation. (They recently pulled down the old Japanese Government-General building, which housed the national museum, and was one of the few decent buildings in Seoul.) Yet not a few Koreans had originally supported Japanese influence as a way of reform, and of overcoming Confucian traditions that they felt were an obstacle to Korea’s emulating the progress achieved in Japan at the Meiji Restoration.
Keith Pratt’s book reads as though it started off as a cultural history of Korea, to which politics have been added. This makes for some slightly naive remarks, e.g.: ‘The 17th and 18th centuries were a golden period for monarchy worldwide.’ He also compares the disillusion of Koreans as the end of the second world war brought not prosperity but the most hideously destructive civil conflict in its history with the nostalgia felt in post-1945 England for wartime comradeship. Yet this is probably the most illuminating approach.
Neo-Confucianism has sometimes promoted reform in Korea, and has been a powerful discipline socially and economically. It underlay that co-operation between government and industry, the chaebol system, which essentially copied the zaibatsu of imperial Japan without which the Korean economic miracle would not have been possible. Like Japan, Korea has never believed in purely free-market capitalism but in a national sense of purpose, even though this has co-existed with exceptionally violent political strife. A symbolic figure here is the late Park Chung Hee, the reviled and ruthless dictator whose role in founding the modern Korean economy is nevertheless widely recognised.
Pratt writes con amore of Korean culture, its music, painting, its superb ancient stoneware and later celadon, its curious mixture of high Buddhism and popular shamanism. It is good to be reminded that Koreans, at least, know that there is more to their country than war and current politics.
I once asked a Korean what he thought of Syngman Rhee, the ghastly South Korean dictator whom we held up as a paragon of freedom during the Korean war. ‘Well,’ he said, after a long pause, ‘his calligraphy was excellent.’