Michael J. Seth

Well, having grown up in the 1950s I thought I knew something about Korea; North Koreans were commies and South Korean were democratic good guys. I supposed there must have been some previous Korean history but didn’t think much about it. Michael Seth’s excellent book was quite enlightening and disabused me of a lot of previous notions.

Of course Korea has a long and illustrious history. Early on it was dominated by China, but when the Chinese withdrew due to internal troubles in the 3rd century AD Korea developed three independent states; Goguryeo in the north, Silla in the southeast, and Baekje in the southwest. The mythological founder of Goguryeo was Jumong, who hatched from an egg. Oviparity is fairly common in Korea mythology; the kingdom of Silla was also supposedly (there are alternative myths) founded by a boy who hatched from an egg, and the six Gaya states, eventually absorbed by Silla, also were founded by boys hatched from eggs.

The three kingdoms fought for years, but eventually Silla – with Chinese help – unified the peninsula in 676. The resulting state was Buddhist – with Confucian leanings - and highly feudal. There was some turmoil but by 935 a strongman, Wang Geon, had again unified the peninsula under the name Goryeo (from which the English word “Korea” is derived). The countries elite were known as the yangban (two sides), meaning civil and military. In the 1100s the military seized power and established something similar to the Japanese shogunate; a nominal royal ruler with actual power in the hands of a general. After a Mongol invasion and hegemony, the Joseon dynasty was established in 1392, adopting a Neo-Confucian ideology; Seth claims Korea was the most thoroughly Confucian state in the world. The king and high officials were always accompanied by pairs of Confucian historians; they recorded every word, gesture, and facial expression and combined this into a detailed record at the end of the reign. Women – who had been relatively free in earlier times – became ultra-regulated; women could not own property, remarry if widowed, or leave their homes except at certain times of day when a bell warned men off the streets. Seth notes Korea was the most sex-segregated country outside the Arabian Peninsula. Every young girl was given a small knife, which she was expected to use on herself if her honor was ever questioned. (There was an exception – there always is – for kisaeng, the Korean equivalent of geishas). To be fair, it wasn’t that different for men; everybody had a color-coded identity tag with the wearer’s name, age, and birthplace – to ensure everyone knew their place in society. Foreign policy was extreme isolation – China and Japan were not considered Confucian enough, and merchants from either country were forbidden contact with ordinary Koreans. This went on until the Japanese conquest in 1910.

The Japanese didn’t really know what to do with Korea and the Japanese government kept changing its policy; was Korea a colony? A protectorate? An integral part of Japan? Eventually it all became academic in 1945.
In 1945, Korea was divided into a Stalinist client state in the north and an American client state in the south. The original dividing line was exactly the 38th parallel, with no allowances for geography (For more on the liberation of Korea from the Japanese, see In the Ruins of Empire). Both sides inserted leaders – Kim Il Sung, who had scored a minor success as a guerilla leader against the Japanese; and Syngman Rhee, with a PhD from Princeton. Both turned out to be bad choices; Syngman Rhee presided over an authoritarian and inept government, while Kim Il Sung actually believed in Communist ideology and invaded the south under the assumption that the masses would arise. The US (officially the UN) responded by bombing everybody, and the Chinese responded to the US advancing into the north by their own invasion. Although initially successful due to American complacency, the Chinese also got bogged down in their own ideology, with Mao insisting that his armies “swim in the sea of the populace”, which turned out to be pretty hard to do when the populace speaks a different language and has a historical aversion to the Chinese. (For more on the Chinese intervention, see Enter the Dragon)

After the war, with a new boundary established, Kim Il Sung responded by executing those responsible for the DPRKs loss (which turned out to be everybody he didn’t like anyway) and Syngman Rhee responded by siphoning American aid into his own and his cronies coffers. Seth notes that in the 1960s and 1970s it actually looked like Communism was working; the DPRK repaired its war damage and reindustrialized while the ROK remained mired in poverty, dependent on American aid. However things began to reverse. The DPRK announced the successful completion of a 7-year plan – then instituted a new plan, which turned out to have exactly the same goals as the previous one. And again, and again. Meanwhile, famine hit – the number of starvation deaths is of course a state secret but outside observers put it between 200k and 3.5M. The ROK, meanwhile, was still a dictatorship, but the new leaders were less corrupt and began development of the country into one of the “little tigers”.

The ROK is now actually a democracy – although admittedly one where historically aristocratic families still have a major say in politics. The DPRK, on the other hand, is just weird. It’s no longer even nominally communist; communism is not mentioned in official documents. Instead it follows juche. “Juche” turns out to be whatever the Great Leader, Dear Leader, or Young Leader says it is, but it conveniently includes what’s essentially the Führerprizip; that there has to be a leader to guide the people. The DRPK is now a hereditary monarchy; it has a class system – the seongbun – divided into three castes with fifty-one subgroups; the highest seongbun includes relatives of the elite, war heroes, and “old revolutionaries”, the middle is workers and peasants. The lowest class is anyone guilty of a huge list of political crimes – or anybody with a guilty family member; it’s hereditary. The upper class gets access to luxury goods; the lowest class can’t send their children to college. The DRPK has recently decided that Koreans aren’t even the same species as the rest of humanity, but independently descended from Homo erectus; and DRPK archaeologists have located and excavated the tomb of Jumong (the guy who was hatched from an egg, see above; also spelled Dongmyeong or Tongmyong), and put the bones on display in Pyongyang.

Author Seth seems fairly even-handed; he criticizes China, Japan, and the United States for their historic and current attitudes toward Korea (in particular he notes the American bombing campaign during the Korean War was overly destructive, and argues that the UN should have stopped at the pre-war 38th parallel rather than continuing north and bringing in Chinese intervention. An end chapter speculates on reunification; Seth notes that South Korea residents are increasingly skeptical of it, and notes that some recent Chinese maps show North Korea as part of Manchuria.

Sorry this is overly long but there was a lot of background to cover; I learned quite a bit and want to read more. A color plate section with appropriate illustrations; a short bibliography; the index seems sparse.… (más)

If you will read only one book about Korean history, this is the one. Seth organizes and edits Korea's rich and vast history into a digestible and coherent whole, covering its legendary origins and through the nineteenth century. Seth presents the history of influence by Korea's geographic neighbors, China and Japan, as something uniquely transformed by the peninsula rather than adopted wholesale or by force. Especially useful for western readers is seeing Korean history in the context of East Asian history, the development of Confucian mores in Korea, and how its geopolitical position gave the nation unnaccountable strength as well as led to it ultimate demise with the Japanese Occupation of 1910-1945. The inclusion of translated historical documents, glossary and extensive notes only add to the precision and usefulness of this book. Unlike other books about Korean history written in English, this volume presents an unbiased, respectful, and modern view of the history of a culture and people.… (más)