The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush

Author:JaHyun Kim Haboush [Haboush, JaHyun Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS023000, HISTORY / Asia / Korea, POL031000, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Nationalism
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

5. The Aftermath

Dream Journeys and the Culture of Commemoration

Dead bodies as metaphors for the wounded political body of the Chosŏn state occupied a prominent place in the postwar discourse of identity in seventeenth-century Korea. The fifty-year period beginning with the Imjin War, the six-year Japanese invasions of 1592–1598, and ending with the Manchu invasions of 1627 and 1636–1637 was one of the most politically and socially challenging periods of Korean history. Chapters 1 and 2 have conveyed the trauma and destruction that Korea suffered from these military encounters as well as the emergent discourse of the nation that ensued.

The Manchu invasions presented the Korean court, elites, and common people with a crisis of a different type. Although the duration of the confrontation had been much shorter and the carnage less severe, the Korean capitulation in 1637 to the Manchus, whom they regarded as “barbarian,” and the subsequent Manchu conquest of China in 1644 profoundly challenged the Korean sense of cultural identity.1 To begin with, the ascendancy of the Manchus and their demand that Korea cooperate in their bid to challenge the Ming for supremacy in China had presented an extremely agonizing dilemma to the Chosŏn state. Koreans felt not only a deep ideological and cultural bond to the Ming—whom they regarded as the leaders of Confucian civilization, membership in which was the kernel of their identity—but also felt indebted to the Ming for the military assistance that they had received during the Japanese invasions.

Indeed, the Manchu question caused profound political upheavals internally, including a coup d’état and a rebellion. King Kwanghae (r. 1608–1623), who adhered to an even-handed policy between Ming and the Manchus, was deposed and his nephew Injo enthroned by the pro-Ming faction.2 In the following year Yi Kwal (1587–1624) rebelled against the new regime and briefly occupied the capital. After pacifying the rebels, Injo’s court resisted Manchu pressure until Hong Taiji, leading an army of 100,000, invaded Korea to demand capitulation.

Besieged in Namhan Fort on a mountain near Seoul in a bitterly cold winter, with little hope for provisions, the Injo court withstood the siege as long as it could but capitulated on the forty-seventh day and was forced to perform a ritual of surrender in accordance with a protocol imposed on it. Injo and the crown prince, wearing the blue garb of commoners, bowed three times and kowtowed nine times on bare earth to Manchu leader Hong Taiji, who was resplendent in imperial symbols—clad in a golden dragon robe and seated on a throne draped with cloth embroidered in golden thread, atop a podium of nine steps. Afterward Hong Taiji departed with Korean hostages, including the crown prince, the second oldest prince, and many of the Korean officials who had been most vocally opposed to the Manchus.3 The shame of the Korean king in performing this ritual of surrender to a foreign ruler, the only such occasion recorded in Korean history, seems to have extended far beyond the person of the king to the entire political body of the Chosŏn state.

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