World Civilizations 112
Lecture Outlines
Lecture #17

Japan, Korea and Vietnam up to 1800

  1. Japan's history is more like Europe's than China's in that it is linear and progressive. There are two phases of that history covered in this lecture: the Warring States period: 1467-1600 and most of the Tokugawa era: 1600-1868.
  2. Up to 1467, the Japanese had been ruled by an Ashikaga Shogun. A "shogun" was nominally a chief minister of the Emperor but, in fact, ruled Japan while the Emperor reigned in much the same way as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Queen Elizabeth II.
  3. The shogun was a territorial lord who was first among equals in a group of lords called the daimyo. In 1467, two of the greatest daimyo disputed who would be shogun. The other daimyo sided with one or the other. Some of the more powerful lords took advantage of civil war to seize territories from their weaker neighbors. Japan descended into a war of all against all. The Japanese characterized this sort of aggression as "the strong eat and the weak become the meat".
  4. Hundreds of smaller feudal estates disappeared and, in the end, independent daimyo were reduced to a few dozen. Eventually, all of the local states were brought under the hegemony of a single lord. The Emperor played no role in this. Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) completed the unification of central Honshu (the main island) and would have probably become shogun if he had not been assasinated. It was Tokugawa Ieyasu who finally won the climactic battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and founded the Tokugawa Shogunate which then lasted until 1868.
  5. The samurai were soldiers in the employment of the daimyo. The daimyo conducted war by assembling large numbers of samurai. Since payment was from the estates of the daimyo, the system was essentially feudal. This is in contrast with China in which the Mandarin were non-hereditary civil servants of the Emperor whose power was total. The new weapon of war was a thrusting spear with a chisel-like blade. It would penetrate medieval armor and impale knights on war horses. It ended the dominance of the feudal knights and placed greater emphasis on the ability to mass large numbers of men. This is what led to the concentration of power in great lords.
  6. The Japanese political system was hierarchical. It was based on a military class of ordinary soldiers drawn from the agricultural villages. In between wars, it became harder to collect taxes from the villages because they contained large numbers of armed and trained warriors. Local samurai were often involved in local rebellions. In England at the same time, the warrior class numbered about ¼ of 1%, in Japan 7-8%. Big difference.
  7. Ieyasu's first move after vicotory was to confiscate the lands of the opposing daimyo. He then rewarded friends and supporters. The emergent structure so concentrated power in the Tokugawa lands that they were not challenged for 250 years. Read details in the book
  8. Under the Tokugawa, peace became universal with only rare exceptions. The penalties for rebellion started with the deaths of the rebels and could escalate to near genocide of entire villages. Because of the peace and the interest of the shogun in prosperity, trade and industry flourished. Taxes of the peasants were about one-third of the crop. This supported the daimyo and his family and a large group of samurai. The town folk produced hand crafted goods for the nobility and samurai. Basically feudal. However, with the growth of regional and inter-regional trade, the towns gradually grew beyond these beginning and produced an urban economy not unlike Europe's at the same time.

Korea

Early History

The people of Korea came from eastern Siberia and spoke an Altaic language. The language is distantly related to Japanese, Mongolian and Turkic. Living by hunting, gathering and fishing, they produced good pottery and practiced an animistic religion.

Between 1,000 BCE and the year 1 CE, agriculture, bronze and iron were introduced producing a village society ruled by tribal chiefs. The Chinese Emperor Wu Ti (140-187) sent an army into northern Korea to threaten the Huns who were spreading across eastern Siberia. They built a city very near Pyongyang the capital of North Korea today. This imperial outpost survived for 300 years and profoundly changed Korea forever.

Between the fourth and seventh centuries, three regional, archaic, native Korean states emerged given the Chinese examples and based on feudal confederations. Silla, the name of one of them, conquered the other two and formed the first Korean state. China recognized Silla as a vassal kingdom and supported it for centuries against internal Korean rivals. In 918, a regional war lord attacked and defeated the Silla kingdom which had become degenerate with time. The new dynasty was called Koryo and Korea is a English pronunciation of Koryo. Koryo was aristocratic, commerce was weak and the state was poor. Invaded often from the north, the Koryo court survived only by becoming a tributary of the Sung, Liao, Chin and Mongol dynasties.

The Choson Ero: Late Traditional Korea

A traitorous Koryo general, Yi Songgye (1392-1398) sided with the rising Ming dynasties while the Koryo aristocrats stuck with the losing Mongols. He defeated his former bosses and founded a new dynasty. This dynasty lasted from 1392 to 1910 which is a dynastic record in world history. Like the daimyo of Japan, the yangban of Korea monopolized education, official posts and land. In short, all of the good jobs. Below them were free peasants and townspeople who payed taxes (the good people). Below the good people were government and private slaves (a third of the country). The form of slavery was somewhat less harsh than that practiced in the American south in the nineteenth century but still not good from any self-respecting humanitarian view. In the middle of this dynastic period (1410-1450), a group of scholars under King Sejong invented a simplified, phonetically based alphabet which made it much easier to educate large numbers of Koreans to become literate.

Korea was repeatedly invaded by Japan at the end of the sixteenth century. The Chinese sent an army to defend Korea and the army did more harm to the Koreans than to the Japanese. Finally, the Manchus invaded Korea as the Ming dynasty was falling and devasted the countryside. Probably as many as two-thirds of the Korean people died in this series of disasters.

Politics in the poor court of the Koryo Kings was vicious as yangban young men competed for a small number of good jobs. Losing the competition for a job could often mean loss of one's head as well. Starting in the the 1600's, the situation gradually got better, prosperity slowly recovered and literacy rose. Unfortunately, the Koryo court continued its very slow and very long decline and famine struck in 1671 killing huge numbers of Koreans.


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