Corea: The Hermit Nation

by William Elliot Griffis

In the central province around Kiōto ruled a kingly house—[[56]]the mikado and his family—with tributary nobles or feudal chiefs holding their lands on military tenure. This is the ancient classic land and realm of Yamato. Four other provinces adjoining it have always formed the core of the empire, and are called the Go-Kinai, or five home provinces, suggesting the five clans of Kokorai.

To the north and east stretched the little known and less civilized region, peopled by tribes of kindred blood and speech, who spoke nearly the same language as the Yamato tribes, and who had probably come at some past time from the same ancestral seats in Manchuria, and called the Kuan-tō, or region east (tō) of the barrier (kuan) at Ozaka; or poetically Adzuma.

Map of Ancient Japan and Corea.

Still further north, on the main island and in Yezo, lived the Ainos or Ebisŭ, probably the aborigines of the soil—the straight-eyed men whose descendants still live in Yezo and the Kuriles. [[57]]The northern and eastern tribes were first conquered and thoroughly subdued by the Yamato tribes, after which all the far north was overrun and the Ainos subjugated.

In the extreme south of the main island of Japan and in Kiushiu, then called Kumaso by the Yamato people, lived a number of tribes of perhaps the same ethnic stock as the Yamato Japanese, but further removed. Their progenitors had probably descended from Manchuria through Corea to Japan. Their blood and speech, however, were more mixed by infusions from Malay and southern elements. Into Kiushiu—it being nearest to the continent—the peninsulars were constantly coming and mingling with the islanders.

The allegiance of the Kiushiu tribes to the royal house of Yamato was of a very loose kind. The history of these early centuries, as shown in the annals of Nihon, is but a series of revolts against the distant warrior mikado, whose life was chiefly one of war. He had often to leave his seat in the central island to march at the head of his followers to put down rebellions or to conquer new tribes. Over these, when subdued, a prince chosen by the conqueror was set to rule, who became a feudatory of the mikado.

The attempts of the Yamato sovereign to wholly reduce the Kiushiu tribes to submission, were greatly frustrated by their stout resistance, fomented by emissaries from Shinra, who instigated them to “revolt,” while adventurers from the Corean mainland came over in large numbers and joined the “rebels,” who were, in one sense, their own compatriots.

From the time of Jingu, if the early dates in Japanese history are to be trusted, may be said to date that belief, so firmly fixed in the Japanese mind, that Corea is, and always was since Jingu’s time, a tributary and dependency of Japan. This idea, akin to that of the claim of the English kings on France, led to frequent expeditions from the third to the sixteenth century, and which, even as late as 1874, 1875, and 1877, lay at the root of three civil wars.

All these expeditions, sometimes national, sometimes filibustering, served to drain the resources of Japan, though many impulses to development and higher civilization were thus gained, especially in the earlier centuries. It seemed, until 1877, almost impossible to eradicate from the military mind of Japan the conviction that to surrender Corea was cowardice and a stain on the national honor. But time will show, as it showed centuries ago [[58]]in England, that the glory and prosperity of the conqueror were increased, not diminished, when Japan relinquished all claim on her continental neighbor and treated her as an equal.