논단/Korea's Place In the Sun - 태양(the Sun)"의 함의

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"태양(the Sun)"의 함의 : 종속의 남한과 주체의 북한 다운받기 (32 KByte)   "태양(the Sun)"의 함의 : 종속의 남한과 주체의 북한 미국의 저명한 한국현대사 연구자인 브루스 커밍스(Bruce Cumings)는 1981년 그의 대표작『한국전쟁의 기원: 해방과 분단정권의 등장』(The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945～1947)을 간행하고, 1990년에는 이 책의 후속 편으로『한국전쟁의 기원 2집: 폭포의 큰 울림』(The Origins of the Korean War Vol 2: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947～1950)을 출판한 바 있었다.   그는 이 두 책에서 한국전쟁의 기원을 1930년대 일제시대에까지 거슬러 올라가 살펴봄으로써 해방 당시 한국은 사회혁명(social revolution)이 성취될 여건이 성숙되어 있었고, 이러한 혁명은 미국의 패권주의적 군사개입이 없었다면 성공했을 것이라고 보았다.   이처럼 그는 미국의 제국주의적 패권정책을 비판하는 수정주의 학설의 대표적 주창자로서 한국전쟁을 베트남전쟁과 같은 내전(Civil War) 내지 민족해방전쟁으로 규정한 바 있었다. 따라서 그는 도덕적 우위를 갖고 있다고 본 북한의 지도자 및 정부에 대해서는 호의적인 평가로 일관한 반면 미국의 꼭두각시에 불과하다고 억측한 남한의 지도자와 정부의 정통성에 대해서는 시종 비판적으로 논급한 바 있었다.   이러한 커밍스의 학설은 어둡고 긴 군사독재의 터널을 빠져 나오지 못하고 있던 한국학계에 큰 반향을 불러 일으켜 수정주의에 입각한 현대사 연구가 붐을 이루게 하는 기폭제 역할을 수행하였다.   그러나 냉전의 붕괴와 함께 『스티코프(Terentii Shtykov) 비망록』과 같은 소련측 기밀자료가 연이어 공개되고, 한국전쟁의 국제전적 성격을 밝힌 연구로 윌리엄 스톡(W. Stueck)의 『한국전쟁: 국제사』(The Korean War: An International History, 1995)와 박명림의 『한국전쟁의 발발과 기원 Ⅰ: 결정과 발발』(1996)과 『한국전쟁의 발발과 기원 Ⅱ: 기원과 원인』(1996)이 속속 간행됨에 따라 한국전쟁이 국제적인 요인보다는 한국사회 내부의 갈등으로 인해 발발했다는 커밍스의 학설은 밀려드는 파도 앞에 놓인 모래성과 같은 처지가 되었다. 지난해 말 출간된 『브루스 커밍스의 한국현대사』는 1997년 미국에서 나온 Korea's Place In the Sun : A Modern History(1997)의 한글판이다. 번역본의 출간과 더불어 신문지상의 서평란은 이 책에 대한 호평과 혹평의 십자포화로 수놓아 졌다. “남한과 북한 심지어 미국에 사는 한국인까지를 조명하는 구체적이고 고급스러운 한국론”(「한국일보」2001. 11. 2)이자, “미국인으로서 30여년간 한국을 본격적으로 천착한 그의 태도에는 경의를 표해 마땅할” 정도로 “그의 한국사랑에 감명 받는다”(「경향신문」2001. 11. 3)라는 찬탄의 축포가 작렬하는 반면 “사실적 판단과 객관성, 그리고 균형 감각의 측면에서 많은 결점을 안고 있는 커밍스 최악의 저작”(「조선일보」2001. 11. 3)이라는 비평이 그 대척점을 정조준한다. 왜 이렇게 극과 극의 평가가 엇갈리는 것일까? 이 책을 긍정하는 평자들은 커밍스가 한국 역사의 흐름을 바라보는 데 사용한 “비교 ․ 유추 ․ 은유”의 마법, 즉 반미(反美) ․ 반제(反帝)의 비판의식과 약소국 한국민중에 대한 강렬한 연민의 정을 보이는 서술 기법에서 우러나오는 감정적 호소력에 매료되어 있는 듯하다. 때문에 그들은 이 책의 행간 곳곳에 베어 있는 “합리주의자”를 자처하는 미국인, 즉 “영원한 타자”의 눈으로 한국 “근대성”의 역사 자체를 부정하는 커밍스의 오만함에는 눈이 멀어버린 듯하다. 왜냐하면 이 책은 커밍스가 인정한 바와 같이 “한국 사람들한테 불리한 것이라는 인상을 줄”수도 있는 “미국적 시각”(21쪽)에서 쓰인 “학부의 동아시아 문명 강좌에서 쓸 한국에 관한 독본”(10쪽)이지, 한국의 성공을 예찬하기 위해 쓰인 책이 아니기 때문이다. 이러한 오해는 책제목에서부터 시작된다. 이 책의 역자들은 번역서 출간 이전 “양지의 한국”으로 직역되던 “Korea's Place In the Sun”의 함의를 번역하지 않음으로써 원저자가 걸어 놓은 “비교 ․ 유추 ․ 은유”의 깊은 속내를 알아채지 못하게 봉쇄해 버렸다.   커밍스는 이 책의 서문에서 자신이 제목에서 의미한 바를 다음과 같이 설명하였다. “이제 오직 일본만이 떠오르는 태양의 나라임을 자처하고 있고, 근심 많은 미국인들만이 자기 나라를 지는 해라고 생각한다. 실로 우리의 흥망성쇠와 주기적인 일식을 관장하는 세계는 그리스와 로마의 세계가 아니라, 상대적으로 소수인 선진산업국들이 끊임없이 경쟁을 벌이는 산업시대이다. 그리고 바로 그러한 태양계에 한국은 이제 막 합류하게 되었다.” 커밍스는 자신의 책제목이 한국이 “소수의 선진 산업국들이 끊임없이 경쟁을 벌이는 태양계의 일원으로 합류했다는 의미”를 상징한다고 말한다. 물론 "in the Sun"은 태양계를 방불하게 하는 현재의 세계체제에서 한국이 서구 “산업 세계의 중심에” 놓이게 되었다는 말이다.   그러나 이 책에서 설명하고 있는 한국의 태양계 진입과정은 모멸과 험구로 가득 차 있다. 즉 한국의 산업화는 식민지 시대 일본에 의해 이루어진 산업화의 물적 ․ 인적 토대를 바탕으로 해방 후 미국 시민들의 세금으로 조성된 거대한 원조에 의해 종속적으로 이루어진 예기치 못한 성공이라는 것이다.   즉 한국은 미국 중심의 세계체제 하에서 종속적 성장을 한 꼭두각시의 나라인 반면, 북한은 “태양왕의 나라(Nation of the Sun King, 이 책의 역자는 태양의 왕국으로 번역했음)"로 비유하면서 미국중심의 세계체제에 맞서 독자적인 태양계를 이끄는 중심 나라로 그 주체성을 다각도로 강조한다. 이처럼 그는 지금까지도 해방이후 남 ․ 북한의 발전상을 평가함에 있어 두 개의 다른 척도를 사용하는 북한 편향을 떨쳐버리지 못했다. 커밍스가 예찬하는 한국의 “미덕”은 덕치를 기반으로 한 농업위주의 자급자족적 폐쇄사회이며, 이러한 미덕이 그대로 구현되고 있는 것으로 보이는 조선왕조의 적손(嫡孫) 북한은 그에게는 영원히 비판적 지지의 대상으로 남으리라고 본다. 커밍스는 말한다. “이 책에 나오는 모든 것은 새로운 접근법과, 동료들의 최근 연구를 최대한 숙지한 결과로써 해석된 것이다. 나는 사고방식을 바꾸는 것은 성장의 신호라는 원칙 아래, 여전히 나한테 옳게 보이는 해석을 유지할 권리와 내 예전 연구에 나왔을지도 모르는 견해를 수정할 권리를 행사했다”라고.(18­19쪽) 그러나 이 책을 정독해 보면 한국어나 한문으로 된 원전을 해독할 능력이 결여된 커밍스가 읽을 수 있었던 최근 연구들은 미국학자들이 일군 성과에 국한된 것이며, 그나마 자신의 구미에 맞는 것만을 편식했음을 알 수 있다. 또한 한국사를 보는 그의 시각도 수정주의, 세계체제론, 오리엔탈리즘, 그리고 목적론적 구조주의 이론에 여전히 주박(呪縛)되어 있음을 알 수 있다. 그는 파도에 휩쓸려 부서질지도 모르는 자신의 학설을 지키기 위해 방파제를 쌓아 올렸을 뿐이었다.   아직도 그는 한국전쟁은 미국의 패권주의적 군사개입이 없었다면 “식민주의나 민족분단, 외국간섭으로 야기된 엄청난 긴장이 해결되었을”(418 쪽) ‘민족해방전쟁’이자 ‘내전’이었다는 수정주의 시각을 고수하고 있다. 또한 그는 “대한민국이라는 공화국은 예전에는 완전히 종속적이었다. 이 나라는 처음에는 식민지였다가, 그 다음에는 외국군에게 점령당했으며, 그 후 1950년 여름에 미국이 이 나라를 망각의 늪에서 구출했다”(419쪽)라는 서술에 보이듯이 세계체제론에 입각해 주변부의 운명은 핵심부에 의해 규정된다고 확신하며, 한국의 경제성장이 일본과 미국과 같은 중심부에 기생해 얻은 비주체적인 것임을 강조함으로써 폄하한다. 나아가 그는 근대 이전 한국사회의 역동성을 부정하며 개화파를 비롯한 한국인들이 펼친 근대화 움직임을 "일본과 미국의 흉내"로밖에 여기지 않고 한국사의 진보를 위해 한국인의 기울인 주체적 노력을 무시해 버린다. 사실 커밍스는 이 책 전편에 걸쳐 합리성이 결여된 “한국”과 서구적이고 자유주의적인 “근대성”을 연결시킬 수 없다는 오리엔탈리즘의 각본대로 조선후기의 역동성과 개화기의 자주적 근대화의 가능성을 부정하고 남한의 현대사도 폄하(貶下)하는 자세를 일관되게 견지하고 있다. 이 책에 대해 본격적인 평론을 쓴 전상인은 말한다. “이 책은 커밍스의 저작들 가운데 최악의 것이 아니가 한다. 어쩌면 커밍스는 이 책을 통해 그나마 지금까지 자신이 한국 현대사 연구에서 쌓아 왔던 나름의 학문적 명성을 한꺼번에 상실할지도 모른다”고.(「B. 커밍스. 『양지의 한국: 현대사』―20세기 한국사의 반미적 해석, 친북적 왜곡, 반한적 평가―」,『해외한국학 평론』창간호, 2000). 이러한 지적은 촌철살인의 정곡을 찌르는 평가라고 생각한다. 왜냐하면 이 책의 갈피갈피에는 모래성과 같아진 자신의 학설을 지키려는 위기의식이 베어 있으며, 합리주의를 가장한 오리엔탈리즘이라는 지적 오만이 꿈틀거리고 있기 때문이다. 한마디로 이책은 객관성과 논리성에 의거한 학술서라기 보다는 비꼼과 뒤틀림, 비유와 은유로 점철된 읽는 이의 가슴에 호소하는 격정적 역사산문이라 할 수 있겠다.

 

 

** 미국  Norton사 간행 수정판의 pdf판 다운로드

    : http://craig1992.blog.com/2012/10/14/koreas-place-in-the-sun-a-modern-history-revised-pdf-download/ 

 

    미 New York Times 의 위 저서에 대한 간략한 소개 (1장과 Book Review를 소개하고 있음. 온라인 구매는 연결 안되고 있음) 

     : http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/cumings-korea.html

 

 

[참고]

 

* 출처 : http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/cumings-korea.html       CHAPTER onE Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History By BRUCE CUMINGS W.W. Norton & Company Read the Review The Virtues One might trace the history of the limits, of those obscure actions, necessarily forgotten as soon as they are performed, whereby a civilization casts aside something it regards as alien. Throughout its history, this moat which it digs around itself, this no man's land by which it preserves its isolation, is just as characteristic as its positive values. --Michel Foucault Like most other people on this earth, contemporary Koreans in North and South think they have escaped history and tradition in the dizzying pace of an energetic twentieth century. Meanwhile, they move in ways that would be inexplicable without investigations of a much longer period--the poorly recorded millennium before 1400, and especially the well-recorded half-millennium of the Choson dynasty (1392-1910). To grasp "modern" Korea we will first need a tour through previous centuries, to make the point that you may forget about history, but history will not forget about you. Consider this statement on Korean history around the time of Christ: "The significance of sinicised Choson, and later settlements in Korea sponsored by the Han emperors, lay in their long-term cultural influence on Japan. In time the Korean peninsula became the main conduit through which Chinese culture flowed to the Japanese islands." This was written in 1993, in a good book. It could have been written at any time since Japan rose up more quickly in the Western imagination than did Korea--namely, after 1868--but not before. What's wrong with the quoted statement? First, Korea was never "Sinicized," although it came close in the period 1392-1910. Certainly it was not Sinicized at a time when walled mini-states contested for power on the peninsula. Second, is there no other significance to Korea than its "long-term" effects in conducting Chinese influence by remote control to Japan? Was that influence unchanged by its passage through Korean hands? Did China exercise no "cultural influence" on Korea, but only on Japan? If not, why not? If so, why emphasize and dwell upon Japan, and not Korea? I could go on, but we may say that from the inroads of the Western imperial powers in East Asia right down to the moment at which I am writing, non-Koreans have had trouble taking Koreans seriously, in understanding Koreans as actors in history. Imagine a European version of this: Greek and Roman culture passed through country X along about 200 B.C. to A.D. 1400 (the above author's time frame) and had a definitive effect on ... England. We need not name country X to see the deficiencies of such a statement. Great Britain, like many other European countries, lived and evolved in the instructive shadow of Greek and Roman civilization. In Edinburgh perched on a hilltop overlooking the sea, we happen upon a partial reconstruction of the Parthenon, a thousand miles from the real thing. Does that make of Scotland a mere reflection of Greek glory, a vessel, a conduit? Of course not. It is the history of the past century, in which Korea fell victim to imperialism and could not establish its own constructions of the past, which makes us think that if Koreans are Confucians, or Buddhists, or establish a civil service exam system, they must therefore have become "Sinicized." The world is more complex than that, and Korean history is stronger than that. Koreans made Confucius their own just as Renaissance thinkers made Plato and Aristotle their own; that Confucius' grave was in Shantung, just across the Yellow Sea from Korea, made the adaptation all the easier. The real story is indigenous Korea and the unstinting Koreanization of foreign influence, not vice versa. In his masterful book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre persuades readers in the twentieth century to understand that the ideas inhabiting their minds are fragments of a lost totality, whether they fancy themselves Lockean liberals, Augustinian Catholics, or Aristotelian rationalists. There is simply no possibility of recapturing the disappeared whole, a world where such systems of thought were the only ideas, structuring the totality of human interaction and inhaled like the air we breathe. It is the same with Korea, where a world view suffused with Confucian, Buddhist, and nativist ideas defined what it meant to be Korean for millennia, only to be lost with a poof in our time. Still, there are the remnant fragments of this world in Korean minds, which help to explain why many Koreans do the things they do, and how they have adapted themselves to modern life. Old Korea was a universe all of its own, a fully realized human history like no other. It was a world defined by virtue, and if the virtues may be in retreat in contemporary Korea, as they are everywhere else, they still animate Korean minds: minds that are "front-end loaded" whether they know it or not, with thousands of years of history, and deeply felt morality. Today we connote those virtues with the catchall term "Confucianism." This is often said to be a conservative philosophy, stressing tradition, veneration of a past golden age, careful attention to the performance of ritual, disdain for material things, commerce, and the remaking of nature, obedience to superiors, and a preference for relatively frozen social hierarchies. If Confucianism had those tendencies, it also had others--a salutary loyalty to one's family, for example, which might translate into competition with other families over material wealth; an emphasis on moral remonstrance, for another, which gives to students and scholars an ethical stance from which to speak truth to power. Much commentary on contemporary Korea focuses on the alleged static, authoritarian, antidemocratic character of this Confucian legacy. Yet one-sided emphasis on these aspects would never explain the extraordinary commercial bustle of South Korea, the materialism and conspicuous consumption of new elites, or the determined struggles for democratization put up by Korean workers and students. At the same time, the assumption that North Korean communism broke completely with the past would blind one to continuing Confucian legacies there: its family-based politics, the succession to rule of the leader's son, and the extraordinary veneration of the state's founder, Kim Il Sung. Running silently alongside this Confucian stream is a mighty river of inarticulate axiom and belief, a native strain of thought that inhabits the minds of the uneducated, the unlettered, the cloistered, hidden-and-forbidden woman, the bent peasant in the rice field, the old man hustling through the streets of Seoul with a hundred pounds of baggage on his wooden A-frame, the industrial worker howling to the moon under the dull influence of makkolli, the inquisitive young child, the young couple enthralled in the mutual discovery of their own sexuality, the invisible outcaste. That mind sits under the breastbone and not between the ears: as Richard Rutt put it, "Koreans, like the Chinese and the Hebrews, think of the heart, not the head, as the seat of thought." When they say, "I think," they point to their chest. Mind is mind-and-heart or sim, a visceral knowledge that joins thought with emotion and that has an honored position in Western civilization in the thought of Plato. The Korean mind-heart is attuned to the spirits that inhabit the nature of all things (bears, crickets, trees, flowers, homes, rivers, mountains), the ghosts and goblins that walk the night, the shamans who cast spells, the heterodox women who unite mind and body in the writhing incantations of the mudang sorcerer. This is the human mind connected to the viscera and the body in touch with its natural environment, and out of it comes superstition, intuition, revelation, insight, madness, wisdom, and, above all, freedom. It is the purest Korean tradition, infusing songs, poems, dances, dreams, and emotions; it resists all attempts to excise the senses and bank the fires of passion. It is the Korea that I, a Western rationalist, know least about: ghosts and demons I can't see, wailing and screaming I can't hear, forces for good or evil I can't feel, foot-stomping, throat-shrieking, hand-waving experience that goes on without me. An observant American visitor to Korea a century ago, a scientist and traveler named Percival Lowell, had this to add: "The Koreans are passionately fond of scenery. The possessions of each province in this respect are not only thoroughly known, but they are systematically classified and catalogued. A grove of trees is celebrated here, the precipices of a mountain there, the moonlight falling on a pool of water in a third spot...." Somehow I think this is the most authentic, fully human Korea--perhaps because it is the Korea we are always warned against. From this native source, I think, comes the earthy, expansive, bouncy, kinetic energy the foreign traveler senses in Koreans, so attractive and compelling, and finds lacking in Korea's neighbor to the East. To all those anonymous invigorating people, I raise a cup of soju. ORIGINS OF THE KOREAN NATION Koreans emerged as a people on a mountainous peninsula surrounded on three sides by water Someone once said that if the Korean peninsula were flattened with an iron, it would be as big as China. Koreans associate the origin of their history with the great crater-lake mountain on their northern border, Paektusan, or White Head Mountain: they remain today a "mountain people," who identify with hometowns and home regions that, so they argue, differ greatly from other places in Korea. To the foreigner this regionalism often seems exaggerated, but it exercises very real influence--for example, on recent voting patterns in South Korea. No doubt it exercised much greater influence when few Koreans lived in cities, inhabiting a universe called their own village, and walking for hours just to reach a town on the other side of a foothill. The peninsula was also surrounded on three sides by other people: Chinese to the west, Japanese to the east, and an assortment of influences to the north: "barbarian" tribes, aggressive invaders, and, in the past century, an expanding and deepening Russian presence. Although Japan exercised strong influence in the late 1500s and again in the past century, in ancient times the peoples and civilizations on the contiguous Asian continent were far more important to Korean history. The northern border between Korea and China formed by the Yalu and Tumen rivers has been recognized by the world for centuries, much longer than comparable borders in Europe, and so one might think these rivers always constituted Korea's northern limits. In fact, Koreans ranged far beyond these rivers, well into northeastern China and Siberia, and neither Koreans nor the ancient tribes that occupied the plains of Manchuria considered these riparian borders to be sacrosanct. The harsh winter climate also created frozen pathways for many months, facilitating the back-and-forth migration out of which the Korean people were formed. The imagined beginning of the Korean nation, for the contemporary North and South, was the third millennium B.C. when a king named Tan'gun founded Old Choson (sometimes translated as "morning calm," Choson remains the name of the country in North Korea, whereas South Koreans use the term Han'guk, a usage dating from the 1890s; the Western name Korea comes from the Koryo dynasty, 918-1392). According to a surviving text from the Koryo period, Chinese historians wrote that Tan'gun built his royal palace near modern-day P'yongyang and established a state called Choson, in the same era as a legendary founder of China, Emperor Yao. James Gale was much closer to the truth when he wrote that Korea "takes its beginnings in the misty ages of the past that elude all attempts at close investigation, ages that lie somewhere between that of man and those of angels and spirit beings, joining heaven on the one hand and earth on the other." The Koryo text gave this version of Tan'gun's birth (there are several others): In those days there lived a she-bear and a tigress in the same cave. They prayed to Hwanung [the king who had descended from heaven] to be blessed with incarnation as human beings. The king took pity on them and gave each a bunch of mugwort and twenty pieces of garlic, saying, "If you eat this holy food and do not see the sunlight for one hundred days, you will become human beings." The she-bear and the tigress took the food and ate it, and retired into the cave. In twenty-one days the bear, who had faithfully observed the king's instructions, became a woman. But the tigress, who had disobeyed, remained in her original form. The bear-woman could find no husband, so she prayed under the sandalwood tree to be blessed with a child. Hwanung heard her prayers and married her. She conceived and bore a son who was called Tan'gun Wanggom, the King of Sandalwood. Of obscure origin, Tan'gun has nonetheless exercised his influence on Koreans in every century since Christ, and no doubt many before; the legend above was not manufactured in the Koryo period, as Japanese historians have claimed, but can be found illustrated on some stone slabs from a family shrine in Shantung, across the Yellow Sea from Korea, that dates to A.D. 147. A temple erected in Tan'gun's honor in 1429 stood in P'yongyang right up until the Korean War blew it to smithereens in the 1950s. Nationalist historians assert a linear, homogeneous evolution of the Korean people from the distant point of Tan'gun's appearance to the Korean of today. Moreover, the king was not just a person: he was also a continuous presence from the time of Tan'gun down to the present, a vessel filled by different people at different times, who drew their legitimacy from this eternal lineage. Under its first president, for example, South Korea used a calendar in which Tan'gun's birth constituted year one--setting the date at 2333 B.C. And in September 1993 North Korea interrupted the ongoing nuclear crisis involving the United States to announce with great fanfare the discovery of Tan'gun's tomb and a few remains of his skeleton, at a site close to P'yongyang: The founding of KoJoson [Old Choson] by Tangun 5,000 years ago marked an epochal occasion in the formation of the Korean nation. With the founding of the state of KoJoson an integrated political unit was established, the blood ties and cultural commonness of the population were strengthened and their political and economic ties became closer, which gave momentum to the formation of the nation.... The Koreans are a homogeneous nation who inherited the same blood and culture consistently down through history. Kim Il Sung toured the site later that month, and a year after that his son, Kim Jong Il, dedicated a museum in the same place. All the scribes came forward to proclaim Koreans the oldest (and therefore finest) people in the world, with one continuous line of history from the thirtieth century B.C. down to the present. Whatever one makes of this latest discovery or the she-bear myth, this is clearly a Korean story: few other peoples (the Japanese and the Israelis come to mind) assert such distant origins, with a continuously distinct ethnicity and language down to our time. Few place such inordinate attention on the female issue of a prodigal son, or the son's prodigious talents (the North Koreans claimed that Tan'gun's unearthed pubic bone was unusually large; ancient texts sometimes gave the length of the king's phallus, but only if it was something to write home about.) Few peoples eat as much garlic. Above all, few of the world's peoples live in a nation with no significant ethnic, racial, or linguistic difference: Korea is indeed one of the most homogeneous nations on earth, where ethnicity and nationality coincide. It is pleasant for Koreans to think they were always that way; it is a dire mistake to think that this relative homogeneity signifies a common "bloodline" or imbues all Koreans with similar characteristics. Unfortunately there is no written history of Korea until the centuries just before the birth of Christ, and that history was chronicled by Chinese scribes. Excavations at Paleolithic sites, however, have determined that human beings inhabited this peninsula half a million years ago, and people were also there seven or eight thousand years ago, in the Neolithic period--as revealed by the ground and polished stone tools and pottery they left to posterity. Around 2000 B.C. a new pottery culture spread into Korea from China, bearing prominent painted and chiseled designs. These Neolithic people practiced agriculture in a settled communal life and are widely supposed to have had consanguineous clans as their basic social grouping. Korean historians of today sometimes assume that clan leadership systems characterized by councils of nobles called hwabaek, institutions that emerged in the subsequent Silla period, go back to these Neolithic peoples, as would the Tan'gun myth. But there is no hard evidence to support such imagined beginnings for the Korean people, unless one credits the recent discovery in North Korea, which few outside historians are yet willing to do. By the fourth century B.C., however, a number of small states on the peninsula had survived long enough to come to the attention of China, and the most illustrious was Old Choson, which some historians locate along the banks of the Liao River in southern Manchuria, and others along the Taedong River, which runs through P'yongyang and northwestern Korea. Choson prospered into a civilization based on bronze culture and a political federation of many walled towns, which (judging from Chinese accounts) was formidable to the point of arrogance. Composed of a horse-riding people who deployed bronze weapons, Choson extended its influence to the north, taking most of the Liaot'ung basin. But the rising power of the North China state of Yen (1122-255 B.C.) checked Choson's growth and eventually pushed it back to territory south of the Ch'ongch'on River (located midway between the Yalu and the Taedong rivers). As the Yen gave way in China to the Ch'in Empire and the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 200), Choson declined and refugee populations migrated eastward. Out of this milieu emerged a man named Wiman, who assumed the kingship of Choson sometime between 194 and 180 B.C. Wiman's Choson was a meld of Chinese influence and the old Choson federated structure; apparently reinvigorated under Wiman, this state again expanded across hundreds of miles of territory. Its ambitions ran up against a Han invasion, however, and Wiman Choson fell in 108 B.C. These developments coincided with the emergence of iron culture, making possible a sophisticated agriculture based on implements such as hoes, plowshares, and sickles. Cultivation of rice and other grains increased markedly, thus enabling the population to expand. From this point onward there is an unquestioned continuity in agrarian society down to the emergence of a unified Korean state many centuries later, even if we are not yet willing to call the peoples of the peninsula "Korean." Han Chinese built four commanderies to rule the peninsula as far south as the Han River (which flows through Seoul), with a core area at Lolang (Nangnang, in Korean; the location is near modern-day P'yongyang). It is illustrative of the relentlessly different historiography practiced in North and South Korea today--as well as of the dubious projection backward of Korean nationalism that both sides engage in--that DPRK historians deny that the Lolang District was centered in Korea and place it northwest of the peninsula, possibly near Beijing. Perhaps this is because Lolang was clearly a Chinese city, the site of many burial objects showing the affluence of the Chinese overlords and merchants who lived in it, with many of the artifacts unearthed by a Japanese archaeologist named Sekino Tadashi under the direction of the colonial governor-general, in 1913. (Perhaps the North Koreans have a point, after all.) THE PERIOD OF THE THREE KINGDOMS For about four centuries Lolang was a great center of Sino-Korean statecraft, art, industry (including the mining of iron ore), and commerce. Its influence carried far and wide, attracting immigrants from China and exacting tribute from several states south of the Han River. In the first three centuries A.D. a large number of so-called walled states in southern Korea grouped themselves into three federations, known as Chinhan, Mahan, and Pyonhan; rice agriculture had developed in the rich alluvial valleys and plains to the point where reservoirs for irrigation could be established. Chinhan was situated in the middle part of the southern peninsula, Mahan in the southwest, and Pyonhan in the southeast. The state of Paekche, which soon came to exercise great influence on Korean history, emerged first in the Mahan area; no one is certain when this happened, but the state certainly existed by 246, since Lolang mounted a large attack on it in that year. That Paekche was a centralized, aristocratic state blending Chinese and indigenous influence is not doubted, however, nor is its growing power: within a hundred years Paekche had demolished Mahan and occupied what today is the core area of Korea, around Seoul. It is said that the common Korean custom of father-to-son royal succession began with King Kun Ch'ogo of Paekche, and his grandson inaugurated another long tradition by adopting Buddhism as the state religion (in 384). Meanwhile, two powerful states had emerged north of the peninsula around the time of Christ--Puyo in the Sungari River basin in Manchuria and Koguryo, Puyo's frequent enemy, to its south near the Yalu River. Koguryo, which would also exercise a lasting influence on Korean history, developed in confrontation with the Chinese. Puyo was weaker and sought alliances with China to counter Koguryo, but eventually succumbed to it around A.D. 312. Koguryo was now expanding in all directions, in particular toward the Liao River in the west and toward the Taedong River in the south. In 313 it occupied the territory of the Lolang Commandery and came into conflict with Paekche. Peninsular geography shaped the political space of Paekche and Koguryo, and a third kingdom called Silla that fills out the trilogy. In the central part of Korea the main mountain range, the T'aebaek, runs north to south along the edge of the Sea of Japan. Approximately three-fourths of the way down the peninsula, however, roughly at the thirty-seventh parallel, the mountain range veers to the southwest, dividing the peninsula almost in the middle. This southwest extension, the Sobaek Range, shielded peoples to the east of it from the Chinese-occupied portion of the peninsula, but placed no serious barrier in the way of expansion into or out from the southwestern portion of the peninsula. This was Paekche's historic territory. Koguryo, however, ranged over a wild region of northeastern Korea and eastern Manchuria subjected to extremes of temperature and structured by towering mountain ranges, broad plains, and life-giving rivers; the highest peak, Paektusan, occupies the contemporary Sino-Korean border and has a beautiful, crystal-pure volcanic lake at its summit, called Ch'onji, or Pond of Heaven. It is 500 meters from the summit, with surrounding peaks at nearly 3,000 meters above sea level. A famous Korean monk named Toson, who combined Buddhist and Taoist practices of geomancy, saw the Korean peninsula as "a branching tree with its roots at Mt. Paektu." Meanwhile, in 1942 a German geographer assayed the traveler's breathtaking vista--"a view of monumental grandeur"--from the rim of the crater, with a vast expanse of virgin forests below: Gazing outwards, he scans over the slopes with their white patches and downward to the sheer unending plateau with its immense forests. Gazing inward his eye looks down 500 m[eters] over steep precipices to the broad surface of the lake, which appears to be motionless, even when storms are raging overhead. In good weather it is a radiant dark blue, and the forms and colors of the caldera walls are reflected in perfect clarity. The reds of the lower lavas, the gray and black of the higher ones, the gleaming yellowish white of the pumiceous sand appear double their actual size in the reflection and are all the more impressive. All observers agree that the contrasts that this twofold view unite make the scene ... one of the most enthralling sights on earth. Koguryo branched far and wide from this mountain, from contemporary Vladivostok to Port Arthur, from the thirty-eighth parallel to Changch'un in Manchuria. Like Koguryo, North Korea utilized this mountain as part of its founding myth, and now Kim Jong Il is said to have been born on the slopes of Paektusan, in the desperate year of 1942 (he was actually born along the Russo-Chinese border south of Khabarovsk, and accounts conflict as to whether he was in China or in Russia). Unsurprisingly, it is also the Koguryo legacy that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) claims as the mainstream of Korean history. Certainly Koguryo bowed to no one in championing its own kings: the founder, Chumong, was not merely the son of heaven, a great archer and horseman, and strong as a mature man at the age of seven; he could also walk on water. once when enemy warriors were hot on his heels, legend has it, Chumong drew up short in front of a wide river. When he was about to be captured, "immediately a host of fish and turtles gathered together on the surface to form a bridge so that Chumong and his party could cross. Then they dispersed and sank back into the depths, leaving the pursuers on horseback with no way to cross." Chumong "gave the name Koguryo to his land from his family name Ko, meaning high, because he was begotten by the sun on high." North Korea's Kim Il Sung, also a sun-king, called himself by an old Koguryo term meaning maximum leader (suryong) and privileged a direct line from that ancient kingdom through the Koryo dynasty and down to the present. It is the glories of a third kingdom, however, that first constituted the main current of Korean lineage according to South Korean historiography. The Silla state to the southeast eventually became the repository of a rich and cultured ruling elite, with its capital at Kyongju, north of the port of Pusan. The presidents who ruled South Korea either as dictators or as elected leaders from 1961 through 1996 all came from this region, and most Republic of Korea (ROK) historians privilege Silla's historical lineage; the author of Syngman Rhee's ideology, the first minister of education, named An Ho-sang, produced his own "Juche" philosophy and located its origin with Silla. It is the southwestern Paekche legacy that is the casualty of divided Korea, with the people of the Cholla provinces suffering discrimination by Koreans of other regions and by historians in North and South; fortunately the discovery of King Muryong's tomb (501-23), near Kongju, revealed to twentieth-century scholars the brilliant artistry of Paekche, with finely filigreed gold crowns that rival the celebrated crowns of Silla. one painter of Paekche ancestry in Japan was said to be the foremost court artist of the ninth century, "the first memorable painter in Japan, the first to bring landscape, for example, to the level of a dignified art." Taken together, the three kingdoms continue to influence the history and political culture of Korea; it is not unusual for Koreans to assume that regional traits that they favor or despise go back to the Three Kingdoms period. Were these three kingdoms inhabited by "Koreans"? Certainly some of the characteristics of each kingdom had survivals in unified Korea, as we will see. But there was way too much warfare, migration, and intermingling to make for a homogeneous race of people, distinct from their neighbors, and far too little verifiable historical material for us to know the boundaries, ethnic stock, and lingustic differences among the three states, or among these three and the states in western Japan, for that matter. Koguryo unquestionably merged with Chinese and northern ethnic stocks, and the two southern kingdoms had much intercourse with peoples inhabiting the Japanese islands, especially western Kyushu. Recent evidence suggests that as many as one-third of the residents of Japan's Tomb period (A.D. 300-700) could trace their recent ancestry back to Korean roots. It is best, I think, to hypothesize that the gene pools of contemporary Koreans and Japanese must inevitably have had an ancient, common root, just as northern Chinese and Mongol peoples cross-fertilized with inhabitants of the peninsula. So we have no unique, homogeneous races in Korea and Japan, however much both peoples want to believe in such things, but a common human stock that branched off culturally and linguistically at some unknown point, thereafter to have a relatively independent historical development, but with only the slightest DNA trace of racial difference. Silla evolved from a walled town called Saro, and although Silla historians are said to have traced its origins back to 57 B.C., contemporary historians regard King Naemul (356-402) as the ruler who first consolidated a large confederated kingdom and who established a hereditary kingship. His domain was east of the Naktong River in today's North Kyongsang Province. A small number of states located along the south central tip of the peninsula facing the Korea Strait did not join either Silla or Paekche, but instead formed a Kaya league that maintained close ties with states in what is now Japan. Kaya was eventually absorbed by its neighbors in spite of an attack by Wae forces from Kyushu against Silla on their behalf in A.D. 399, an attack Silla repelled with help from Koguryo. For the next two decades the Koguryo army was stationed in Silla. Centralized government probably emerged in Silla in the last half of the fifth century, as the capital became both an administrative and a marketing center. In the early sixth century its leaders introduced plowing by oxen and built extensive irrigation facilities. Increased agricultural output was the result, permitting further political and cultural development, including the formulation of an administrative code in 520, the creation of a hereditary "bone-rank" system for designating elite status, and the adoption of Buddhism as the state religion around 535 (Paekche and Koguryo adopted Buddhism earlier). Silla was weaker than Koguryo militarily; indeed, by the beginning of the fifth century Koguryo had achieved undisputed control of all of Manchuria east of the Liao River as well as of the northern and central regions of the Korean peninsula. At this time it had a famous leader with an appropriate name: King Kwanggaet'o, whose name translates roughly as "the king who widely expanded the territory." Reigning for twenty-one years (391-412), from the age of eighteen, he conquered sixty-five walled towns and 1,400 villages, in addition to assisting Silla in fights with Wae forces from Japan. Kwanggaet'o was the master of northern Korea and much of Manchuria; in 427 he settled the Koguryo capital at P'yongyang, a junction of alluvial plains and rivers, which became the center of this large nation. But as Koguryo's wide domain increased, it confronted China's Sui dynasty (581-618) in the west and Silla and Paekche to the south. Silla attacked Koguryo in 551 in concert with King Song of Paekche. After it conquered the upper reaches of the Han River, Silla turned on Paekche forces and drove them out of the lower Han area. While a tattered Paekche kingdom nursed its wounds in the southwest, Silla allied with Chinese forces of the Sui and the successor T'ang dynasty (618-907) in combined attacks against Koguryo. These were immense clashes between hundreds of thousands of soldiers on each side, and they reshaped the face of Northeast Asia. First Koguryo armies drove across the Liao River in 598 and beat back several Sui attempts to dislodge them. Neither could the Sui emperor Yang Ti defeat the Koguryo armies at their Liaotung fortress, so he boldly launched an enormous invasion of Koguryo in 612, marshaling more than one million soldiers and sending one-third of this force against the capital at P'yongyang. The Koguryo commander, a scholar and soldier named Ulchi Mundok, arranged successive defeats, feints, and retreats, in order to lure the Sui forces into a trap along the Ch'ongch'on River, thirty miles north of P'yongyang, where--finally--he awaited the Chinese. There he prepared for the occasion a poem, which he sent to the opposing commander: Your divine plans have plumbed the heavens; Your subtle reckoning has spanned the earth. You win every battle, your military merit is great. Why then not be content and stop the war? The Chinese were unimpressed. So the Koguryo forces attacked the enemy from all sides, cutting the Sui forces to pieces; nine armies fled in disarray toward the Yalu River. Perhaps as few as three thousand Sui soldiers survived to retreat into China; their defeat contributed to the fall of the dynasty in 618. The newly risen T'ang emperor T'ai Tsung launched another huge invasion in 645, but Koguryo forces won a striking victory in the siege of the An Si fortress, forcing T'ai Tsung to withdraw. Koreans ever since have seen these victories as sterling examples of resistance to foreign aggression. There is much merit to the argument; had Koguryo not beaten them back, all the states of the peninsula might have fallen under long-term Chinese domination and ultimate absorption. Thus commanders like Ulchi Mundok became models for emulation thereafter, especially during the Korean War (1950-53). Paekche could not hold out under combined Silla and T'ang attack (the latter landed an enormous invasion fleet on the southwest coast in 660), however, and it quickly fell under their assaults. T'ang pressure had also weakened Koguryo, and after eight successive years of battle it gave way from both external attack and internal strife accompanied by several famines. It retreated to the north, enabling Silla forces to advance and consolidate their control up to the Taedong River, which flows through P'yongyang. Silla thus emerged on top in 668, and it is from this famous date that many historians speak of a unified Korea. The period of the Three Kingdoms thus ended, but not before all three states had come under the long-term sway of Chinese civilization by introducing Chinese statecraft, Confucian philosophy, Confucian practices of educating the young, and the Chinese written language (Koreans adapted the characters to their own language through a system known as idu). The Three Kingdoms also introduced Buddhism, the various rulers seeing a valuable political device in the doctrine of a unified body of believers devoted to Buddha but serving one king. In addition, artists from Koguryo and Paekche perfected a mural art found on the walls of tombs, and took it to Japan, where it deeply influenced Japan's temple and burial art. Some Korean scholars maintain that Paekche "conquered" Japan, which raises any number of questions (for example, What was "Japan"?), but many Korean and Western historians now believe that the wall murals in royal tombs in Japan suggest that the imperial house lineage may have had a Korean origin; perhaps that is why Japanese archaeologists are slow to open more imperial tombs (most of the great ones are still off-limits to archaeological research). That Koreans profoundly influenced Japanese development, there is no doubt: as one Japanese historian put it, Paekche art "became the basis for the art of the Asuka period (about 552-644)," and the tomb murals clearly do show a strong Koguryo influence. Nationalistic scholars in Japan try to deny all this, just as their counterparts in both North and South see Korea as the onetime ruler of Japan and "the fount of all ancient Japanese civilization." Recent evidence, weighed dispassionately, shows that Japan got from old Korea advanced iron products, armaments, horse trappings, gold and silver jewelry, pottery, and new methods of statecraft, some of it copied from China and some originated by inhabitants of Korea. In particular, "nearly all the iron to make the first Japanese weapons and tools" came from Korea, and the Japanese learned that the Koguryo method of armoring both horse and rider was "the most deadly military technology in the world before the advent of gunpowder." An American scholar puts the point discreetly: one may be inclined to agree with those experts, Korean and Japanese, who see Korea as the wellspring of Japanese culture before 700." (C) 1997 Bruce Cumings All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-393-04011-9       < book review >- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -      http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/27/reviews/970427.27kristot.html    April 27, 1997 The Great Divide By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF A revisionist challenges the conventional view of good guys vs. bad guys in the two Koreas Korea's Place in the Sun A Modern History. By Bruce Cumings. Illustrated. 527 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $35. ruce CUMINGS is a prickly and provocative historian who is denounced by his critics almost as sharply as he denounces them. The foremost revisionist trying to reshape our understanding of the Korean War, he built his reputation several years ago with a monumental two-volume history of the origins of the conflict in which he argued that it is too simple just to assert that North Korea attacked South Korea. He blamed everybody for the bloodshed, including both Koreas and the United States. In ''Korea's Place in the Sun,'' written for the general reader, Mr. Cumings takes up where he left off, offering an energetic revisionist account of the two Koreas in the years since the war. It is not correct, as many South Koreans assert, that he is a toady for the North: he repeatedly criticizes North Korea for being repressive, intransigent and incompetent. But just about everyone accepts that North Korea is like that, and in trying to be evenhanded, he devotes most of his space to showing that South Korea's leadership has been much more villainous than most people realize. For my taste, he is too evenhanded. There really is a fundamental difference between North Korean totalitarianism and a South Korean dictatorship that only recently gave way to democracy. Still, in reading this book, I had the odd sensation of disagreeing with much of it while also finding it enormously engaging. Mr. Cumings has pored over the historical documents and he argues intelligently. His book is important precisely because he marshals considerable evidence to challenge conventional understanding. To be sure, the first 100 or so pages, covering Korean history from ancient times to the modern era, constitute a rather dry prologue. But once he reaches the 20th century, Mr. Cumings becomes more passionate and original. He repeats his argument that the origins of the Korean War are murkier than most Americans believe, and he is sure to enrage many with his assertion that ''it is Americans who bear the lion's share of the responsibility'' for the division of the country. He argues that if the United States had pulled out of Korea, there would have been ''a purifying upheaval that might have been pretty awful, but nothing like the millions of lives lost'' in the Korean War and later turmoil. He states that after the war American policy toward South Korea created ''one of the worst police states in Asia,'' while he sympathetically describes North Korea's ideology of self-reliance as ''the cornerstone of Korean nationalism.'' Some of this sent my eyebrows soaring, as did -- to take another example -- the way he plays down North Korea's state-sponsored terrorism. Yet few people know as much about modern Korea as he does, and I think he is probably right in suggesting that in a sense North Korea has inherited the ancient Korean tradition of a ''hermit kingdom,'' and that in a Korean context it is really South Korea that is behaving in a revolutionary way. Surprisingly, given his obvious empathy with Koreans in general, Mr. Cumings disputes the common Korean belief that Japan simply plundered the peninsula during its long colonial annexation from 1910 to 1945. Instead he notes that while the Japanese imperialists may have been brutal and divisive, it was under their auspices that schools were built and an excellent network of roads and railroad lines constructed. In 1945, thanks to the Japanese, tiny Korea had half as many miles of roads as all of China. Mr. Cumings also makes the point that during the Japanese occupation, the Koreans were perpetrators of repression as well as its victims. He writes that the ''comfort women,'' or sex slaves sent by Japan to accommodate its troops, were in many cases seized by fellow Koreans. That is one reason why the issue was buried in Korea for so many decades, and why it is so painful today. All in all, ''Korea's Place in the Sun'' is passionate, cantankerous and fascinating. Indeed, it is rather like Korea itself. Nicholas D. Kristof is the Tokyo bureau chief of The New York Times.