East Asia: Culture 1

After staying in Seoul for three days, I clearly felt that Chinese and Korean cultures are more similar to each other than Chinese and Japanese cultures are.

Korea has absorbed Confucian culture more deeply. Architecturally, central Seoul resembles central Beijing's Forbidden City, with Gyeongbokgung Palace located there. The main gate of Gyeongbokgung is called Gwanghwamun, and outside Gwanghwamun there is a long road that strongly resembles Chang'an Avenue. Both Gyeongbokgung and the Forbidden City follow a symmetrical layout along a central axis: the main hall sits in the center, important palaces lie along the axis, and the remaining buildings radiate to the two sides, matching the Confucian hierarchical idea of ordered honor and rank. After checking, I found that the two were originally built only about twenty years apart, and Gyeongbokgung was completed earlier. Of course, the Forbidden City was certainly not built by referring to Gyeongbokgung; a more reasonable explanation is that both incorporated Confucian thought and drew on earlier Chinese palace models. In scale, the Forbidden City is larger than Gyeongbokgung, which tacitly matches the two countries' positions in the tributary system. Korea grants free admission to tourists entering Gyeongbokgung in hanbok, and there are also hanbok-clad performers in front of Gwanghwamun, enough to show Koreans' identification with and affection for their native culture. Careful observation also shows that hanbok is more similar to hanfu than Japanese kimono is. By contrast, the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo differs greatly from Gyeongbokgung and the Forbidden City. It has absorbed quite a few Western stylistic elements and also does not follow a symmetrical central-axis layout.

In writing, I had always thought that Korean, Hangul, was much less connected to Chinese than Japanese is. After all, Japanese directly contains many kanji, while Chinese characters are almost never seen in written Korean. But now I realize this was a preconception. As a phonetic writing system, Korean of course does not directly write Chinese characters, except in a very small number of situations, which I mention below. Yet in vocabulary and pronunciation, Korean has also inherited a large amount of ancient Chinese vocabulary. Japanese seems to contain many kanji, but after Chinese characters became Japanese kanji, most either broke away from their original meanings or kept their meanings while changing in form. These are all cases of Japanese integration and modification of Chinese characters. By comparison, Korean's inheritance of Chinese characters is more often direct borrowing, somewhat like the way Japanese treats Western writing, such as English.

Here is a concrete example: Seoul Station in Korean, Seoul-yeok, corresponds to the three Chinese characters "Seoul station." Ignoring Korean liaison, its original pronunciation is seo-ul-yeok. If you read the third syllable several times, you will find it somewhat resembles the Japanese eki, meaning station. Looking closely at the sign for Seoul Station, I found that the syllable yeok is written with the traditional Chinese character "yi," the character used for post station. The whole Korean text on the station sign is written as "Seoul yi." Korean directly borrows Chinese characters in a few formal contexts, such as newspapers, legal provisions, personal names, and station signs. Seoul-yeok is therefore Seoul yi, and yi and yeok involve only a slight pronunciation change. In Japanese it is written as "Souru-eki"; neither the pronunciation nor the written form is still the original Chinese character. One can understand this as Japanese simplifying the character yi into eki. From this, one can see that Japanese people have already integrated Chinese characters into their own cultural system and modified them on their own, rather than simply borrowing them.

China, Japan, and Korea use slightly different signifiers, symbols and writing, to represent the same referents, images or objects. This phenomenon is very common in the Chinese-character cultural sphere; similar words include "school" and "hospital." Most of these words originated in China, while a small number of modern terms were first translated from Western languages by Japanese people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then introduced by Chinese scholars and fed back into Chinese. Korean may then have introduced them from Japanese or Chinese at some point, as with words such as politics, economy, democracy, and freedom. So in writing, China, Japan, and Korea are more like mutually influencing one another than a simple father-and-son relationship.

In the appearance and temperament of residents, Koreans and Chinese feel more alive, the Confucian engagement with the world, while Japanese people generally have a faint sense of death, wabi-sabi, yugen, and mono no aware. This is relatively easy to perceive. One interesting phenomenon is that Koreans I met in Korea itself left a far better impression on me than Koreans I met outside Korea. Outside Korea I often encounter Koreans who shout loudly or smoke in public places; in Korea I almost never saw this, and the quietness of rail-transit carriages could rival Japan. It is possible that, as the capital, Seoul filters the quality and habits of the population to some extent, just as Japanese people in Tokyo and Osaka are completely different. Therefore, more observation is needed in relatively remote parts of Korea. Coincidentally, my summer research school is precisely in such a place, and tomorrow I will set off for the school, traveling directly from northwestern Korea to the southeast, a total of two hours, yes, the country is that small.

As a holder of geographical determinism, I guess that for the phenomenon above, the greater similarity between Chinese and Korean cultures than between Chinese and Japanese cultures, the decisive factors are that China and Korea are connected by land and that their capitals are relatively close. These two factors further consolidated Korea's, Goryeo's and the Joseon dynasty's, subordinate position in the tributary system, keeping the Korean Peninsula within the radiation range of Confucian culture for a long time. Japan was also within that range, but because China and Japan are not connected by land and are farther apart than China and Korea, personnel, trade, and cultural exchange between China and Japan was more difficult. Japan therefore had the ability, freedom, and more opportunities to develop its own culture and absorb foreign cultures.