Frontier Lives: Defining Borders, Cosmopolitanism, and the Circulation of Knowledge

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Over time, Korean boundaries have been both permeable and impermeable. Not easily characterised, boundaries were certainly not static, and even location varied over time. This panel looks at the Korean frontiers at four different times and considers what constituted the boundary, how security was established, and what people saw when they looked across. Anonymous Japanese poets such as sakimori, Jurchen in the borderland who served multiple masters, individuals such as Amenomori Hōshū, and formal Korean Interpreter Missions to Tsushima offer longitudinal slices of life in Korean foreign relations.
The sakimori were dispatched to Tsushima by Nara-Heian authorities from the seventh to the tenth centuries to defend the border against Silla. Listening to war drums across the straights, they longed to be elsewhere (Xin Wei). Jurchen brought Koryŏ and Liao together to share a suspicion of the borderland and to define a mutual frontier, while the Jurchen had other ideas (Remco Breuker). Amenomori Hōshū, an eighteenth-century cosmopolitan, peered into Korean customs and provided practical advice on Chosŏn Korea to his lord on Tsushima (James Lewis). The Korean Interpreter Missions to Tsushima had opportunities to circulate knowledge between Korea and Japan, but in the mid-nineteenth century they failed to acquire intelligence regarding Japan’s relations with Europeans (Sigfrid Östberg). These frontier perspectives illustrate the permeable and impermeable character of Korean boundaries at different times and help us understand how Koreans defined themselves and how others defined them.

Area of Study

• Korea

Session Organizer

• Xin Wei, Oxford University

Chair

• Remco E. Breuker, Leiden University

Individual Presentations

• Boundaries between Silla and Nara-Heian: A Perspective from the Sakimori no uta or Songs of the Border-Guards in the Man’yōshū - Xin Wei, Oxford University

• A Moveable Border: The Koryŏ-Liao-Jurchen Borderland in the 11th Century - Remco E. Breuker, Leiden University

• The Japanese View of Korea during the Tokugawa Period: Focusing on Amenomori Hōshū and his 1728 Kōrin Teisei - James B. Lewis, University of Oxford

• Interpreters, Goods, and Information: Japanese–Korean Interaction in the Mid-Nineteenth Century - Sigfrid Su-gun Östberg, University of Oxford

Discussant

• James B. Lewis, University of Oxford