Part IV: East Asia 237ancient Koguryo Korean or Chinese? It depends on who you ask. Koguryo was
one of three ancient Korean kingdoms vying for centuries for control of the
peninsula, yet, a complex of Koguryo royal tombs has just been registered to
China by UNESCO as a World Heritage site over the objection of Korea
(Rawski 2012). Such questions emerge from efforts on the part of modern
nations to trace their history and thus to project the modern nation backward
into antiquity.
But Korean defensiveness has a more recent source. From 1910 to 1945
Korea was a colony of Japan, governed harshly and exploited for labor and
resources during Japan’s rapid industrialization and military mobilization.
Korean women were exploited as “comfort women” (i.e., sex slaves) for Japa-
nese soldiers during World War II. In 1937 Japan invaded China, killing a hun-
dred thousand Chinese during the Nanjing massacre. World War II ended with
Japan’s devastating defeat; annihilation by nuclear weapons and occupation by
the Allies (led by the US). In China the war ended in revolution and the cre-
ation of the People’s Republic of China that did its best to expunge the tradi-
tions of its past. In Korea it ended in dual regimes, at first under the control of
Russia and the United States, and then under the two distinct governments of
North Korea and South Korea. Postwar rebuilding and the astonishing success
of capitalist economies everywhere but North Korea would seem to have
erased any commonalities we might call “East Asian civilization.”
Nevertheless, the continuing relevance of the Confucian heritage in the way
East Asian peoples live and think is often noted. It has been compared to the
influence of the Greeks and Romans on contemporary Western society: as Greek
language, logic, and rationalism, Athenian-style democracy, Roman law and the
Latin language all continue to shape modern thought in the West, so Confucian
ideas continue to shape people in China, Japan, and Korea (Jelonek 2005).
For Confucius, the family was the model for all of society. Based on famil-
ial love and respect, on hierarchical (patriarchal) control, on norms rather than
law, and harmony rather than conflict, the family is the fundamental social
unit. Society should operate on the same principles. Even the emperor should
order the nation on familial values.
This is not to say that Western peoples do not love their families or value har-
mony at home, or that the Western family has not been patriarchal. But the dif-
ferences are socially significant. In Confucian societies, there is not equality even
among brothers, who are rank ordered by elder and younger (in Chinese, even
kinship terms observe a distinction between elder brother and younger brother,
or elder sister and younger sister). Filial devotion to parents is culturally marked
in folklore and moral teachings, such as in the story of the devoted son who
spends his entire life carrying his blind father on his back, or the daughter who
carves out a bit of flesh from her arm to make a soup for her starving mother (an
old story that showed up in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club). The respect shown to
elders of the family can hardly find a parallel in Western society.