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Korean and Japan in William E. Griffis

The relationship between Korea and Japan has not been in good terms in their long history. For William E. Griffis, Korea was both an Issachar in Eastern Asia and the rich grist between the millstones of China and Japan. The eastern millstone, Japan, has incessantly invaded Korea on the dogmatic ground that Korea was once a Japanese territory and had been a tributary to Japan for 1700 years. This perspective was popularized by Japan through The Mikado's Empire, then the best-selling introductory book for Japan. Griffis is also the author of Corea, the Hermit Nation, the most popular book to introduce Korea to the world. However, the Japanese dogma based on the distortion of Japanese history could not survive Griffis, a yankee armed with impartial, scientific, democratic, peace-loving spirit and who later could use materials from China and from his colleagues in Korea. In the two books, especially, in Corea, the Hermit Nation the Japanese distortion is more evident. In reverse, many evidences and events in the book prove that Korea had surpassed Japan at least before the Meiji Restoration, and even has conquered Japan. Griffis argues that higher Korean civilization had flown into Japan and Japanese ancestors are Koreans. Consequently, the sudden and incongruous insertions of distortive remarks in the books even seems to make the Japanese a naivete. For the long time of 1300 years, however, the dogma has imbedded so deep in the Japanese mentality that it has now become a second nature for them. Therefore, their recent claim of Dokdo island(Takesima in Japanese) has to be seen in this context. There are a few ways such as archeological and linguistic approaches to disprove the dogma. For Japan with such mentality, there seems to be almost no hope for her to be become a democratic and rational people in a western sense and to have a peaceful relation with Korea. For Koreans, as what Griffis points out which are still true in this century, overcoming the problem of irresponsibility of her upper classes and the nationwide low morality seems to be a way to make their country strong and to build a better relation with Japan.