뉴스레터

Last fall, I had the opportunity to teach a course on "Historical Disputes in Northeast Asia" at Cornell University in New York. Most of the people who took the class were Korean-American students or Korean students who had completed an advanced-level Korean language class at Cornell or those whose Korean proficiency was recognized to be at this caliber.

The course consisted of nine weeks of lectures on what we call the "seven pending issues," followed by two weeks of examining the theories and practices for their resolution. The final two weeks were devoted to student presentations on the following topics: "East Sea v. Sea of Japan:　Contrasting Logic and Strategies for the Future," "Japan's Dialectic of the Past and the Future to which it Aspires," "Founding and Development of Gojoseon," "Queen Min:　Latest Research Trends and Reassessment" and "AN Yong-bok's Activities in Japan."

At the start of the course, students were given a list of reading requirements for each lecture (at least two works per lecture). They were asked to submit a three-page review of the readings before each class. In turn, the students asked that I provide them with a critique of each of their reviews. I was somewhat flustered because I had been so used to how things were done in Korea:　grades were given based on the final paper, without any feedback during the semester. What the students were asking for was a lot of work on my part. Regardless, I agreed to it as it was something positive, something that an educator should be doing for his/her students.

Each lecture started off with an introduction to the points of contention of a historical dispute in Northeast Asia. It was followed by an open discussion. The students often expressed concerns over the excessive nationalism exhibited by Korean society and the Korean government's inadequate response to historical issues in the international society relative to that of Japan. The Wason Collection on East Asia, Cornell's library of books on East Asia, is a case in point. There are around 200,000 books in Chinese and 100,000 in Japanese. In contrast, there are only about 10,000 books in Korean. This is understandable given that China and Japan had either garnered the interest of the West or actively promoted their own history and culture to the world way before Korea had. However, these students also needed to know that today, the Korean government and society are doing their part to turn things around.

To this end, I had the students compare Korea and Japan's respective stance on historical issues. They studied the "10 Issues of Takeshima," a pamphlet issued by Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They also studied the Korean rebuttal to these ten points, listed on the Northeast Asian History Foundation's website. The discussion that ensued helped the students understand that Korea is not claiming its sovereignty over Dokdo on nationalistic sentiments alone. They also came to see that the Japanese reasoning is seriously flawed from a historical standpoint and that Japan's insistence on taking the Dokdo matter to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) contains serious contradictions. There was one student who had maintained that the excessive energy Koreans are putting into a matter so "trivial" as the naming of the East Sea derives from nationalistic sentiments. However, after carefully examining the respective stance of the two nations, came to the conclusion that there was a problem with the name "Sea of Japan" in the context of international practices associated with geographical naming. The course was yet another reminder that in a historical debate, whether with a foreigner or a Korean, the most persuasive reasoning is one that is logical and based on historical facts.