The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Ecumene (Part II)
The Japanese and Korean Ecumene
By 1591 Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-98), the son of a peasant from an obscure village, had unified Japan and was its supreme ruler. His next ambition was to conquer China, as he stated in a letter to one of his vassals, “I am going to not only unify Japan but also enter Ming China.”[i] The motivation to conquer China was partially to maintain his control over Japan by redirecting the energy and attention of his lords towards an external enemy with promises of larger fiefs obtained by new conquests.[ii]
But more importantly, after unification, Hideyoshi saw Japan as a spiritual ecumene in cosmological form and therefore required a pragmatic empire to fulfill its spiritual promise. In diplomatic correspondence to Asian nations before the Imjin War, Hideyoshi viewed himself to be conqueror of the world: “After my birth, a fortune-teller said that all the lands the sun shone on would be mine when I became a man, and my fame would spread beyond the four seas . . . I will make a leap and land in China and lay my laws upon her.”[iii] The conquering of China was critical for Hideyoshi not only for his fame but also to justify the spiritual ecumene of Japan with the pragmatic world empire.
This need to justify his spiritual ecumene explains why Hideyoshi was not content to conquering Korea and leave China alone, for Korea is a more realistic objective than the mastering the vast territory, population, and military might of China. But Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea was not sufficient because he needed to conquer the center of the world, the “middle kingdom,” to justify Japan’s spiritual ecumene. When China ceased demanding tributes from Japan in the beginning of the fifteenth century, it only exacerbated Hideyoshi’s ambition.[iv] Instead of perceiving this neglect as China not caring about its relationship to Japan, Hideyoshi instead viewed it as a sign of weakness: China lacked the power to keep its tributary states obedient.[v]
Whereas Japan began to see itself as a spiritual ecumene, Korea viewed itself as subordinate to China, “the civilized center,” due to its geographical proximity and relative weakness. However, Korea began to rank foreign nations according to their visiting envoys with Korea as “the small civilized center,” second only to China with all other nations evaluated lower according to their perceived level of Chinese cultural attainment.[vi] In exchange for sending tributes and expressing loyal submission, Korean rulers were recognized by the Chinese emperor as receiving the Mandate of Heaven and thereby legitimized as the ruler of Korea.[vii] The Korean ecumene is what we would call today an ethno-nationalist community, not claiming to represent all of humankind but all of Koreans as the second most civilized people in the world.
The Chinese ecumene saw itself as spiritually representing all of humankind with its pragmatic empire at the center of a tributary system. China would send and receive of envoys, exchange gifts, and receive and grant titles to other nations.[viii] The Japanese ecumene also saw itself as spiritually representing all of humankind but pragmatically was only unified internally. To fulfill its spiritual mission, it had to conquer China. Finally, Korea’s ecumene (if it can be called that) was limited to its ethno-nationalist community with the country being internally unified but content to be part of the tributary system of China.
[i] Hur Nam-lin, “The International Context of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s Invasion of Korea in 1592,” Korea Observer 28/4 (1997): 691.
[ii] Samuel Hawley, The Imjin War: Japan’s Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 22.
[iii] Hideyoshi to the King of Korea, Tensho 17 (1589) in Homer Hulbert, Hulbert’s History of Korea Volume I (New York: Hillary House, 1962), 347.
[iv] For the Chinese (and the Koreans), Japan was seen as an outpost of civilization, filled with barbarians, and an object of disdain. Etskuo Hae-jin Kang, Diplomacy and Ideology in Japanese-Korean Relations (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 66.
[v] Ji-Young Lee, China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 56-78.
[vi] Kang, Diplomacy and Ideology in Japanese-Korean Relations, 50-51.
[vii] Donald Clark, “Sino-Korean Tributary Relations under the Ming,” in The Cambridge History of China Volume 8, The Ming Dynasty 1368-1644 Part 2, Denis Twitchett and Frederick Mote, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 272-300.
[viii] For more about the scholarly debate about the Chinese tributary system, see Lee, China’s Hegemony, 27-55.