the question of the "opening" of the East
INTRO.
Reading about James Fenton, British poet, in ‘A German Requiem’, which concerns the efforts of the vanquished power to come to terms with the experience of the Second World War:
It is not your memories which haunt you. It is not what you have written down. It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.
The poem thus concludes with a mirroring of the opening lines:
‘It is not what he wants to know. It is what he wants not to know.’
Came to think about the route to meet the West for the nation of Korea.
James Fenton is highly unusual among contemporary poets in not only writing about history but also participating in it, having been present at many of the major international wars and revolutions of the last twenty-five years of the XX century. Fenton went to Indochina in 1973, travelling in and reporting from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. In 1975, he was evacuated from Phnom Penh just before the Khmer Rouge arrived, and moved to Saigon, where he famously rode on the first North Vietnamese tank to reach the Presidential Palace. Fenton was the Guardian’s correspondent in Germany in the late 1970s, witnessed the Kwangju massacre in Korea in May 1980.
Fenton was leaning on the left, some Marxist origins, In presenting the past of Asia as one of perpetual bloodshed, chaos and despotism, then, he risks reproducing what Said calls ‘the imaginative demonology of “the mysterious Orient” ... but he opens to other mindsets.
PART 1. - THE EAST
In one early poems written before his journey to Indochina, ‘Our Western Furniture’ is a twenty-one sonnet sequence about the enforced ending to Japan’s isolationist policy by an American expedition under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry in the 1854-55
Fenton quotes from Perry’s report to Congress in 1856, in which he warns that America’s main imperial rival will be Russia, as both seek to extend across Asia from different directions, clearly anticipating the domino theory formulated in the Cold War:
Speaking before the American Geographical and Statistical Society on March 6, 1856, he expressed views that should ring through the centuries and I quote :
It requires no sage to predict events so strongly foreshadowed to us all; still westward will "the course of empire take its way." But the last act of the drama is yet to be unfolded ; and notwithstanding the reasoning of political empirics, westward, northward, and southward, to me it seems that the people of America will, in some form or other, extend their dominion and their power, until they shall have brought within their mighty embrace multitudes of the islands of the great Pacific, and placed the Saxon race upon the eastern shores of Asia. And I think too, that eastward and southward will her great rival in furure aggrandizement (Russia) stretch forth her power to the coasts of China and Siam ; and thus the Saxon and the Cossack will meet once more, in strife or in friendship, or another field. Will it be in friendship? I fear not. The antagonistic exponents of freedom and absolutism must thus meet at last, and then A-ill be fought that mighty battle on which the world will look with breathless interest ; for on its issue will depend the freedom or the slavery of the world — despotism or rational liberty must be the fate of civilized man. I think I see in the distance the giants that are growing up for that fierce and final encounter ; in the progress of events that battle must sooner or later inevitably be fought.
These words so meaningful today, were uttered more than a century and a half ago.
PART 2- KOREA
The term, "hermit kingdom" is used to describe a country that directly shuns foreign involvement. It can describe many different countries. However, it has come to describe Korea on account of a book by William E. Griffis' book, entitled Corea: The Hermit Nation, which was published in 1882.
The book was unfair The term, "hermit kingdom" is used to describe a country that directly shuns foreign involvement. It can describe many different countries. However, it has come to describe Korea on account of a book by William E. Griffis' book, entitled Corea: The Hermit Nation, which was published in 1882. The book was unfair as Griffis never visited Korea. Western Christianity was taking root there.
Japan employed gunboat diplomacy to press Korea to sign this unequal treaty. The pact opened up Korea, as Commodore Matthew Perry's fleet of Black Ships had opened up Japan in 1853.
In September 1875, a Japanese warship, the Unyo, appeared in Korean waters, ostensibly to conduct coastal surveys, in direct violation of Korea's national isolation policies.
The drafts of the treaty defined Korea as an independent state on an equal footing with Japan. Japan sent an envoy, Mori Arinori, to China to report on recent Korean affairs. China insisted that, although Korea was independent, China could come to the support its vassal state (Korea) in a crisis, an interpretation that Mori saw as contrary to the idea of independence in international law. Finally, on February 26, 1876, Korea signed the Kanghwa Treaty; finally, the “Hermit Nation” had been forced to open its doors.
PART 3 -The treaty
The escalation of foreign negotiations in the following years further prompted the necessity for a national flag. One of these proposals was described in the “Korea Strategy” papers written by the Chinese delegate Huang Zunxian. The plan suggested incorporating the flag of the Qing Dynasty into the flag of the Joseon Dynasty, the nowadays known one, the Taegeukgi (태극기).
A delegate of the Joseon Dynasty, was sent to discuss the issue with politician Li Hongzhang, the Kissinger of the ime, who agreed with the idea, but suggested some changes of his own.
According to the treaty, it ended Joseon's status as a tributary state of the Qing dynasty and opened three ports to Japanese trade. The Treaty also granted Japanese many of the same rights in Korea that Westerners enjoyed in Japan, such as extraterritoriality.
- Under Article 3, Japan would use the Japanese and Chinese languages in diplomatic communiques, while Korea would use only Chinese.
- Article 4 terminated Tsushima's centuries-old role as a diplomatic intermediary by abolishing all agreements then existing between Korea and Tsushima.
- In addition to the open port of Pusan, Article 5 authorized the search in five provinces for two more suitable seaports for Japanese trade to be opened in October 1877.
- Article 7 permitted any Japanese mariner to conduct surveys and mapping operations at will in the seas off the Korean Peninsula's coastline.
- Article 9 guaranteed the freedom to conduct business without interference from either government and to trade without restrictions or prohibitions.
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| Poor Korean fishermen -1880 |
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Taegeukgi = tae 태 geuk 극 -- gi 기.
