Korea Dispatch

Korea c. 1904

An article in the IHT by Norimitsu Onishi about the buraku of Japan and their slow rise out of the traditional depths of Japan’s ancient social hierarchy, a rise — and article — that took inspiration from Obama’s election in the U.S. What caught my attention was a short graf in the middle that referred to Korea’s more egalitarian society, a result, says Onishi, of the wars and invasions that swept the peninsula and Japan’s colonial occupation.

…nearly identical groups of outcasts remain in a few other places in Asia, like Tibet and Nepal, with the same Buddhist background; they have disappeared only in South Korea, not because prejudice vanished, but because decades of colonialism, war and division made it impossible to identify the outcasts there.

As far as I know, it is factually true that the successive wars that erupted in Korea destroyed among other things the family records of thousands born into slavery. Those same people were then freed from their traditional lower status, with some even gaining the ranks of the elite yangban.

Still, the statement did make me pause because it seemed like a casual snub at Korea. But an interesting read nonetheless.