“Choson Korea’s Modern Diplomacy and the Traditional World Order in East Asia”(Nagoya University Press, 2018)

Mayuko Mori(Lecturer, Department of International Relations, Division of Global Social Sciences, School of Arts and Sciences, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University)

It is a great honor to be in the privileged position of receiving a Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize for my book, Choson Korea’s Modern Diplomacy and the Traditional World Order in East Asia. 　My book owes a great intellectual debt to the work of past scholars of Choson history, particularly those within the Japanese academic tradition. The field of Choson history in Japan boasts a rich legacy and has enjoyed a sustained track record for world-class research that addresses the country’s history through the rigorous interrogation of primary sources. That being said, very few works on Choson history have been honored with an award as prestigious as the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. For this reason, I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to the selection committee and all the staff at the foundation for doing the field of Choson history an excellent service by bringing it into the limelight. The field of Choson history constitutes more than just the study of one of Japan’s neighboring countries; it is an indispensable field of study which allows us to not only gain a deeper understanding of Japan’s contemporary relationships with both North and South Korea, but also for considering the nature of international relations within the Pacific Basin at large. It is my sincere hope that this award helps, in some small way, to encourage more individuals to take an interest in Choson history. 　My book addresses Choson in the late 19th century; a period in which Choson continued to exist as a tributary state of Qing China. My book attempts to analyze, in the context of contemporaneous events, how Choson perceived this relationship, and furthermore how it perceived the ideational premise which lay at the very heart of this relationship; namely, the notion of Confucian cultural preeminence (zhonghua 中華). In the late 19th century, Japan and the West ushered Choson into a new period of international relations premised on the Westphalian treaty paradigm. As this form of international relations continues to exist through into the present day, scholars have often been most concerned with understanding what Choson perceived treaty relations to be. However, as my book demonstrates, at the time, Choson, while engaging in treaty relations, continued to place great significance upon the notion of zhonghua. Chos?n harbored much resentment against the Qing for its toppling of the Ming from the position of the ultimate arbiter of zhonghua, and furthermore for its attempts to reconfigure its tributary relationship with Choson along the lines of Westphalian treaty relations. For these reasons, Choson came to perceive itself as the true successor to the Ming’s legacy as the ultimate arbiter of zhonghua. In other words, Choson interacted with the outside world in a climate where two conflicting interpretations of zhonghua existed: that of the Qing’s, which saw itself as culturally preeminent, and that of Choson’s, which saw itself much in the same manner. After the signing of the Shimonoseki Treaty in 1895, Choson’s long-enduring relationship with the Qing came to an abrupt end, and Choson now no longer had to accept the Qing conceptualization of zhonghua. 　It was in this context that, in 1897, the Great Korean Empire came into being. While my book focuses on the development of diplomacy in the Choson context up until this watershed moment, I believe it is in my interlinking of this narrative with the concept of zhonghua in which the book’s true originality lies. 　To conclude, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to everyone at the K. Matsushita Foundation and Nagoya University Press who helped bring this project to fruition. I also wish to offer my sincere thanks to Professors Tsukiashi Tatsuhiko and Okamoto Takashi for their unremitting intellectual guidance over many years.

Profile
Mayuko Mori is a Lecturer in the Department of International Relations at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University. She was born in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. She received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of Area Studies at the University of Tokyo, but has also spent time studying on the PhD program in the Department of Korean History at Seoul National University. Her PhD dissertation was honored with the M. Matsushita Academic Award from the Konosuke Matsushita Memorial Foundation. Before taking up her current position, Dr. Mori was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) DC2 Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo, and a Post Doc JSPS Research Fellow at Kyoto Prefectural University. She also currently serves as a Director of the Japanese Association of Modern East Asian History. Her research interests include Modern East Asia’s international relations, Korean studies, and, in particular, modern Korean political and diplomatic history. She has also recently published a non-academic book entitled Studying Modern Korean History at Seoul National University (Fukyosha, 2017).