Miyajima Hiroshi, a Japanese scholar of Korean history living in Korea, recently published two books which compiled his past works over the last 40 years. These two books trace the history of his ideas, and at the same time, present criticisms of the major scholary works of Korea and Japan. He criticizes both Korean and Japanese “sprout school” scholars, because of their historical methodology modeled after Western notion of developmentalism.
Miyashima emphasizes that the Choson Land Survey Project was not forcefully conducted by a power from outside, but corresponds to an internal transformation of Korean land reform. His argument was highly criticized because it suggested very different perspectives from main- stream historical works of Korea and Japan. Although he attempted to criticize the theory of internal development and their subjective perspective, his argument did not explicitly explain the land-owning relationship of Korean people because he focused too much on the modern idea of land ownership. He also criticized Japanese scholars who tried to find European feudalism in Japanese history which actually functioned as an ideological basis of Japan’s aggression in Korea. He discards organic society theory which emphasizes the coincidental development of a nation, and alternatively, suggested the theory of East Asian peasant society. He argued that Korea, Japan and China formed a peasant society based on the development of production after the 16th century, and that Yangban became the ruling class with an independent paradigm. Through this analysis, he argues that the demolition of the class system in the later Choson Dynasty was a fabrication of history and through the lens of Confucian modernity, suggested that the common history of East Asia can be narrated. He insisted that Japan’s aggression of other East Asian countries had a particularism which in unseen in Western history that allowed him to conclude that East Asian modern history should be re-read through the concept of East Asian modernity.
His study uniquely positions East Asia and East Asian modern history in a non-European theater, and is meaningful from discovered commonalities of these three nations. Nonetheless, his argument is flawed in explaining the transforming mechanisms from peasant society to modern capitalistic society, class struggle during this transition, and even idealized “modernity” itself. Although he attempted to view East Asian nations from the post-modern and transnational perspective, this view confined him in that perspective and so he paid little attention to the lives of Minjung who struggled to distance themselves from such a conflicting world system.