Territorial Disputes

Territorial disputes have always plagued the human kind: we are always fighting over possessions, even over the land that we live on. For the Koreans, they seem to favor conquering land through peaceful means. Since the ancient days, Chumong claimed his kingdom with existing ruler by competing in shooting arrows and then tricking King Songyang that Chumong’s capital was built upon that land first. Then, closer to the millennium, the dispute over Tsushima shed no blood. Both Korea and Japan both tried to declare the island as their own, but no battle was fought over the land. Because the island is located at such borderline territory, the culture of that island became a mix of both countries, thus rendering it to be harder to separate whose property it is. The Choson had “chose manipulating selected levers of administration that sustained peaceful and managed contact rather than imposing militarily or by other forceful” while the Japanese So family governed the island without disturbance from the Koreans. In this article, I believe the citizens were the one who had benefited the most from this mutuality--no war, no casualty. Even in 2005, the Koreans wanted to claim the island had only done so through a drive to collect one million signatures.

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Although the Immortal Yi Sun Shin was not about Korean territorial disputes per se, it was about Japanese expansion through Korea. After watching the first episode of this epic drama, (I noticed that they used the Pirates soundtrack) my first impressions of this national hero were of passion, patriotism, sentiment, sensibility. He embodies these values even during a war. When the battle ended, he went to the forest by himself and wept for those who had died, including his cousin whom he had sent on a suicidal mission to save the Ming general. Since it is a drama, it portrays the Koreans a bit too honorable and emotional whereas the Chinese were a bit to corrupt and petty, and the Japanese were a bit too cruel and devious.