The UNESCO World Heritage Committee, meeting at its 48th session in Busan, has urged Japan to improve its exhibits at the Sado Island Gold Mines so they present the mines’ full history. The committee has repeatedly urged Tokyo to better reflect the full history of its other World Heritage site: the Hashima Coal Mine that is part of the Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution.
Both illuminate Japan’s industrial past: The Sado mines showcase unmechanized mining methods during the Tokugawa Shogunate; the Meiji sites highlight feudal Japan’s transfer of Western technology between the 1850s and 1910. However, both sites continued operating into the mid-20th century, relying on wartime forced labor by Koreans and other Asians.
In their inscription process, the Japanese government pledged to develop interpretation and presentation strategies to address their comprehensive history. Japan has failed to honor its commitment. The World Heritage Committee called for broader historical transparency regarding the victims of forced labor.
The ongoing dispute, stemming from Japan’s evasive approach to its imperial past, recalls one remarkable American art historian who waged a solitary struggle to unravel Japan’s hidden history.
Dr. Jon Carter Covell (1910-1996) arrived in Seoul in the fall of 1978 as a Fulbright senior scholar. The Korea Herald was the first local media outlet to interview her. She was widely recognized as the first Westerner to earn a doctorate in Oriental art history, receiving her degree from Columbia University in 1941. She wrote several important books about Japanese art, including “Under the Seal of Sesshu,” which explored the legendary Muromachi-period Zen monk and ink painter, Sesshu Toyo.
Calling herself a “new convert to Korean art history’s cause,” she said her first venture would concern Buddhist paintings of the Goryeo kingdom. She was excited about the monthlong special exhibition of 49 Goryeo-era Buddhist paintings at the Museum Yamato Bunkakan in Nara, Japan, the first exhibition of its kind, which had closed just days before.
“It was a sort of shake-up,” Covell said. Only one or two pieces of Goryeo Buddhist painting were known to exist in Korea at the time. Most of the paintings exhibited at the Yamato Bunkakan, borrowed from temples across Japan, had been labeled as Chinese. “It was interesting that Japanese scholars didn’t react at all,” she said, adding that the exhibition had been made possible solely through the “bravery and wisdom” of Masao Ishizawa, director of the private museum.
Covell had taught art history at California State University at Long Beach and the University of California, Riverside Extension, and Japanese and Korean art history at the University of Hawaii. She had lived at Daitoku-ji temple in Kyoto for about a decade.
Her original plan to stay for about six months to search for the roots of Japanese art extended to eight years. During those years, Covell devoted herself to research and writing while giving occasional lectures. Until she returned to California in 1986 for health reasons, she wrote more than 1,000 newspaper and magazine articles and essays, contributing mainly to The Korea Herald, The Korea Times and The ASPAC (Asian and Pacific) Quarterly of Cultural and Social Affairs. Some of the writings were published in two volumes, “Korea’s Cultural Roots” and “Korean Impact on Japanese Culture: Japan’s Hidden History.”
Well-versed in Japanese and Chinese classics and with a keen eye as a veteran art historian, she wrote extensively about Korean art and history in a style easily accessible to general readers. Reading between the lines of Japan’s earliest historical sources, “Nihongi” (Chronicles of Japan) and “Kojiki” (Record of Ancient Matters), she explored the hidden meanings, ambiguous references and outright distortions in those texts.
Most notably, she reversed the narrative of Empress Jingu’s legendary “conquest of Korea,” arguing that the beautiful and dynamic princess of the Buyeo horse-riding tribe had been transformed into a Japanese empress and that the story of her “invasion” had been effectively turned on its head. She contended that the son of the Buyeo princess became Ojin, the first historically verifiable Japanese emperor of Korean lineage.
A stunning article appeared in the Dec. 16, 1981, edition of The Korea Times, under the headline, “I was Taught a Lie at Columbia.” It read:
“At Columbia University, students in Oriental art history were taught that certain jade pieces found in ancient Japanese tombs were called magatama, an exclusive product of Japanese craftsmanship. ... In my early teaching, I, too, spread the word that these shapes were EXCLUSIVELY Japanese. ... What an error! What a lie I was taught!
“This is only one sample of what goes on in the Western world, as it ignores Korean art. ... Oh yes, that ‘curved jade’ (gogok) is a tantalizing object, highly challenging to the imagination and thought-provoking. But most Korean archaeologists are rather timid about determining the symbolism of these primeval, prehistoric curved or comma-shaped jewels as they term them.”
Covell’s daring interpretations — “pulling back the curtains covering up the tremendous importance of Korea and Koreans upon Japan’s development” — were met with a cool response from Korean academia. Thanks to the labor of love by independent journalist Kim Yu-kyung, her writings have been translated and compiled into four Korean-language volumes: “In Search of Korea’s Cultural Roots,” “Buyeo Horse Riders and the Wa,” “Korean Art Remaining in Japan” and “Korean Buddhism and Its Art.”
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Lee Kyong-hee
Lee Kyong-hee is a former editor-in-chief of The Korea Herald. The views expressed here are the writer's own. — Ed.
khnews@heraldcorp.com
