Takahashi Toru’s Study of “Joseon” and the Discourse of Sadaejuui
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This paper focuses on the discourse of sadaejuui, which can be understood as a tributary ideology that elevates a dominant counterpart to exemplary status, as presented by the Japanese historian Takahasho Toru, a representative example of his field, the colonial historiography of “Joseon,” and explores its significance and context. Among Japanese historians of the colonial historiography of Korea, Takahashi, who stood out as an exception in his delving into the realm of thought and philosophy, valued “spirit” as the source of outward phenomena, through which he tried to define the national characteristics of Korea. In doing so, he expanded the scope of his research from language and literature to Confucianism, Buddhism, and new religions. The discourse of sadaejuui, which was the conclusion he reached, constituted his attempt to construct a philosophical discourse of sadaejuui distinct from the political discourse of sadaejuui more commonly discussed at the time. In so doing, the thrust of the argument he ultimately intended lay in the spiritual foreign dependency of Korean thought, rather than its unoriginality, as it was commonly articulated. This indicated an eternally unchanging nature that would reemerge time and again while merely changing its object of dependency, switching from China in the past to the U.S. at the time, even as it would continue to shift elsewhere in the future. In that sense, Takahashi’s discourse of sadaejuui resists equation with Sinophilism based on an admiration for Chinese civilization in and of itself. Rather, in English, its meaning is more closely aligned with the term “dependency” than “Sinocentrism.” However, while the discourse appears to emerge as a result of inductive reasoning, it in fact originated in a deductive approach which took as its starting point “Japan’s unique culture and thought” as the exemplary model it had in mind. As such, he argues that Korea failed to transform foreign ideas from an autonomous perspective so as to successfully synthesize them because, unlike Japan, it lacked a national body or structure of state (J. kokutai) which, in his view, led to its subordination to Japan.
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