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Friday, May 8, 2009
I knew this would happen eventually
Korean cultural authorities, not content with stealing just China's and Japan's culture and history to claim it as Korean, have moved on to Egypt's.
My girlfriend teaches Japanese and is a much bigger pushover than me in that she always gets told to proofread stuff translated from Korean into Japanese. Her friend did the translating, and my girlfriend was just cleaning it up a little. Anyway, one of her tasks last year was to do one in which the author claimed: (1) the Mongolian spot originated in Korea, (2) New Zealand's aboriginal people are actually Korean, (3) Confucius is Korean, and (4) Koreans invented Chinese characters.
I was going to do a post on it, but I googled and Navered around and saw that it's apparently a pretty insignificant book (no hits, if I remember) that it wasn't worth it. Chinese do exaggerate some of these claims, I know, but the idea that Koreans are stealing other people's cultures isn't groundless.
It's not groundless, because in a country of fifty million people, there are bound to be some people with outrageous ideas. A Korean nationalist version of tinfoil hat wearers.
Near Gate 1 of Yongsan Garrison is the office of some weird group that claims Manchuria and much of the Russian Far East must return to Korean control. Native Koreans I was with at the time told me I should immediately toss the literature they had managed to put in my hands.
While there are some mainstream beliefs about Korean origins of early Japanese people and culture, accepted by a lot of Japanese scholars as well, some of the Chinese claims are flat-out fabrications by (apparently) Chinese netizens trying to whip up trouble, citing non-existent professors at Seoul National University, etc.
My girlfriend teaches Japanese and is a much bigger pushover than me in that she always gets told to proofread stuff translated from Korean into Japanese. Her friend did the translating, and my girlfriend was just cleaning it up a little. Anyway, one of her tasks last year was to do one in which the author claimed: (1) the Mongolian spot originated in Korea, (2) New Zealand's aboriginal people are actually Korean, (3) Confucius is Korean, and (4) Koreans invented Chinese characters.
ReplyDeleteI was going to do a post on it, but I googled and Navered around and saw that it's apparently a pretty insignificant book (no hits, if I remember) that it wasn't worth it. Chinese do exaggerate some of these claims, I know, but the idea that Koreans are stealing other people's cultures isn't groundless.
It's not groundless, because in a country of fifty million people, there are bound to be some people with outrageous ideas. A Korean nationalist version of tinfoil hat wearers.
ReplyDeleteNear Gate 1 of Yongsan Garrison is the office of some weird group that claims Manchuria and much of the Russian Far East must return to Korean control. Native Koreans I was with at the time told me I should immediately toss the literature they had managed to put in my hands.
While there are some mainstream beliefs about Korean origins of early Japanese people and culture, accepted by a lot of Japanese scholars as well, some of the Chinese claims are flat-out fabrications by (apparently) Chinese netizens trying to whip up trouble, citing non-existent professors at Seoul National University, etc.