Talk:Korean influence on Japanese culture

This article is WP:POVFORK full of WP:SYNTH

All the individual topics covered here are covered in greater detail, and in a less biased manner, in their relevant articles. Of the 133 citations, virtually all are either from questionable sources (written from a pro-Korean perspective by authors with apparently limited knowledge of Japan) or from reliable scholarly sources that merely say things along the lines of "Buddhism came to Japan from China through the Korean peninsula", "writing came from China through the Korean peninsula", or even "some Korean scholars have suggested that such-and-such aspect of Japanese culture may have originated in Korea, but I find this unconvincing". There are to the best of my knowledge no other articles titled "Country X influence on the culture of Country Y". There is a conspicuous lack of Chinese influence on Japanese culture, European influence on Japanese culture and American influence on Japanese culture, even though all three of these are universally considered to be more apparent in Japan (modern Japan, for the latter two) than "Korean influence". The reason for this imbalance is of course that the present article's original creator, and most of its significant contributors, are Korean nationalists who are clearly promoting an anti-Japanese agenda. The article's creator's sole contribution to Wikipedia apart from this page was to frivolously nominate List of English words of Japanese origin for deletion (does anyone else see the irony there?). The user appears to have left Wikipedia after losing that debate in the measure of eight-million-to-three.

The article currently includes 133 citations, but these can all be traced to a (relatively) small circle of authors. I would argue that most if not all of these articles are either unreliable for the claims being made, or otherwise inappropriate in that they are being cited out-of-context to support an opinion that they do not themselves hold.

Source analysis

The article cites "Jon Carter Covell" 10 times. Covell doesn't appear to be a Japanologist (at least not one I heard of in college). Googling his name brought up no reliable sources, but a list of his works indicates he is interested in Korea, not Japan, and so I would question whether he knew the Japanese language or even had the ability to find out about Japan from reliable primary or secondary sources. While I could not find any reliable sources, I did find one unreliable but (at least apparently) third-party source that is extremely critical of the author. The publisher's website explicitly states that it specializes in books on Korea, and so its publications are not automatically reliable sources on Japan (this article claims to be an article primarily on Japanese culture rather than Korean). Additionally, the book's title Korean impact on Japanese culture: Japan's hidden history. This implies not only that the article was originally written based solely on Covell (a fact borne out by Globalscene's original draft citing it five out of eight times), but that the work is a WP:FRINGE conspiracy theory book whose ideas run contrary to the scholarly consensus. Everything in the book should therefore be taken with a pinch of salt, and it should not be cited 10 times in the article. McCallum and Gautam are both cited only once, and attached to the same sentence beginning "Therefore", with the previous sentence not having a citation. We can therefore assume that either they both back up the whole statement, in which case Gautam is clearly unnecessary when McCallum is published by a university press, or Gautam backs up one sentence and McCallum backs up the other. My concern is that McCallum might back up the innocuous that Baekjean architects helped in the construction of early Japanese, and another, less reliable source makes the claim that "Therefore, Japanese temples are modeled on Korean ones", which. This would be a blatant violation of WP:SYNTH, and given that the user who originally added[1] both the sentences and the sources is a blatant POV-pushing SPA, I wouldn't be surprised. Mitchell's book is more than 400 pages long, and not primarily about Japanese temples, and no page number is given. This would not be a problem, except that Mitchell's other published works imply he is a scholar of either comparative religion or Buddhism in particular, but not of Japanese temple architecture or "Japanese culture". It also seems unlikely that he reads Japanese. Even the best scholarly work (and let's be clear, OUP generally only publishes the best scholarly work) can have minor factual errors, and in a big book like that a minor statement regarding something outside the author's area of expertise is either probably wrong or derivative of other, more specific sources. This means we can't take some Wikipedians' word that Mitchell backs up the statement to which he is attached. Uehara (date?) and Ryan are both attached to a statement that Japanese architecture was influenced by China. This statement doesn't belong in an article called "Korean influence on Japanese culture". They are joined by Fenellosa, an extremely old source that can't be taken to represent the current scholarly consensus. Fenollosa is also used three more times. Once again for a statement about China (not Korea), and twice for his opinion that some Kannon statues were from Corea. Again, Fenollosa's opinion is noteworthy, and should be included in the articles on those statues if it isn't already, but a 1912 book can't be a reliable source to hang a POVFORK article on. Mizuno is cited four times. The first is for a statement that has nothing to do with Korea. The second is for a statement that similar practices were common in Korea. The third is for a statement that workers from Baekje took part in a construction project, with no indication that this is a "Korean influence". The fourth is for a curious statement that cites the New York Times but doesn't actually cite the New York Times. It mentions a "reporter" for the newspaper who supposedly noted the Korean influence on a certain Buddha statue. The fact that the reporter is not named, or directly cited, despite the sentence having two sources (the other being the Asia Society) makes this statement extremely suspect on its head, and I would also have to wonder how much training in Japanese culture the average NYT art correspondent has. The fact that the two sources are separated by five years (1979 and 1984) means we can't even easily date the report. Stanley-Baker is cited twice. Once for the same statement as I Mizuno, and again for the same statement as II Mizuno. Paine and Uehara 1932 are both cited (the former twice!) for the same statement as II Mizuno, which is to say that similar practices were common in Korea at a certain time. Whether any of these sources actually say "therefore, Japanese culture took this influence from Korea, and not the other way around or they both developed it independently", is unclear. Also ... Uehara 1932!? Really? Really? if the one Uehara source is over eighty years old then we can assume the other is about as old as well. Schirokauer et al. are again cited for the same statement as the others immediately above. By the way, of the four scholars involved in the book, only Lurie and Gay appear to specialize in Japan, as opposed to China, and they in Japanese literature, not art. Of course, they are still reliable sources, but they are obviously being misused here, as (at least as the sentence is worded now) it appears they are not talking about "Korean influence on Japanese culture". Von Ragué is interesting. Her book is from a trustworthy university press, and the book even has "Japanese" and not "Korean" in the title. But the sentence to which she is attached says that the method in question is "native to Korea". The fact that her book's title indicates she is writing about Japan also implies that she actually said the method was imported to Japan from Korea. This in turn gives me the impression that she is the only source of the twelve cited in this paragraph who actually supports this paragraph's conclusions. This is a whole big WP:SYNTH mess. If only one source actually draws a conclusion on a subject that is discussed in numerous other sources that don't draw the same conclusions, and that one source is almost 40 years old (considerably older than most of the other sources), then in accordance with WP:WEIGHT and WP:NPOV we need to cut the paragraph. Or better yet cut the whole article. Watt and Ford: Watt is apparently an expert in Chinese art, and the more I learn about him the more I grow to respect his life and achievements at the Met. But in this bio on the museum's website, neither Japan nor Korea are mentioned even once. Ford on the other hand at least seems more focused on Japanese art. However the real problem with this source is that it's a book about a particular art collection (the Florence and Herbert Irving Collection) but I get the distinct impression that the shrine in question is not part of said collection. It therefore seems incredibly likely that the book (which I admit I have not read) is not actually talking about what the article claims it is talking about. Plutschow and Suzuki both appear to be respected experts in their field, and I am not qualified to dispute the statement to which they are attached. I do, however, wish that the Korean nationalists who wrote this article would actually do something useful and add this information to the Asuka-dera article where it belongs, rather than taking it out of its appropriate context and synthesizing it with a whole lot of other stuff as part of some modern-day political agenda. (Note: It is entirely possible that they don't actually say what the article cites them as saying, which was definitely true of the Yamanoue no Okura paragraph before I removed it. I am just saying that at the moment I don't have the resources to either prove or disprove SYNTH has taken place.) That said, a single 6th-century temple in a rural village in Nara Prefecture having modeled its architecture partly or entirely on that of an extinct Korean kingdom (whose educated populace mostly fled to Japan a matter of decades later and left barely a trace on Korean civilization from that point on) could only represent a "Korean influence on Japanese culture" in the broadest possible sense. The sentence to which both Bhattacharyya and Frédéric are attached is incredibly poor English. I don't know enough about temple architecture to say whether the sentence is "true" or not, but the fact is that Bhattacharyya is clearly talking about Indian influence on East Asian culture in general, and we don't yet have an article on "Indian influence on Japanese culture". I also wonder if he discusses Indian influences on Korean culture, and if so, I wonder how my Korean nationalist co-editors would feel if I created an article "Indian influence on Korean culture" based on his book... As for Frédéric: if the statement is uncontroversial (nothing in this article should be considered uncontroversial) and can be found in other sources, we can use him; otherwise, consensus is to stay the hell away. "Nishi and Hozumi Kazuo" looks like extremely dodgy. I am not saying they don't know what they are talking about or that their book (?) is not reliable. I am just saying I don't want to cite a book on Wikipedia where I can't figure out how many authors there were and what their names were. "Nishi" and "Hozumi" are both surnames, and "Kazuo" is a boy's first name. I'd say the most likely reason is that the book was written by two men whose first names both happen to be Kazuo. On what looks like the cover of this book they give their names in western order. But someone on Wikipedia, who apparently knows Japanese names well enough to be aware that they can be written both ways, but not well enough to know which way is which, came to the conclusion that they were either related or married, shared the "family name" Kazuo, and "Nishi" and "Hozumi" were their first names. This makes me of course extremely suspicious of whether whoever added the sentence in question had even read the book or understood what was in it if they did. As an aside, the sentence itself (per III Mizuno, above) has nothing to do with Korean influence on Japanese culture anyway. The article cites Mark Schumacher's personal website four times. Disregarding the nature of this source as a self-published work by a lay scholar who may or may not meet Wikipedia criteria like RS and GNG, the fact is that he says the opposite of what the Korean nationalists responsible for this page want him to say. Relevant quotes from the linked page's Korean Influence in Japan section are Prince Shōtoku lived at a time when Korean influence was perhaps near its peak in Japan." and "However, by the early 8th century, the Korean artistic influence began to wan, and was eventually overshadowed by Japan's growing fascination with China and Chinese Tang-era culture." Basically he says that Korean influence in Japan lasted for a short time at the dawn of the historical period, and then rapidly disappeared. That is not what this Wikipedia article wants its readers to think. Also of note is the fact that he devotes slightly more space on the page to Hata Influence in Japan. I wonder if the same Wikipedia editors who wrote this article would be willing to devote the same amount of time and effort to an article "Hata influence on Japanese culture"? No? Gee, how odd... Sun-Young Shin is an assistant professor of second-language studies at Indiana University. His qualifications are all in linguistics and English language/literature. What he thinks about Japanese Buddhist architecture seems pretty irrelevant, and I also wonder why we are citing an "Audio/Slide Program for Use in Korean Studies" that is not linked. Is this a PowerPoint that he used in teaching a class? If so, was it found online? If it was found online, then why is it not linked? If it is a PowerPoint for a class but is not to be found online (i.e., someone on Wikipedia was in the class) then the source clearly fails WP:V. If this is not a PowerPoint for a class, then what exactly is it? I've never heard of an "Audio/Slide Program" used as a source that wasn't a PowerPoint (or Office Impress or other) presentation... Swann seems like he is being horribly misused here. He is cited twice. The first instance he is attached to the incredibly obviously and indisputable fact that "Kudara" is the Japanese name for "Baekje". If he is also meant to support the previous sentence, then he is either being used out-of-context or he is wrong. The relevant article gives a fuller (and therefore probably more plausible -- again, I'm not an expert, just naturally skeptical) story. "Kudara Kannon" may translate as "Baekje Guanyin", but it appears to be just a name. The Horyu-ji Temple themselves don't seem to believe Kudaran (or Korean) influence is noteworthy enough to receive significant coverage on their website. The second time Swann is cited, he is specifically attached to a claim that the statue was brought from Baekje or built in Japan by a Baekjean immigrant. If this is in fact the scholarly consensus, then I wish Korean nationalist Wikipedians would add it to the Horyu-ji article rather than maintaining a WP:POVFORK that contradicts all our other articles. Gurugé and Portal are cited once each, both for the same claim as II Swann above. As above, if all three of these sources actually make this claim, then why does the actual Horyu-ji article contradict it? Why are Korean nationalist Wikipedians afraid to engage Japanese Wikipedians on the actual Japanese culture pages, instead creating and maintaining a POVFORK where they can say whatever they want and not have it challenged except by equally disruptive and self-destructive users like that other guy? McCune: Notice how this article cleverly cites Schumacher for the claim that the Kudara Kannon is Korean, but picks another source for the claim the Guze Kannon is Korean. I wonder why they didn't cite Schumacher for both. He discusses both in some depth. He's also a much more modern source than McCune (roughly 50 years), and therefore (assuming he is a reliable source) he is a much better source on the modern scholarly consensus than she is. I wonder if the reason this Wikipedia article's creators chose one source for one claim and a different source for a different claim, is that neither source actually supports both. It's worth pointing out that Schumacher appears to make the claim that if there is influence from anywhere in the Guze Kannon, it is from Central Asia. I wonder if McCune discusses the Kudara Kannon. He also says that Fenollosa (and older source than anyone) thought the statue was Korean, but that there was no consensus. Does McCune discuss the Kudara Kannon, I wonder? If she does not, then we have a problem: this section of the article is saying that both the Kudara and Guze Kannon statues are of Korean origin, a claim that neither source makes by itself. This article takes Schumacher as a reliable source. Schumacher says that "Guze Kannon is Korean" was a theory developed by Fenollosa, but never widely accepted. Therefore, we need to throw out the other sources that make this claim. We especially need to throw them out if they are not making this claim but are attached to sentences that give that impression. These sources are the Asiatic Society of Japan, Kinoshita, and the primary source 聖冏抄. None of these sources are attached to any other part of this article, and we have an apparently semi-reliable source that claims (at best) "the jury's still out". The Asia Society source was already discussed in IV Mizuno above. The source is attached to a claim about "a reporter" at the New York Times, and for this it is insufficient. Unless the actual NYT article can be located, the sentence is effectively unsourced, and we should treat the Asia Society source like it isn't cited. Oh, come on! Why did I have to accidentally analyze two sources that appeared to be attached to a statement, only to find that the statement's actual source was further down! Anyway Cotter is the "New York Times reporter" mentioned in IV Mizuno and the Asia Society source discussions above. Holland Cotter at least appears to know art. And maybe he can be used as a source for a hypothetical future Korean influence on Japanese Buddhist art article. In fact, most of this section could possibly be salvaged if it was entirely rewritten and moved to a more appropriate title, with all the WP:SYNTH removed. But he and other professional art critics cannot be synthesized together with other sources to claim that Japanese culture overall has received a stronger Korean influence than Chinese (or Indian!) or European or American influence. And no, I'm not interested in creating all those articles just to make a point. This article simply should not exist, because there are NO other "Country X influence on the culture of Country Y" articles. Cotter also can't be used for the claim that the views expressed in the exhibition he was discussing are "widespread" or "consensus", since he clearly states that the exhibit "goes against the grain of history". Sugiyama and Morse are attached to two separate sentences. The first, like so many others in this article, is an innocuous point that people of Korean origin contributed to the construction of a certain temple. The second is interesting, since it concerns supposed Silla influence in the early Heian period. The problem is that Sugiyama and Morse's book is about the mid-Nara period. Another problem is that like virtually all the other sources here, no page numbers are given. I find it incredibly unlikely that Silla influence on early Heian sculpture is discussed on more than one or two pages of this book about the Tenpyō era, so what gives? Are the writers of this article trying to hide something?? The CAAA source is apparently a collection of abstracts from papers, and it is cited for two sentences both with the same basic premise, that Korean immigrants were responsible for the planning and construction the Great Buddha at Tōdai-ji. I have two questions for the writers of this article: Why is this information only included in this article and not added to the main article in question? And have you actually read the papers being quoted here? Citing abstracts for claims like this is extremely tricky, since the whole point of this article is clearly to give a modern Korean political spin on the issues, and scholars almost never give the exact same dimensions, weight and point of view to their abstracts as they do to the full papers. The point of an abstract is merely to state the facts as plainly and simply (and briefly) as possible. Kuninaka no Kimimaro was descended from immigrants from Baekje. This is not in dispute. But unless he lived to be 114, he was not born in Baekje. He was born in Japan. His father was probably also born in Japan. He was Japanese, not Korean. And he certainly was not South Korean. And he was the principal mastermind behind the Nara-Daibutsu. The principal architect of the statue was Japanese, not Korean. The fact that his remote ancestors immigrated from a kingdom on the Korean peninsula that was wiped from the face of the earth decades before he was even born does not make him Korean. The Nara-Daibutsu is not a "Korean influence on Japanese culture". So regardless of what this source actually says (I doubt anyone on Wikipedia has actually read the original papers) this paragraph should not be included. McBride is a source about Buddhism in Silla, not about the Nara-Daibutsu. The difficulties this sentence describes were actually primarily related to a shortage of gold reserves in Japan. One would think that if Nara Japan was as closely linked with Silla as this paragraph wants us to believe, they could have just imported the gold, but still. The gold problem isn't even mentioned in this Wikipedia article. The implication is that the problems were overcome by the skill and diligence of the superior Korean workers, or some racist-nationalist nonsense like that. We have very limited historical records for this period, and those we have say the main difficulties involved a shortage of materials, and these problems were solved by the miraculous intervention of supernatural powers, brought about by prayer. What does this have to do with "Korean influence on Japanese culture? NOTHING! Nihon-shoki is an ancient primary source that tells us nothing whatsoever about Korean influence on Japanese culture for the intervening 1,300 years, and cannot really be relied on for detailed analysis of the cultural impact of Kudarans in Japan in the sixth-century (more than 100 years before it was compiled). Myers and Akiyama may or may not be reliable, but that is beside the point. They are discussing a topic for which there is next to no archaeological evidence one way or the other, and for which there is exactly one written source from more than a century later. Since this article is a WP:POVFORK we are unable to explain these facts in its proper context. If modern scholars actually consider this article's claims to be the case, then they can be cited in the Japanese painting article or some other more appropriate place. (The following paragraph is another piece inspired entirely by Covell. Also, [o]nce in Japan, they continued to use their Buddhist names instead of their birth (given) names, which eventually led to their origins being largely forgotten is like admitting "we're making this stuff up, and you can't prove us wrong".) Farris is used as a source for the statement "Various metal-working techniques such as iron-working, the cuirass, the oven, bronze bells used in Yayoi period Japan essentially originated in Korea." This is technically accurate, but metal-working techniques used in Japan before the dawn of the historical period having been adopted from an equally shadowy area that happens to have existed on the same peninsula that is now called Korea has nothing whatsoever to do with so-called "Korean influence on Japanese culture". And, again, there is no Chinese influence on Japanese culture and there never will be, because Chinese nationalists are apparently not insecure enough that they need to go onto English Wikipedia and denigrate another country's culture by saying "Oh, by the way, they just copied everything off us". Plus, I'm worried about whether "essentially" is Farris's word, or if he actually gave a more detailed and nuanced discussion and some Wikipedians are "interpreting" him as saying this. Fagan and "Agency of Cultural Affairs/Japan Society/IBM" are also both attached to an otherwise non-controversial statement that is being taken out context (the bad English grammar in the middle of the sentence implies that there were no indigenous Japanese who were skilled, because Kudaran immigrants were "the" skilled workers). Plus, I'm confused as to who/what the second source is: the Japanese Agency of Cultural Affairs, the Japan Society and IBM are all separate entities. Also, who exactly is Fagan? The author of the Oxford Companion to Archaeology is probably not a very reliable source on "Japanese culture"; he doesn't really need to be since this sentence actually has nothing to do with culture anyway. We should delete the sentence then. Or delete the entire article. The entire "Iron ware" section relies exclusively on Covell and someone named Harmon. The title of Harmon's book says it all: 5,000 Years of Korean Martial Arts: The Heritage of the Hermit Kingdom Warriors. How does Harmon know about these 5,000 years of Korean martial arts? Where's the evidence? Certainly no on in Korea (or anywhere else for that matter, except Mesopotamia and maybe a few other places) had writing at that time. He self-published his book through the vanity press Dog Ear Publishing. Harmon himself has apparently never accomplished anything noteworthy except self-publishing this 200+ page book. Where is his doctorate in Japanese studies? What university does he teach at? Does he not teach at a university? Does he even have a higher degree? Does he even speak Japanese? Page 167 tells us all we need to know about Harmon's knowledge of and attitude toward Japanese cultural history. He is NOT a reliable source. And for that matter, why the devil does Covell get so much attention in this encyclopedia article? What has he done to merit one of the highest-ranked websites devoting an encyclopedia article worth of material to his "research"? What university did he teach at? What was his doctorate in? Did he even speak Japanese??? Anyway, yeah, almost none of these sources are reliable, and those that are are being horribly abused and misrepresented. Hudson is apparently a reliable source, but the sentence to which he is attached is written in such broken English that I'm sure whoever wrote it either (1) didn't read Hudson, or (2) didn't understand what Hudson was trying to say. I for one can't understand what this sentence is trying to say. A third option is that whoever wrote this sentence knew what Hudson was trying to say, but didn't care. I don't generally go for that option, but we've already seen that in this article it's definitely a possibility. Cooper appears to also be adequate. And what this sentence says might be factually accurate. But "pottery" isn't the same thing as "culture". From the mid-17th century to the mid-19th century, Japan was almost completely closed off to outside cultural influence, so this point is completely moot. The Met and Washington OCG are both cited for statements that are probably equally factual, but irrelevant to an article about Japanese culture. Also, the timeline here is kinda screwy: did Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea bring captive potters to Japan in the 1590s, or did Koreans come over to Japan (voluntarily?) "in the 17th century CE"? I doubt whoever added these almost-oxymoronic statements to the article could tell you, since they actually know nothing about Japanese history or culture. They are just looking for any excuse to claim "everything Japanese is actually Korean". The sourcing for the "Satsuma ware" section is ridiculous. "Some sources claim X, but other sources claim Y" is an indication that some sources are wrong, and given that one is a blog post... Anyway, I think that all of these sources may be wrong, since they all appear to be written by non-Japanese-speaking laymen, who are reliant on other secondary sources.

(Probably more to come...)

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:57, 4 July 2014 (UTC)