The Japanese Missionaries and Their Impact on Korean Buddhist Developments (1876-1910)

This work deals with the interaction between the Japanese Buddhist missionaries and Korean monkhood in the turbulent early modern period of Korean history, which began with the conclusion of Korea's first "unequal " treaty with Japan in 1876 and ended with Japanese annexation of the whole country in 1910. As Korea was peripherized and increasingly drawn in Japan's fledgling sphere of influence in East Asia, Japanese modern Buddhism became a reference model of sorts for the Korean monks who tended now to view Japan as their "protector " in practice and an ideal of "Buddhism-friendly" modernity in theory. In fact, even before the Japanese intrusion Korean Buddhism was struggling to readjust its hitherto subjugated social position proportionally to the level of wealth and influence of richer monasteries, and provided important religious and ideological background for Korea's first generation of modern reformers in the 1880s. But the Japanese missionaries managed to quickly appropriate the nascent discourse of "Buddhist modernity " in Korea and turn it into a tool of co-opting Korean Buddhist clergy for its own political purposes. While a partial or full loss of nationalistic credentials was the logic result of this process for the Buddhist community, its unequal alliance with the invaders/colonizers might be also understood as perhaps an unavoidable result of the combination of traditional Confucian oppression and new Christian anti-Buddhist attitude