Keyhole-shaped Tombs and Unspoken Frontiers: Exploring the Borderlands of Early Korean-Japanese Relations in the 5th-6th Centuries

In 1983, Korean scholar Kang Ingu ignited a firestorm by announcing the discovery of keyhole-shaped tombs in the Yongsan River basin in the southwestern corner of the Korean peninsula. Keyhole-shaped tombs were considered symbols of early Japanese hegemony during the Kofun period (ca. 250 CE - 538 CE) and, until then, had only been known on the Japanese archipelago. This announcement revived long-standing debates on the nature of early "Korean-Japanese" relations, including the theory that an early "Japan" had colonized the southern Korean peninsula in ancient times. Nationalist Japanese scholars viewed these tombs as support for that theory, which Korean scholars vehemently rejected. Approaches to understand the eclectic nature of the keyhole-shaped tombs in the Yongsan River basin starkly revealed larger issues in the studies of early "Korean-Japanese" relations: 1) geonationalist frameworks, 2) hegemonic texts, and 3) core-periphery models of interaction. This dissertation critiques these issues and evaluates the various claims made on the origins of the keyhole-shaped tombs in the Yongsan River basin, the racial identity of the entombed, and their geopolitical circumstances. In order to avoid the pitfalls of nationalist and text-centered frameworks, I apply a holistic approach to these tombs by combining a critical analysis of the available historical texts with a quantitative analysis of the archaeological material. In addition, this project addresses questions of territorial control and borders of historical states, such as Paekche on the Korean peninsula and Yamato on the Japanese archipelago in relation to these tombs. I argue that these tombs arose from interactions between autonomous polities in the textually defined borderlands or frontier regions of the historical states of Paekche and Yamato. This study illuminates the role of these "borderlands" within the dynamic political changes occurring in early relations between groups on the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago which eventually led to the formation of an early "Korea" and "Japan." As a secondary objective, the dissertation illustrates how geonationalism (i.e. the projection of arbitrary geographical borders into the past), totalizing notions of territory and conquest, and the hegemonic nature of text-based narratives render these "borderlands" invisible and silent