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This article examines the mechanics of the trade with Japan through Pusan and focuses on the characteristics of the Korean merchants as a way of clarifying the operation of the Pusan market. The character of the merchants was largely determined by the structure of trade. Before the mid-eighteenth century, the trade was entrepôt trade—Chinese silk and Korean ginseng for Japanese silver—but after that time, the trade structure shifted to Korean ox hides and sea slugs for Japanese copper. Hypotheses are offered to explain the change in the trade structure. Changes in trade structure produced changes in the character of the Korean merchants involved with the Japan trade. Kaesŏng merchants seem to have controlled the long-distance trade to the Chinese border and the supply of ginseng out of the interior in the north, but from the mid-1700s, they were replaced by merchants from the southern Kyŏngsang region who were part of the local networks handling marine commodities and seafood. Comparisons of Korean and Japanese archival material have enabled us to identify individuals. The author also argues that trade volumes are still difficult to determine, because of the confusion over what constituted smuggling. In addition, the author examines the effect on local society of the Japanese presence and shows how the populace living close to the Japan House in Pusan was deeply involved with trade as brokers and even as consumers of Japanese culture.

This article examines the frontier economy shared by Kyŏngsang Province and Tsushima Island. Leaving aside private trade, the official trade comes under scrutiny through Chosŏn government data. The size of the Japan element within the Chosŏn economy is gauged in terms of the volumes recorded in connection with the official trade and the geographic source of the official trade across Kyŏngsang Province. One purpose is to quantify the Japan trade. Another purpose is to canvas the writings of Chosŏn intellectuals and commentators for indications of literate opinion on the Japanese economic connection. The scale of the economy that involved the Japanese reached to about 43% of the taxation receipts of Kyŏngsang Province, and literate commentators lamented this enormous involvement in the domestic economy as a “burden” on the country. When the figures are disaggregated, the true “costs” are estimated at about 14% of annual provincial revenues. The author interprets these as transaction costs, because they were paid out without any expectation of return, unlike other transactions. The gap between 43% and 14% reveals a gap between the structures of trade and the mentality that interpreted those structures or, in other words, between what was exchanged and how those exchanges were seen by Chosŏn writers.

This article compares the volumes of trade in Northeast Asia, a little studied problem because of the difficulties in interpreting the Tsushima documents, but one which helps to place Northeast Asian trade within global trade. The author compares trade volumes passing between Korea and Japan in Pusan and between Japan and the Dutch in Nagasaki and concludes that prior to the 1690s, the Korea-Japan volume was greater, but after the 1690s, the Japan-Dutch volume was greater. Reasons for the change had little to do with official ceilings set by the Tokugawa shogunate, because Tsushima was able to circum-vent any restrictions and send false reports to the bakufu. The Japan-Dutch trade was tightly monitored and falsification was impossible. Rather, the rea-sons for the higher Korea-Japan trade and its subsequent drop probably lay in the devaluation of Japanese silver in the 1690s.

This article follows the trade in silver from Japan to China and examines the role of silver in Chosŏn Korea. Silver was the international currency and the means of settling trade accounts, so its function within Chosŏn society and economy helps us understand the degree to which Chosŏn was involved in international society. A great deal of silver passed through Chosŏn, primarily coming from Japan on its way to China, but silver also came into Korea from China in connection with the Ming armies that fought the Japanese in the 1590s as well as in payment for red ginseng in the eighteenth century. The Chosŏn economy was nearly bi-metallic until the late seventeenth century, thereafter silver disappeared from circulation to be replaced by copper coins. However, silver continued to be used for trade with China until the late eighteenth century and was kept by government organs as a storage currency to be used in case of emergency. The author hypothesizes that Chosŏn’s withdrawal from the entrepôt trade, or its withdrawal from the international trade in silver, from the eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries was one important reason why Chosŏn society was not prepared for the cultural and systemic shocks of the late nineteenth century.

Anyone with any interest in Korean literature has come across the name of Kevin O’Rourke. Coming to Korea in 1964 at the age of twenty-four as a member of the Columban Fathers, he received his Ph.D. in Korean literature at Yonsei University and has been teaching at Kyunghee University since 1977. Professor O’Rourke has published countless translations as well as his own poetry. The enormous scope of his work covers both prose and poetry, and extends from the roots of Korean literature in hyangga and Koryŏ kayo through poetry in Chinese up to modern poetry and fiction. His published translations, spanning three decades from the early 1970s to the present, include Ten Korean Short Stories, The Square (Ch’oe Inhun), Our Twisted Hero (Yi Munyŏl), Tilting the Jar, Spilling the Moon (a Poetry Book Society recommended translation), Selected Poems of Yi Kyubo, The Book of Korean Shijo and many others, as well as numerous scholarly articles on Korean fiction and poetry.