4 - Kinship and succession in China, Japan, and Korea

Summary

The last chapter examined how northeast conquest regimes and nearby states shaped a ritual vocabulary imported from the Central Plain to meet their specific situations. By exploring issues surrounding the legitimacy of royal succession that arose when newly emergent states in Korea and Japan adopted Chinese-style legal codes, this chapter aims to provide a fresh perspective on the idiosyncrasies of Chinese Confucian practices. The native legacy of rulership and succession which constrained the exportability of Confucian practices helps explain how, despite commonalities in their initial kinship systems, Japanese and Korean regimes ended up with strikingly different resolutions in their attempts to implement Chinese-style political structures.

The fundamental problem was the Chinese legal code that was introduced into the emerging states of the Korean peninsula and thence into the Japanese archipelago during the state-building era. The normative ideas of political legitimacy embedded in the codes were generally regarded as Confucian, referring to a set of principles which were incorporated into the education of elites and rulers. Assumed to be universally applicable, these norms were in actuality predicated on the Chinese patrilineal kinship system rather than the very different indigenous kinship and succession systems practiced in early Korea and Japan. Ancient Japanese and Korean kingship was based on bilateral kinship, which emphasized the blood lines of mothers as well as fathers. Rulership was dominated by a royal lineage, which practiced brother–sister marriage. Chinese legal principles denied inheritance rights to daughters and wives and dictated that only sons could ascend the throne. They proved difficult to implement, especially because they threatened the legitimacy of native rulers. Although Japan and Korea eventually adopted patrilineal principles, the end results deviated from the Chinese system and from each other in significant respects.

This chapter begins with a brief survey of the Chinese patrilineal kinship system, which marked status differences by gender, generation, and birth order within the descent group or lineage.