Our Mission
Restoring our history through our own perspective.
Korean history has long been written from the perspectives of others. The historical outlook of the Noron faction in late Joseon understood Korea through deference to China. As a result, much of the history of the Dongyi, or “Eastern Yi,” peoples was dismissed as the history of barbarians, while Korean history was told through the ideology of “Little China,” which cast Korea as a lesser counterpart of China.
Korean history has also been written through the eyes of the Japanese far right, whose country occupied Korea. This is the colonial view of history associated with the Japanese Government-General of Korea.
Historians who upheld colonial interpretations and should have lost their influence at liberation instead came to dominate academia and education. Consequently, even after liberation, Koreans continued to learn the Government-General’s view of history as the sole established account.
These historians established the view that the Four Han Commanderies were located on the Korean Peninsula, presenting the beginning of Korean history as a period when ancient China occupied its northern part. This is the account taught in school textbooks. They also treated as orthodoxy the rejection of the early records in the Samguk Sagi (History of the Three Kingdoms), a position advanced by the Government-General’s Korean History Compilation Committee. In doing so, they diminished the value of the Samguk Sagi and erased the early histories of Goguryeo, Silla and Baekje.
In effect, this spread the argument that southern Korea had been ruled by a Japanese administrative institution known as the Imna Japanese Headquarters, or Mimana Nihon-fu. Even the significance of the nationalist independence movement was diminished.
The Hangaram Institute of History & Culture is a research community founded by Director Lee Deok-il and like-minded scholars. Across history from ancient to modern times, as well as culture, we seek to dismantle what we regard as the false theoretical structures of Sino-centric and Japanese colonial historiography.
Although our beginnings may be modest, we believe this small step can open the way to a much greater advance: freeing Koreans from historical perspectives shaped by subservience and the betrayal of national interests, and enabling us to understand ourselves through our own eyes.