The embassies

Japan invaded Korea in the 1590s and devastated it. Two decades later the two countries were exchanging embassies again — because the new Tokugawa government wanted the legitimacy that formal relations with Korea conferred, and Korea wanted to know what Japan was doing.

The Tongsinsa

The Tongsinsa — "communication envoys" — went twelve times between 1607 and 1811. Each mission ran to four or five hundred people: diplomats, scholars, physicians, musicians, calligraphers, acrobats. They sailed from Busan, landed in Kyushu, and were escorted overland to Edo over months.

In Japan the missions were an event. Crowds lined the route. Japanese scholars sought out the Korean scholars for brush conversations — written exchanges in classical Chinese, the shared written language, conducted late into the night. Some of those manuscripts survive, and they read like people genuinely delighted to meet each other.

The Tongsinsa records were jointly inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2017 — submitted together by Korean and Japanese institutions, which is itself the point of them.

The Waegwan, which nobody has heard of

Everyone knows Dejima, the fan-shaped island in Nagasaki where the Dutch were confined. Almost nobody outside Korea knows about the Waegwan in Busan, and it was an order of magnitude larger.

The Choryang Waegwan, established in 1678, was a walled Japanese settlement covering roughly 33 hectares — around ten times the area of Dejima — housing several hundred Japanese men from the Tsushima domain. They lived here permanently, traded silver for silk and ginseng, and were forbidden to leave the walls without permission.

It was the only place in Korea where Japanese could live, and for two centuries it was the main channel through which each country learned anything about the other. Little of it survives above ground, but the district name — Choryang — is still on the map, and the National Maritime Museum handles the story properly.