Noshiroko

Noshiroko was a village in Satsuma province where, in the Edo period, the people maintained the Korean customs of their ancestors, seventeen families brought there in the 1590s, during Toyotomi Hideyoshi's Korean Invasions. The village lay seven ri west of the castle town of Kagoshima.

The village is known from the travelogue Saiyûki written by Tachibana Nankei in 1782-1783. According to Nankei, at that time (nearly two hundred years after their supposed resettlement there) the people still maintained Korean customs, language, and dress, and numbered in the hundreds of households. Nankei relates that most of the people had family names such as Shin, Kin, and Park, an indication that they had not adopted Japanese-style names.

Nankei writes that the village did not normally accommodate visitors from other provinces, but that he managed to obtain a letter of introduction from "the head of Noshiroko, Machida Kenmotsu," and was afterwards able to meet with the shôya (village headman) Shin Pochun. The precise positions of these two figures, particularly relative to one another, seems unclear. Nankei also met with a representative of the goningumi, Shin Shukin, while staying in the village.

Noshiroko also maintained pottery kilns, where Korean-style pottery, known as Kôrai-yaki, was produced. Nankei writes that half the villagers were potters, that they continued traditions and techniques their ancestors had brought over from Korea, and that the final product was, to his eyes, quite different from that otherwise produced in Japan, and identical to that imported from Korea. The community provided the lord of Satsuma with their best pieces, which he would then give as esteemed gifts, claiming them to have been imported from Korea. The majority of ceramics created at Noshiroko, which were then sold in Satsuma, Ôsumi, and Hyûga provinces, as well as in Osaka, are described by Nankei, however, as being of low-quality. These were nevertheless held in high esteem in the Osaka markets, he writes, however, because of the value placed on Satsuma wares; they were called either Hanoshiro pottery, or choka, a local Satsuma dialect word for a certain type of clay bottle for tea producers, called dobin (土瓶) in Edo dialect.

Though the people of Noshiroko spoke Japanese no differently from (read: just as fluently as) the people of other villages in the region, many also spoke Korean, and would be used as Korean interpreters when the domain required such. Shipwrecks were not uncommon in Satsuma during the Edo period, so neither was it uncommon for villagers of Noshiroko to be called upon.

References

• Plutschow, Herbert. A Reader in Edo Period Travel. Global Oriental, 2006. pp75-88.