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, and was exempt from obligations of service.

The village is known from the travelogue Saiyûki written by Tachibana Nankei in 1782-1783, as well as the Saiyû zakki written by Furukawa Koshôken a few years earlier. 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. Koshôken gives the number as 1500 individuals. 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.

Koshôken writes that the Koreans settled in Noshiro in the 1590s were forbidden from intermarrying with Japanese, and that even at his own time, nearly 200 years later, they were prohibited from shaving their heads in the Japanese fashion, despite repeated petitions to the lord of Satsuma. He describes the people as tall, with slender faces and a distinguished look, and writes that they tie their hair up with hairpins in much the same way as the people of Ryûkyû. The villagers would also, Koshôken writes, perform Korean dances for the lord of Satsuma whenever he passed by the village on his sankin kôtai journey.

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, though Koshôken writes that five families were the leaders in the community, and that it was these five families in particular who maintained Korean dress and customs. 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, 95.