In Anti Japanese Tribalism, Lee Young-hoon and his co-authors ignite one of the most controversial debates in modern South Korean historiography By challenging dominant narratives about Japanese colonial rule and accusing Korean elites of perpetuating myths for political and economic gain, the book forces readers to confront the uncomfortable relationship between memory, identity, and nationhood.
But what if these mythologies, far from being anomalies, are part of a much deeper phenomenon? One rooted not only in politics but in tribalism, shaped by shamanic tradition, ancestral worship, and symbolic storytelling?
This article reviews Anti Japanese Tribalism in the context of broader forms of cultural and shamanic tribalism, drawing comparisons with Peter H. Lee’s Myths of Korea and Anna Reid’s The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia. Together, these works reveal how historical memory can become not just a tool of nationalism, but a sacred script, invoked to bind the group and demonize the outsider.
The Core Argument of Anti Japanese Tribalism
Published in 2019 by a team of South Korean scholars led by economist Lee Young-hoon, Anti Japanese Tribalism dissects what it sees as distortions in South Korea’s historical self-image. The authors argue that Korea’s collective memory of Japanese colonialism (1910–1945) has been shaped less by evidence and more by mythmaking. They take aim at topics like land confiscation, forced labor, and comfort women, suggesting that postwar elites exaggerated victimhood to unify the populace and delegitimize dissent.
But Lee’s core thesis isn’t simply about historical error, it’s about what he calls tribalism: the irrational, emotionally charged loyalty to a group identity that resists scrutiny. In this view, Korea’s “anti-Japanese” posture is not a rational response to history, but a quasi-religious loyalty to a narrative passed down like sacred truth.
This provocative framing caused an uproar in Korea. The book became a bestseller and a lightning rod. Critics accused it of historical revisionism and insensitivity toward victims of Japanese oppression. Supporters hailed it as long-overdue intellectual courage.
Yet few commentators have explored the deeper implications: Why are some historical narratives so emotionally non-negotiable? Why do nations cling to certain myths, even when the evidence is murky? This is where a broader view of tribalism becomes essential.
Myth as National Scripture: Myths of Korea
Peter H. Lee’s Myths of Korea offers a compelling bridge between the academic and the spiritual dimensions of national memory. Published by the University of Hawaii Press, this compact but richly sourced volume traces Korea’s foundational myths, especially the story of Dangun, the legendary founder born of a heavenly prince and a bear-turned-woman.
This myth is not just folklore. As Lee shows, it has been used by successive regimes, from Joseon Confucians to 20th-century nationalists, to affirm Korean uniqueness, purity, and antiquity. In many ways, the Dangun myth operates as a tribal charter, sanctifying Korea’s moral superiority and eternal sovereignty. The parallels to Lee Young-hoon’s critique are striking: both authors reveal how myths can function as national scripture, resistant to challenge.
Where Anti Japanese Tribalism accuses elites of using victimhood to forge tribal unity, Myths of Korea shows how spiritual origin myths undergird that same unity with divine legitimacy.
Siberian Shamanism: A Cultural Mirror
While Anti Japanese Tribalism focuses on Korea, its critique of myth-based identity invites broader comparisons. Notably, Korean shamanism shares structural and symbolic similarities with the shamanic traditions of Siberia and Central Asia. Both cultures preserve communal memory through ritual, mythology, and spiritual intermediaries, systems that predate modern nationalism but continue to shape it. Exploring Siberian shamanism offers a mirror to Korea’s own ancestral frameworks, showing how tribal memory can endure across very different societies.
Ancestral Memory and the Siberian Mirror: The Shaman’s Coat
To fully understand the roots of tribalist identity in Korea, it’s helpful to examine a kindred tradition: Siberian shamanism. Anna Reid’s The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia (Bloomsbury, 2002) is a travelogue-history hybrid that explores how indigenous tribes, like the Evenki and Yakuts, have preserved identity through ritual, memory, and myth in ways remarkably similar to Korean practices.
In these communities, shamans act as cultural archivists, channelling ancestral spirits, reciting origin epics, and reinforcing moral boundaries between “us” and “them.” Like Korean shamans conducting gut rituals, Siberian shamans perform acts of memory that are spiritual as much as historical.
Reid documents how these traditions persisted even under Soviet repression, and how tribal memory has resurfaced in post-Soviet identity politics. While the form is different, the function is eerily similar to Korean nationalist mythmaking: it’s about belonging, trauma, and survival, all wrapped in ritualized memory.
Seen through this lens, Anti Japanese Tribalism isn’t just a critique of historical distortion, it’s a confrontation with a deeper shamanic structure of identity, in which memory becomes sacred and forgetting becomes betrayal.
Revisiting Anti Japanese Tribalism in Context
By placing Anti Japanese Tribalism alongside these other works, we begin to see tribalism not just as a political phenomenon, but as a cultural operating system. In Korea, the emotional power of anti-Japanese sentiment may stem not only from schools or media but from something older: the deep currents of ritual memory, mythic suffering, and communal grievance.
Lee Young-hoon challenges the logic of this tribalism, but he also pays it a backhanded compliment. He shows how powerful it is, how resistant to reason, how central it remains to Korea’s identity. If Korean nationalism is a kind of modern-day shamanism, then Anti Japanese Tribalism is the heretical act of questioning the tribe’s sacred story.
In a time when identity politics, nationalism, and historical grievances dominate global discourse, Anti Japanese Tribalism is a timely, if incendiary, intervention. But to truly understand its impact, we must look beyond Korea. As Myths of Korea and The Shaman’s Coat remind us, tribalism is as old as myth itself. Whether channelled through shamans or scholars, it shapes how we remember, who we blame, and what truths we dare not question.
