에가미 나미오(江上波夫)와 기타 사다키치(喜田貞吉)의 일본민족 기원론 - 한민족(韓民族)의 민족이동을 중심으로 -

Abstract

‘The horse-rider hypothesis’ was a succeeding theory to that of Sadakichi Kita, a proponent of Ilsun donjoron, the argument that the Japanese and Korean peoples share common ancestry, which helped justify Japan's colonial annexation and assimilation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Namio Egami, an advocate of the horse-rider hypothesis, however, might have felt reserved about publishing the theory that seemed influenced by imperialist thoughts. This paper aims to examine how such consideration or reservation was reflected in Egami's ethnogenetic theory of the Japanese people through the comparison with Kita's. Both of them sought for the origin of Weain, rice farmers of ancient Japan, in the southern parts of China. Kita assumed, however, that Weain's main route of migration to Japan was a land route that went north and turned across Santo peninsula and Korean peninsula and finally reached Kyushu, while Egami assumed that it was a sea route by which it went directly from China to Kyushu. Moreover, Kita regarded Weain, rice farmers in ancient Japan and Hanin, rice farmers in ancient Korea as almost the same race, while Egami distinguished Weain from Hanin definitely and interpreted the influence of Hanin on Japan as a cultural one rather than the result of migration. Both of them, however, concurred in identifying “the Tribe of Descendants of the Sun-Goddess” who ruled in ancient Japan as a branch of bigger Puyo tribe. Egami, however, linked their identity directly to Central Asia over Korean peninsula by adopting the concept of ‘horse-rider’. In brief, Egami seemed to have avoided the genealogical theorization on the relationship between the Korean race and Japanese race by tactfully operating on the concepts of “cultural diffusion” and “migration”. If this point of argument was treated lightly in Egami's theorization, his theory would have been pointless however much it may have been modified.