Legacy of Prof. Ed Wagner

In writing of late in this column, which I call the “Frog Outside the Well,” I have touched on the subject of Korean jokbo (genealogies) a few times. I have had feedback from this column and from my YouTube channel that Korean jokbo are unreliable in that commoners and slaves have bought their way into established genealogies.

This calls for looking at the work of Prof. Ed Wagner who was the first to get a degree in Korean history in America and who taught for his whole career at Harvard University. Indeed, he is called the “Father of Korean Studies” in America.

Perhaps he is best-known in Korea for his expertise in Korean jokbo. Indeed, he was one of the first to use jokbo as an historical resource at a time when Korean scholars, for the most part, ignored jokbo and decried their inaccuracy and worth as reliable historical documents. But Wagner showed quite convincingly that, like any other source document, it could be cross-checked and evaluated, caseby-case, as to the accuracy and the worth of the document. And he found that jokbo were very largely reliable and could be used to put together a picture of the elite political structure of past eras.

The majority of Korean scholars were quick to say that jokbo were mostly falsified in that people bought their way into jokbo to enhance their standing in society. The generalization often goes so far as to say former slaves made a lot of money and bought their way into an established jokbo. Whereas this generalization has some degree of truth to it, the idea quickly evaporates into meaninglessness when you ask the question of when these flagrant and widespread forgeries took place. And the answer is always, with the onset of the 20th century, during the Japanese period. Okay. Fine. What then of the jokbo that were published before the 20th century? Are they suspect, too? The answer is a resounding no. And an examination of those jokbo show that they are largely accurate.

Therefore, if we have a 20th century jokbo that we suspect has been largely forged, we can find out how accurate or inaccurate it is by comparing it to earlier generations of the jokbo. A lineage organization will publish a jokbo every generation, roughly every 30 to 40 years.

The accuracy of the jokbo can often be determined by checking corroborative sources. For example, if a marriage is recorded in the husband’s jokbo, one can double-check the accuracy by seeing if there is such an entry in the wife’s jokbo. More importantly, if a man has a claim to have passed an exam, we can check the exam rosters to see if, indeed, he did pass the exam.

On this front, sometimes we catch minor inaccuracies. For example, the jokbo might say that a man passed the “munkwa” (highest civil service) exam, but on checking we find that he passed a secondary civil service exam (the sama, saengwon or jinsa exam). That is an error of the “exaggeration” type, not of the out-of-theblue falsification type.

And indeed, checking who passed exams and who was married to whom was what Wagner was interested in seeing. The jokbo was really of secondary importance to him — he was interested in who passed exams in that the exams were the access to power and political position in Joseon Korea.

His contributions in the study of the political structure and who was who in Joseon made an immeasurable contribution to the study of Korean history. He was able to challenge some of the prevailing ideas, many of which had been inherited from Japanese scholarship of the time. Wagner was the first of the generation of iconoclastic historians who challenged the accepted ideas, many of which had been learned in Japan and under Japanese control in Korea. Many of these ideas of Japanese origin were designed to “show” that Korea was inferior to Japan, and thus justify Japan’s colonial rule over Korea. Wagner helped to break that mold.

And he had help in Korea. His closest colleague was Song Juneho of Jeonbuk National University who spent three sabbatical years over his career at Harvard working with Wagner. They created the Wagner-Song Index of those who passed the Munkwa Civil Service Exam, all 14,607 of them from the 500-year Joseon Kingdom, and in the index were those connected to the passers, creating a rolodex of 100,000 men who were the leaders of Korean society in traditional times.

On top of that all, Wagner was a meticulous, cheerful, good-humored mentor who respected and developed his students to the best of their abilities. Thank you, Professor Wagner. Your legacy lives on in Korea. And we all need to respect the tradition of jokbo in the way you have shown us.