This paper aims to clarify the early contact between Japan and Vietnam—both Tonkin and Cochinchina—during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by investigating letters sent from Vietnam to Japan. In order to better understand the letters and their background, a paleographical approach is adopted. The oldest letter was sent from Tonkin by Nguyễn Cảnh Đoan, a high-ranking military officer residing in Nghệ An Province. The addressee, “King of Japan,” is a fictitious person, which indicates that Vietnamese officials did not understand contemporary Japan. Two entrepreneurs took advantage of this gap in knowledge to deceive Nguyễn Cảnh Đoan into sending the letter to a nonexistent King. The second and third letters were sent from Nguyễn Hoàng to Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Terasawa Masanari (a chief officer of Nagasaki), not to Tokugawa Ieyasu.

From investigations of the format and terminology of these three as well as other letters, it is clear that both the Trịnh King and Nguyễn lords aimed to relativize the authority of the Lê emperor and to promote their status by arrogating the title of “An Nam Quốc vương (King of Annam).” The Tokugawa Shogun also utilized the exchange of letters with a foreign monarch to enhance his authority.

抄録全体を表示

 The natural and war related calamities that caused the famines that forced peasants in North Vietnam to abandon their native villages from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries are analyzed through an examination of some Vietnamese chronicles and geographies.
  1) During Lê dynasty there were many droughts from spring to early summer that led to large-scale famine. This illustrates that fifth-month rice production was important in North Vietnamese agriculture, especially in the highland areas beyond the Red River Delta.
  2) One of the major causes of instability in rice production during Lê dynasty was the difficulty of maintaining stable yields in fifth-month rice cultivation which depended entirely on rain from the unpredictable Northeast Monsoon. Furthermore, the fifth-month rice cultivated in the highland areas was frequently damaged by locusts, especially in the fifteenth century.
 3) Tenth-month rice cultivated in the delta area suffered damage from inundation by the Red River. In the early years of Lê dynasty, the flooding effected mainly the Hà Nội district and later, with the agricultural development of the lower delta, the Hu'ng-Yên district too was subject to flooding. However, except in the Thanh-Hoá delta, only a few of these floods led to famine.
  4) The littoral zones of the Red River Delta were frequently damaged by high tides, mostly caused by typhoons. However, although such damage had increased with reclamation, it rarely caused large-scale famine.
  5) Civil war produced famine in certain strategic areas such as Hải-Du'o'ng, Nghẹ-An and Thanh-Hoá.
  It appears that famines occurred mostly in the highland areas, the upper part of the middle delta provinces, and the Thanh-Hoá and Nghẹ-An provinces during Lê dynasty.
  However, a geography written at the beginning of the nineteenth century, shows that most of the ghost villages have thôn or phu'ò'ng as part of their name, indicating that they were probably established in the later part of Lê dynasty. From this it appears necessary to research into the socio-economic factor linking natural or war related in calamities to the peasants, abandonment of their native villages. This will be considered in part (2).

抄録全体を表示

Who was Kim Yung-kun? What made him devote himself to so many things for which he worked in the 1930s and the 1940s? And how should we comprehend the significance of his efforts to blaze a trail in the field of Vietnamese research? These three inquiries are pursued serially in this study. Born in 1910 and graduating in 1927 from Gyeongseong Second Superior School, Kim Yung-kun came to Hanoi in 1931 as an assistant librarian, an experience that would give him a deeper understanding of Vietnamese history and culture with which he might be unfamiliar. Ten years later, he left Indochina and returned to Korea in order not to be involved in the Japanese military occupation of Vietnam.
 Back in his country, Kim Yung-kun tried to apply himself to Korean studies, strongly influenced by Mun Il-pyeong and some other Koreanologists. However, after joining in with other leftists, his desire arose for a more active social and political engagement in order to deal with acute n ational problems. Since that time Kim Yung-kun endeavored to integrate academic work with concrete social and political engagement, leading to a number of action research studies covering Korean history, tendency literature, criticism of arts and so forth. These academic interests and militant engagement have originated from Kim Yung-kun’s experiences in Vietnam. Having devoted a part of his life to Hanoi earned Kim Yung-kun the reputation of being an expert on Vietnamese studies and won him the enduring friendship of Lê Dư. In the early 1940s, the Korean Vietnamologist also published in a book his earlier works on Japanese relations with Vietnam, Champa and Cambodia, which he had been continuously writing since about 1936. Years later, he met with numerous difficulties when carrying out a study of Vietnam as he was deeply involved in various political movements. And so, his vision of Southeast Asia turned out to be incomplete.

抄録全体を表示