More on Half-Koreans

Being the father of two beautiful half-Korean children, I have a natural interest in the Korean views on purity and impurity of blood.

Jodi, over at Asia Pages, has an interesting anecdote in her post "Tainting the Bloodline," which I'll quote in part here:

As one of my co-workers currently is courting a Japanese woman with serious intentions for marriage, his doing so has sparked a lot of gossip in the office, particularly in regards to what his children will be like.

One woman has told me how she cannot understand his decision to marry a foreigner and how she is especially appalled that he is ruining the Korean bloodline .... [W]hen I questioned her on what she meant, she told me how his children would be half-Japanese and not pure Korean.

"But what does it mean to be pure Korean?" I asked. "For don't Koreans have a mixture of Chinese and Mongolian blood within them?"

Interestingly, the woman was speechless, but if she had attempted a rebuttal, Jody had the scientific evidence to rebut the rebuttal:

I might have engaged her in a talk about the mysterious Y chromosomal DNA variation and its possible role in the "tainting" of the Korean bloodline.

That's a pdf-file that Jody links to, so don't go there if you don't like those sorts of things. Also, the article is very technical. Go here to see the html-page summary (and note the quarterblood Japanese tainting of this otherwise pureblood Korean article):

"Y chromosomal DNA variation in east Asian populations and its potential for inferring the peopling of Korea"

Wook Kim, Dong Jik Shin, Shinji Harihara, and Yung Jin Kim

Based on the result of the dual patterns of the haplotype distribution, it is more likely that the population structure of Koreans may not have evolved from a single ancient population derived from Northeast Asians, but through dual infusions of Y chromosomes entering Korea from two different waves of East Asians.

The language here is tentative about the "infusions," but the genetic evidence strongly argues that Koreans are mixed.

Interestingly, a cultural memory of the halfblood (Hon Hyeol) origins of Koreans comes down to us in the guise of the Dangun myth that I referred to in my post of April 24:

There is, after all, that very first Korean, the "Hon Hyeol" Dangun Wanggeom (단군왕검), mixed offspring of a bear-woman (Ungnyeo) and a god-man (Hwanung).

According to the Wikipedia article on Dangun:

Scholars today regard the legend as reflecting the sun-worship and totemism common in the origin myths of Northeast Asia. The bear is often found in origin myths of Manchuria and Russian Far East. The legend therefore may hint at the relationships among various tribes that worshipped the sun, bear, and tiger.

Indeed, my first quasi-anthropological thought upon hearing this Dangun myth was that it preserved an old memory of the union of two tribes, an invading tribe that worshipped the sun and came from outside of the Korean peninsula and a sedentary tribe that worshipped the bear-totem and already inhabited the Korean peninsula.

Whether my wild speculation is right or wrong, the myth assumes that Koreans are mixed from their very origins, and the genetic evidence from the article that Jodi cited would tend to support the view that Koreans are an ethnically mixed people and not the 'purebloods' that they often claim to be.