Kaya: a Vanished State of Korea

The Korean peninsula is not always a very hospitable place. It is largely mountainous and this altitude intensifies the impact of each of the four seasons, with humid summers and cold winters. Little of the ground is suitable for agriculture and there is not much grassland for horses. Nevertheless, the desire of humanity to spread out around the world to find new and possibly better opportunities is a powerful one and so we find communities being established in almost every corner of the world.

So it was with the Korean peninsula too, as Manchurian people migrated along its length searching for a suitable place to settle. One group - possibly more than one group, it is not easy to tell at this distance in time - travelled down to the south of the Korea and found the fertile ground around the mouth of what is now called the River Nakdong. This area provided both agricultural produce, fish and also iron ore. The people who created the small states known as Kaya (or sometimes Gaya) in this area were able to mine and smelt the iron and then export it in large quantities to the Paekche (or Baekje) culture further north in Korea and also the Wa kingdom of the Yamato culture that was then prevalent in Japan.

Kaya was initially constituted of five or six small states which subsequently joined together in a confederacy sometime in the 2nd or 3rd century CE. It united around what is now known as Kimhae or Gimhae in modern South Korea. As a confederacy, it was better able to hold out against its more numerous and powerful neighbours but, even so, the Silla kingdom eventually was able to swallow up all of its territory. The Kaya culture was largely subsumed into the Silla one and it is all but forgotten today, especially outside of the region in which its people lived.

One issue which is quite well known with respect to the Kayan people has been the continuing controversy between Korean and Japanese people in terms of their shared history. Owing to centuries of rivalry between the two states and, most importantly, the fiercely oppressive period of colonisation inflicted on the Koreans by the Japanese, what happened in the past remains a battlefield for contention between the two. This is a battle that is fought by archaeologists, historians and the writers of school history textbooks. While Koreans maintain that Kaya was an independent state conducting relations with others on a basis of equality, some Japanese have argued that Kaya was subservient to Wa and existed in a form of vassalage. This kind of argument is capable of stirring angry exchanges and to escalate into violence rapidly. It is only one of many such controversies that exist across East Asia.

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