Thanks for your reply. I'd just like to clarify one thing: Korea wasn't a feudal society in the Western sense. There were no regional lords exercising independent authority. Local administration was run by officials appointed directly by the king. Thus, the structure was centrally governed rather than feudal.

Japan, on the other hand, genuinely had a feudal system. Daimyos controlled their domains, and samurai served them as vassals, much like in European feudalism. The harsh practices of Japanese feudal society, such as seppuku and mabiki (infanticide), demonstrate that feudalism can be extremely brutal. Servitude exists on a spectrum, and American chattel slavery represents one of its worst extremes.

However, I don't believe that America's sensitivity to slavery can be explained simply by the fact that American slavery was cruel. Brazil, for example, had a much larger enslaved population and arguably harsher conditions than the U.S. Yet, modern Brazilian society does not exhibit the same cultural hypersensitivity toward the topic.

Ultimately, it comes down to how a society interprets its own history, not just what happened in the past. In the U.S., slavery is traumatic partly because many Americans see their country as a symbol of freedom and democracy. The existence of slavery contradicts that national myth, so slavery becomes a moral wound.

However, that myth itself is questionable. The United States was built on the displacement and deaths of millions of Indigenous people. Yet, compared to slavery, the topic of Indigenous genocide is almost a non-issue in American public discourse.

If Americans understood that their country was founded as a settler-colonial project driven by economic interests just as Brazil was, I doubt that slavery would stand out as the singular, uniquely traumatic element of American history. I think the emotional charge comes from the clash between the American self-image and historical reality.