8th East Asia Culture Research Meeting of 2010

Speaker: PARK Yu-ha (Professor, Sejong University Collage of Liberal Arts)

Date: 12th November 2010, 18:30-20:00

Venue: Hosei University Ichigaya Campus, ’58 Building 2F Research Center for International Japanese Studies Seminar Room

Chair: WANG Min (Professor, Hosei University Research Center for International Japanese Studies)

Summary of Meeting

We welcomed Prof. Dr. Park Yu-ha, Sejong University College of Liberal Arts, and conducted the meeting on the theme of “Some problems to accommodate the history issue between Japan and Korea”.

In this report, Prof. Park used two current opinion researches conducted by the Asahi Shimbun and the Donga Daily (June 2010) and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun and the JoongAng Ilbo (August 2010) and pointed that Korean and Japanese have some ill feelings against each other on history issue and apology issue.

After that Prof. Park discussed an actual condition of Korean toward Japan and Japanese. She illustrated a case of publication of So Far from the Bamboo Grove (January 2007), a case of erection of cenotaph for Korean kamikaze pilot (May 2008), and a case of stoning to Japanese ambassador to Korea. By these three cases what was cleared were as follows: firstly Conservative and Liberal of Korea are normally at feud but they share a common interest with “anti-Japan”, and secondly Korean Conservative is naturally affinitive to Japanese Conservative in regard to anticommunistic and pro-American attitude, but a main actor of anti-Japan movement is local veteran’s association, which is conservative.

Added to this, Prof. Park examined the background and structure of recognition toward Japan, then she presented a point of view that Korean’s difference of attitude toward Japan based on a norm “whether one had all the fun or not in the era of Japan’s colonial rule” and by this norm an “internal cold war” is boiled up.

As a conclusion, Prof. Park pointed out that if we consider based on the unilateralism-like view, there must be only a victim and a victimizer, but, in fact, everyone is both a victim and a victimizer. This indication is so suggestive for us when we deal with a history issue not only between Japan and Korea but with multilaterally.

Reported by SUZUMURA Yusuke (Visiting Academic Researcher, Research Center for International Japanese Studies, Hosei University)