Japan-(South) Korea Relations in Historical Context

Abstract

The history of Japan-(South) Korea relations from the early 1870s into the late 1980s is also a history in which the common “lens” shared within the Japanese policy circle was reified into a social context.¹ Japan’s condescending image of Korean otherness is a temporal construct, but the consistency in the way it is reproduced today suggests that Japanese elites continue to represent Korea (and the Koreans) as less than an equal, if not subordinate, to Japan (and the Japanese). Japan’s rapid modernization in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration and its rise to great power status enhanced Tokyo’s confidence on the international stage, enhancing negative images of Asian/Korean otherness within Japanese identity narratives. This confidence fused into a Japanese sense of “exceptionalism,” with its ultimate perversion presenting itself in the form of the Greater Far East Asian Coprosperity Sphere.² Even the postwar narratives of heiwa- and shonin kokka conclude that Japan should maintain its “leadership” role as a harbinger of peaceful coexistence. During the cold war, Japan was preoccupied with maintaining its alliance with the United States effectively altercasting South Korea as a “junior partner.” Hence, it is useful to shift our focus on to the reproduction and reification of contemporary sensitivities in bilateral relations. In short, we complete the agent-structure dualism.