Recognizing and Accomplishing the Double Mission: A Short History of Studies on Japanese Politics in Korea

Abstract

This paper examines the characteristics of studies on Japanese politics in South Korea, one of the leading fields of Japanese studies in the county, by focusing on their achievements and limits. Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Korea-Japan Normalization Treaty, this paper addresses the problems and missions of Japanese political studies in Korea to enable further development of the field. Through reviewing the history of the field and analyzing the activities of the Korea Association for Contemporary Japanese Studies, this paper illustrates that establishing Koreas own research methodology and achieving global validity have been the double missions to be accomplished simultaneously. After Koreas liberation, the American perspective emerged as a new universal approach to Japanese studies, creating a new tension with Korean scholars pursuit of critical Japanese studies. Since the late 1960s, while beginning to consider Japan as a model, Korean scholars came to recognize a gap between the model and the reality. The research achievements that began in the 1980s and radically increased in the 1990s inherited and then overcame this legacy.