THE EFFECT OF POLITICAL TENSIONS ON INTERCULTURAL RELATIONS BETWEEN SOUTH KOREA AND JAPAN

Abstract

South Korea and Japan are immediate neighbors and have been maintaining a relationship for approximately 1,500 years. To this day, they continue to engage in interactions ranging from cultural, social, economic and political spheres. However, despite these close ties, the relations have become worse and people have been riled up by the occasional political conflict that occurs from time to time between the governments. Its root cause is due to Korea's bitterness of the Japanese colonization and ongoing territorial disputes. However, this thesis found that in spite of the frequent political rifts the intercultural and economic exchanges between the people has been increasing steadily. This thesis intends to examine the effect of the political tensions on the intercultural relations indicators of the two countries during the time period of 1998-2012 and why the number of youth exchange and trade volumes increased despite the long standing political tension. According to this thesis findings, whenever the number of political tension conflicts arose the intercultural exchange indicators decrease. And when the intercultural disharmony turns up the economic indicators go down and vice versa. This happened because people took massive and drastic action such as street protests and spreading aggressive comments through conservative mass media. Governments are obliged to represent their people's aspirations and therefore impose economic restrictions towards each other by trade barrier, restriction and other damaging mechanisms. This thesis argues both South Korea and Japan are in need of nurturing the understanding between the two countries peoples in order to maintain their strategic economic partnership as both countries are close trade partners, data analyses show both countries are important in terms of export market towards each other. The study of existing research works also gave possible explanations to the two countries 'unusual' relationship by linking their geo-political measures and the involvement of the United States between them. In terms of international relations theoretical framework Korea-Japan relations lies between the realism and liberalism theory. Realism believes every state has its own agendas therefore conflict is inevitable, whereas liberalism promotes economic dependency between states as a peace facilitator. Korea and Japan despite having a fierce conflict between them hold close ties that help to build a tight partnership. This thesis contends that Korea and Japan are faced with a dilemma between the growing needs of strengthening the cooperation and historical bitterness as well as strong nationalistic ideology.