Long Indifferent, Japanese Are Drawn to South Korea By NORIMITSU ONISHI SEOUL, South Korea ? For Yuko Fueki, a 25-year-old actress, and many other Japanese of her generation, the country next door drew a blank. But four years ago, she stumbled upon a South Korean movie that whetted her interest. It led her to study Korean and eventually to move here, where she became South Korea's first Japanese television star.
"Until I saw that movie, I had no interest at all in Korea," said Ms. Fueki, who has also taken a Korean stage name, Yu Min. "I knew it was a nearby country, next to China. Like many people around me, I really didn't know anything at all. But things have really improved now. There's a lot more interest in Korea as a country." In recent years, especially since Japan and South Korea were co-hosts of the World Cup in 2002, the exchange in popular culture has risen sharply. Although the legacies of Japan's brutal colonial rule here remain close to the surface, the cultural interchange signifies a profound change in the relations between the countries since Japanese troops withdrew at the end of World War II.
Last month, South Korea lifted almost all restrictions on the import of Japanese culture after tentatively opening its market in 1998. For the first time, South Koreans can legally buy CD's of Japanese singers and rent Japanese movies at the local video store. Japanese can now be heard on cable television, which until recently would have been greeted with the same kind of outraged reaction from some listeners as playing Wagner does in Israel. In Japan, many people who had never thought about the Korean peninsula are watching South Korean television dramas and studying the language. Kimchi ? the spicy pickled vegetable that is Korea's national dish ? would have been dismissed a generation ago, but it is now becoming a favorite in Japan. A new generation of entertainers like Ms. Fueki ? or BoA, a Korean singer who is now famous in Japan ? are effortlessly crossing borders between the countries, as well as to Taiwan, Singapore and China.
This opening of markets to Japan has occurred as South Korean confidence grows in its own "soft" power. In 1998, the same year South Korea began tentatively allowing in Japanese culture, the government put into effect its first five-year plan to build up its one culture industry. Lee Bo Kyoung, an official in the Ministry of Culture, said the government aided specific cultural areas by providing scholarships and equipment to many schools. The number of college departments dealing with careers in culture has risen from almost none to 300 today. Cultural exports have nearly doubled since 1998 ? especially movies, video games and television. The second five-year plan will focus on raising exports and building cross-cultural ties, including with Japan and China, Mr. Lee said.
Bans still remain on imports of Japanese animation and certain television programs, but they appear driven less by a need to protect culture than markets. Mr. Lee said the government agreed to restrict Japanese animation until 2006 at the request of South Korea's growing animation industry. Young South Koreans and Japanese are overwhelmingly the consumers of each other's culture. "When the young people today have political power and are running our societies," Mr. Lee said, "then we will feel the full impact of this cultural exchange." In Japan, South Korean television dramas have become so popular that organized tours bring Japanese to filming locations here. Chiyako Inoue, 43, a homemaker from Matsue, in western Japan, said she became so enthralled by one South Korean drama that she began studying Korean.
According to Japan's Ministry of Education, the number of Korean language programs in high schools was 163 in 2000, compared with 73 in 1994 and 7 in 1986. The number of private language schools that teach Korean has also mushroomed. The sudden attraction to Korean culture and language is striking given Japan's colonial history in Korea, which it ruled from 1910 to 1945. Just as Dakar's gaze goes largely unrequited by Paris, postwar Japan chose to forget about the Koreas, fixing its attention on America. In a cafe in a fashionable corner of Seoul, Ms. Fueki, who grew up in Tokyo, recalled that one of her friends even thought that Korea was a region in China. Until she came here and made it a point of reading books on Japanese colonial rule, Ms. Fueki herself said she had known very little about it.
"I hadn't studied it as extensively as Koreans do from the time they are schoolchildren," she said. "There are really only a few lines in our school textbooks that said, `These are things that happened, and Koreans don't have good feelings toward Japanese. ' That was the extent of it. "If there was like or dislike, if there was some feeling, that would have been good. But there is nothing scarier than indifference. And young Japanese were indifferent toward the Koreas." When she first appeared on television here, Ms. Fueki played a deaf-mute and ? on the advice of her managers who feared she might be rejected ? hid her nationality. After she revealed it, she said the reaction was evenly divided.
Since then, as the only Japanese acting regularly here, she has been put in the unusual ? and sometimes uncomfortable ? position of responding to political issues like how Japanese textbooks should portray the region's history and the ownership of a disputed island. Last year, she realized how a past that Japan would like to forget remained alive and raw here. A group of women who had been used as sex slaves by the Japanese Imperial Army invited her to visit their home. She spent the day with them, talking and cooking. But the next day a South Korean newspaper reported something she had not done. "They wrote that I had gone there representing Japan and offered a tearful apology," she said. "I was stunned."
She was also stunned by the reaction in Japan. "Then I received a lot of e-mail in protest to my Web page, phone calls and even letters, from Japanese who still don't acknowledge those facts. That's when I learned there are still many people like that. One university professor said, `Those things didn't happen. Why did you go and apologize?' " For young Koreans, consuming Japanese popular culture means separating it from Japan's history or policies ? the same way many people approach American culture. Kim So Hee, 21, a college student, was buying the latest CD of the Japanese band L'Arc-en-Ciel at the J-Pop section in the Kyobo Bookstore here. She had been listening to Japanese music for five years, downloading it from the Internet, and was glad she could now buy it legally.
Still, an incident that occurred during a visit to Tokyo in December gave her pause. On Dec. 23, the birthday of the Japanese emperor, she said she stumbled upon a parade with people waving Japan's flag ? a hated symbol of imperialism throughout much of Asia. "When I saw those flags, I wanted to cover them all" with a big South Korean flag, she said. "I wondered to myself whether it was really O.K. to like this culture. Can I really separate the culture from the history? But now I've calmed down and I can separate the two." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/22/international/asia/22SEOU.html Long Indifferent, Japanese Are Drawn to South Korea By NORIMITSU ONISHI
私に沢山のメールや、電話や、手紙で抗議してくる日本人が大勢居て、歴史の真実を認識してない日本人が 多くてとても驚いただってよ、早く朝鮮に帰化しろよ糞マンコは "Then I received a lot of e-mail in protest to my Web page, phone calls and even letters, from Japanese who still don't acknowledge those facts. That's when I learned there are still many people like that. One university professor said, `Those things didn't happen. Why did you go and apologize?' "