Media Discourses on the Other: Japanese History Textbook Controversies in Korea

One of roles of the mass media has been to record, interpret, and reinterpret important moments in national history, thus helping to form what has been called people’s “collective memories.” When history is viewed as a struggle to retain memory, the popular text that carries and recollects the past of a nation-state is not merely mass-delivering factual information about the past; it is reconstructing the concurrent meanings of the past and determining the direction of historical perception. The media of communication condition the form and content of memory and provide a place for historical discourses that compete with that memory. For people in Korea, which was under Japanese colonial rule between 1910 and 1945, their thirty-six year experience of the Japanese as colonialists has been an unsettled diplomatic issue. This painful experience has also consciously and unconsciously affected the Korean media’s construction of images of Japan. While Japan assumes that the Korea–Japan pact of 1965 has resolved the issue of legal indemnity, many Koreans believe that Japan’s reflection on the past has not been sincere enough to eradicate their internalized feeling of being victims of Japanese imperialism. The official apologies made by Japanese leaders have been viewed as formal statements that were not followed by any efforts to liquidate the colonial past. The periodi