earticle

영어

"East Asia" is the term that has recently come to attract considerable attention both in the media and at various academic meetings. At an ideological level, it comprises various attempts to construct an alternative discourse about the East and the West by questioning the universal validity of the languages and the frames of knowledge originated from the West, and by recovering in the East (East Asia) what has been lost, muted, under-represented or distorted in the dominant representations. At a more practical level, the emergent discourses include an urge for the countries in East Asia to overcome separate national interests and to form a political and economic community as a concrete reality, and thereby to become one of the major leading forces of the world history in the 21st century. One of the common features of these attempts is the fact that they invariably presuppose substantial cultural similarities among the East Asian countries and endeavor to develop these commonalities as the bases for constructing East Asia as an integrated political and economic community. Through the detailed case studies of a number of Japan-resident Korean families, this paper will analyse the realities of this concept of "East Asia as a community". The lives of Japan-resident Koreans provide us a critical space in which we can examine the nature of cultural heterogeneity encompassed by the term East Asia as well as the extent to which one national community is able to incorporate different ethnic and cultural elements and yet to live together in peace without much discrimination, oppression or violation of human rights. While it is true that various forms of discrimination against the Korean residents in Japan persist even today, the discourses of internationalization and multiculturalism emerging in the mainstream society enable some of the younger generation Koreans in Japan to manipulate the politics of identity in their attempt to tight against the pressures of assimilation and to demand to be accepted as full members of the society as ethnically Korean residents.