Explaining Korean Selective Outrage

One of the recurring questions that watchers of South Korea must continuously ask themselves is why it is that the country's people and government are capable of such intense - even hysterical - fits of anger and recrimination over even the most minor of (often entirely imaginary) offenses committed by ideologically sympathetic countries like Japan and the United States, and yet manage to restrain themselves to a much greater degree when the likes of China and North Korea engage in much more ominous actions.

Some have tried to explain this disparity in terms of Korea's heavily heirarchical culture, but I cannot put much faith in such explanations myself: for one thing, Japanese culture is also very heirarchical, with the same manifold variations on status embedded in the national language, and similar expectations of deference to elders simply by virtue of their greater age, so if culture were really the answer, one should expect the Japanese public to be as quick to throw tantrums over minor insults from "lesser" cultures according to the Sinocentric vision of the world. A much more plausible explanation is the "Bully Theory", i.e. that South Korea's political atmosphere encourages these hyperbolic expressions of rage against Japan and the United States but never against China or Russia precisely because the first two countries can be counted upon not to hit back, just like a bully who only ever picks on the kids he's sure will never give him a punch in the nuts. Furthermore, I believe that unlike the actions of Kim Jong Il, the South Korean penchant for such tantrums is not at bottom a purely rational matter of extracting maximum gains in international affairs by engaging in a game of bluff - as even mild repercussions such as the subsiding of the "Korean boom" in Japan are enough to make such behavior a losing proposition - but primarily a matter of a people steeped in ultranationalism, and yet insecure of its place in the world, attempting to quiet its self-doubts by deflecting blame for any and all failings on safe targets abroad. In short, these repetitive and childish chauvinistic displays are mostly just about South Koreans using perceived harmless foreign scapegoats to feel good about themselves.

I say all of the above in order to put my interest in a research paper I've just discovered into some context: an Adelaide University economist by the name Elias K. Khalil investigates the self-same behavior I describe, and using standard economic reasoning he comes to much the same conclusion - that Korea's clashes with Japan and the USA are not reducible to rational strategic calculation, but must be understood as displays of nationalism as a consumption good in its own right. For instance, all but the most delusional of Korean leaders must be aware that there is not a prayer of Korea retaining control of Takeshima if an all-out military conflict with an unrestrained Japan were ever to occur, and I suspect most ordinary South Koreans realize as much at some level, but South Korean politicians of all factions have no trouble making provocations in the name of defending against Japanese "imperialism" because they are so certain no such creature exists. Bashing Japan over Dokdo is a surefire vote-winner amongst the sizable portion of the South Korean public addicted to the cheap euphoria of nationalistic chest-beating, and if it costs so little, why not indulge it? Ranting and raving over sex-crazed American soldiers defiling pure Korean maidens can do wonders for the insecurities of "patriots" [sic] who cannot hide from the reality that these same degenerate foreigners are the guarantee of their "superior" [sic] nation's freedom: that is why massive protests over "murderous GIs" vanish into thin air as soon as the American government starts indicating it'll take its troops and go home.

I think in the long run there is only one cure for this dangerous tendency in modern South Korea, and that is to alter the calculations behind these acts of emotional self-indulgence to force a more mature, calculating attitude in keeping with the norms of an advanced capitalist state: not only should American troops continue to be removed from the Korean peninsula, but the reformation of Japanese defenses to enable greater scope for independent action must be fully supported. When Japan is perceived as being willing to act decisively against Korean provocations, and when the realization dawns the the United States just might not be there to hold the Japanese back, then and only then will we see the South Korean government exercising the same restraining influence on domestic chauvinism as it does with the Chinese government.

Comments

[Won Joon Choe]

I agree with you for most part, Abiola. In fact, on the very entry in Joshua's Blog that you linked (where he offers a culturalist explanation), I offer a similar "realist" explanation. The difference is that you frame the argument more elegantly and eloquently.

Given that I generally eschew monocausal explanations, however, I do think cultural and historical explanations cannot be dismissed altogether. In this connection, I do think that South Korea is more resigned when it comes to a Chinese hegemony as opposed to a Japanese or American one for cultural and historical reasons. At least since the Mongol invasions, Korea has been a full-fledged vassal state of a power that occupied China. So Koreans have been accustomed to deferring to China. In contrast, Koreans see Japan as a receptacle of Korean culture and therefore inferior. The Americans too are deemed inferior in the context of the Korean racial and cultural cosmos (though there is a countervailing Western-philia and "Oriental" inferiority complex at play as well).

In contrast, to address your counter-example, Japan exhibits the opposite behavior of Korea vis-a-vis China and Japan (less conciliatory toward China and more conciliatory toward the U.S.), because Japan was never really a subject of China, protected by its oceanic moat.

[Abiola Lapite]

It is true enough that Japan never had the same relationship with China as Korea did, but that still isn't to say that the Japanese didn't also used to have a similar Sinocentric worldview, which they did. Up until the period when "Dutch learning" began to seep into Japan during the isolationist shogunate, China was seen as the source of all higher civilization, and even then it took the Meiji restoration - and in particular, the Western humiliations of the Qing - for Chinese prestige to be truly erased in Japanese eyes, but erased it was: the Japanese still revere traditional Chinese civilization, but the attitude towards current China seems to be to see it as a degenerated/corrupted form of a once-great nation.

The point I'm getting at is that the modern Japanese attitude towards China vs. the West is a relatively new one, showing that nations can change in the face of changing facts, and if South Koreans are still so comfortable towards the idea of "Big Brother China" (though grumblings about Mt. Baekdu suggest to me that they aren't really), one must look for a deeper cause than mere historical inertia: it isn't as if traditional Korean respect for all things Chinese prevents today's South Koreans from looking down on the Chinese they meet as impoverished bumpkins.

[Andrew]

" the Japanese still revere traditional Chinese civilization, but the attitude towards current China seems to be to see it as a degenerated/corrupted form of a once-great nation."

I'm sure this must have been helped by the fact that they defeated China outright in one war (1894-5) and conquered its most important bits in another war (WWII). If I recall correctly, Japanese propaganda imagery during the 1894-5 war heavily featured images of Westernized, virile Japanese soldiers wearing modern uniforms striking down weak, degenerate, tradition-bound Chinese soldiers still wearing the queue.

[gene berman]

Down through the ages, they've hewed to two Shakespearean ideas: that "the play's the thing" and "all the world's a stage and each of us but an over-actor."

My summation is that they're just like all the rest of us..only more so.

[Abiola Lapite]

Andrew,

The wars may have had something to do with it, but the Japanese attitude towards China was already changing well before them, as is clear from reading Fukuzawa Yukichi's 1885 essay "An Argument for leaving Asia"「脱亜論」.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datsu-A_Ron

(I'll have to get around to translating the original essay one day, as I can't find an English translation anywhere.)

In any case, it's clear to me from both first-hand evidence and reading what third parties have to say that Koreans have needed no victories against China to come around to much the same attitude.

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/nation/200505/kt2005050317515611990.htm

[Won Joon Choe]

Thread necromancy per the events in Korea--which is perhaps the worst case of the anti-American mass hysteria I've seen in Korea since at least 2002.