세키노 타다시의 한국 고적 조사에 대한 시각 검토 - 실증적 조사에 내포된 이데올로기적 기반

Abstract

In association with the issue for establishing the Japanese Empire, the scientific discourse for objectifying the Japanese Annexation of Korea in the Pre-WWII era was one of the most important issues to the Japanese intellectuals. Japanese thinkers, anthropologists and historians discussed various scientific and historical reasons to the colonial origin of the Koreans. Sekino Tadashi was not a thinker who joined in the ideological debates for creating the colonial view of history in Korea. As a scientific person who was an ideal type of the intellectual that the modern Japan required, his research method was based on direct observations and positive proof of the objects. However, his basic perspective to the Korean race was parallel with the biased view point that the Japanese intellectuals in the Meiji Japan period shared. In this context, Sekino approached cultural heritage in Korea with hypotheses for proving elements of Chinese culture in Korean cultural relics and the ancient Japanese domination in the southern Korean peninsula that the colonial government wanted to prove, and further what the people in the Japanese Empire wanted to believe.BRSekino’s inductive methodology contributed to more powerful foundations than other thinkers for objectifying the Japanese colonial domination in Korea, as he succeeded in eliminating debates on his approach to Korean cultural relics. By adopting the basic guideline of Korean archaeology and art history established by Sekio, which masks the biased view on the colonial past with the name of the scientific objectivism, Japanese scholars in colony Korea could insist that they conducted their research with objective ways. In this context, for the Imperial Japan, Sekino was a more suitable man for rationalizing its dominance to Korea than ideologists who brought about controversial issues.