비교의 공동체

Abstract

Contrary to the perception that the social contexts of post-war Korea and Japan were completely different, there are also aspects of the country that were reorganized in a similar way, because post-war Japan and Korea each concealed colonialism and its legacy through aspects of complicity between the nation-state and American imperialism. In addition, the nation-states of the United States, Korea, and Japan deny this similar collusion and abandon their responsibility to respond to colonial victims. In film culture, these phenomenon are explicitly visible in the genres of liberation melodrama, idea picture, and educational documentaries produced under the US military government control in both Japan and Korea. However, at the same time, there were film cultures in Korea and Japan that expressed alternative, or “colonial differences,” and by comparing them, this article focuses on comparative film studies that emphasizes differences based on the binary opposition of Japan = empire and Korea=colony. Inotherwords,thisshowsthat“colonialdifference”andmemoryare not based on the totality of the nation, but lie on various layers such as gender, diaspora, class, and transnational local. This would be a restoration of contemporaneity between Korea and Japan, where they have responsibility to respond to each other.