Literary View towards Unresolved Territorial Conflicts in Northeast Asia: Focusing on Inherent Community Memory between South Korea and Japan and Collective Perception of South Korean

Abstract

Purpose: This article is to explore to understand the realistic background of the territorial conflicts, it has limitations in the understanding and resolution of the territorial conflicts at a more fundamental level regarding the humanities approach. In this respect, it is important to analyze the unresolved territorial conflicts based on the literary view from a humanistic approach based on a political and cultural perspective rather than a confrontation based on the logic of power.
 Method: The humanities approach is especially literature, contains the conflict generation and resolution process at the human level. The literary works representing each country, especially novels and tales, uniquely demonstrate the origin and development of the conflicts through their own plots. Based on which, it will be possible to understand how the territorial disputes will develop by country at the cultural level.
 Results: This article has not suggested a fundamental resolution for the territorial conflicts of Northeast Asia, and especially the historical issues of Dokdo between South Korea and Japan. However, it is important to take a humanistic approach focusing on the literary works as ideological, economic, cultural, and nationalist conflicts. This is because the memory of intersecting harms and damages as ideological, economic, cultural, and nationalistic confrontations are repeated with a focus on the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria are the factors that continue the conflict.
 Conclusion: As the historical contexts are different, the cultural and psychological tendencies are also unique, and the territorial disputes develop through the combination of such factors. In order to analyze the collective psychology and conflict of the South Koreans who experienced the loss of sovereignty and division due to Japan’s forced annexation, and the territorial and historical issues surrounding the Island of Dokdo, which has been an obstacle to the normalization of the South Korea-Japan relations to this day, the culture of the time literature works dealing with modern and contemporary history that reflect the culture and language have been considered.