Muss Konfuzius für Korea sterben? Innergesellschaftliche Kulturkonflikte in Korea

Abstract

Korea is the country with the strongest cultural tradition of Confucianism in East Asia. This does not, however, mean that Confucian culture is static and changeless. This can clearly be discerned from the discourses on Korean culture which first began toward the end of the 19th century. Korea was then confronted with a rapidly modernizing and increasingly imperialist Japan. The discourse on culture concentrated on the question of how to strike a balance between Korean traditional culture and Western and Japanese influence. The object and content of these discourses changed over time, but their basic form and structure remained unchanged. There are usually people who want to preserve tradition, while there are others who want to change it, demanding modernization and renewal. In between are those who prefer a middle way. The paper provides a comparative analysis of the battle lines of the cultural discourses in Korea toward the end of the 19th and the end of the 20th century.