Semantic structure of the comfort women issue in Japanese and South Korean newspapers

Abstract

In analyzing public opinion concerning the conflict between Japan and South Korea, the role of the media cannot be ignored. To understand Japanese public opinion about Japan–Korea relations, it is imperative to analyze reports by major news organizations and their framing of the specific issues between the two countries. This chapter undertakes this task by computationally analyzing a huge number of news articles published by Japanese and Korean newspapers. More specifically, we used Word2Vec, which expresses the meaning of words in the form of vectors and investigated the semantic structure of news articles on issues related to Takeshima/Dokdo and comfort women. The results indicated that framing differed significantly between the Japanese and the South Korean press, as well as between the liberal and the conservative media in each country. We discuss these differences and their implications in relation to the differing perceptions of the issues between Japan and Korea, which arguably make reconciliation between the two countries more challenging.