The Gendered Construction of the Japanese Language-Learning Boom in Postcolonial Korea

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the print news media’s gendered representation of Japanese language-learners in postcolonial Korea. It focuses on why young women, notably yŏdaesaeng (female college students) and kisaeng (sex workers in the tourism or entertainment industry), were identified as the main learners of Japanese. I argue that male media elites could not respond to the growing demand for learning the Japanese language in terms of the anti-Japanese nationalistic framework, which equated Korean nationalism to anti-Japanese sentiment. Instead, they attributed postcolonial Korea’s failure to create and sustain a monolingual state to female subjects’ sentimental, sexually promiscuous desire to learn Japanese. Throughout the article, I argue that public commentaries by male intellectuals on Korean women’s Japanese language-learning, which were widely circulated in the media, reinscribed language ideologies of women and bilingualism. This perpetuated patriarchal gender relations, as male nationalists sought to manage tensions arising from Japan’s continued economic and cultural influence, despite the ‘official’ normalisation of relations between Korea and the former colonial power.