Differing Definitions of Nationalism in the Global Age

The content of the article read in class about Japanese comic books portraying Chinese and Korean populations negatively ties in a lot with chapter five of Im Kwon-Taek. In the age of globalization, the Japanese response has recently been to try to prove their own culture’s worth by painting other nations as inferior to them. In this way, Japan attempts to define its own sense of nationalism in a fast-paced and competitive industrialized world by claiming that they, as Asians, are far more like Western nations; therefore, they are superior to other Asian nations, and worthier of the fruits and successes of Western living. The negative effects of this course of action are that it is ironically degrading to the entire Asian continent, the Japanese included. In essence, rather than trying to define themselves as differentiated from (though perhaps not superior to) other Asian countries, the Japanese are insisting that they are really a part of the West, thus denying their heritage to a certain extent. In this way, they consider the attainment of Western ideals to be their goal, thus implying the West’s superiority.
The Korean nationalism described in “Sopyonje: Its Cultural and Historical Meaning” runs in a direction that is both diametrically opposite yet strangely similar in its ideology. The movie Sopyonje inspired “nostalgia for ‘our culture’” (p. 140) in Koreans at a time, the 1990’s, when the Korean movie and television industry had experienced a decline (p. 137). However, with this nostalgia comes the temptation to define one’s culture in ethnocentric terms of what the West does not have (p. 142-143). In this way, one still allows culture to be controlled by the Other. If all Korea can aspire to be is what the West lacks, then there can hardly be any room for original development and Korean identity becomes merely a silhouette of opposition to the West. Furthermore, what about all of the positive technological advances being imported from the West? Are they to be shunned by the Korean population? Doing so perhaps implies that technology and modernization are distinctly Western in character and cannot be comprehended by Koreans, rather than that Westerners merely invented some tools first which can then be expanded upon by Koreans.
In essence, it seems that a culture must be developed in independence of but not isolation from those of other cultures. A country should not try to instate an identity based on the denigration of other countries, especially those that share commonalities with it. Doing so merely implies that the Western identity is the more favorable one and that only the “fittest” Asian culture is worthy of that identity. A country also must not define itself in opposition to the West as that also gives Western ideals hegemony, in that they dictate what is not allowed in Eastern cultures. Ultimately, a culture should strive to see itself not in terms of what is Eastern or Western about it, but rather try to harmonize between modernization and tradition, retaining what it prizes while shifting to accommodate progressive changes that will benefit its people economically and technologically.