한일수교와 일본표상 -1960년대 전반기의 한국영화와 영화검열-

Abstract

This paper seeks to closely examine the characteristics and contexts of the Park Jung-Hee regime’s cultural politics and Korean Cinema in the first half of the 1960s by focusing on the truth behind censorship and cinematic phenomenon during a specific era before and after the establishment of amity between Korea and Japan. Korea-Japan amity was meant not only to develop Korea-Japan relations but an issue of legitimizing the Park Jung-Hee regime and as a critical plan intimately correlated to establishing the nation’s future. The Park Jung-Hee regime actively pursued a Korea-Japan summit for the purpose of economic development and concluded a Korea-Japan framework agreement in 1965, establishing amity and normalizing diplomatic relations. However, the majority of citizens found the government’s consistent humiliating and modest posture throughout the process of establishing this agreement problematic and began to express intense infuriation. The opposition struggle of the Korea-Japan agreement culminated with a student protest on June 3, 1964 and went on to expand further than mere anti-Japanese sentiment to rage at the Park Jung-Hee administration’s betrayal of nationalism and democracy, an administration who had previously committed publicly to uphold ‘national democracy’. Meanwhile, there was the rise of Japanese culture in Korean society which began in the early 1960s. In the 1950s, the Rhee Seung-man administration cried out for a ‘clean sweep of Japanese ways’ and suspended all exchanges between Korea and Japan. However, subsequent to the April revolution and the seizure of power by the Democratic Party, humanitarian exchange along with cultural exchanges between Korean and Japan were generously permitted. As a result of print materials, music, and movies, the domain of popular culture and the so-called ‘Japanese rage’ began to stir. Looking ahead at the point of signing the Korea-Japan agreement, the discussion enters a more serious level than that of Japanese films, Korean films and their exchanges. The movie industry began to accelerate the production and distribution of Japanese cultural goods. The Korean movie industry conveyed three different postures regarding Japan around the same time. 1) Adhering to the equation of ‘Japanese ways = box office hit’, various methods were utilized to attract Japan unto the screen 2) Adapting to the opposing atmosphere of the Korea-Japan agreement and appealing to the anti-Japanese sentiment of citizens by advocating nationalism. 3) Providing imaginary reconciliation via the narrative and spectacle of attaches between Korean and Japanese(romance, family relationship) in which beautiful and good Japanese woman sacrifice herself for Korean lover or persons. Although these three tendencies seem to be contrary to each other, these cinema was addressing the dual identity of Korean people as colonial subject. They reflect public need to solve the problem imaginarily by socially symbolic act such as cinema and cultural exchange. These cultural efforts were made vigorously to seek new relationship with Japan but reached a deadlock by the Park Jung-Hee regime’s cultural politics and cinema censorship. In the first half of 1960s, cinema censorship and policies of cinemas in regard to Korea-Japan relations were oppressive but more or less unprincipled,temporary or easily fluctuating. Ultimately, one government’s cultural policies acted as the leading cause to the promotion of malformations of Korea-Japan relations. Fixation on anti-communism became linked to the fear of cultural exchanges between Korea and Japan, the inconsistencies of the censorship policy extinguished the trust cultural artists had in the government and in tandem,disheartened the volition of Korea-Japan cultural exchanges. Furthermore, the anti-Japanese sentiment maintained by citizens was utilized as a foreign alibi to prop up the Park Jung-Hee regime’s inability to hold a liberal posture towards the Korea-Japan cultural exchanges. Such cultural policies of the Park Jung-Hee regime ultimately became the cause of discord between economic, political, and cultural levels of the Korea-Japan relations during the Cold War period, which more or less languished in a state of disproportionate deformity.