2000년대 이후 한국의 일본 체험과 ‘관(광)객’의 상상력: 영화 <러브레터> 사례를 중심으로

Abstract

This article attempts to revisit the process of reorganization of Korean society's public gaze toward Japan from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. During this period, not only political and historical interest in Japan, but also cultural and playful interest in Japan emerged and expanded unprecedentedly. In this article, paying attention to that point, we will look at the process by which Korea's ‘tourist gaze’ towards Japan at the time-the gaze that perceives Japan as an aesthetic product image or an object of symbolic consumption-is formed through collective experience and Let's take a look at the reproduction process. Existing discussions on tourists were critical in that they lack rational judgment and are biased toward temporary emotions or desires, and thus distort the uniqueness of foreign culture or the originality of a place and damage the original. Recently, however, their ambivalent performance, which crosses ‘national thinking’ and 'transnational desire', is being newly focused, and through this, the advent of a common sense that connects the multipolar world is expected. By paying attention to the potential inherent in the role of a ‘tourist’, this article examines what changes the ‘experience of being a Japanese tourist’ brought in Korea in the late 1990s and early 2000s. First, in Chapter 2, we will look at how the popular Japan theories that were popular in the early 1990s made the perception of Japan more complicated and multi-layered. In Chapter 3, we deal with “Love Letter,” which is the movie that gave the decisive impetus to the visual change, and is the biggest box-office Japanese movie in Korea. In particular, it will deal with the unusual collective “aesthetic experience” that emerged during the process of containing the film in South Korea. Chapter 4 analyzes the structural homology between the image of ‘aesthetic Japan’ that has been repeated and replicated in Korean culture since “Love Letter” and the image of ‘aesthetic Korea’ discovered by Japan during the first Korean wave period.Through this, this article intends to reconsider the meaning of Korea and Japan becoming ‘tourists’ to each other.