This research aims to explore how urban culture in modern East Asia has been mutually exchanged and inter-communicated and then evolved as described in the modern literatures of this region. What it puts on a main spotlight here is threefold as follow ...
This research aims to explore how urban culture in modern East Asia has been mutually exchanged and inter-communicated and then evolved as described in the modern literatures of this region. What it puts on a main spotlight here is threefold as follows:
First, it examines the ways in which new cultures have been ushered into and then received within the respective cities or urban spaces of the three East Asian nations – Korea, China and Japan. What this section focuses on in particular lies not only in the historical aspect of seeing the subsequent changing lifestyles of their native inhabitants that occurred in the process of cities being designed, planned and constructed under the colonial rules; but it also seeks to probe how they have seen, and come to receive, such changes in their then individual everydays. Moreover, as well as looking into the overall reception process of new cultures in this period that ensued by means of cultural media such as films and books, it also traces from the point of views of translation and clothing studies the historical process in which Western cultures have been received by these three East Asian nations through Western-educated people’s translations and writings, thereby analyzing how their respective modern urban cultures influenced, and came to be mirrored in, modern clothing. In this way does this part strive to identify a miscellany of the lifestyles and associated life-stories of people that are generated inside “new” urban cultural space, as well as in the reception process of modern urban culture; at the same time, it also examines how they were reflected in literatures and the authors perceived this urban cultural space as a new phenomenon in this period. In other words, what the research aims to heed here includes the opposition and resistance towards (infiltration of) new culture, the willingness to maintian the existing culture(s), the chaos and confusion caused in the process of both Western and traditional cultures being mixed up together, the shift in the existing perspective(s) towards reception of culture, and so forth.
Second, this research explores the overall mode of human migration and cultural exchange that took place within and between/among East Asia’s modern cities, that is, how modern urban culture, received and then translated by Korea, China and Japan respectively in their own ways, has been mutually exchanged and inter-communicated. Skyrocketting as a new imperial power following its crucial victories at the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and then the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), Japan began taking greater control in the East Asian region swayed by the former’s unbridled imperialistic ambitions, thereby playing a leading role in geographically wider-scale communication/dissemination of culture to this region with the help of its correspondingly heightened political and economic influences on it. With this context in mind, this part examines the comparative manners in which cultural exhanges have occurred between/among the cities of Korea, China and Japan at the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth. In particular, given that the rationale behind Japan’s rapid rise to power during this period cannot simply be explained in political and economic terms as, of the three nations, it was in Japan since the Meiji period that political as well as social movements for cultural enlightenment, the adoption of Western-style modern education, the establishment of nation-state have been (per)formed most actively and in the most advanced forms, it can thus be said that such a leading role Japan played in inter-nationalcultural exhange on a regional scale has greatly impacted on then East Asian societies. Such a tendency of urban culture to be exchanged and communicated in diverse ways emerged not only through that of clothing in consumer space, but also in the wake of experiencing foreign foods. In this sense, this part also sees the dynamics of cultural exchange in part from the perspective of literary exchange, by looking into its tendency beyond national boundaries.
Last, this research examines the way in which urban culture becomes transformed (and transforms itself) or into that of the transformed urban culture being communicated/disseminated, by looking at the process of urbanization that these three East Asian nations have undergone: in other words, the modern urbanization process accelerated further under Japan’s imperialistic attacks on and colonization of East Asia. It shows that the understanding of the ways in which the three nations’ respective urban cultures have become diffused as urbanization and colonization progressed should necessarily be premised upon that of the underlying historical background of their respective domestic situations that occurred after the 1920s, and of the then international situation surrounding the East Asian region as a whole. In 1920s Chosun a variety of political groups and organizations were formed amid its then societal atmosphere ever more heightened by virtue of the concomitant rise of nationalist and socialist movements, in order to embark on their resistance against imperialistic powers; and such resistance movoments impacted on the then international situation as well, thereby enabling international-scale attempt to take control of excessive imperialistic attacks and associated activities to appear. This underlying international situation surrounding the then East Asian region led to continuing to put pressure on Japan to dedicate itself to forming and then consolidating its own sphere of influence in this region.What distinctly stands out in this period tends to be less the multi-directional cultural exchange between/among the three nations being done on an equal footing, than the (relatively) linear, one-way diffusion of literature and culture as a whole of one to another. This research thus looks into the similarities and differences appeared from these three East Asian nations’ respective modern urban cultures, thereby making an interdisciplinary attempt to bridge scholarly-generic differences hitherto existent between their respective urban cultures and modern literatures.