ฅThe Japanese defense policy for Korean Peninsula and its environs
As you know that 2013 is the 60th Anniversary of the Korean War, Armistice on July 27, 1953, 50th Anniversary of the Korea-Canada Relationship, 60th anniversary of Korea-U.S. Alliance from October, 1953, And 48th Anniversary of the treaty on Basic Relations between the Republic of Korea and Japan from June 22, 1965.
Because the superpowers, U.S. and the China fought a torturous war over the Korean Peninsula, the Korean people suffered over a million deaths.
The war was ceased due to attrition and North and South Korean signed a cease fire because of the influence of Chinese and American hegemony. Now Korea is divided into two parts the North and South that are in a “Cold War” stand- off at the DMZ. The tragedy of a people divided opposing ideologies if never ending.
Added to this from last autumn we have seen various changes of political leadership in North East Asia particularly in the environs of the Korean Peninsula that can affect peace building strategy.
Park Geun-hye, who is the newly elected 18th president of South Korea, has policies directed toward economic regrowth and defense. Whereas the New Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, has policies of nuclear armament and a hardline strategy the further destabilizes the region.
On the other hand, the new leader 96th Prime Minister of Japan, Abe Shinzo, who is struggling with the nuclear clean up as well as rebuilding from the great Tohoku Earthquake disaster, is formulating a strong right wing nationalist policy.
Furthermore he is restarting the export market with an economic strategy so called “Abenomics”.
As well by using the North Korean Nuclear test as a pretext for Japan defense forces to become a more militaristic organization.
At the same time, Japan is receiving world rebuke for its efforts to rewrite a sugarcoated history of Japanese colonial rule of Korea in the early 20th century.
In this article of the 14th WKF, I have considered Japanese defense policy taken from the Defense White Paper for Korean Peninsula and environs.
(World Korean Forum 2013 at UBC, Vancouver in Canada@ June 24,2013)
ฅThinking of the adolescent's problems of Korea
This study is designed to investigate the circumstances of youth in contemporary Korean society in the context of fierce competitiveness spreading as creolization proceeds and a consciousness of multiculturalism rises in the effort to adapt to rapidly changing international society.
We proceed from an analysis of existing research by Korean researchers using materials from the Bureau of Statistics and the Youth White Paper of the Department of Culture and Tourism(official publications) and by employing the methodology of educational sociology to examine the recent situation of youth and relevant research concerning youth.
In view of the present situation, with contemporary society undergoing dramatic change through the diversification of culture and the development of information and communications technology and the parallel phenomenon of the declining birthrate, the relevance of our research is not necessarily confined to Korean society. It contains some relevance for the situation of youth in Japanese society, where the seriousness of various problems social confusion, eclass collapsef at schools, youth drifting between broken homes are the subject of special TV news programs. Although the situation in Korea cannot be just equated with that in Japan because of the distinctive problems of the economic crisis that put a halt to the growth that had continued since the beginning of Koreafs modernization project and the worries over the collapse of a Confucian society before the pressures of contemporary civilization. So educational reforms cannot necessarily be treated as the same as in Japan.
However, at least in the present situation of the world under the influence of Euro-American style globalization, and especially when one considers the situation of Korean youth, especially high school youth, dealt with in this paper, it has some value as a reference for comparison in considering the situation of Japanese youth.