South Korea and Japan’s Frictions Over History: A Linguistic Constructivist Reading

This article looks at the characteristics of “frictions over history” in ROK-Japan relations since the 1990s, with a focus on Korea’s responses. It addresses some hypotheses on the characteristics and trends shown in the political process of “blundering” through comparative analysis of sixty-one cases, and additionally presents an in-depth case study on Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s remarks of 2007 concerning the comfort women issue. This research shows that the responses to blunders and the political process were the products of interactions between the agent’s speech acts and are a type of language game that is linguistically inter-constituted. Moreover, the 2007 comfort women case study shows that conflicts and the process of negotiations regarding blunders are a type of constructive language game in which the agents construct rules of engagement; modify mutual perceptions, and transform actors themselves through a series of speech acts.