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Over the past few decades, cooperation between Korea and Japan has increased and deepened, but frictions continue to persist. Which direction is the relationship between Korea and Japan heading? This is the question that this article attempts to address. From an analytical standpoint, this article applies contemporary international relations theories - realism, liberalism, and constructivism - to the pattern of cooperation and conflict in Korea-Japan relations. After reviewing both optimistic and pessimistic positions drawn from diverse perspectives, the author makes a synthesis, where he suggests the case for cautious optimism. What we find in reality is long-term progress in an upward movement, interrupted by recurring frictions in the short term. Empirical evidence supports the case that Korea-Japan relations are making steady progress towards deeper, heightened, and multi-layered cooperation. However, such issues as historical controversy and territorial disputes are the hurdles that both nations need to overcome. Whether Korea and Japan can maximize the effects of optimism, while they effectively minimize the impacts of pessimism will determine the nature of the ties between the two countries. Cooperation between the two countries is not necessarily guaranteed, but we find irreversible trends of improved cooperation over time. However, lingering suspicions, submerged nationalist sentiments, and sporadic surges of extremism remain. They should be carefully managed by the leaders of the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes how railway infrastructures created a new social and economic geography, spreading tensions along and across the colonizer-colonized system in Korea under the rule of the Japanese. The author elaborates that the colonial economy transformation implied the growth of solidarity and stratification in the space between settlers and Koreans. He argues describing the groups shifting patterns of alliance and conflict rather than treating state and settlers as a unitary category, is critical for realizing the transformation of colonial political economy. Moreover, he resolves that further studies are needed to understand the extent to which the Japanese rulers interchanged between formal and informal governance.

AbstractThis article analyzes the decision of the WTO's Appellate Body in the dispute between Japan and Korea over Japan's imposition of countervailing duties on DRAMs imported from Korea. The legal analysis comments on the analysis of evidence, the lack of remand authority in the WTO system, and the meaning of a ?direct transfer of funds?. The economic analysis discusses several issues related to determining the magnitude of the benefit to a firm of a financial bailout and the appropriate duration of a countervailing duty to offset the injury caused by a non-recurrent subsidy. We offer legal and economic criticisms of the Appellate Body's conclusion regarding the relationship between subsidies and injury to the domestic import-competing industry. We conclude that the Appellate Body's decision weakens the requirement of a causal link between subsidies and injury and, consequently, may open the door to protectionist abuse of the Subsidies and Countervailing Measures Agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dokdo issue has constituted a popular area of academic enquiry in both Korea and Japan, but few studies have extended their research parameters beyond the question of who is the rightful owner of this island. Whatever the legal merits of competing claims to Dokdo, the Dokdo issue has expanded to represent an important political focus in the domestic affairs of both states, and it remains an omnipresent irritant in Korea-Japan relations. A full understanding of this complex issue cannot be gained simply through legal and historical argument. With the aim of overcoming these existing inadequacies in the academic coverage of Dokdo, this article attempts to identify the dynamics in which extralegal and extrahistorical factors have interacted and complicated this contentious issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the roles of the Japanese colonial exposition in Korea in registering changes in the political culture of Japanese colonialism. Ways by which the 1929 Korean Exposition sought to restructure the imagery of Korea, an effort that was concomitant to the expansion of Japanese imperial power in Asia; Ways by which the exposition has provided Japan with a cultural background on which to reconfigure its identity in relation to Asia as well as to the West; Influence of Japan's experience in the West on the ways by which the country has structured the politics of expositions in its own colonies.

This paper seeks to balance the regional and thematic focus of cholera historiography by examining maritime quarantine in Busan, as it was devised and implemented by Japanese officials and doctors during the pre-colonial period. It also places the relationship between Korea and Japan in the context of relations with China, Russia and Britain. This paper shows that quarantine measures in Busan and other Korean ports reflected the rise of Japanese imperial power and the increasing desire on the part of the Japanese to establish an effective borderline for their regional empire. From 1879 Japan began to impose maritime quarantine in Busan, where Japanese influence was very strong even before the colonial period, though at that time Japan was unable to perform quarantine in its own ports independently due to the objections of Western powers, particularly Britain. Victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars established Japan as a regional power on equal terms with the West, and as the dominant power in Korea and Eastern Asia. With the acquisition of the right to impose quarantine in its homeland, Japan strengthened and extended the range of quarantine from Japan to Korea, China and Russia. Now quarantine screened Japan from potentially harmful agents – pathogenic and political – and its functions diversified further as modernisation and imperial expansion gathered pace. The reliance which Japan placed upon quarantine in maintaining its empire explains why it was increasingly out of step with other powers regarding international sanitary precautions. The Japanese maritime quarantine in Busan during this period therefore shows many aspects of Japan’s ‘national empire’.