• The Journal of Korean Philosophical History
• /
• no.43
• /
• pp.107-139
• /
• 2014

Tasan Chong Yak-yong has criticized Zhu Xi's metaphysical viewpoints of human being. Therefore he revealed his viewpoint of human being and the theory of moral practice through his thoughts about the Lord of Heaven and human nature with spiritual inclination toward goodness. He has drawn the Lord of Heaven into Confucianism again. Heaven as the Lord endows human being with a nature that enjoys virtues and detests vices. It watches human being's good and evil. Here we can say Heaven is a outer efficient cause of moral behavior. According to Tasan, human being has its own 'self directed weight'自主之權 so that he can make a judgment and decision about what to do. Therefore we have to do manifest this moral inclination which is a inner efficient cause of moral behavior. That is to say, we must follow the order of daoxin道心 inside our mind. If we did go against it, our mind would be uncomfortable. Now through the method of so-called shu恕 we need to put filial piety孝 fraternal respect弟 compassion慈 into practice. These three moral practices represent the spirit of reciprocity in Confucianism. These lead us to make an achievement of ren仁, representative virtue in the theory of moral practice. Our moral practice means the fulfillment of humanity. This is the way to serve Heaven. Tasan insists that theses are the core thoughts of Confucius and Mencius.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
• /
• v.26 no.1
• /
• pp.175-209
• /
• 2020

This paper examines how the cinematic representation of the Japanese military "comfort women" stimulates 'imagination' in the realm of everyday life and in the memory of the masses, creating a common awareness and affect. The history of the Japanese military "comfort women" was hidden for a long time, and it was not until the 1990s that it entered the field of public recognition. Such a transition can be attributed to the external and internal chronopolitics that made possible the testimony of the victims and the discourse of the "comfort women" issue. It shows the peculiar status of the comfort women history as 'politics of time'. In the same vein, the cinematic representations of the Japanese military "comfort women" can be found in similar chronopolitics. The 'comfort women' films have shown the dual time frame of the continuity and discontinuity of the 'silence'. In Korean film history, the chronotope of the reproduction of "comfort women" can be divided into four phases: 1) the fictional representations of "comfort women" before the 1990s 2) documentaries in the late 1990s as the work of testimony and history writing, 3) melodramatic transformation in the feature films in the 2000s, and 4) the diffusion of media and categories. The purpose of this article is to focus on the first phase and the third phase in which the issue of 'comfort women' is represented in the category of popular fiction films. While the "comfort women" representations before 1990 were strictly adhering to the framework of commercial movies and pursued the sexual exploitation of "comfort women" history, the recent films since the 2000s are experimenting with various attempts in the style of popular imagination. Especially, the emergence of 'comfort women' feature films in the 2000s, such as Spirit's Homecoming, I Can Speak, and Herstory, raise various questions as to whether we are "properly" aware of issues and how to remember and present the "cultural memory" of comfort women. Also, focusing on the cinematic representation strategies of the 2000s "comfort women", this article discusses the popular politics of melodrama, the representation of victims and violence, and the feature of 'comfort women' as meta-memory. As a melodramatic imagination and meta-memory for the historical trauma, the "comfort women" drama shows the historical, political, and aesthetic gateways to which the "comfort women" problem must pass. As we have seen in recent fiction films, the issue of "comfort women" goes beyond transnational relations between Korea and Japan; it demands a postcolonial task to dismantle the old colonial structure and explores a transnational project in which women's movements and human rights movements are linked internationally.