A Comparison of the Modern Political Culture of Korea and Japan

With Focus on Democratic Political Process

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to compare the political culture of Korea and Japan with particular reference to how the cultural characteristics affect the stability of the two political systems. The two countries are similar in many respects, including the geographical location, the historical background, the language structure, and even the DNA structure. Culturally, they have the common cultural heritage of Confucianism and Buddhism. More importantly and more relevantly, the two countries share the same political experiences as both of them were under the U.S. military government right after the World War Two, and were forced to embrace the Western democratic political system. This external imposition of the Western liberal democracy upon the two countries, of course, has resulted in many difficulties for the two political systems. Both of them are still in the process of internalizing the liberal democratic values and reconciling them with their traditional values. This struggle is manifested by the fact that the two countries have been almost constantly engaged in the discussion of political reforms and Constitutional amendments. Yet there are some important differences in the way Korea and Japan have tackled this problem of internalizing the Western democracy. Korea has gone through a series of political upheaval, thus creating political instability frequently, while Japan has been able to maintain political stability in relative terms. The focus of this paper is to explain this cross-national difference in terms of the characteristics of the two countries' political culture. More specifically, the paper examines several cultural variables that are related to the democratic political process, such as satisfaction with political system, fairness of electoral process, responsiveness of political parties and legislators, necessity for political parties, support for political parties, and party identification. In general, Japanese voters score higher than Korean voters in these cultural traits. It can be inferred from this finding that these cultural differences are responsible, at least partially, for the relative stability of the Japanese political system visavis the Korean political system.