A Study on Long-staying Korean Viewpoint about Japan
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, An Yong-Su 
Published: June 2018

As a part of the globalization of Japanese society, the number of long-term foreign residents in the country increases. Besides, unlike in the past, foreign students do not necessarily return to their home countries upon graduation, but often prefer to stay in Japan and start a job with a Japanese company. This leads to an increase if the contacts between Japanese nationals and foreigners, accompanied by various problems, arising from differences in language, culture and life-habits which develop as true social problems.
All municipalities and universities, trying to respond to these social needs, are carrying numerous surveys of the life-conditions of foreigners. However, most of these are questionnaire-style quantitative studies and seldom analyze on an internal psychological level how individual foreigners interact with Japanese society and how they understand and evaluate it.
This study utilizes the Analysis of Personal Attitude Construct(PAC) to research from a both emotional and cognitive point of view how foreigners and Japanese nationals understand and evaluate each other. Studies like this, which have as their respondents people with different cultural and personal background, show the true capacity of the PAC method.
The questionnaire approach has an objective to collect and analyze a great number of averaged data and is not preoccupied with individuals’ deeper personality. Further, when numerous averaged data are processed, deviations resulting form respondents’ cultural backgrounds are routinely ignored, focusing only on superficial common traits, which makes it extremely difficult to define factors and mechanisms that cause qualitative change.
This research utilizes the Analysis of Personal Attitude Construct(PAC) method, developed by Naito, which includes 1) free associations related to the topic, 2) cluster analysis based on the distance between association items, 3) respondents’ comments on the extracted cluster structure, aimed at the understanding of the attitude structure of each individual respondent. In the PAC method, respondents are free to create items of their own and show their reactions to the items, which takes into account their individuality, thus allowing the researcher to grasp, while using a comparatively simple method, the cognitive and emotional aspects of respondents’ inner world.
This paper examines the view of Japan, nourished by Koreans who stay in Japan comparatively long and have many contacts with Japanese people. As a results the following common findings emerged: 1. Japanese avoid being a nuisance to people and prefer solving problems by themselves, 2. They dislike showing their true feelings, distinguishing between truth and appearance, 3. They often act carefully out of respect for privacy, 4. They respect traditional culture and values, being curious about other cultures at the same time, 5. They are very strict about rules, which is positive when working together, because they always follow procedures, 6. The do not express themselves excessively, remain restraint and prefer internal satisfaction to looks, 7. They have both groupistic and individualistic traits. Among individual respondents’ impressions of Japanese people we could also mention: insufficient English proficiency, Japanese education creating strong personality since youth, Japanese being similar and yet different from Koreans, Japanese liking classifying things, Japanese being oppressed by a great number of rules, etc.