JAPANESE CORPORATIONS AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOUTH KOREAN - JAPANESE RELATIONS, 1965-1979

The interaction of Japanese multinational corporations and the Park regime of South Korea during the period 1965-1979 has been the subject of debate, and the alleged importance to the former's economic interests of the latter's political collaboration has received much attention. However, this radical economic thesis is basically defective because of its lack of balance in the analysis of the interplay of politics and economics in the interaction between these two actors.;There was, to be sure, a period in the relationship between the Japanese corporations and the Park regime that would seem to support the position of the radical argument. The Japanese multinational corporations came to participate in the politics of the Park regime, establishing complex structures of relations with the latter's power centers as they shifted over time. Their involvement in South Korean politics created the relationship known as nikkan yuchaku kankei (the relationship of growing together between South Korea and Japan) in which the illegitimate profits of Japanese corporations went hand in hand with the corruption of both governments. Moreover, by shifting their alliance from the ruling party to the Constitutional Amendment faction within the Park regime, they played an indirect role in undermining party politics and in maintaining the political status quo in South Korea. It is because of this role that the Park regime's turn to authoritarianism is said to be the logical result of its dependence upon the Japanese multinational corporations. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI.;In the first place, contrary to the radical assumption that characterizes the government and ruling elite of South Korea as a political device of the Japanese multinational corporations for squeezing more out of South Korea than it puts in, we regard the militarists as the most powerful group in the ruling elite and their control of the means of violence as their foundation of political power and economic domination. The ruling elite had its own independent position and role to play, rather than being mere political devices of the Japanese economic interests. In South Korea we also see the presence of a powerful political structure that consciously directed the economic processes, so that the sole emphasis on the economic factor is out of the question.