This paper will be concerned with the conflict between traditional values and Western influences in modern South Korea. Although Western influences are very strong in South Korea today, the nation as a whole has traditionally been resistant to all outside influences. For example, during the early history of the region, the nation of China had a powerful impact on the society and culture of both South Korea and Japan. In particular, China introduced the traditional values of Confucianism to both nations during that time. Nevertheless, "despite millennia of cultural and political ties with China, Korea maintained its individuality" (Kim 8).
When Western missionaries and traders began arriving in Asia during the seventeenth century, most Koreans continued to be resistant to outside influences. Nevertheless, by the early eighteenth century, many Korean leaders began thinking that Western influences could have a positive impact on the nation's economic growth. Thus, many Koreans at that time began thinking that "foreign ideas in general and European commercial enterprise in particular should be seriously considered" (Kim 58). In the late eighteenth century, Christian ideas in the form of Catholicism began making their way to Korea. Many Korean scholars were attracted to Catholicism and the concepts of "Western Learning" which it embraced. However, by the early nineteenth century, many other Koreans had come to resent the influence that Western ways of thinking were having on the traditional way of life in their country. Thus, in the early nineteenth century, Catholics in Korea were subjected to bloody persecutions as the nation's leaders turned against the influence of the Westerners (Nahm 141). Despite these persecutions, however, many Koreans continued to be interested in Catholicism and Western thought, and this caused two conflicting ways of thinking to arise in Korea which continue to exist to the present day.
Through...