Rashomon, and how a public memory is formed

The same event, the notes write, can be remembered differently depending on which side one saw, and on the view one already holds of the person. That double character of memory and description is clear, they say, in the film Rashomon, and it is familiar from school reunions, when people who shared a childhood still recall it in quite different ways. Memory is shaped not only by the experience itself, but by the stance of the person who receives it.

The notes then ask how a public, national memory is formed, especially after a shock such as the death of a head of state, and turn to a paper titled “How the media form a memory of Park Chung-hee’s historical legacy.” The paper, they write, deals with collective memory, public value, and the role of the media in answering that question.

Three newspapers, a coup, and growth

The paper, as the notes present it, analyzes how Chosun Ilbo, Dong-a Ilbo, and Seoul Shinmun described Park in obituaries written just after his death. An assessment of a life and of achievements tends to come after a death, they write, so such an analysis can show a social view of the person, and also how the media meet the death of a public figure. The paper also reads a semantic network in the articles, to see how his life and work were socially received, and compares how each paper’s leaning led to a different way of describing the same death.

Overall, the notes say, the media took in both positive and negative views of his achievements, and paid relatively little attention to the private side of his life. Symbolic words such as a military coup, economic development, the Yushin policy, and rural modernization were often used. A coup or Yushin, they write, amounts to a negative judgment of his policy, while economic development and rural modernization were achievements one could see in figures and in plain sight, and were not judged negatively in the same way. But according to a paper’s leaning, they add, an obvious military coup was in some cases described as an unavoidable choice for the national interest at the time, or even as a revolution rather than a coup — a case of the same historical event being read in different ways. Political achievements, in this telling, were written with both praise and blame; his personal life, the frequency of keywords suggested, was not much noticed.

A missing word, and two guesses

The writer’s own view, the notes record, is a question: why was “dictatorship” not among the main keywords? From today’s vantage, they write, dictatorship or long rule can hardly be left out of a memory of Park Chung-hee, and it seemed odd that the newspaper articles of the time said little about that.

Two guesses are offered. The first is that, even though he had been shot, his influence in the atmosphere of the time could not be ignored, so a wording that carried a personal judgment — dictatorship, or long rule — may have been hard to risk. The second is that democracy was not yet firmly established, and there may already have been a public feeling that long rule, even a further term, was not so bad once economic development had been achieved. Those are the writer’s guesses, not findings of the paper. A study of this kind, the notes add, can also show what collective values a society asks of a public figure, and which achievements it treats as meaningful, as well as how a collective memory is formed through the media. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes’ reading of a paper on media memory of Park Chung-hee, including obituaries in Chosun Ilbo, Dong-a Ilbo, and Seoul Shinmun

Last updated: 14 November 2026