식민지 시기 자살에 대한 사회적 책임론의 형성: 사회관에 따른 자살론 분석을 중심으로

This article paid attention to how suicide became a social issue in the Japanese colonial period of Korea. This article examined the characteristics of social discourses of suicide in the Japanese colonial period through the colonial government official documents and colonial intellectuals’ discourses in the newspaper editorials and articles. This article analyzed each recognitions of suicide classified by three views of society; the nationalistic right wing view based on the theory of social revolution, the socialist view and the social solidarist view based on mutual-cooperation and sympathy. Since the introduction of the modern printed media-newspapers, magazines, novels, etc. -and the knowledge of statistics, suicide has emerged as a problematic social phenomena. Colonial government officials regarded the increasing suicide rate as the natural consequence of complex social life and socio-economic development. In the context of the impoverishment of rural communities, however, the exodus of peasant from agricultural area, and the severe lack of food under the colonial economy, suicides were considered as the miserable result from political and economic condition. The argument about suicide has been deployed as the critic of colonial reality and national oppression. In these discourse, suicides were regarded as the effect of the gulf between rich and poor and socio-economic inequality. The suicidal was considered as a manifestation of national despair which most people experienced under the colonial oppression. The colonial intellectual indirectly requested of the national independence and the reform of economic structure in the lamentation of suicides in newspapers. These discourses have formed the cultural meaning of suicide in Korea that emphasized on the responsibility of the whole society for the suicidal.