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Changes in Personal Territorial Consciousness between Japan and Koreafrom the Perspective of Physical Contact Behavior —Focusing on Comparison with Lim (2008)—

  • 日本硏究
  • 2026, (64), pp.49~66
  • Publisher : The Center for Japanese Studies
  • Research Area : Humanities > Japanese Language and Literature
  • Received : January 11, 2026
  • Accepted : January 26, 2026
  • Published : February 20, 2026

Ro Ju Hyoun 1

1덕성여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study conducted a follow-up survey using the same questionnaire employed by Lim (2008) to examine changes in personal territorial consciousness and interpersonal behavior among young Japanese and Koreans from the perspective of physical contact. By comparing data from 2008 and 2023, this study investigated how the patterns of physical proximity and psychological tolerance toward contact shifted in the post-COVID context. Our findings revealed several trends. In both countries, a larger proportion of the participants chose to “sit close to each other”, suggesting a general decline in their psychological resistance to physical contact. Lim’s earlier observation that Koreans tend to sit closer than Japanese remains valid in 2023, while both groups continue to show an intimacy–distance hierarchy: higher willingness to sit next to family members and same-sex friends, and lower willingness to sit with strangers or recently acquainted older opposite-sex individuals. At the same time, tolerance of physical contact in intimate relationships appears to have converged between the two countries. With regard to age and gender, Japanese participants consistently maintain a “peer > senior” pattern regardless of gender, whereas this age-based difference has diminished among Koreans. In cross-gender interactions, gender rather than age has a stronger influence on interpersonal distance in both countries, and the tendency for women to be more sensitive than men to their partner’s gender, as reported by Lim (2008), is less clearly observable as a general pattern in the 2023 cohort. These results indicate that post-pandemic youths adjust their physical boundaries in more flexible and context-sensitive ways, not by uniformly avoiding body contact but by recalibrating distance along the axes of intimacy, age, and gender. By exploring Japanese–Korean differences through the nonverbal dimension of physical contact, this study provides empirical data for understanding the cultural underpinnings of interpersonal behavior and offers insights into how younger generations redefine norms of personal territory in the post-pandemic era.

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