The Japan–South Korea Identity Clash

The Japan–South Korea Identity Clash

Author: Brad Glosserman

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-05-26

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0231539282

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Japan and South Korea are Western-style democracies with open-market economies committed to the rule of law. They are also U.S. allies. Yet despite their shared interests, shared values, and geographic proximity, divergent national identities have driven a wedge between them. Drawing on decades of expertise, Brad Glosserman and Scott A. Snyder investigate the roots of this split and its ongoing threat to the region and the world. Glosserman and Snyder isolate competing notions of national identity as the main obstacle to a productive partnership between Japan and South Korea. Through public opinion data, interviews, and years of observation, they show how fundamentally incompatible, rapidly changing conceptions of national identity in Japan and South Korea—and not struggles over power or structural issues—have complicated territorial claims and international policy. Despite changes in the governments of both countries and concerted efforts by leading political figures to encourage U.S.–ROK–Japan security cooperation, the Japan–South Korea relationship continues to be hobbled by history and its deep imprint on ideas of national identity. This book recommends bold, policy-oriented prescriptions for overcoming problems in Japan–South Korea relations and facilitating trilateral cooperation among these three Northeast Asian allies, recognizing the power of the public on issues of foreign policy, international relations, and the prospects for peace in Asia.


The Korean Vernacular Story

The Korean Vernacular Story

Author: Si Nae Park

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0231551320

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

As the political, economic, and cultural center of Chosŏn Korea, eighteenth-century Seoul epitomized a society in flux: It was a bustling, worldly metropolis into which things and people from all over the country flowed. In this book, Si Nae Park examines how the culture of Chosŏn Seoul gave rise to a new vernacular narrative form that was evocative of the spoken and written Korean language of the time. The vernacular story (yadam) flourished in the nineteenth century as anonymously and unofficially circulating tales by and for Chosŏn people. The Korean Vernacular Story focuses on the formative role that the collection Repeatedly Recited Stories of the East (Tongp’ae naksong) played in shaping yadam, analyzing the collection’s language and composition and tracing its reception and circulation. Park situates its compiler, No Myŏnghŭm, in Seoul’s cultural scene, examining how he developed a sense of belonging in the course of transforming from a poor provincial scholar to an urbane literary figure. No wrote his tales to serve as stories of contemporary Chosŏn society and chose to write not in cosmopolitan Literary Sinitic but instead in a new medium in which Literary Sinitic is hybridized with the vernacular realities of Chosŏn society. Park contends that this linguistic innovation to represent tales of contemporary Chosŏn inspired readers not only to circulate No’s works but also to emulate and cannibalize his stylistic experimentation within Chosŏn’s manuscript-heavy culture of texts. The first book in English on the origins of yadam, The Korean Vernacular Story combines historical insight, textual studies, and the history of the book. By highlighting the role of negotiation with Literary Sinitic and sinographic writing, it challenges the script (han’gŭl)-focused understanding of Korean language and literature.


The Journal of Korean Studies, Volume 19, Number 1 (Spring 2014)

The Journal of Korean Studies, Volume 19, Number 1 (Spring 2014)

Author: Clark W. Sorensen

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-06-27

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1442236698

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The University of Washington-Korea Studies Program, in collaboration with Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, is proud to publish the Journal of Korean Studies. In 1979 Dr. James Palais (PhD Harvard 1968), former UW professor of Korean History edited and published the first volume of the Journal of Korean Studies. For thirteen years it was a leading academic forum for innovative, in-depth research on Korea. In 2004 former editors Gi-Wook Shin and John Duncan revived this outstanding publication at Stanford University. In August 2008 editorial responsibility transferred back to the University of Washington. With the editorial guidance of Clark Sorensen and Donald Baker, the Journal of Korean Studies (JKS) continues to be dedicated to publishing outstanding articles, from all disciplines, on a broad range of historical and contemporary topics concerning Korea. In addition the JKS publishes reviews of the latest Korea-related books. To subscribe to the Journal of Korean Studies or order print back issues, please click here.


Top-Down Democracy in South Korea

Top-Down Democracy in South Korea

Author: Erik Mobrand

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2019-04-19

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 0295745487

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

While popular movements in South Korea rightly grab the headlines for forcing political change and holding leaders to account, those movements are only part of the story of the construction and practice of democracy. In Top-Down Democracy in South Korea, Erik Mobrand documents another part – the elite-led design and management of electoral and party institutions. Even as the country left authoritarian rule behind, elites have responded to freer and fairer elections by entrenching rather than abandoning exclusionary practices and forms of party organization. Exploring South Korea’s political development from 1945 through the end of dictatorship in the 1980s and into the twenty-first century, Mobrand challenges the view that the origins of the postauthoritarian political system lie in a series of popular movements that eventually undid repression. He argues that we should think about democratization not as the establishment of an entirely new system, but as the subtle blending of new formal rules with earlier authority structures, political institutions, and legitimizing norms.


Marginality and Subversion in Korea

Marginality and Subversion in Korea

Author: Sun Joo Kim

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2013-11-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 029580338X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the history of Korea, the nineteenth century is often considered an age of popular rebellions. Scholarly approaches have typically pointed to these rebellions as evidence of the progressive direction of the period, often using the theory of class struggle as an analytical framework. In Marginality and Subversion in Korea, Sun Joo Kim argues that a close reading of the actors and circumstances involved in one of the century's major rebellions, the Hong Kyongnae Rebellion of 1812, leads instead to more complex conclusions. Drawing from primary sources in Korean, Japanese, and classical Chinese, this book is the most extensive study in the English language of any of the major nineteenth-century rebellions in Korea. Whereas previous research has focused on economic and landlord-tenant tensions, suggesting that class animosity was the dominant feature in the political behavior of peasants, Sun Joo Kim explores the role of embittered local elites in providing vital support in the early stages to spur social change that would benefit these elites as much as the peasant class. Later, however, many of these same elites would rally to the side of the state, providing military and material contributions to help put down the rebellion. Kim explains why these opportunistic elites became discontented with the state in the scramble for power, prestige, and scarce resources, and why many ultimately worked to rescue and reinforce the Choson dynasty and the Confucian ideology that would prevail for another one hundred years. This sophisticated, groundbreaking study will be essential reading for historians and scholars of Korean studies, as well as those interested in early modern East Asia, social transformation, rebellions, and revolutions.


Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form

Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form

Author: Katherine In-Young Lee

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2018-10-02

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0819577073

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner of the the 2019 Béla Bartók Award for Outstanding Ethnomusicology The South Korean percussion genre, samul nori, is a world phenomenon whose rhythmic form is the key to its popularity and mobility. Based on both ethnographic research and close formal analysis, author Katherine In-Young Lee focuses on the kinetic experience of samul nori, drawing out the concept of dynamism to show its historical, philosophical, and pedagogical dimensions. Breaking with traditional approaches to the study of world music that privilege political, economic, institutional, or ideological analytical frameworks, Lee argues that because rhythmic forms are experienced on a somatic level, they swiftly move beyond national boundaries and provide sites for cross-cultural interaction.


A New History of Korea

A New History of Korea

Author: Ki-baik Lee

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1988-03-15

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13: 0674255267

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The first English-language history of Korea to appear in more than a decade, this translation offers Western readers a distillation of the latest and best scholarship on Korean history and culture from the earliest times to the student revolution of 1960. The most widely read and respected general history, A New History of Korea (Han’guksa sillon) was first published in 1961 and has undergone two major revisions and updatings. Translated twice into Japanese and currently being translated into Chinese as well, Ki-baik Lee’s work presents a new periodization of his country’s history, based on a fresh analysis of the changing composition of the leadership elite. The book is noteworthy, too, for its full and integrated discussion of major currents in Korea’s cultural history. The translation, three years in preparation, has been done by specialists in the field.


Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945

Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945

Author: Mark E. Caprio

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2011-07-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0295990406

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the late nineteenth century, Japan sought to incorporate the Korean Peninsula into its expanding empire. Japan took control of Korea in 1910 and ruled it until the end of World War II. During this colonial period, Japan advertised as a national goal the assimilation of Koreans into the Japanese state. It never achieved that goal. Mark Caprio here examines why Japan's assimilation efforts failed. Utilizing government documents, personal travel accounts, diaries, newspapers, and works of fiction, he uncovers plenty of evidence for the potential for assimilation but very few practical initiatives to implement the policy. Japan's early history of colonial rule included tactics used with peoples such as the Ainu and Ryukyuan that tended more toward obliterating those cultures than to incorporating the people as equal Japanese citizens. Following the annexation of Taiwan in 1895, Japanese policymakers turned to European imperialist models, especially those of France and England, in developing strengthening its plan for assimilation policies. But, although Japanese used rhetoric that embraced assimilation, Japanese people themselves, from the top levels of government down, considered Koreans inferior and gave them few political rights. Segregation was built into everyday life. Japanese maintained separate communities in Korea, children were schooled in two separate and unequal systems, there was relatively limited intermarriage, and prejudice was ingrained. Under these circumstances, many Koreans resisted assimilation. By not actively promoting Korean-Japanese integration on the ground, Japan's rhetoric of assimilation remained just that.