Candy and School Lunches
In the New York Times yesterday there was an interesting article entitled, “Is Candy Evil or Just Misunderstood?” In particular it discussed the rel...
Category: Korea
The Use of Collective Responsibility
It is a famous fact that the Government-General in Taiwan adopted the baojia (保甲) system in 1898 in reaction to a series of attacks against the Japanese. It is ...
An Interpreter’s Tale
I have been collecting notes for a study of the treason of interpreters. This may not make it into my dissertation, but I find the topic fascinating. In the his...
A Chinese Warlord’s Predictions for the Korean War
Yan Xishan, former warlord of Shanxi province and briefly premier of the Chinese republic wrote a book, Peace or World War, that was published in its English tr...
A Question of Credibility: The ASCK
Of late I have become depressed by what I see as a lack of credibility in some of the efforts to counter the flood of media reports and bombastic condemnations ...
The Will of a Traitor
In The Will of a Traitor, posted next door at 井底之蛙, I write about the controversial will of China’s most famous collaborator, and an interesting English t...
Academia/Colonial/Conferences/English/Frog in A Well/Historiography/Korea/Korea-China/Korea-Japan/US-Korea
AAS 2010 Blogging: Annexation Centennial
Final exams crash onto my desk tomorrow, but I’m as organized as I can be in advance, so I thought I’d do a little belated AAS blogging, especially ...
Guides at Frog in a Well
Here at Frog in a Well we have attempted to occasionally go beyond our role as a publisher of three group weblogs on the history of East Asia. Though it still h...
Non-Orientalizing Colonial Ethnography
I am re-visiting reprints of a journal called Korean Social Work (『朝鮮社会事業』), which colonial bureaucrats and social reformers in Korea published nearly every mon...
Things I don’t know about Korea, part 2
I’m having great fun with this class, but I’m still discovering vast areas of ignorance as we move along: Eunuchs: The Kabo reforms abolish the offi...
Tonghak and Taiping
I was struck, preparing for class yesterday, that the Tonghak and Taiping faiths were surprisingly similar and arose nearly simultaneously: Syncretic monotheist...
Things I don’t know about Korea, part 1 of many
Now that I’m teaching my Korean History course I am, of course, running into questions I cannot answer. I’m going to post them here periodically: Th...
Now in Firefox: Korean Newspapers at the National Library
I just heard from one of our fellow contributors here at Frog in a Well that the National Library of Korea now offers limited support for a variety of browsers!...
Once more, dear friends, into the breach….
In my first post here I said that I was going to be teaching a Korean history course for the first time: I lied. Or rather, I was scheduled to teach it, but the...