Korean Patriots and Japanese Incense
This afternoon I dropped by the “Independence Hall” (독립관) found near the independence gate. It was open today for the festivities. Inside you can fi...
Category: Nationalism
City Hall
I didn’t attend the liberation day festivities last night or the ones that continue outside city hall as I write this posting. I did drop by this morning,...
It’s August 15th
It’s August 15th hear in Korea and you know what that means? It is a time to celebrate Korea’s independence from its colonial master in 1945 and som...
Why octopuses are good at archaeology and Yonsama is the son of God
A brief news round-up. I meant to blog on the story of the octopus that ‘discovered’ a treasure trove of twelfth century pottery off the coast of Ko...
The Rice Bowl and the Bomb
Japan Focus and the NYTimes seem to be in sync at the moment, with a spate of pieces on resurgent nationalism and Japanese war memory.1 Say what you like about ...
Japanese War Memories at ASPAC
I’m not going to go though quite the same song-and-dance I did with Japanese Diaspora or South Asian studies because these issues are much more familiar t...
Korea: The Uniqueness
Over at my own blog Muninn I have posted an entry talking a bit about the portray of Japan and Korea in the “Hall of Asian Peoples” in New York̵...
… and then they came for Taekwondo
Another sign of Korea’s increasing sense of insecurity in the face of rapidly growing Chinese economic and political power, or another sign of China’...
Unity is Almost Always a Myth
In an otherwise interesting discussion of North Korean defector readjustment and North-South relations in the Washington Post, Samuel Songhoon Lee drops this In...
Remixing Tagore
This story in the Korea Times about Rabrindranath Tagore’s poem ‘The Lamp of the East’ caught my eye. In the South Korean nationalist imaginat...
Is there such a thing as an innocent nation?
Moving away from the news reports for the moment, something a bit more speculative. The above question is one that crops up in my mind every now and then when I...
5,000 years
One of those phrases that anyone dealing with Korean history must learn to live with is the ‘5,000 years’ business. Today I came across one of the m...
Grading Finished; Blogging Resumes
She really has no conviction to her writing. It seemed merely argumentative and she was just trying to prove her points through facts. That’s alright to m...
Empty history
I’m spending a few weeks in Korea, mainly for the Academy of Korean Studies organised World Congress of Korean Studies that will be taking place this week...