Written by Joong- Seok Seo, an eminent Korean historian and a thinker of rare originality, this book examines the tumultuous history of modern Korea from the perspective of nationalism. Based on the author’s extensive research and wide-ranging experience, the book goes to the heart of critical questioning about the political uses and abuses of nationalism by the ruling elites of post-liberation Korea. Indeed, Korean Nationalism Betrayed fills a yawning gap in the Western understanding of the authoritarian political structure of South Korea (1948-1988) that manipulated and distorted nationalism by identifying it with ultra-right anti-communism. The author provides a set of thought-provoking and compelling arguments against the assumptions of the Cold War, attributing the continued climate of tension and antagonism between the two Koreas to the tenacity of a Cold War mind-set. He traces the root of the tragedy of national division to the failure of Korean nationalism, and puts forward a compelling case for overcoming the legacy of polarized ideological stance, based on Cold War ideology and embracing a policy of reconciliation and cooperation by both sides.

This book examines the role of translation—the rendering of texts and ideas from one language to another, as both act and trope—in shaping attitudes toward nationalism and colonialism in Korean and Japanese intellectual discourse between the time of Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 and the passing of the colonial generation in the mid-1960s. Drawing on Korean and Japanese texts ranging from critical essays to short stories produced in the colonial and postcolonial periods, it analyzes the ways in which Japanese colonial and Korean nationalist discourse pivoted on such concepts as language, literature, and culture.

This book presents four well-researched articles that throw light on some of the major themes in the history of the ancient Silk Road. The first two papers by Dr Kenneth H. J. Gardiner, based on Chinese and Latin sources and material evidence, tell the remarkable story of trade and diplomacy between Han China and the Roman Empire. Papers by Professors Sang Hyun KIM, a pioneering scholar of Korean Buddhism and Pankaj N. Mohan who published widely on Korea’s cultural linkages with its neighbours in East and South Asia, demonstrate that the Eastern Sector of the Silk Road, commencing from Gyeongju, the capital of the early Korean state of Silla, served for several centuries as an important channel of exchange of religion, philosophy and art, Their papers enable us to understand how Shamanism and Buddhist culture of Silk Road spread to the Korean peninsula in the sixth and seventh centuries and contributed to the development of Korean civilization.

A Representation of Nationhood in the Museum examines how the National Museum of Korea, as a national repository of material culture and the state’s premier exhibition facility, has shaped and been shaped by Korean nationalism. Exploring the processes by which the museum has discovered and interpreted material culture, using concepts of ethnic nationalism in the historical and political contexts of South Korean society, the book analyses how this nationalist interpretation has regulated South Koreans’ understanding of their material culture. Issues considered include: cultural and political relations with China; Japanese colonial rule, cultural imperialism and its legacy; the division of Korea since 1945; the Korean War and nation building since liberation in 1945; and domestic political upheavals, including military coups in 1961 and in 1979. Demonstrating that authoritarian regimes’ emphasis on the promotion of national unity drove national museums to establish national identity through material culture, Jang argues that international political and diplomatic factors also affect the process of the formation of national identity in a specific political context. Concerning itself with issues such as the relationship between politics and identity, museums and authoritarian regimes, this book should be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in museum studies, nationalism studies, Asian studies and history departments.

Territorial disputes are one of the main sources of tension in Northeast Asia. Escalation in such conflicts often stems from a widely shared public perception that the territory in question is of the utmost importance to the nation. While that's frequently not true in economic, military, or political terms, citizens' groups and other domestic actors throughout the region have mounted sustained campaigns to protect or recover disputed islands. Quite often, these campaigns have wide-ranging domestic and international consequences. Why and how do territorial disputes that at one point mattered little, become salient? Focusing on non-state actors rather than political elites, Alexander Bukh explains how and why apparently inconsequential territories become central to national discourse in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. These Islands Are Ours challenges the conventional wisdom that disputes-related campaigns originate in the desire to protect national territory and traces their roots to times of crisis in the respective societies. This book gives us a new way to understand the nature of territorial disputes and how they inform national identities by exploring the processes of their social construction, and amplification.

South Korea’s postcolonial history has been replete with dramatic societal transformations through which it has emerged with a fully blown modernity, or compressed modernity. There have arisen the transformation-oriented state, society, and citizenry for which each transformation becomes an ultimate purpose in itself, its processes and means constitute the main sociopolitical order, and the transformation-embedded interests form the core social identity. A distinct mode of citizenship has thereby arisen as transformative contributory rights, namely, effective or legitimate claims to national and social resources, opportunities, and respects that accrue to each citizen’s contributions to the nation’s or society’s collective transformative goals. South Koreans have been exhorted or have exhorted themselves to intensely engage in such collective transformations, so that their citizenship is framed and substantiated by the conditions, processes, and outcomes of such transformative engagements. This book concretely and systematically analyzes how this transformative dynamic has shaped South Koreans’ developmental, social, educational, reproductive, and cultural citizenship.

Since the Korean War, gijichon—U.S. military camp towns—have been fixtures in South Korea. The most popular entertainment venues in gijichon are clubs, attracting military clientele with duty-free alcohol, music, shows, and women entertainers. In the 1990s, South Korea's rapid economic advancement, combined with the stigma and low pay attached to this work, led to a shortage of Korean women willing to serve American soldiers. Club owners brought in cheap labor, predominantly from the Philippines and ex-Soviet states, to fill the vacancies left by Korean women. The increasing presence of foreign workers has precipitated new conversations about modernity, nationalism, ethnicity, and human rights in South Korea. International NGOs, feminists, and media reports have identified women migrant entertainers as "victims of sex trafficking," insisting that their plight is one of forced prostitution. Are women who travel to work in such clubs victims of trafficking, sex slaves, or simply migrant women? How do these women understand their own experiences? Is antitrafficking activism helpful in protecting them? In On the Move for Love, Sealing Cheng attempts to answer these questions by following the lives of migrant Filipina entertainers working in various gijichon clubs. Focusing on their aspirations for love and a better future, Cheng's ethnography illuminates the complex relationships these women form with their employers, customer-boyfriends, and families. She offers an insightful critique of antitrafficking discourses, pointing to the inadequacy of recognizing women only as victims and ignoring their agency and aspirations. Cheng analyzes the women's experience in South Korea in relation to their subsequent journeys to other countries, providing a diachronic look at the way migrant issues of work, sex, and love fit within the larger context of transnationalism, identity, and global hierarchies of inequality.

This book explains the roots, politics, and legacy of Korean ethnic nationalism, which is based on the sense of a shared bloodline and ancestry. Belief in a racially distinct and ethnically homogeneous nation is widely shared on both sides of the Korean peninsula, although some scholars believe it is a myth with little historical basis. Finding both positions problematic and treating identity formation as a social and historical construct that has crucial behavioral consequences, this book examines how such a blood-based notion has become a dominant source of Korean identity, overriding other forms of identity in the modern era. It also looks at how the politics of national identity have played out in various contexts in Korea: semicolonialism, civil war, authoritarian politics, democratization, territorial division, and globalization.

The division of Korea in August 1945 was one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the twentieth century. Despite the enormous impact this split has had on international relations from the Cold War to the present, comparatively little has been done to explain the decision. In Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea, author David P. Fields argues that the division resulted not from a snap decision made by US military officers at the end of World War II but from a forty-year lobbying campaign spearheaded by Korean nationalist Syngman Rhee. Educated in an American missionary school in Seoul, Rhee understood the importance of exceptionalism in American society. Alleging that the US turned its back on the most rapidly Christianizing nation in the world when it acquiesced to Japan's annexation of Korea in 1905, Rhee constructed a coalition of American supporters to pressure policymakers to right these historical wrongs by supporting Korea's independence. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Rhee and his Korean supporters reasoned that the American abandonment of Korea had given the Japanese a foothold in Asia, tarnishing the US claim to leadership in the opinion of millions of Asians. By transforming Korea into a moralist tale of the failures of American foreign policy in Asia, Rhee and his camp turned the country into a test case of American exceptionalism in the postwar era. Division was not the outcome they sought, but their lobbying was a crucial yet overlooked piece that contributed to this final resolution. Through its systematic use of the personal papers and diary of Syngman Rhee, as well as its serious examination of American exceptionalism, Foreign Friends synthesizes religious, intellectual, and diplomatic history to offer a new interpretation of US-Korean relations.