Category: Korean Studies

ARTICLES

Korean Tea Bowls (Kōrai chawan) and Japanese Wabicha: A Story of Acculturation in Premodern Northeast Asia
Nam-lin Hur, 1

For more than two centuries from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, one particular item dominated the fashion of wabicha, a form of tea ceremony, in Japan: tea bowls obtained from Korea, commonly called Kōrai chawan (高麗茶碗), or Korean tea bowls. Korean tea bowls held the key to the evolving aesthetic of wabicha, which was highly refined by Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591) and inherited by other eminent tea masters in Tokugawa Japan. Despite their prominence in the world of wabicha, Korean tea bowls have not often been studied. This article traces the cultural trajectory of Korean tea bowls from the perspective of trade and piracy, border-crossing cultural flow, classification, and acculturation. It then explores the question of what made Korean tea bowls so popular in the world of Japanese wabicha by focusing on four factors: the culture of the upper-class samurai, tea, and Zen Buddhism; the exoticism of Korean tea bowls; commercialism and political power; and the household profession of tea masters. Korean tea bowls, which symbolized the beauty of wabicha, served as a catalyst for a move away from a Chinese-centered aesthetics of tea culture in medieval times and toward a Japan-centered aesthetics of tea culture from the mid-eighteenth century onward.

Continue reading “Korean Studies, vol. 39 (2015)”

ARTICLES

Celestial Observations Recorded in the Samguk Sagi During the Unified Silla Period, AD 668–935
F. Richard Stephenson, 1

This article investigates in detail the accuracy and reliability of the astronomical records in the Samguk sagi during the period of Silla rule throughout the Korean peninsula. In the cases of eclipses and lunar and planetary phenomena, the individual records are compared with the results of modern retrospective computation. Comparison with the various reports in the annals of Chinese dynastic histories is also undertaken.

Continue reading “Korean Studies, vol. 38 (2014)”

SPECIAL ISSUE: URBAN CULTURAL LANDSCAPES OF COLONIAL KOREA, 1920s–1930s

Guest Editor: Yung-Hee Kim

Guest Editor’s Introduction
Yung-Hee Kim, 1

This special issue of Korean Studies includes selected articles originally presented as papers at the ‘‘Tapestry of Modernity: Urban Cultural Landscapes of Colonial Korea, 1920s–1930s: An International Interdisciplinary Conference’’ held at the Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, February 16–17, 2012. The conference was part of the Center’s project to commemorate its fortieth anniversary.
Continue reading “Korean Studies, vol. 37 (2013): Urban Cultural Landscapes of Colonial Korea, 1920s–1930s”

ARTICLES

Mapping Japan in Chosŏn Korea: Images in the Government Report Haedong chegukki
Kenneth R. Robinson, 1

The Chosŏn Korea government compiled a handbook on relations with Japanese and Ryukyuan contacts in the early 1470s. This report, titled Haedong chegukki and extant today as a printing from 1512, included several maps of Japan prepared by the Chosŏn government. Historians of cartography and foreign relations commonly refer to these images as Japanese Gyōki-style maps of Japan based upon the design of the Japanese islands and provinces. However, Korean mapmakers compiled these maps to be read and for state use, thus placing Japan as a foreign country and inscribing into the images discourses of interaction that would be legible to government officials.
Continue reading “Korean Studies, vol. 36 (2012)”

Rethinking Korean Identity in Music

Guest Editor: Eun-Young Jung

Rethinking Korean Identity in Music: Editor’s Introduction
Eun-Young Jung, 1

‘‘Fusion’’ and Questions of Korean Cultural Identity in Music
R. Anderson Sutton, 4

Continue reading “Korean Studies, vol. 35 (2011)”

All back issues of Korean Studies, going all the way back to volume 1 (1977), are now available online for subscribers to Project MUSE—and at no additional fee.

Links to individual articles in the early volumes can be found online in our cumulative Article Index to vols. 1-24 (1977-2000).

ARTICLES

The Democratic State Engulfing Civil Society: The Ironies of Korean Democracy
Jang Jip Choi, 1

Continue reading “Korean Studies, vol. 34 (2010)”

Cultural Change in Korean Films

Transitional Emotions: Boredom and Distraction in Hong Sang-su’s Travel Films
Youngmin Choe, 1

This article explores the cultural significance of boredom and distraction in postmodern Korea by focusing on Hong Sang-su’s holiday films. It posits that Hong’s films about characters attempting to escape from the banalities of urban life can be seen to reveal, stylistically and thematically, the emotions and anxieties unleashed by excessive leisure in neoliberal Korea. By re-casting the absence of events in Hong’s films as an existing affect of lacking, it challenges the adequacy of pre-existing affective paradigms in the understanding of boredom in neoliberal Korea. In recognition of the transient stage in which boredom as emotion finds itself, it proposes categorizing emotions at such historical junctures as ‘‘transitional emotions,’’ drawing on theories that socialize rather than psychologize emotion by locating them as circulating intersubjectively.

Continue reading “Korean Studies, vol. 33 (2009)”

Korean Minorities in the Age of Globalization

Between Defector and Migrant: Identities and Strategies of North Koreans in South Korea
Byung-Ho Chung, 1

This article examines the structural conditions and the individual strategies of North Koreans in South Korea. It provides a historical account on the changing social definitions of and policies toward North Korean border-crossers and how the changing conditions have affected their identities and lives. It also gives an ethnographic account of the difficulties and risks of individuals whose identities are caught between ‘‘defector’’ and ‘‘migrant.’’ The problems they face in capitalist South Korea are examined in the major areas of social transition—arrival, orientation, residence, consumption, work, education, and ideology—focusing on individual strategies that negotiate cultural differences between the two Koreas.

Continue reading “Korean Studies 32 (2008)”

ARTICLES

The Changing Faces of Inequality in South Korea in the Age of Globalization
Hagen Koo, 1

Continue reading “Korean Studies, vol. 31 (2007)”

Guest Editor: Kenneth R. Robinson

ARTICLES

Guest Editor’s Introduction
Kenneth R. Robinson, 1

Economic Growth in P’yŏngan Province and the Development of Pyongyang in the Late Chosŏn Period
Soo-chang Oh, 3

Pyongyang, one Korea’s oldest cities, was considered an important defense site during the Koryŏ dynasty, but did not develop significantly until the Chosŏn dynasty in the seventeenth century. This was partly because of its border location and unsuitability for farming but most of all because of discrimination by the central government. After the eighteenth century, however, Pyongyang led in the social development of Chosŏn. With stability in the relationship with Qing China, the area was free from the threat of war. The accumulated money and grains were used to entertain foreign diplomats and prepare for war while also providing commercial capital. The fact that the traditional ruling order and ideology were not strong was an advantage for the development of commerce. On the other hand, the government tried to induce Pyongyang’s development within the system, as by, for example, holding a special civil service examination and recruiting members for the Royal Guard. During that time, Pyongyang progressed and continued to develop as the new urban cultural center of the region.

Continue reading “Korean Studies, vol. 30 (2006)”

ARTICLES

Yayoi Wave, Kofun Wave, and Timing: The Formation of the Japanese People and Japanese Language, p. 1
Wontack Hong

A sudden change in climate, such as the commencement of a Little Ice Age, may have prompted the southern peninsular rice farmers to cross the Korea Strait ca. 300 B.C.E. in search of warmer and moister land. This may answer the timing of the “Yayoi Wave.” Evidence confirms the seminal role played by peninsular peoples in the formation of Middle and Late Tomb culture and the inadequacy of the “evolutionary” thesis, restoring our attention to the “event” thesis. Around 300–400 C.E., a drought may well have forced the Paekche farmers around the Han River basin to search for a new territory. This may answer the timing of the “Kofun Wave.”

Continue reading “Korean Studies, vol. 29 (2005)”