Decolonizing Japan–South Korea Relations: Hegemony, the Cold War, and the Subaltern State

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-253
Author(s):  
Boyu Chen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
HYUN KYONG HANNAH CHANG

Abstract Protestant music in South Korea has received little attention in ethnomusicology despite the fact that Protestant Christianity was one of the most popular religions in twentieth-century Korea. This has meant a missed opportunity to consider the musical impact of a religious institution that mediated translocal experiences between South Korea and the United States during the Cold War period (1950s–1980s). This article explores the politics of music style in South Korean diasporic churches through an ethnography of a church choir in California. I document these singers’ preference for European-style choral music over neotraditional pieces that incorporate the aesthetics of suffering from certain Korean traditional genres. I argue that their musical judgement must be understood in the context of their lived and remembered experience of power inequalities between the United States and South Korea. Based on my interviews with the singers, I show that they understand hymns and related Euro-American genres as healing practices that helped them overcome a difficult past and hear traditional vocal music as sonic icons of Korea's sad past. The article outlines a pervasive South Korean/Korean diasporic historical consciousness that challenges easy conceptions of identity and agency in music studies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 282-306
Author(s):  
Sunwoo Lee

Abstract Chi Ki-ch’ŏl’s story reveals a man not driven by ideology, but buffeted by it. He began adulthood as a Korean exile in Manchuria, where the Japanese occupation army conscripted him. After Japan’s defeat in August 1945, he joined a Korean contingent of the Chinese Communist Army and fought in the Chinese Civil War. His unit later repatriated to North Korea, where it joined the invasion of South Korea on 25 June 1950. When U.S.-led forces of the United Nations shattered that invasion in September, he quickly arranged to surrender to U.S. troops. While in custody, Chi worked with Republic of Korea (rok) intelligence to organize prisoner of war (pow) resistance to their being returned to North Korea after the impending armistice. He enjoyed privileges as an anti-Communist in the pow camps, and hoped it would continue. Although an active anti-Communist, Chi judged that he would not be able to live in South Korea as an ex-pow. After refusing repatriation to North Korea, he also rejected staying in South Korea. But Chi would survive elsewhere. He relocated to India, where he thrived as a businessman. He chose the space of neutrality to succeed as an anti-Communist, where life nevertheless reflected the contentious energy of the Cold War. Chi’s decision demonstrated how ideology, despite its importance to him, was not sufficient to translate his rejection of Communist North Korea into a commitment to South Korea.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 433-457
Author(s):  
Jinhee Park

Abstract This article examines autobiographic documentaries about families that expose “dissensus” in the mapping of transborder migration and diasporic desire that were the results of the Cold War in North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. Jae-hee Hong (dir. My Father’s Emails) and Yong-hi Yang (dir. Dear Pyongyang and Goodbye Pyongyang) document the ongoing Cold War in their fathers’ histories through their position as a “familial other,” who embodies both dissensus and intimacy. Hong reveals that anticommunism in South Korean postwar nation building reverberated in the private realm. Yang documents her Zainichi father, who sent his sons to North Korea during the Repatriation Campaign in Japan. The anticommunist father in South Korea (Hong’s) and the communist father in Japan (Yang’s) engendered family migration with contrasting motivations, departure from and return to North Korea, respectively. Juxtaposing these two opposite ideologies in family histories, as well as juxtaposing the filmmakers’ dissonance with the given ideologies in domestic space, provide the aesthetic form for “dissensus.” The politics of aesthetics in domestic ethnography manifests in that the self and the Other are inextricably interlocked because of the reciprocity of the filmmaker and the communist or anticommunist subject.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-152
Author(s):  
Muhammad Fawwaz Syafiq Rizqullah ◽  
Luna Tristofa ◽  
Devia Farida Ramadhanti

This paper aims to analyze the reason why South Korea as a North Korea rival in the Koreanpeninsula willing to give aid toward North Korea. The tension in Korean peninsula has happened since a long time ago especially after the cold war between USA & USSR. The conflict event become worst because of North Korea always threatening South Korea by testing the Nuclear missile. Despite of what North Korea done in the region, South Korea still gave abundance of aid in term of health assistance, food, and others basis of human necessity. By using qualitative approach and collecting data from credible literature resource and using the concept of disaster diplomacy this research found that South Korea has special type in term of conflict resolution, South Korea often using soft diplomacy and negotiation in order to creating peace. South Korea also believe positive peace diplomacy should be implementing in order make better condition in Korean peninsula. This research also believe that the actor has a big impact in successfully to support better condition between both countries and strengthening the relation. Lastly, this paper proof if in order to win in some competition not always using hard diplomacy or military power.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 575-602
Author(s):  
Katri Kauhanen

The Korean National Council of Women, a women’s organization established in 1959, has received criticism in Korean literature for its collaboration with the authoritarian regimes that ruled South Korea for decades. This article, however, argues for a different kind of interpretation. The Korean National Council of Women came together to join the International Council of Women, a major international women’s organization that was looking for new affiliations in the recently decolonized parts of Asia and Africa in the midst of Cold War competition. Thus, we should view the existence of the Korean National Council of Women in the framework of transnational women’s activism and how the Cold War shaped it. After outlining the connections made between South Korean women and the International Council of Women, the article analyzes the projects proposed by the Korean National Council of Women under the anti-communist authoritarian regime. Based on archival research in South Korea and Belgium, this article argues that instead of following rules from above, the Korean National Council of Women negotiated a way to combine the advancement of women’s issues with the development of the nation. The International Council of Women, while criticizing communist women for their close relationship with the state, celebrated the achievements its South Korean affiliate made as a state-registered organization.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-364
Author(s):  
Sangjoon Lee

Abstract As the apparent progeny of Cold War politics in the West, espionage films witnessed unprecedented popularity around the globe in the 1960s. With the success of Dr. No (1962) and Goldfinger (1964)—along with French, Italian, and German copycats—in Asia, film industries in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea recognized the market potential and embarked on churning out their own James Bond-mimetic espionage films in the late 1960s. Since the regional political sphere has always been multifaceted, however, each country approached genre conventions with its own interpretation. In the US-driven Cold War political, ideological, and economic sphere, developmental states in the region, particularly South Korea and Taiwan, vigorously adopted anti-communist doctrine to guard and uphold their militant dictatorships. Under this political atmosphere in the regional sphere, cultural sectors in each nation-state, including cinema, voluntarily or compulsorily served as an apparatus to strengthen the state’s ideological principles. While the Cold War politics that drive the narrative in the American and European films is conspicuously absent in Hong Kong espionage films, South Korea and Taiwan, on the other hand, explicitly promulgated the ideological principles of their apparent enemies, North Korea and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in their representative espionage films. This article casts a critical eye over South Korea–initiated inter-Asian coproduction of espionage films produced during the time, with particular reference to South Korea–Hong Kong coproduction of SOS Hong Kong (SOS Hongk’ong) and Special Agent X-7 (Sun’gan ŭn yŏngwŏnhi), both produced and released in 1966.


Author(s):  
Andrew Yeo

Chapter 2 recounts the origins of bilateralism in Asia and the legitimization of the US-led hub-and-spokes system among Asian elites during the Cold War. It also outlines the rise of ASEAN in the 1960s. Exploring postwar US alliances forged with the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Thailand, I demonstrate how material threats, institutions, and ideas interact to produce an alliance consensus among political elites in Asia. Despite periodic domestic opposition to US alliances, and the weakness of ASEAN, the hub-and-spokes system and ASEAN become entrenched over time.


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