That doesn’t mean that I’m going to let ahistorical overgeneralizations or mythologies pass uncommented. If it makes you feel any better, I’m just as harsh on Japanese uniqueness, American melting-pots and leftist politicization of the classroom.

I’m kind of curious as to what the “three factors” were: whatever they are, it’s clearly a formulaic simplification of a much more complicated history (about which I’ve written before), but it’s useful to know the formulas.

really, then, why are the koreans still here?

you mean, koreans had nothing to do with winning the imjin war? i think they did. china was one of three factors leading to japan’s defeat, the other two factors were korean. boy, i get so tired of westerners trying to take a dump on everything koreans find important due to their need for revenge. man, why not go to a country that you actually like?

I thought Juche was related to Maoist concepts of self-sufficiency… of course, at a certain point all totalitarian concepts start sounding alike.

In terms of the education system, what’s actually quite striking — and supports your argument of developmental requirements — is that the South Korean system closely resembles the Japanese system after the two separated and, theoretically, went their separate ways, both on state-driven developmental courses. Did the US have a hand in the post-war Korean education reform, the way it did in Japan?

In fact, I would say that the idea that many of the ‘bad things’ (particularly the education system) about modern Korean society have their origins in the Japanese colonial government is almost as much of a commonplace among ordinary Koreans (particularly those of a more liberal or left persuasion) as the nationalist tropes we were discussing above. My opinion is that while the precise form of these nationalist themes certainly seems to have been shaped by the colonial experience (helped along of course by a much longer history of shared cultural and linguistic heritage) they don’t exist *because* of that experience – they exist because of the requirements of high speed state-led capitalist development.

On the invasions thing: I’ve toyed with the idea in the past of writing something about the exact number of invasions the Korean peninsula has suffered and attempting to compare it to other parts of the world. I know this would be a fairly pointless and frivolous exercise, but it might be interesting to show just how Korea stacks up in the ‘invasions league table’.

Perhaps that’s why it jumped out at me: I’m used to seeing these tropes in Japan, where the legacy of wartime propoganda and the national education system have perpetuated the theme of Japanese uniqueness and uniformity. I wonder how much of South Korea’s adoption of these themes is related to the legacies of the colonial experience, in terms of structures like national education and a penchant for reactive cultural essentialism.

As an aside, almost any territory in the near or middle east can claim at least as many invasions and imperial overlords as Korea.