The Gregorian calendar, as we usually define it today, goes back to the 1896 Kabo reform. But you might know that the Western way to calcul the calendar and its time unit were officially adopted in Chosŏn in 1653 with the Shihŏn calendar. However if your question really dealt with the seven days week… well, wether it was the gregorian, or the traditional luni-solar and solar calendars, they all have a seven days week. Actually, most calendars in the world, if not all – personnaly I don not know any whicj does not – have a seven days week, even if the reason is a kind of mystery in my eyes.

I hope this help you anyway.

In part, thinking about Joel’s note about Sadae, I wonder if part of the problem is the hypocrisy of modernization theory. Which is to say, European and American society is largely self-evidently modern in most defintions, and “pre-modern remnants” are considered exceptions which don’t call the definition into question, whereas the application to non-Western societies has almost always taken a much stricter line. “Democracy” runs into the same problem: we don’t tend to do really effective comparative work noting the similarities between “hybrid” or “partial” democratic systems in non-western societies and the ‘flawed’ or ‘ocassional’ problems in Western democracies.

I’m sounding rather Saidian, here, but these definitional questions are one are where his analysis rings most true for me.

This semantic game has been bothering me for some time now. If you read Don Baker’s works on Choson Catholicism, you will notice that Koreans were aware of Western philosophy and technology for many centuries, meaning that the Western ideas and knowledge of Europe, though mediated through Jesuit texts written in Chinese, were present in Korea long before the twentieth century. That said, I agree with James Palais that the sociopolitical conditions in the last decades of Choson was not conducive to carrying out effective modernization projects on their own. What I want to learn more about is the degree to which the encounter with West after 1910 was a shock for the Koreans, especially for those who resided in urban centers, and I also would like to know more about the ways in which the traditional world views shaped and in turn was shaped by more rapid and drastic encounters with modernity under Japanese colonialism.

As you pointed out, this division of (precolonial = modern ideas can exist only in incipient/quasi/anticipatory form) and (colonial = modernity really begins) is too arbitrary. I am hoping that introducing data-intensive methods in Korean history (this would be one utility of digital humanities) will help diversify the perspectives in the field. Having said that, let me know if you would like to use some statistical data in your teaching (i.e., demographics, literacy and education, economy, etc.). It might be a nice supplement to the assigned narratives and I am personally interested in knowing about how your students respond to it.

Finally, on eunuchs: unlike the eunuchs in the Ming dynasty, Choson eunuchs to my knowledge never wielded political power. Some queen dowagers and royal in-laws did, but not eunuchs.

Christine