우물 안 개구리

In my first post here I said that I was going to be teaching a Korean history course for the first time: I lied. Or rather, I was scheduled to teach it, but the course didn’t make its minimum enrollment. However, the time has come to try again.

The last time I did this, I was going to focus it on upper-level undergrads and make it as much about primary sources as possible. The only four books I’d ordered were Korea Old and New: A History (Eckert, Lee, Lew, Robinson, Wagner), The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry, and the two volumes of the new Sources of Korean Tradition from Columbia.¹ Ambitious and, apparently, off-putting in the extreme.

I’m torn, really, on the question of whether to teach a “Rice Paddies” style course — all of Korean history in a single semester — or break it up (as I have my China and Japan courses) into pre/post 1700 (and start with the later one, which should draw more students at first). If I teach the whole history, I might well keep the poetry — I do poetry in my China and Japan courses, and the Korean stuff is lively and diverse — but I can’t see using the Sources sets as-is. This time I want to pitch the course much more broadly, and draw in some of the business and language students — Koreans actually make up one of our largest groups of foreign students, and our business department has a long-standing interest in Korea — so that the course really does reach critical mass. So I’m thinking that the heavy dose of Columbia primary materials is probably not a great idea. That said, I prefer to have students read primary materials as much as possible, or ethnographic-style observations, or historical scholarship which evokes a clear and detailed recreation of a moment or era.

I’d love to hear thoughts from our readers about what works and what doesn’t, what’s come out recently that’s good for students, and especially if there are better textbooks at this point.

Update: I just ran across Kenneth Robinson’s Korean History Bibliography, which looks like a great starting place.

1. Vol. 1: From Early Times Through the Sixteenth Century ; Vol. 2: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries [↩]

Here at 우물 안 개구리 we are delighted today to bring you an amazing new tool that will revolutionize your life. Well, at least if you are reading Korean texts or newspapers which put all the dates in 檀紀 years. And you are so mathematically challenged you can’t take a number and subtract 2333 in your head. And you haven’t bothered to memorize the 檀紀 years for the period you are interested in. And you have a Mac with OS X installed. And you can’t be bothered to do the calculation on paper.

Ok, maybe it won’t revolutionize your life, and the potential beneficiaries of this wonderful new product may not earn me a whole lot of karma, but I’m happy to announce the results of 1.5 hours of fiddling with the “Dashcode” developer’s application on a slow Friday night:

The New Frog in a Well 檀紀 Dashboard Widget

It is a thoroughly amateurish job, but if you install this widget, enter the 檀紀 year and press return, it should give you the year in a more familiar form.

• My favorite new blog Photoshop Disasters has a Korean Basic Instinct 2 poster in which Sharon Stone’s head has been altered from the US version: Cosmo7 cites the fact that the hair is wet, which is the photoshop ‘tell’ but can’t explain why they would do that. I suspect that the wet hair is a side-effect of needing a head shot that was oriented differently, that they wanted to shift Stone’s gaze away from the viewer, make her less …. well, here’s where my complete lack of exposure to Korean media becomes a liability. Either they want her to be less aggressive (which doesn’t entirely make sense, given the movie) or more aloof.
• Dr. Virago and Dr. Crazy (Dr. Crazy’s analogy to Star Trek/Lost In Space/Heroes is worth the price of admission) among others, are having an interesting discussion about how scholars achieve “visibility” and “impact” both within their subfields and in the discipline. Their discussion doesn’t directly touch Asian Studies, but it does have some thought-provoking ideas for both young and feeling-marginalized scholars.
• I just got my current Journal of Japanese Studies in the mail, and two of the three articles are about Korea: one about the development of the Korean Civil Code under Japanese protectorate and the other about middle-class Koreans in 1930s Japan. The latter is by an old grad school friend, Jeff Bayliss, who’s teaching a course combining Korean and Japanese history which is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I’m a little jealous, yes, but mostly I’m thrilled to see the crossover scholarship being taken seriously.

Some very interesting Korean history talks coming up in the next few months. Obviously to attend them all one would need the sort of jetsetting lifestyle that is beyond most of us, or possibly even a time machine. But hopefully there will be something good near to you. Please feel free to make corrections or suggestions for additions to this list in the comments section.

January 18, Centre of Korean Studies, SOAS, London
Staffan Rosen, Stockholm University
“Merit and Reward – The Imperial Korean System of Decorations 1900-1910 in an International Perspective”
Room G52, SOAS main building, 5pm
More info
*****************

January 25, Fulbright Forum, KAEC Building, Seoul
Richard D. McBride, II
“When did the rulers of Silla Korea become kings?”
6th floor conference room, 7pm (R.S.V.P. by Monday, January 21st)
More info
*****************

January 28, UCLA Asia Institute, Los Angeles
Keun-Sik Jung, Seoul National University
“Colonial Censorship and Japanese Publication Police System”
10383 Bunche Hall, 3pm
More info
*****************

February 6, UCLA Asia Institute, Los Angeles
Dr. Yongwook Yoo
“Palaeolithic Settlement of the Korean Peninsula: A Research Before the History of Korean People”
11377 Bunche Hall, 12pm (talk in Korean)
More info
*****************

February 8, Centre of Korean Studies, SOAS, London
Gina Barnes, Professorial Research Associate, SOAS
“Cross-straits relations between Korea and Japan in the mid-4th to 5th centuries”
Room G52, SOAS main building, 5pm
*****************

February 21, Comparative Histories of Asia Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, University of London
Vladimir Tikhonov (Pak Noja), University of Oslo
“Sin Ch’aeho’s (1880-1936) Metamorphoses: Confucian Scholar, Social-Darwinist Nationalist and Anarchist”
Room NG15, Senate House Building, 5pm
More info
*****************

February 21, Harvard Korea Colloquium, Cambridge Mass.
Rachel Chung, Columbia University
“Sông Hyôn’s Model for Study of Music: Neo-Confucian Philosophy of Music in 15th Century Chosôn Korea”
Room S250, CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge St., 4pm
More info
*****************

February 22, Centre of Korean Studies, SOAS, London
Vladimir Tikhonov (Pak Noja), Institute of East European and Oriental Studies, Oslo University
“To beat or not to beat: discussions on pedagogical ideals, corporal punishment and military training in colonial Korea”
Room G52, SOAS main building, 5pm
*****************

In my discussion of the job market I said “I only saw two Korea positions, which seems about par for previous years: at some point, though, Korea positions should catch up with Japan ones.” Morgan Pitelka took exception, noting (correctly) that

Other than UCLA, which continues to have one of the most productive Korean studies programs outside of Korea, and perhaps Harvard and Columbia, how many grad schools are cranking out Korean studies PhDs? I also know of only a handful of liberal arts colleges with any substantial Korean studies, and rarely language. Very few regional/MA-granting universities have substantial Korean studies. Almost all have some Japanese studies. Also, as far as I know, few colleges or universities DON’T have access to study abroad in Japan. On the other hand, most colleges and universities don’t have study abroad options in Korea.

He’s absolutely right, of course: Korean studies doesn’t have the infrastructure Japanese studies does in the US¹ and that means that — like the painfully slow growth of MidEast studies and Islamic history after 9/11 — it will take real time and effort to build. But that’s a symptom, I think, not the root of the issue. As I said, “Korean history is no less interesting than Japanese history, and the US is no less involved in Korean affairs than it is in Japanese affairs.”

Another commenter, “Overthinker” offered a cultural explanation:

There seem to be three fundamental reasons why Japanese Studies is “bigger” than Korean. One is that WW2 was more significant that the Korean War, and has given us longer-lasting imagery; household words like Pearl Harbour and Hiroshima that everyone knows about, whereas to most people the Korean War is basically Klinger in a dress. Second is the dominance of Japanese products in the marketplace: while LG and Samsung etc are strong players, they have not yet achieved the dominance of Toyota, Sony, and Nintendo. Third is the generally “cooler” images of Japan. Think of Korea, and most Americans would be hard-pressed to think beyond the aforementioned M*A*S*H and perhaps Kim Il Jung singing “I’m so ronery”. Mention Japan and people think of samurai and geisha and ninja, plus robots and giant rubber monsters stomping Tokyo on a regular basis. All these three factors would seem to indicate a greater interest in Japan at the BA level, which translates to bigger graduate programs, and more PhDs in the area. To become bigger, Korea needs to become more popular – more people at the undergrad level need to be curious about the place.

This is closer, I think: I definitely agree that Japan’s lead in economic and cultural production is a part of the puzzle. The relationship between pop culture images and student demand is not always straightforward, but it is true that there is more Japanalia in American culture than Koreania² and more interest in the cultural roots of its economic success³ because that success was so striking in the 80s.

But, as I’ve said before, “there’s no question that a historian can’t complicate by talking about what led up to it” and I think the key to this puzzle is earlier. Much earlier: I think it starts in 1853.

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1. or anywhere in the West, I think, but I’m just going to go with what I know [↩]
2. No, I don’t know that “Koreania” is a word: would “Koreanalia” be closer? [↩]
3. I just had a discussion with my World History students about Musashi’s Book of Five Rings…. [↩]

In spite of the lovely Korean Studies Center which headquartered the conference, ASPAC 2007 didn’t have a lot of Korean content. In fact, with the exception of one paper on a mixed panel, I think I saw it all.

AAS President-Elect Robert Buswell gave the keynote address at the banquet on Saturday night, speaking on “Korean Buddhist Journeys to Lands Real and Imagined.” Though it was a bit long and specialized for an after-dinner discourse, I found it thought-provoking. I didn’t however, take notes, so you’ll have to wait for the paper (I’m sure there’s a paper in the works) to get the details. I was struck by a few thoughts, though.

• Given the frequency of Korean Buddhist travel as far as India, and the ease with which they navigated China in particular, I think we need to reconsider travel in Asian history. It’s clearly more of a norm than an exception, at least for certain categories of people. That means a great deal more integration among elites, more awareness of neighboring (and even distant) cultures than our traditional national-limited cultural histories suggest. It also means that western travellers like Marco Polo need to be considered a very small part of a much larger travelling and writing public; yes, I’m reconsidering Marco Polo, somewhat, because narratives like the ones Buswell described put his journies into a much more plausible context.
• The “imagined” travelogues to legendary and/or allegorical lands constitute a rich fantastical literature which ought to be considered in comparison with work like The Odyssey and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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The Korea Journal, which has for some time provided online access to its articles in PDF format has now added a weblog. The Korea Journal Blog has just started and Michael Hurt, of Scribblings of the Metropolitician fame, appears to be involved in the project. I hope that other journals do something similar, taking advantage of a medium which can help reach a much wider audience and encourage greater dialogue between the academic world and others interested in the study of Korea.

I was very saddened to hear that Professor James Palais has died. Everyone in the world of Korean history will have heard of him and anyone who has read any of his books and papers will know that his scholarship was at a level that leaves you in awe just a few pages in. Unfortunately, many of us at a relatively early stage in our studies will never have the opportunity to meet Professor Palais.

There is a rather perfunctory obituary from Yonhap. Hopefully there will be something more substantial soon via the Korean Studies discussion list which I will post here.

UPDATES:
Obituary from the Northwest Asian Weekly
Obituary in the Seattle Times

In the spirit of cross-linking, back-linking or something like that, here’s Antti’s post on the death of James Palais, which links here and also includes more interesting links to obituaries and the personal reflections of people that knew him.

Below is a probably rather incomplete bibliography for James Palais, gleaned from the Korean History Bibliography:
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Thanks to Antti for making note of the fact that all the papers for the 2006 annual conference of the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology are available online as PDFs.

While I’m mentioning Antti, whose weblog is a must read for anyone interested in Korea, readers here might be interested in a number of his recent postings including one on Korean name romanizations, the claim that Pak Hon-yong’s reputation has been reinstated in the DPRK , on “defensive nationalism” in Jo Jung-rae’s new novel, discussion of some photos of Seoul in the early 1970s and the Daeyeonggak hotel fire, and an interesting a discussion of the history of Noraebang in Korea.

The Korean Studies mailing list has been full of people’s recollections of the the Koreanist Fuji Kawashima of Bowling Green State University, who died recently. If you are not on the list and want to read what people are saying you can look here. There is also an obituary here.

I did not know this important scholar or his work on the yangban society of Chosŏn, so I thought that for readers of Frog in a Well the most useful way to remember him might be to provide a list of some of his publications in English (taken from the Korean History Bibliography compiled by the Centre for Korean Studies at the University of Hawai’i):
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