An Interpreter’s Tale
I have been collecting notes for a study of the treason of interpreters. This may not make it into my dissertation, but I find the topic fascinating. In the his...
Category: Korea
A Chinese Warlord’s Predictions for the Korean War
Yan Xishan, former warlord of Shanxi province and briefly premier of the Chinese republic wrote a book, Peace or World War, that was published in its English tr...
A Question of Credibility: The ASCK
Of late I have become depressed by what I see as a lack of credibility in some of the efforts to counter the flood of media reports and bombastic condemnations ...
The Will of a Traitor
In The Will of a Traitor, posted next door at 井底之蛙, I write about the controversial will of China’s most famous collaborator, and an interesting English t...
Academia/Colonial/Conferences/English/Frog in A Well/Historiography/Korea/Korea-China/Korea-Japan/US-Korea
AAS 2010 Blogging: Annexation Centennial
Final exams crash onto my desk tomorrow, but I’m as organized as I can be in advance, so I thought I’d do a little belated AAS blogging, especially ...
Guides at Frog in a Well
Here at Frog in a Well we have attempted to occasionally go beyond our role as a publisher of three group weblogs on the history of East Asia. Though it still h...
Non-Orientalizing Colonial Ethnography
I am re-visiting reprints of a journal called Korean Social Work (『朝鮮社会事業』), which colonial bureaucrats and social reformers in Korea published nearly every mon...
Things I don’t know about Korea, part 2
I’m having great fun with this class, but I’m still discovering vast areas of ignorance as we move along: Eunuchs: The Kabo reforms abolish the offi...
Tonghak and Taiping
I was struck, preparing for class yesterday, that the Tonghak and Taiping faiths were surprisingly similar and arose nearly simultaneously: Syncretic monotheist...
Things I don’t know about Korea, part 1 of many
Now that I’m teaching my Korean History course I am, of course, running into questions I cannot answer. I’m going to post them here periodically: Th...
Now in Firefox: Korean Newspapers at the National Library
I just heard from one of our fellow contributors here at Frog in a Well that the National Library of Korea now offers limited support for a variety of browsers!...
Once more, dear friends, into the breach….
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...
Japanese Publications on Colonial Bureaucracy
I would like to introduce two recent publications on colonial bureaucrats here. One is Okamoto Makiko, Shokuminchi kanryô no seijishi (岡本真希子『植民地官僚の政治史：朝鮮・台湾総督府と...
Reflecting on “Giants”
Todd Crowell reports that Kim Dae Jung is seriously ill and reflects on his life and career as a “Giant of [Asian] Democracy” For Kim achieving the ...