Three Questions About Western Historiography and Korea

Another excerpt from Donald Clark’s Living Dangerously in Korea, and two three questions: Given the speed of change in modern Korea, it takes some mental effort to recall the conditions of diet, health, housing, education, and living standards that prevailed in Korea at the time of liberation. In the 1930s, for example, life expectancy was thirty-six years for men and thirty-eight years for women. Women were treated like chattel by their own relatives. They had little autonomy or even identity of their own. They were known as so-and-so’s mother or daughter or wife and their given names were so seldom …

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Jeonju — A Culinary Pilgrimage

I’ve long promised a roundup of places in Jeonju that I’d recommend to people… or, rather, places that I make a point of going when I’m in Jeonju myself. For anyone not in (or going to) Korea, well… this might be of less interest to you, unless you love reading abut amazing restaurants that you’ll probably never visit.

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Donald Clark’s Living Dangerously in Korea

I’ve mentioned Donald Clark’s book Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience 1900-1950 a few times lately (and it will certainly come up again), but I haven’t really summed up my thoughts on the book, something I’m trying to do a little more since falling out of the habit last year. Here are my thoughts… 

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The Really Intractable Thing: North Korea, Climate Change, and Why We’re Failing

Over at The Week, a depressing piece on the horrors up North, titled “North Korea isn’t Nazi Germany — in some ways, it’s worse”: Unless North Korea invades or bombs another country, or China gives up its patronage of the Hermit Kingdom, it’s hard to see much concrete coming out of the report. Paul Whitefield at the Los Angeles Times remembers the post-Holocaust slogan, “Never Again,” then throws up his hands in resignation: So what should the world do? What can the world do? Must we accept that in North Korea, basic freedoms — even such a simple thing as the right not …

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Speed Skating and Death Threats

Believe it or not, this is not a rant. If I were going to rant about anything related to the Sochi Olympics, it would be Russia’s headfirst leap back into the Middle Ages in terms of its homophobic legislation, and the disgusting way the IOC caved to the Russian state’s barbaric laws. But I’m not watching the Sochi Olympics, so it’s not so much on my radar. But the other day I had an interesting, somewhat frustrating discussion, but ultimately (maybe) helpful discussion with a student the other day about the recent twittermobbing and threatening of Scottish speed skater Elise …

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