Abstract North Korea has identified its official foreign policy as being focused on ‘self-reliance’ since the mid-1906s. Kim Il Sung (Kim Il-sŏng) had been long preoccupied with external interference in internal affairs, so the escalation of the Sino-Soviet schism created an environment in which to eliminate foreign influence in domestic politics and strengthen his control.…
Abstract To provide a glimpse into this period and ideas prominent at the time, the article explores the ideas of the Korean intellectual An Jae-hong, a scholar-gentleman whose career spans the nation’s colonial period and was entwined with debates over Korean nationalism. Natalia Kim channels and develops the insights from her work on the period…
Introduction The position of law in North Korean politics and society has been a long concern of scholars as well as politicians and activists. Some argue it would be more important to understand the extra-legal rules that run North Korea like the Ten Principles on the leadership cult as they supersede any formal laws or…
Abstract Kim Saryang (real name: Kim Sich’ang, 1914–1950) was among the Korean authors of the 1930s and 1940s who wrote frequently on the issues related to the Korean ethnonational identity, both in Korean and in Japanese. In May 1945, when dispatched on a lecture tour to the Japanese army units stationed in North China, he…
Abstract Owen Lattimore was an early student of frontiers in East Asia, and this paper takes as its point of departure Lattimore’s collection of books and articles relating to Koreans in Manchuria, and the border between Manchuria (then Manchukuo) and Korea. The paper indicates the depth of dependency that Lattimore and others had on Germanlanguage…
Abstract The Korean peninsula, like Taiwan (1895–1945), was one of Japan’s colonies in the first half of the twentieth century (1910–1945). The end of World War II brought an opportunity to be independent, but the different ideologies of the Capitalist Bloc and the Soviet Bloc generated the Cold War. The Korean War (1950–1953) was the…
Introduction Emerging as an independent nation in 1948, South Korea went through a difficult phase of political development shifting from a martial and authoritarian regime toward a liberal–democratic one. The April Revolution in 1960, the May 16 coup in 1961, the October Yusin in 1972, the Kwangju Uprising in 1980, and the June Democratic Uprising…
Abstract Building on past analysis by its author of North Korea’s history of developmental approach and environmental engagement, this paper encounters the field of pomiculture (or orchard development and apple farming) in the light of another key text authored by Kim Il-sung, 1963’s “Let Us Make Better Use of Mountains and Rivers.” At this time…
Abstract From the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, Seoul and Pyongyang sought to gain international recognition as the sole government on the Korean peninsula. Africa, the site of many newly independent nations during the Cold War, became the primary battleground for this inter- Korean competition. Focusing on North Korean-African relations, this article examines several African…
Abstract GiCheon (氣天) is one of many contemporary South Korean mind-body disciplines focused on physical and moral self-cultivation. Utilizing a series of interviews with the adherents of this movement, this paper examines their individual experience and understanding of GiCheon praxis in the new social and political context, revealing the mechanisms of self-construction in modern and…