Abstract In March 1958, delegates from across North Korea met in the National Art Theatre in Pyongyang for the First Conference of the Korean Worker’s Party. To date, it has an event largely overlooked by South Korean and Western historians of North Korea because of a lack of source material. The newly unearthed official minutes,…
Editor’s Note Welcome to the Spring 2019 issue of the European Journal of Korean Studies. Vol. 18, No. 2 marks growth and a step forward for the publication. This issue also finally sees our new website www.ejks.org.uk come online with the complete archive of previous issues of the Papers of the British Association for Korean…
Abstract Despite Chosŏn Korea having been nicknamed the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ by the American William Elliot Griffis in 1882, Englishmen had already been there in the early half of the nineteenth century. This paper considers three journeys by westerners to the Korean peninsula in 1816, 1832 and 1845, utilizing these explorers’ travel diaries to analyze lifestyles…
Abstract In current day South Korea pseudohistory pertaining to early Korea and northern East Asia has reached epidemic proportions. Its advocates argue the early state of Chosŏn to have been an expansive empire centered on mainland geographical Manchuria. Through rationalizing interpretations of the traditional Hwan’ung- Tan’gun myth, they project back the supposed antiquity and pristine…
Abstract The present article deals with one of the attempts by South Korea’s privileged stratum to undermine the very basis for any criticisms against the colonial-age behaviour of its institutional—and in many cases familial—forefathers, namely the so-called New Right movement. Simultaneously an academic and political movement, it was launched in 2004 and had been acting…
Editor’s Note Saying goodbye is always a challenge. With this issue of the European Journal of Korean Studies, we say goodbye to the longstanding and much-loved cover design of the Papers of the British Association for Korean Studies. We have Professor Keith Howard to thank for the previous graphic iteration of the journal, whose generation…
Editor’s Note In this issue, we are pleased to offer two research articles, three research notes, a number of book reviews, and a special research note. Much of our collection examines North Korea, and the remainder ranges from colonial times into contemporary South Korean politics and society. The scholarship on North Korean literature has been…
Editor’s Note Swimming against the Brexit tide, The Papers of the British Association for Korean Studies has become, after sixteen volumes, the European Journal of Korean Studies. This first issue (though maintaining the volume numbers of the BAKS Papers) of the EJKS contains two fine research articles, one from Moscow and the other from Australia,…
Abstract One scenario put forward by researchers, political commentators and journalists for the collapse of North Korea has been a People’s Power (or popular) rebellion. This paper analyses why no popular rebellion has occurred in the DPRK under Kim Jong Un. It challenges the assumption that popular rebellion would happen because of widespread anger caused…
Abstract This study attempts to shed light on how missionaries marginalized the role played by local Koreans engaged in the translation of an evangelical tract, The Peep of Day (1833), into Korean by comparing the English source text with its Chinese and Korean translations. The subjects of comparison for this exercise were the translators’ choice…