Abstract Focusing on the interplay between memory and place, this article examines the rationale behind the use of axonometric drawings (axons) in a geographical research study of the Tumen/Tuman River region encompassing the borders shared by China, Russia and North Korea. The concepts of “memory of place” and “place of memory” guide the structure of…
Abstract Recent residential developments in Pyongyang (P’yŏngyang) show a pattern distinguished from previous eras in the Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il periods. Since Kim Jong Un’s rise to power, major developments, such as the Mirae Scientist Street and Ryomyong Street developments, resemble real estate developments in other capitalist cities. Instead of repeating the…
Abstract Conventional methods are necessary for addressing certain types of problems, but they are inadequate for investigating subjects that cannot be known in an increasingly complex and emergent world. The method proposed in this paper acknowledges the role of imagination as a cognitive function involved in all human activities from perception and reasoning to experiment…
Abstract With recent work in mind from the fields of Critical and Human Geography and Philosophy on webs of political life and ruins as lively matters, in process and becoming the paper considers the futures for North Korean non-urban landscapes from a temporal (and spatial) frame beyond that of Pyongyang’s present. Following a change of…
Abstract On August 22, 1945 the Ukushima-maru set sail from the northern Japanese port city of Ōminato with the apparent intention of delivering an undisclosed number of Koreans to Pusan, Korea. The laborers had been both recruited and conscripted for construction work necessary to fortify the naval base that had been strategically located in this…
There are various ways in which it is possible to talk about ‘Translating Korean Poetry’, it might be best to combine several in this paper. First, I will evoke some of the earliest pioneers in the field and then put on record some of the main stages in my own career as a translator. Next,…
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,…
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…