{"title":"Joseon Exorcist and the ‘Uncanny Valley’ of Korean Historical Dramas: On the Problems of ‘Distorted’ Representations of History in Korean Popular Culture Products","authors":"Kyoung-ryang Ki","doi":"10.22372/ijkh.2021.26.2.193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22372/ijkh.2021.26.2.193","url":null,"abstract":"It was in March 2021 that SBS, one of the representative private TV broadcasting stations in South Korea, launched a new drama series Joseon Exorcist (Chosŏn kumasa). From the beginning, it was publicized as an ambitious, large-scale project, to be aired in sixteen episodes, with the production budget amounting to 32 billion won (approximately 28 million dollars). Considering that its genre identity was decidedly nonmainstream, its large production budget was considered unusual. We can speculate that SBS had been stimulated by the worldwide success of Netflix’s Kingdom, a zombie horror TV series set in the 17 century Chosŏn Korea following the Imjin Wars. Running for two seasons in 2019 and 2020, Kingdom has received a good deal of praise both inside and outside Korea for its fresh subject, innovative direction and captivating storyline. Initially, Joseon Exorcist seemed like a surefire hit. Its first episode","PeriodicalId":40840,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Korean History","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68311621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Admitting an Attraction: Colonial Villainy, Visuality, and The Handmaiden (2016) as Critique","authors":"Keungyoon Bae","doi":"10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.2.175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.2.175","url":null,"abstract":"2016’s The Handmaiden is unusual among contemporary Korean films for more than one reason. Firstly, we have an explicitly queer, in fact erotically queer narrative from a country where LGBT rights are still very much a point of contention, especially in recent years (although there are grounds for optimism). Secondly, it is a South Korean film that has received a substantial amount of attention from European and American media; while Korean films have certainly been making the rounds at film festivals and art house cinema circles for years, it is still relatively uncommon to see a Korean film break into the American mainstream in terms of marketing and distribution, and receive coverage in publications as varied as The New Yorker, Indiewire, and Gawker (now Gizmodo)","PeriodicalId":40840,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Korean History","volume":"25 1","pages":"175-187"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46240287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sport from Imperial Japan to Postcolonial Korea: Dr. Lee Sangbaek and his Participation in the Olympic Movements","authors":"Guoxian Jin, Younghan Cho","doi":"10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.2.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.2.11","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40840,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Korean History","volume":"25 1","pages":"11-44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44953393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘When Sport Met Ideology and Colonial Bitter Memories’: The Impact of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics on North and South Korean Sports","authors":"Jongsung Lee","doi":"10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.2.45","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.2.45","url":null,"abstract":"Over the course of the twentieth century, Korea underwent very unfortunate and tragic experiences from Japanese colonization to the Korean War and the split into two states, the communist North and the capitalist South. Consequently, it was natural that South Korea was subsumed into the Cold War and that South Korean society was filled with strong antiJapanese sentiments. It is beyond doubt that South Korean society has been characterized by anti-communism and anti-Japanese feelings. However, there were other complex aspects to the two most dominating political and social tenets in South Korea. It cannot be denied that the people residing in North and South Korea had a common ethnic background. This racial homogeneity impacted North and South Korean relations despite their different political and economic systems in an age of the Cold War where the global competition between the United States and the Soviet Union fiercely developed and rapidly spread to every field.","PeriodicalId":40840,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Korean History","volume":"25 1","pages":"45-74"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46716928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Driver of Peace? Ping-Pong Diplomacy on The Korean Peninsula","authors":"B. Bridges","doi":"10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.2.75","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.2.75","url":null,"abstract":"“Table tennis has had a long history as a driver of peace, and we are happy to open a new chapter of table tennis diplomacy to promote peace on the Korean peninsula.” With these dramatic words, Thomas Weikert, President of the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF), welcomed news of a joint Korean women’s doubles team being created in July 2018. Weikert has certainly not been alone in depicting sport as a positive force that brings together and even unites peoples and countries. The Olympic movement, indeed, was grounded in the beliefs of its founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin that sport would support and promote peace and friendship amongst peoples and countries. This idealism has continued to prevail within the Olympics and across a range of other global sports. But irrespective of the degree of justification for this idealism, there is little doubt that sport has become a major element of global socie-","PeriodicalId":40840,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Korean History","volume":"25 1","pages":"75-104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44096623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editor’s Introduction: Korean Sports History","authors":"Seok Lee","doi":"10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.2.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.2.1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40840,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Korean History","volume":"25 1","pages":"1-9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42920831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Expansion, Contestation, and Boundary Making: Chosŏn Korea and Ming China’s Border Relations over the Yalu River Region","authors":"Jing Liu, Yan Piao","doi":"10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.2.105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.2.105","url":null,"abstract":"Although the Ming and Chosŏn states recognized the Yalu River (K. Amnok River) as the demarcation of their territories, this boundary was far from a static and distinct line free of controversy and rivalry. Throughout the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, the two governments and their subjects increasingly encountered and interacted on the dotted river islands of the lower reaches of the Yalu River, a region that easily lent itself to mutual exploitation and inhabitance. This led to substantial contestations and negotiations concerning territorial security and border separation between the two states. Past scholarship has paid attention to the related historical facts, including the advancement of Ming military projects toward eastern Liaodong and the anxiety this issue brought to the Chosŏn authorities, and the fluctuant cultivation of the Yalu River islands and their disputable territorial ownership. These research results understand Ming-Chosŏn relations within an impact-response framework, regarding the latter as being","PeriodicalId":40840,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Korean History","volume":"25 1","pages":"105-142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43916572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Confucian State and Its Commerce: The Commerce of Early Chosŏn Revisited","authors":"P. Park","doi":"10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.2.143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.2.143","url":null,"abstract":"Chosŏn Dynasty has always been a Confucian state as well as an agricultural society. It is only natural that its leaders placed utmost importance on agriculture while restricting commerce, and implemented economic policies in line with these ideas from the founding of the dynasty in 1392. Given that this Confucian state was primarily agrarian, scholars have long understood that the Chosŏn government believed commerce and handicraft manufacturing to be a target of strict restraint and prohibition, specifically referring to them as the “branch occupations(末業),” a concept in which ‘branch 末’ is in direct contrast with the primary ‘root 本’, namely agriculture. This anti-commerce policy-making inclination was also thought to be at its height out from the beginning of the state until halfway through the dynasty. The consequences were damaging. In the context of Korean premodern history, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are generally considered a period of stagnation concerning commerce of all sorts, either domestic or international. The alleged commercial condition of this period gives an impression that is highly incongruous with the economic","PeriodicalId":40840,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Korean History","volume":"25 1","pages":"143-174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48827681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editor’s Introduction: New Perspectives from Korean Environmental History","authors":"John S. Lee","doi":"10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.1.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22372/ijkh.2020.25.1.1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40840,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Korean History","volume":"232 ","pages":"1-13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138506764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shifting Perceptions of Insects in the Late Chosŏn Period","authors":"Sang-ho Ro","doi":"10.22372/ijkh.2019.25.1.41","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22372/ijkh.2019.25.1.41","url":null,"abstract":"Scientific debates on the nature of insects originate with Aristotle who tried to understand all Entoma in a general order. Aristotle’s natural history established the early foundation of studying tiny creatures in the Western world. The natural history of insects in East Asia also has a long history but it is hard to determine a specific founder like Aristotle. The English word “insect” came from the Aristotelian concept that Entoma has incisions. Chinese and Korean concepts of worms (ch’ung) are not as apparent in terms of their origins. Nevertheless, we should not take this","PeriodicalId":40840,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Korean History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43682088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}