Isolation and Solidarity: Doing Japanese Studies at an International College in South Korea during the 2020 COVID-19 Outbreak

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores challenges and opportunities for Japanese Studies during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Korea. From March 2014 to February 2022, after receiving a US PhD, I taught Japanese history in English at an international college for Korean and international students. The pandemic’s initial effect was isolation: online courses reduced interactions with students and scholars in Japan cancelled our joint research project activity in Korea. Eventually, however, there emerged solidarity peculiar to where I taught, both with my students and with the Japanese, Korean, and American researchers. In my Japanese history courses, email exchanges with individual students in lieu of class discussion often generated academically valuable yet potentially sensitive inquiries, which could have upset some Korean students if raised in the classroom. For the research, some primary materials turned out to be available online on Korean national libraries’ websites. Our further research indicated the richness of sources produced in colonial Korea, including police records documenting lives of Korean workers in wartime Japan. The students’ critical inquiries and collaborative research suggest vast possibilities for Japanese Studies, yet illuminate the constraints of national boundaries, reemphasized by the pandemic, in a world that we had hitherto imagined to be moving toward the global and borderless.