Contemporary East Asian Research Articles

1890년대-1930년대 조선 지식인들의 프랑스혁명 독해법

The fundamental goal of this article is to fill the void of poor prior research and stimulate further research. The main issue is, first, to apply into the context of the time and analyze various types of texts referring to the French Revolution from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. In that extension, it tracks the changes in the views and historical perspectives of Joseon/Korean intellectuals who lived in a radical transition period leading to the period of King Gojong, the Korean Empire, and the colony on the French Revolution. In addition, the discourse on the French Revolution formed and shared by Joseon intellectuals in the 1890s and 1930s is briefly compared with that of contemporary Chinese and Japanese intellectuals to gauge the worldview of contemporary East Asian intellectuals in the West. The achievements of this study are as follows. First, reformist intellectuals during the period of King Gojong-the Korean Empire represented by Yoo Gil-jun and Yoon Chi-ho were also afraid of active discussion of the French Revolution and acquisition of its historical lessons. Second, intellectuals during the period of cultural governance tried to approach the French Revolution ‘from below’, paid attention to its creative destructive power, and learned its democratic character. Third, Joseon’s modern women welcomed the French Revolution as a successful example of the modern feminine movement, and made it a lesson to overcome the ‘women’s panic era’ in which old women and new women conflict. Fourth, some intellectuals appropriated ‘La Marseillaise’, a military song and national song of the French Revolution, in a way that supported Japanese militarism and promoted totalitarian fascism. It can be seen that the framework for interpretation of the French Revolution during the colonial period shifted from ‘left to right’.

Confucian Democratic Leadership: A Reconstruction for Contemporary East Asia

Confucian Democratic Leadership: A Reconstruction for Contemporary East Asia

Medium is the Message: Examining McLuhan s Theory in East Asia

This paper explores the importance of McLuhan s media is the message theory to the dissemination of popular culture and regional influence in East Asia in the 20th century. By analyzing the historical process of the development of popular culture in China and Japan, the paper illustrates the key role of print media and television media in shaping national identity and social change. At the same time, the paper also points out the limitations of McLuhan s theory in fails to fully consider the socioeconomic factors in East Asia. Reviewing the historical process of the popular culture movement and spatial revolution in East Asia in the 20th century through McLuhan s theory helps us understand the media influence and its deep-seated significance in the current era of information explosion. McLuhan s media is the message theory still has important analytical value, and its limitations need to be further explored in order to better understand the media dynamics of contemporary East Asian society.

Cultural Tradition or Kitsch? Buddhist Iconography in the Art of Contemporary East Asian Women Artists

Cultural Tradition or Kitsch? Buddhist Iconography in the Art of Contemporary East Asian Women Artists

Blindness Challenging Melodrama in Your Eyes Tell (2020) and Blind Massage (2014)

While blindness has been a recurring motif in melodramatic fiction films, this article argues that some contemporary East Asian films about blindness provide a template for challenging ableism and melodramatic conventions via textual analysis. Based on the work of Peter Brooks, Linda Williams, and other significant studies on melodrama and blindness, I first introduce three main characteristics of and gaps in melodrama (virtue, dichotomy, and the moral occult) while examining the connections between blindness and melodrama in East Asian film history. Then I explore how filmic representation in East Asian can question melodramatic conventions and disrupt the dichotomy between disability and non-disability by using the Japanese film Your Eyes Tell (2020) and the Chinese film Blind Massage (2014) as case studies. Your Eyes Tell begins to problematize the melodramatic dichotomy and ableism by attaching great importance to multiple senses, whereas Blind Massage emphasizes the diversity of blindness and challenges melodramatic patterns by representing the body, emotions, affect and sound in very specific ways.

Hybrid protest logics and relational dynamics against institutional decay: networked movements in Asia

ABSTRACT This introductory essay surveys a wave of mass movements in contemporary East and Southeast Asia. We identify three main aspects that drove and sustained this wave of societal pushback amidst institutional decay. We first discuss how democratic backsliding shapes the spread of mass mobilization in polities that are seen as regulated by the interest of power elites and their machinery of coercion and adaptation. We then critically examine the continued relevance of protest leadership by highlighting the relational dynamics between organizing with and without (formal) organizations. We further examine how network and coalition building in political and civil societies shaped the long-term trajectory of movement organizations to facilitate large-scale protests at critical times. This review draws on the contributions to this special issue and the recent literature on democratic backsliding and political activism. It provides a holistic survey of defensive mobilizations and the interactive mechanisms among the masses in the region and beyond.

When antisemitism and philosemitism go hand in hand: attitudes to Jews in contemporary East Asia

ABSTRACT Despite their number in East Asia never exceeding 36,000 (currently around 10,000), Jews there are the subject of both distinctly strong positive and negative views. The presence of these attitudes is astounding not only because most of those who hold them have never come across a Jew, but also because the region misses most of the ‘classical’ motives for either philosemitism or antisemitism. An analysis of contemporary attitudes towards Jews in China, Japan and South Korea, including reactions to the still ongoing Israel–Hamas war, reveals that the distinctions between antisemitism and philosemitism are more blurred and nuanced than is often acknowledged. In East Asia, these two attitudes tend to reflect similar functions, and people often express both views without being aware of their historical and religious context elsewhere. Accordingly, this study by Kowner, Ainslie and Podoler calls for a reassessment of antisemitism beyond the Christian and Islamic spheres, to address this new and changing world.

Beyond Filial Piety: Rethinking Aging and Caregiving in Contemporary East Asian Societies by Jeanne Shea, Katrina Moore and Hong Zhang (eds) (2020)

Beyond Filial Piety: Rethinking Aging and Caregiving in Contemporary East Asian Societies by Jeanne Shea, Katrina Moore and Hong Zhang (eds) (2020)

Creative Genre Matters: Trendy Drama and the Rise of the East Asian Global Media Market

The trendy drama, a new TV genre coined to signify contemporary trends, initially emerged in Japan in the 1980s and became popular with middle-class audiences across East Asia for portraying Western-like chic metropolitan lifestyles. This television genre typically consists of a 10 to 13 episode long miniseries with 60 to 90 minute episodes. Their narratives focus on love affairs between rich, attractive, hard-working elites as they question traditional Han Chinese values and consider whether women should be independent, allowed to work, have sex outside marriage, and divorce. While specifically Chinese, these values have influenced cultures across East Asia. While espousing liberal and feminist ideals, they roam from trendy stores, such as fashion clothing and cosmetic shops, to expensive restaurants, and back to their luxurious apartments. Quickly, these dramas became so associated with highlighting current global and local trends and countering tradition that they became known as “trendy dramas”. This genre quickly took off and soon thereafter, South Korea and Taiwan partnered together to create their own versions of trendy dramas that helped generate much of contemporary East Asian popular culture, including the rise of K-Pop. Based on Mittell’s claim that genres function as a means of framing mass audiences’ taste, here I explore the role of this TV genre in the context of globalization and local culture in East Asia and its effect upon reshaping social meanings during the 1980s and the early 2010s. In particular, the Taiwanese trendy dramas played a key role in elevating this genre within the Asian TV market. In this article, I argue that in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, the trendy drama became a way to debate Han cultural values and their role in the lives of liberal metropolitan Asians. In the process, this genre helped reshape the East Asian TV market along with popular culture around the globe. I will begin by describing the history of the trendy drama before focusing on how it debates traditional beliefs and considers the value and utility of feminism and individualism in contemporary urban Asia.

Constrained, competing and eking – the limits of economic statecraft in East Asia after national development

This paper highlights the highly contingent and constrained possibilities for states concerned with gaining and maintaining economic and, relatedly, strategic advantage in East Asia in a world dominated by global value chains (GVCs) owned and controlled by transnational capital. While the reorganisation of production has given rise to new contender states such as China, challenging the economic and strategic positions of others, the ability for states to engage in non-market conforming behaviour designed to reduce technological dependence, accumulate reserves and embolden national positions against competitors is far more constrained than it once was. Prioritising the relative power and leverage of states operating in various contexts over time, three types of state are identified within contemporary East Asia: former developmental states under persistent competitive pressures compelling very different policy agendas to those that underpinned their respective development stories; a somewhat exceptional constrained “aspirant state”, attempting mercantilist strategies to achieve strategic upgrading under the spectre of systemic exclusion and formidable domestic challenges; and, finally, relatively vulnerable “eke-out” competition states, attempting to leverage labour cost, geography and regulation to maintain economic relevance within the context of hyper competitiveness while also engaging in forms of quarantining and patronage. Our overarching argument is that the latitude to both pursue and leverage ES strategies common in the past is all but gone, even for the most powerful of contender states.

“Greening” Speculative Urbanism? Space Politics and Model Circulation in South Korea and Vietnam’s Special Economic Zones

As products of the waves of deregulation and liberalization of trade and investments in the region in the 1980s and mid-1990s, special economic zones (SEZs) have emerged as an important tool of economic governance in East and Southeast Asia. Recently, governments and investors around the region, have favored multi-purpose SEZs conceived for land and real estate development which exhibit several similarities such as eliciting tourism as the main driver of local development and a declared “eco” and “green” configuration. The Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ) in the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Van Don SEZ in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) are two illustrative cases of urban policy diffusion as a complex phenomenon combining the ROK’s increased international activism and SRV’s own institutional structure and preferences in terms of development goals. Based on a close reading of reports, official documents, qualitative interviews and site visits, this article will further contribute to the debate on the complexity of urban policy diffusion in contemporary East and Southeast Asia.

Using Film to Teach about Compressed Modernity in East Asian Religions

Teaching about East Asian religions all too often presents them as artifacts of the premodern past. This can encourage students to assume that modernization has rendered the East Asian past, especially religious traditions, obsolete. Teaching with contemporary East Asian films is a way to remedy that oversight, challenge that assumption, and bring students into contact with East Asian religious cultures as living traditions in modern societies. Since contemporary East Asian societies have been shaped by what Chang Kyung-sup calls “compressed modernity” – a process by which “economic, political, social and/or cultural changes occur in an extremely condensed manner in respect to both time and space,” resulting in “the dynamic coexistence of mutually disparate historical and social elements” such as modernity and tradition (Chang 2010: 320) – films that explore the interplay between such “mutually disparate… elements” can be used as highly teachable “texts” in the classroom. Examples of such films include Jia Zhangke’s Tian zhuding (2013) and Shinkai Makoto’s Kimi no na wa (2016), which juxtapose traditions such as Confucianism, Chinese popular religion, and Shintō with critical views of social reality in contemporary China and Japan, respectively. These and other films depict the ways in which religious traditions continue to inform how contemporary East Asians negotiate and construct identity, memory, and power. Moreover, they show how these countries’ contrasting experiences of compressed modernity produced different kinds of interactions between modernity and tradition, which in turn explains why religion can look so different in these countries today. This paper was part of a panel on “Teaching Asian Religions Through Film” presented at the Association for Asian Studies conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, March 24­–27, 2022. The panel offered concrete examples on how to adopt cinema and TV to discuss Asian religions, culture, and modernity in the classroom and contributed to the developing analysis concerning the use of visual media in Asian studies pedagogy.

Food History in Modern and Contemporary East Asia

Food History in Modern and Contemporary East Asia

Rethinking, Narrating, Consuming Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asia

As this special issue would not have been possible without the generosity of certain individuals during these most trying times, this modest introduction must necessarily begin with gratitude. My co-editor, Yue Zhang, and I would like to express our sincerest thanks to the tireless and gracious people behind Rupkatha. It is because of their vision and efforts that Rupkatha has become a truly global journal of interdisciplinary Humanities, a home to many ideas that challenge and extend the borders of what it means to do Humanistic research in order to all the more properly respect its integrity. We hope that this special issue that features works from and about the East and Southeast Asian regions, along with their associated diasporic communities, will contribute to the noble vision of Rupkatha. We extend our gratitude to the numerous scholars who shared their expertise as peer-reviewers and whose generosity ensured the success of this special issue. We are also very grateful to our editorial assistants Mr. John, Fong Chi Chon and Mr. Chris, Miao Chi both of whom often went above and beyond the call of duty to ensure the smooth production of this special issue. Of course, we must also thank all those scholars, both established and up-and-coming, who responded to our call for submissions. The response to this special issue could only be described as overwhelmingly robust, which is indicative of the unquestionable vigor in the field of contemporary East and Southeast Asian literary and cultural studies. Indeed, the sheer diversity of the submissions makes it a challenge to collectively introduce the essays without the risk of taking away from their inevitable multiplicity by imposing an artificial thematic unity. Thus, while the concerns of the essays included in this issue cannot be fully contained within their assigned thematic categories, and by no means should be read exclusively within such, I shall nevertheless risk grouping them based on what I conceive to be their principal critical concern—that is to say, rethinking, narrating, consuming.

The 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics and Inter-Asian Connections in South Korea

East Asian countries are historically tied to each other, and sport mega-events provide an important venue in which we can observe the contemporary and changing relations between countries and their people. This study illuminates how the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics provided concentrated exposure to encountering Asian countries and athletes in both mediated and personal ways. It examines how the PyeongChang Olympics contributed to transforming South Korea’s structures of feeling towards its neighbouring countries. By analyzing Korean news reports and online comments on the Olympics, it explores South Korea’s changing attitudes, responses, and reactions to North Korea, Japan, and China. An analysis of the media representation and online responses both configures and reflects the changing characteristics of nationalism in Korea in tandem with the growing importance of its regional connections under the influence of globalization. This study shows that the PyeongChang Olympics serves as a platform for crystallizing regional connectivity and sensitivity both in positive and negative ways. It contends that the national-regional-global frame is both useful and necessary for understanding the impacts of sport mega-events not only on the reconstituted national and regional identities of the local society and people but also on societal and political relations in contemporary East Asia.

Whisper by Chang Yu-Ko

Reviewed by: Whisper by Chang Yu-Ko Sean Guynes Chang Yu-Ko Whisper Trans. Roddy Flagg. Handforth, UK. Honford Star. 2021. 294 pages. HORROR FILMS FROM East Asia (especially South Korea and Japan) have impacted the cinematic genre for decades and made big business through both international releases and English-language remakes. East Asian horror fiction, by contrast, is almost nonexistent in the anglophone literary market. This mirrors a larger disjuncture between anglophone consumption of East Asian visual media and translation of fiction. But a few gems have appeared in recent years, including Mariko Koike’s The Graveyard Apartment (1993; Eng. 2016), Hye-Young Pyun’s The Hole (2016; Eng. 2017), and Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (1994; Eng. 2019), the tip of a wave of intense literary horror fiction that continues now with indie publisher Honford Star’s release of Taiwanese writer Chang Yu-Ko’s English-language debut, Whisper—a gruesome yet thoughtful novel of ghosts, vengeful spirits, historical mystery, extreme inequality, and violent colonial pasts. Whisper opens on a sour note, following a day in the life of husband-and-wife pair Shih-sheng and Hsiang-ying as they drudge through shitty, low-paying jobs that offer no financial security but plenty of stress. Shih-sheng drives a taxi and spends all his money on booze and cigarettes, and his free time on abusing his wife, who works multiple jobs to make ends meet. Stuck in poverty after getting into a debt cycle specific to Taiwan’s medical and legal system, the couple sets the tone for a grim exploration of economic and social inequalities that Chang explores through the stark, nonmoralizing language of realism; until the spooky stuff starts, with Hsiang-ying tortured by a voice and visions that drive her life into disrepair and ruin. Stuck with debt, guilty over abusing his wife, and depressed by his social isolation (caused by his own behavior), Shih-sheng discovers that his wife’s hallucinations were caused by a ghost—one that has killed anyone who hears it for nearly a century. Chang’s novel is a realist noir whose entirely unlikable stand-in detective pursues a historical mystery that involves his own family and the colonization of Taiwan, first by Chinese, then Japanese imperial powers, resulting in the brutal murder of Indigenous peoples like the Bunun. In addition to Shih-sheng, Chang brings in perspective characters like Hsiang-ying’s social-climbing sister, a disturbing Buddhist priestess, and a social worker, who all collide with Shih-sheng in his frantic search for answers as he too becomes pursued by the ghost. Chang draws on Taiwan’s complex internal history as well as a mix of Chinese, Japanese, and Bunun folklore, and Buddhist and Shinto beliefs, allowing Whisper to reflect on how history undergirds contemporary social and economic inequalities, quite literally haunting the present. As a horror novel, Chang elevates the already familiar realist look at the neoliberal violence of daily life in contemporary East Asia with a deft interweaving of history-telling, personal narrative, and scenes of supernatural encounter that move between the tense and the terrifying with alarming ease. Though Chang is unknown in the anglophone world, Shih-sheng’s horrendous encounter with hallucinations of a Japanese woman contorted into an insect-like monstrosity, hanging on ceilings and pursuing him through the woods, will impress even diehard readers of the genre. Few authors are able to do so much with such a short novel, and to do justice to all the generic and critical elements at play (though I do think Chang’s B-plot about Chen-shan was rather weak). Not much scares me, but Whisper gave me a night of restless sleep, and I’m hopeful that its success will lead to more translations of East Asian horror and a long career for author Chang Yu-Ko. Sean Guynes Michigan State University Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

A Study on the Thinking System of Contemporary East Asia

A Study on the Thinking System of Contemporary East Asia

Diverse Voices in Translation Studies in East Asia – Nana Sato-Rossberg & Akiko Uchiyama (eds)

Diverse Voices in Translation Studies in East Asia is the 27th volume in the Peter Lang series New Trends in Translation Studies. While each chapter in Diverse Voices in Translation Studies in East Asia independently bears fruit to the particular facet of translation studies that it examines, as a whole this edited volume reads as one sweeping encapsulation of contemporary East Asian translation studies that demonstrates the depth and potential of the field. It engages [...]

Sungmoon Kim’s Democracy After Virtue

Sungmoon Kim’s <i>Democracy After Virtue</i>

Democracy After Virtueand the Circumstances of Modern Politics

<i>Democracy After Virtue</i>and the Circumstances of Modern Politics