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This excerpt, written in 1920 by a then seventeen-year-old girl, Yu Kwansun, while imprisoned at Seodaemun Prison, is a powerful expression of Korean national resistance against Japanese colonialism. As a student at Ehwa Haktang in Seoul, Korea, she joined other protesters on March 1, 1919, shouting "Mansei!" ("Long live Korean independence!"), which became the first nationwide protest movement against Japanese rule. After being convicted of sedition, Yu was sent to Seodaemun Prison in Seoul, where she demanded the release of other prisoners and continued to express her support for Korean independence, even organizing a large-scale protest on the first anniversary of the movement. She was transferred to an underground cell, where she was repeatedly beaten and tortured for speaking out. She reportedly wrote the excerpt above before dying of her injuries on September 28, 1920, at the age of seventeen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the Japanese colonial period, Korea's reading public paid close attention to Chinese revolutions against Japanese and Western empires. Korean nationalists viewed China's revolutionary struggles as important for liberating Korea from Japan, a stance that reveals a transnational basis of Korean nationalism in the colonial era. One such nationalist was Sin Ŏnjun (1904–38), Tong'a Ilbo 's Shanghai-based correspondent, who played a critical role in conveying the momentous events in contemporary China to colonized Koreans. Drawing on Sin's example, this article shows how Sino-Korean transnationalism constituted Korea's left-wing, progressive nationalism in the 1930s. Although Sin Ŏnjun was a nationalist rather than a communist, he highlighted the communist struggles in China in his dispatches. He saw communism as the only viable way of solving China's internal and external problems, although he, at the same time, disapproved of Chinese communists' "terrorist methods." This article argues that this position also reflected his stance in favor of a broad communist-nationalist alliance in the Korean independence movement. He saw Korea's liberation agenda as closely related to the revolutionary events in China, thus accomplishing a synthesis between Korean nationalistic and social aspirations and an East Asia–wide transnational paradigm of a universal emancipatory struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2003, the dispute over the history of the ancient kingdom of Koguryŏ (37 bce, trad.-668 ce), located in Manchuria and northern Korea, has been one of the hottest issues between China and Korea. The debate seems to have fueled a new nationalistic or Sinocentric historiography of the ancient Chinese northeast. A ninth century BCE poem called “Hanyi” in the Classic of Poetry [Shijing] has been the cause of a far older history dispute. Whereas Chinese scholars have generally understood Han as a Zhou feudal state ruled by a Ji-surnamed scion of the Zhou Dynasty (1045–256 bce), most Korean scholars have linked the polity with Old Chosŏn (n.d.-108 bce), the earliest known state in Korean history. However, by comparing the “Hanyi” with several bronze inscriptions with similar contents, this study seeks to re-read the “Hanyi” from a perspective that transcends the dichotomy of Chinese history versus Korean history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the transnational appeal of the Korean folk song "Arirang" in the cultural and political strains of the colonial encounter between Korea and Japan. The author believes the status of the song as an emblem of Korean national identity depended on Japanese imperialism and mass culture. Koreans believe the song expressed sorrow, indignation and resistance in the face of subjugation. However, for the Japanese, the song revealed truths about the abandonment of traditional lifeways in Japan.