Search

The history of the kingdom of Parhae (Ch. Bohai, J. Bokkai, 698-926) has been studied and debated in East Asia since the early twentieth century. Despite the scarcity of textual sources, over the past few decades, sophisticated analyses of a range of aspects of Parhae politics, society, and culture have been produced by scholars writing in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian. Only very recently, however, have significant efforts- led by Korean scholars-been made to expand the history of Parhae into English language scholarship. This article serves to place these more widely accessible contributions into the context of the international and multilingual negotiation over how the history of Parhae should be understood. Readers from other disciplines who encounter this scholarship are in effect hearing only a single speaker who in practice is engaged in a lively conversation with many participants. The present study is intended to address specifically the needs of such readers, and suggests that the emphasis on "multiculturalism" in contemporary Korean society may aid Korean scholars' engagement with international audiences on the Parhae issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study looks at how education policies in colonial Korea changed over time in order to accommodate the needs of the colonial authorities during the period of Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1910-1945). The colonial experience can be divided into four different periods according to the four Educational Ordinances issued in 1911, 1922, 1938, and 1943 by the colonial government with each period corresponding to a historic event or context. The constitutive relevance of colonial discourse for an understanding of education can be found in the gradual transformation of the education sector in Korea under colonial rule. It is evident that Japanese colonial policy was inherently contradictory in principle and in practice. On the one hand it sought the assimilation of the Koreans, while on the other it maintained its discriminatory and exploitative practices. Such contradiction was obvious within the colonial education system. As the principal instrument of assimilation, education was regarded as the primary means to subordinate the ethnic identity of the colonised and to transform them into loyal imperial subjects. An overview of the four different periods relevant to the changing circumstances to which the education sector responded reveals the social-historical implications of the instrumentality of colonial education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]