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The US media's coverage of the comfort women issue has primarily focused on three main aspects: human rights, nationalist conflict, and security. First, American newspapers and magazines asked the Japanese government to apologize to the former comfort women by revealing the misery of their lives through a discussion of human rights. However, that discussion not only reflected the East-West power imbalance, but even served to promote voyeurism and sexual fantasies. Second, following the end of the Cold War, as tensions between South Korea and Japan over the issue have escalated, US media have increasingly taken a position as middleman, indifferent to the history of these women. The US media have scolded both South Korea and Japan for their nationalistic conflict. Third, the US media began to employ a security discourse on the comfort women issue as the controversy between South Korea and Japan deteriorated to a level that threatened the interests of the United States in East Asia and disrupted the Obama administration's "Pivot to Asia" strategy. US media have played the role of midwife for the birth of the 2015 South Korea-Japan Comfort Women Agreement by shaping and disseminating a security discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Korean government announced its plan to lift the ban on the circulation of Japanese popular culture in 1998, it immediately articulated its intention to support "genuinely" domestic comic books (called manhwa in Korean) and animation in Korea. This policy move demonstrated the government's ambivalence toward the influence of Japanese manga; at the same time that the government officially encouraged cross-breeding between Japanese and Korean popular cultures and audiences, they became overly protective of Korea's domestic popular culture industry. This paper offers a critical examination of the notion of national culture or national aesthetics by looking at the official policy toward manhwa in Korea. In addition, Lee Dong-Gi's and Hyun Tae-Jun's artworks prove to be important alternatives to the notion of an authentic Korean manhwa culture. Using theories of the hybridizing process by Arjun Appadurai and Nikos Papastergiadis, I also investigate Lee Dong-Gi's Atomaus, a hybrid of Japanese Astro Boy and Disney's Mickey Mouse, as well as Hyun Tae-Jun's 2007 replicas of classic Japanese animation characters. These characters and artworks show the ambiguous state between original and copy, or national and hybrid cultural products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the pro-Japanese discourse represented in the play Kim Dong-han written by Kim Yeong-pal, who was a member of the Korean Artist Proletariat Federation (KAPF), a socialistic artists group. The historical figure Kim Dong-han (1893-1 937) had been a prominent pro-Japanese and anticom- munist political figure in colonial Manchuria, though he had spent years as a communist in the Soviet Union. An examination of the dialogue in the play reveals that the arguments for socialism and imperialism share nationalism as a common ground. In Act I, the playwright employs the discourse of nation- alism to create a binary in which Joseon is con flated with Japan, while the anticolonial guerrillas represent Soviet Russia. Though first developed in the early twentieth century as part of intellectuals' efforts to preserve Korean inde- pendence, within four decades, the concept of nationhood had been largely co- opted by Imperial Japan. In Act II, the protagonist Kim Doug-han persuades the communist leader Bi-su with "civilizational" discourse. On the one side is the abundance represented by Kim Dong-han and Manchuria, which is aligned against the poverty embodied by Bi-su and communist Russia. Such rhetoric espousing greater civilization has commonly been used by empires as ethical and universal justifications for invasion. Japan also sought to place all narir,n.c if Fa.ct Asia in this mold. thus assembling an imnerial nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The festive mass rally that took place in South Korea during the 2002 Work Cup was more than a sporting event. As a way of understanding the national frenzy and people's experiences during the World Cup, we interpret the mass festive rally as a form of social performance. In doing so, we portray this sporting event as a national stage, with Korean supporters as performers and the worldwide audience as spectators. This study uses the term "nation-ness" to encapsulate the idea of nation that links such disparate phenomena as nation, nationalism, and nationality. Through the examination of various performances within the rally, as well as of various reactions by the governmental, corporate, and public, it reveals that the spectacle contained three dimensions of performance: evolving processes, a betwixt-and-between, and everyday life. Attention to the performative aspects of the event contributes to illuminating this phenomenon as a set of evolving processes that are closely tied to contemporary South Korean society. Through analyzing South Koreans' performance in the World Cup, we suggest that nation-ness was performed as cultural practices that were utilized for individual revelation, and as expressions of nationalism interwoven with globalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comparative study that examines the different responses and social affects of Protestantism in Korea and Japan between the late nineteenth century and mid-1940s. One factor is the difference in socio-political contexts concerning political instability. Another is the contrast in the efforts of the missionaries. Lastly, the dissimilarity in the religio-cultural milieu regarding religious opposition of traditional religions and Shinto-centered unity.