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By examining the widespread enthusiasm for education during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945), this article sets out to contribute to historiography on so-called 'education fever' (kyoyungyol), which so far has largely concentrated on researching the period after 1945. In the 1920s and 1930s the term was used to describe a multifaceted phenomenon that was driven by a striving for upward social mobility and the idea of national self-strengthening. Based on a wide range of sources including newspapers and journals, official documents as well as missionary reports, the article argues that 'education fever' was, on the one hand, closely linked to Korean nationalism, whose proponents made frequent recourse to the ubiquitous phenomenon in order to strengthen Korean political power through education. On the other hand, despite efforts to restrict school access, colonial authorities to a certain degree were forced to respond to these demands for education, highlighting Korean agency in the process.

Efforts have been made among scholars from Japan, South Korea, and China since the 1980s--on both private and state initiatives--to narrow the gaps in their historiographies and to cultivate mutual understanding. This article offers an extensive discussion of the author's history project, "A Student Project of Writing a Common History Textbook," which which was incorporated in a multinational class environment in the Spring 2019 semester. First the author explains the development of the conceptual framework and the organization and management of the class. Then, some of the history teaching materials that the students created is introduced. Finally, the author examines what the students actually learned from this exercise and working with their group members, based on their journals and answers to the project survey. The author would argue that this was a success in promoting mutual understanding among students by having them learn history together from various points of view, as the goal was not a complete reconciliation of their historical viewpoints. Young people from different countries, even those from the countries embroiled in politico-historical controversies, are able to learn from one another to create more complex historical narratives that look beyond competing nationalisms. The results of the course confirm the value of teaching history from a global standpoint and hold promise that if adopted widely, it might have a long-term and larger, positive effect on society and even on international relations by producing globally competent future generations.

This paper investigates the differentiated educational ideologies projected during the Japanese colonial era by comparing the Japanese language textbooks used by Korean and Japanese primary students at that time. By comparing the texts and images in "Kokugotokuhon" (Japanese language textbooks for Korean students) and "Shougakutokuhon" (Japanese language textbooks for Japanese students) with critical discourse analysis (CDA) in analysis of texts and visual image analysis (VIA) for images, this paper verifies the differentiated educational ideologies that Japanese colonial authorities presented to Korean students. There were three findings that were featured in the Japanese language textbooks for Korean students that were absent from the textbooks for Japanese students. Firstly, depictions of physical labour and helping parents after school and late at night were present only in the textbooks for Koreans. Secondly, Japanese nationalism with an Emperor-centred ideology was emphasised in the Japanese language textbooks used by Koreans. Thirdly, the textbooks encouraged Korean students to practise war-like games and drills. The results from this study suggest that differentiated education was provided to Korean students during the Japanese colonial era via the contents of the Japanese language textbooks, which projected the colonial ideologies of the Japanese government. Korean students were being educated to become Japanese colonial subjects.

The term 'publicness' is a keyword to explain the creation of a people in the history of modern education in Korea in which the relationship between the ruled and the ruling power rapidly changed from the perspective of continuity and discontinuity. In Korea, the term has been commonly used in three different contexts, and its meanings have changed since the 1894 Gabo Reform, the first reform for the modernization of Korea. Even when the ruling power changed in 1910 with Japanese colonialism, the ruling class took the meaning of publicness as a governing institution (??? ???), which had a very weak sense of publicness as an ethical principle of fairness (Gong [?]) or as public benefit and opinion (Gong [?]). In contrast, the resisting power, which was fully established throughout the colonial era from 1910 to 1945, lacked the sense of publicness as a ruling institution, but embraced the two other concepts of publicness. This historical experience of the competing concepts of publicness materialized into the creation of a modern people through law and education even in the post-colonial period of modern Korea. Generally speaking though, the creation of a modern people in Korea has been strongly affected by the concept of publicness as a ruling institution through a nationalist education.

Informed by recurring international controversies, this study explores representations of the Second World War as official history in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean secondary-level textbooks and theorizes about how they influence and function as collective memories about this time period. Using grounded theory, it finds that the examined Japanese textbooks tend to present the Second World War in chronological order with a passive voice and avoid discussing why the war occurred and how it ended. The examined Chinese textbooks develop narratives in chronological order as well, but thematic units are structured to highlight the coalition of Mao's Communist Party and Chang Kai-Shek's Nationalists as the decisive factor in the victory against Japanese imperialists contributing to the worldwide fight against fascism. The examined Korean textbooks tend toward a single, patriotic perspective of a people that overcame Japanese colonialism and developed as an independent nation, often ignoring issues that complicated the relationship between the two nations.

In the last two decades, the issue of comfort women--the women and girls who were forced into sex slavery for the Japanese army before and during WWII--has risen to global attention. Tens of thousands of comfort women (the average estimate is anywhere between 80,000 and 200,000) were confined at comfort stations managed by the Japanese Imperial Army throughout the Asian Pacific. The vast majority (an estimated 80% to 90%) of these women were from Korea, the closest Japanese colony at the time, though they were also from China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and throughout Southeast Asia. Memorials and dedications have cropped up everywhere outside of Asia, including, in the United States alone, Glendale, California; Fairfax, Virginia; Southfield, Michigan; and Union City, New Jersey. In Winnipeg, the recorded testimony of comfort woman survivor Lola Fidencia David (''Lola Fidencia David Breaks the Silence'' 2013) when she visited in October 2013 will be part of the oral history collection at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR). Starting with the accounts of this visit sponsored by the CMHR, this article recounts the recent history of how the issue of comfort women has risen to global prominence and come to be a persuasive emblem of human rights. The comfort women movement, originally rooted in a deep and specific anticolonial activism dedicated to demanding legal redress from Japan, has morphed into a global women's and human rights agenda based on testimony, sympathy, and remembrance. This article considers what has been lost and gained in this shift, as well as its consequences for an ever-expanding human rights industry. It is divided into three parts. First, the author recounts details of the CMHR event in October 2013 and provides an overview of comfort woman testimonies, including the narrative and political constraints within the presentation of this history. Second, she traces the 20-year-old grassroots activism movement within Korea regarding military sexual slavery, and how this became subsumed under a global women's and human rights discourse. Lastly, she concludes with a comparison of comfort women's art to a Park Gun-Oong (2013) cartoon to argue for how distance and anonymity may be more strategic and ethical ways of caring for difficult knowledge than commemoration and memorialization in what Erika Doss (2013) refers to as the current era of ''memorial mania.''

The paper reviews Asia-Pacific higher education and university research, focusing principally on the "Confucian" education nations Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong China, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam. Except for Vietnam, these systems exhibit a special developmental dynamism--still playing out everywhere except Japan--and have created a distinctive model of higher education more effective in some respects than systems in North America, the English-speaking world and Europe where the modern university was incubated. The Confucian Model rests on four interdependent elements: (1) strong nation-state shaping of structures, funding and priorities; (2) a tendency to universal tertiary participation, partly financed by growing levels of household funding of tuition, sustained by a private duty, grounded in Confucian values, to invest in education; (3) "one chance" national examinations that mediate social competition and university hierarchy and focus family commitments to education; (4) accelerated public investment in research and "world-class" universities. The Model has downsides for social equity in participation, and in the potential for state interference in executive autonomy and academic creativity. But together with economic growth amid low tax regimes, the Confucian Model enables these systems to move forward rapidly and simultaneously in relation to each and all of mass tertiary participation, university quality, and research quantity and quality.

This article reports on an ethnographic case study that explored how Chinese learners' national identities were displayed and reconstructed through their English language-learning journeys in Britain. Drawing on a variety of sources (ethnographic observations, informal conversations, diaries, and narrative interviews), the analysis focuses on the Chinese learners' raising self-awareness of being Chinese and their attitudes towards Japanese students, South Korean students, and students from Taiwan. This study found that during their English language learning journeys in Britain, the Chinese learners tended to affirm and often displayed their membership with respect to China and Chinese national imagination, which contributed to heightened senses of Chinese national identity and increased patriotism. At the same time, the experience of interacting with Japanese students, South Korean students, and students from Taiwan encouraged the Chinese learners to question and critically reexamine their own attitudes and values related to their national identities. Then, the elements that made up an individual's Chinese national identity were brought under scrutiny and negotiation. Implications for classroom practices are also discussed.

The Christian missionary movement is a kind of global movement that aims to evangelize the whole world; hence the concept of globalization can be useful for the study of Christianity as a worldwide movement. However, recent studies have suggested another equally important concept: the process of localization, which runs parallel to the process of globalization. Hence, the present paper attempts to take Christian higher education as a case study and tries to reveal a better picture of the interplay between the processes of globalization and localization. An attempt was made to compare the sociopolitical contexts in three Northeast Asian countries, namely China, Japan, and Korea, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to see how Christian higher education had responded to the issue of nationalism in these countries. It was found that Christian higher education in the three countries played very different roles when they were encountering different situations, and they had come to different fates in the three countries under study.

The Han sphere, including Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China, adopted Han characters and classical Han writing as the official written language before the 20th century. However, great changes came with the advent of the 20th century. After World War II, Han characters in Vietnam and Korea were officially replaced by the romanised "Chu Quoc Ngu" and phonemic Hangul, respectively. In Japan, the number of Han characters in use decreased, and the syllabic "Kana" system was promoted to a national status. In Taiwan, although Taiwanese romanisation was developed centuries ago, Han characters remain the dominant orthography in current Taiwanese society. This paper examines Taiwan's orthographic transition from the perspective of the Han sphere. Both internal and external factors have contributed to the different outcomes of orthographic reform in these countries. Internal factors include the general public's demand for literacy and anti-feudal hierarchy. External factors include the political relationships between these countries and the origin of Han characters (i.e. China). (Contains 5 notes.)

Existing theories of international relations have failed to interpret the hostile relations between Korea and Japan due to their Cartesian assumptions about the nature of national sovereignty and identity. Such theories view the hostilities between the two states as the result of incorrect policies or unhealthy interactions between domestic norms and foreign policies, because they believe that there are few negative structural elements between Japan and Korea. This study suggests an alternative explanation by utilising the worldview of East Asian medicine. By interpreting the formation of the Japanese and Korean national identities from the late nineteenth century and by viewing the hostility between the two states not as evidence of 'malfunctioning' inter-state relations but as a core element of their national identities, this study proposes an alternative understanding of 'problem-solving' with respect to Korea–Japan relations that is directed towards healing their relations with a long-term perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the complicated nature of the citizenship of ethnic return migrants from Japan and Korea, Nikkeijin and Joseonjok. It aims to contribute to the scholarship by demonstrating that racism and nationalism are layered concepts by examining the reasons why Nikkeijin and Joseonjok enjoy preferential treatment to some extent but at the same time become targets of discrimination in Korea and Japan. I draw on Christian Joppke's position that citizenship is composed not only of legal status but also of social and identity elements and utilize two relatively novel concepts that shed new light on the complex nature of Nikkeijin and Joseonjok citizenship. One is Takeyuki Tsuda's concept of ethnoracism, which helps capture the type of racism aimed at groups that are not racially distinct but whose ostensible background differences are essentialized as inferior. The other is Gil-Soo Han's nouveau-riche nationalism, which argues that migrants are evaluated according to the global and developmental status of their country of origin. This comparative analysis helps demonstrate how the lives of Joseonjok and Nikkeijin are shaped by multiple layers of nationalism, racism, and status perceptions in their respective countries of residence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Books containing hate speech against Koreans and the Chinese have become a common sight in Japan's bookshops. The publication of 'hate books' has increased in tandem with the struggles of the publishing industry and the deterioration of Japan's relations with South Korea and China. This article seeks to explain the causes of Japan's hate book phenomenon, with a particular focus on books targeting Koreans. While South Korean researchers have mainly identified rising nationalism in Japan as the key factor, Japanese analysts label peculiarities in the Japanese publishing industry as the main cause of hate books. We argue that both these explanations are necessary but ultimately insufficient because they ignore each other's key findings. We propose a synthesized explanation that takes account of both the role of nationalism in creating demand and the unique structure of the Japanese publishing industry, which tends to incentivize the supply of hate books. The article also shows that nationalism only translates into hate book demand in times of diplomatic crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ongoing debate over "comfort women" memorials, especially one statue known as the Statue of Peace. Whereas Japanese ultranationalists and their foreign collaborators attack "comfort women" memorials for tarnishing Japan's reputation and spreading historical falsities, progressive scholars sympathetic to "comfort women" victims criticize these memorials for reinforcing female chastity and anti-Japanese nationalism. Examining these varying responses to "comfort women" memorials across the Pacific, this article analyzes how Japanese ultranationalism, anti-Japanese Korean nationalism, US imperialism, and transnational feminism collide in the representation of "comfort women." By pointing out the significance and limitations of "comfort women" memorials, this article concludes with a discussion of how socially engaged memorials can serve as critical sites for building transnational feminist coalitions in shared struggle against both wartime violence and postwar amnesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent colonial compensation lawsuits reflect the metamorphosis of historical grievances in collective public memory into tort claims in private law. This article provides a synthetic view of the nexus of colonial law and history in South Korea–Japan relations, focusing on cross-border litigation brought by former forced laborers and victims of sexual servitude known as "comfort women" during World War II. The concept of public policy (ordre public) in Korea, which has colonial origins, has long served law courts as the standard for deciding the validity of a juristic act. But of late heavy reliance on the general clauses of law in legal proceedings has risked turning history and law into handmaids of national spirit, muddling historical accountability and legal liability. Improvement of South Korea–Japan ties should start from a more accurate understanding of colonial laws and a rounded appreciation of their shared legal history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiculturalism has been a relatively recent trend in Korea and Japan. Since the 1990s, both countries have been witnessing a rising influx of immigrants, the majority of whom were labor migrants and marriage migrants. Labor migrants have been accepted only as temporary residents. Contrary to this, marriage migrants have been seen as permanent residents, who need to integrate into the family and society. Both the Korean and Japanese governments have been providing them with relatively easy access to permanent residency and naturalization. Despite this effort, marriage migrants experience legal vulnerability, and they experience prejudice and discrimination with their families and society. This problem, even though highlighted by politicians and academics, has been persisting in society, and it has usually been researched as a policy problem or phenomenon that happens independently of its societal surroundings. However, because unequal treatment of migrants is related to social conditions as well as legal and policy issues, this study approaches the problem by examining marriage migrants' citizenship on three levels: legal, social, and identity. The study elaborates the causes behind their mistreatment through national identity and related nationalism. Both Korea and Japan possess an ethnic sense of belonging; they are perceived as ethnically homogeneous, monocultural nations. Therefore, the integration of ethnically different migrants presents a significant challenge. Ethnic nationalism in both countries manifests also in its subform, nouveau‐riche nationalism. It is responsible for deep‐seated beliefs in cultural superiority and evaluating people based on their country of origin and skin color. The study demonstrates the impact of ethnic nationalism on the legal level of citizenship in both countries and elaborates that this impact has been more restrictive in Japan than in Korea. Furthermore, nouveau‐riche nationalism is shown to have a negative impact on the social and identity levels of citizenship in both counties, whereas in Japan social stigma and prejudices are shown to be more serious than in Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to the Japanese Foreign Ministry's claim that Koreans never demonstrated any clear basis for its claims that it had taken effective control over Dokdo (Takeshima) before 1905, the Ministry ignores the critical role of the Korean media, especially major Korean newspapers such as the Hwangsŏng Newspaper and Dongnip Sinmun (Independent), in publicizing and mobilizing Korean nationalism through a sustained assertion of Korean sovereignty over Dokdo. By publishing articles which officially denounced Japanese intrusion into Dokdo or the Japanese government's feigned ignorance and disregard for such an act, or articles which explicitly discussed the long history of Korea's recognition of Dokdo and Ulleungdo as her nascent territories, Korean newspapers not only expressed Korean nationalism by incorporating anti-Japanese sentiment. They also emphasized Korea's ancient consciousness of national unity by clearly declaring that at the heart of such nationalism and rhetoric was a strong identification of Dokdo and Ulleungdo as Korea's historic territories. Korean newspapers were instrumental in publicizing Korean consciousness about Dokdo and Ulleungdo by not only reporting on Japanese intrusions into Dokdo, educating the Korean public on the ancient history of Dokdo and Ulleungdo, but also serve as crucial evidence proving that Japan willfully ignored Korea's national sovereignty and judicial authority to wrest away Korean sovereignty over Dokdo and Ulleungdo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

As in much of the world, the Coronovirus pandemic has dominated South Korean politics in 2020. Compared to other countries, Seoul's approach has been highly nationalist and politicized, as the ruling party lauded its pandemic response as the global standard and linked it to a larger, leftist-nationalist agenda. This "pandemic-leftist" discourse peaked around the April 15 midterm elections, but subsided the following month, as domestic and foreign setbacks arose. To explain, firstly, a competitive-nationalist race to flatten the infection curve encouraged the government to infringe on the civil liberties of infected patients, and society to stigmatize them. Other countries contained Covid-19 without such rights violations and stigma. Secondly, critics distinguished between the government's relative success in pandemic response and its general failures in economic and foreign policies. Instead of asking other countries to learn from one's country, each country would do well to learn from the experiences of others and to continually improve its own policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do countries with a history of conflict and colonialism overcome animosity? Despite thick economic interdependence and societal contact, problems of memory remains in Northeast Asia, as negative images spawning from past interactions continue to inhibit improvement in perceptions of other states. Riots exhibit anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea, Japan is taking an increasingly conservative hardline, and with a rising China, the chronic antagonism in the region could take a turn for the worse. We borrow from the social-psychological theory of group-affirmation and apply it to an international context to hypothesize that reflecting upon pride of national membership can improve perceptions toward others. Utilizing survey data collected during 2007 to 2012 from 7200 South Koreans, we find that group members who reported to be prouder to be Korean held more positive perceptions of other countries as a potential ally to cooperate with. The implications of the study propose a more realistic route to cooperation than an erosion of national identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper joins the debate on Japan's territorial dispute with South Korea over the Dokdo/Takeshima islets. Informed by the ontological security framework of analysis, this paper seeks to explain the decision to adopt the ‘Takeshima Day’ ordinance by the Shimane Prefectural Assembly and the subsequent ascendance of ‘Takeshima’ to the fore of Japan's identity construction vis-à-vis the Korean ‘other’. In this paper, I distinguish between two processes: one that led to the adoption of the ordinance and another that resulted in the entrenchment of ‘Takeshima’ in Japan's identity construction vis-à-vis the Korean ‘other’. The paper argues that the former process should be understood within the context of Shimane Prefecture's distinct identity construction vis-à-vis Tokyo, while the latter can be attributed to recent changes in Japan–Korea relations unrelated to the territorial dispute per se. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the 2002 FIFA World Cup, staged in South Korea and Japan, the Red Devils, the supporters of the South Korean football team, made headlines around the world. Taking to the streets in huge numbers—most estimates suggest 7 million people took part in the celebrations over the course of the tournament— they displayed fervor and a sense of unity that commentators found unprecedented. This phenomenon went beyond the physical borders of Korea, moreover, as diasporic Korean communities from Toronto to London celebrated in a similar fashion. Taking seriously the claims of diaspora studies, which seek to understand the relationship of national (and other) identities in transnational context, this study investigates the experiences of Korean and Korean Canadian participants in the Red Devils cheering. Two Koreans and two Korean Canadians participated in semistructured, open-ended interviews designed to understand the meaning of their participation in these events. The major themes that emerged from the interviews include the importance of understanding the cheering in the context of Korea’s colonial history, the importance of a sense of belonging and the traditional “we” culture, and the need for catharsis after economically challenging times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In March 2005, riots erupted in South Korea against Japan in reaction to Japan's claims of sovereignty over some rocky uninhabited islets (0.23 km2). What explains the moral outrage against Japan, the severity of which could have erupted into a military conflict? Such outrage is a puzzle for two reasons. First, the probability that South Korea could defeat Japan is nil, especially since the US-Japan alliance dominates the US-South Korean alliance. Second, even if the probability of defeating Japan was 100%, the net benefit of conflict was apparently negative - given the meager potential reward vis-à-vis the cost of war. This article offers a rational choice model that demonstrates that the moral outrage cannot be explained as a strategic threat. The analysis demonstrates that sociological and evolutionary game explanations are also unconvincing. This calls for an evaluation of how emotions relate to rational choice in international conflicts. [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]

The article discusses the disputes between Northeast Asian countries, particularly South Korea, China and Japan as seen in the changes in descriptions of history in Japanese textbooks, among others. It cites that the publication of the second report of the Japan-Republic of Korea (ROK) Joint History Research Committee showed the animosity between the two parties. It also presents the studies on the historical perceptions in each country, and the rise of Japanese nationalism.

The advent of post-Cold War order, growing economic interdependence and dense social and cultural networks have greatly facilitated South Korea's bilateral ties with China and Japan since the early 1990s; however, disputes over the history and territory have recently strained such ties. Whereas Japan's renewed territorial claim over Dokdo Island, its distortion of history textbooks and Koizumi's tribute to the Yasukuni Shrine dealt a critical blow to Seoul-Tokyo relations, China's Northeast Project, which claims Korea's ancient kingdom of Goguryeo as a Chinese peripheral local government, provoked widespread anti-Chinese sentiments in South Korea. Nevertheless, South Korea's nationalist responses were not uniform. Seoul responded to Tokyo in a much tougher manner with profound diplomatic implications, whereas public outcry over China did not escalate into any specific retaliatory actions. This article argues that such variation can be explained by the dynamic interplay of issue-character, domestic political terrain involving public opinion and leadership perception and feedback from political leadership in China and Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the divergent approaches pursued by Japan and South Korea in their attempts to resolve an issue that is related to a fundamental responsibility of sovereign states: the protection of citizens. The case considered here is North Korea's abduction of Japanese and South Korean nationals. In Japan, the abduction issue has taken center stage in the country's North Korea policy, whereas in South Korea, recent administrations have downplayed the issue—despite the fact that nearly 500 South Korean citizens remain detained in North Korea, compared to fewer than 20 known Japanese abductions. The authors find that the key to understanding the divergent responses lies in the politicization of specific, ostensibly apolitical demands for the state to fulfill its duty to protect citizens. In particular, the proximity of the abductions issue to key nationalist themes, which politicians in each country use to mobilize support, prevents the matter from being addressed in a neutral way. [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 focuses on the study which examines the ethnic nationalism and political community in Japan and Korea. The study reveals a substantial assymmetry in the sense that both Japanese and South Korean state authorities react to the issue of voting rights. Japan respond to the said challenge by resorting to arguments grounded in the ethnic perspective of political belonging. Despite occasional references to ethno-cultural questions, the reluctance of the state to enfranchise its overseas citizens is greater in South Korea. It is suggested that even in modern democracies characterised, it is noted in the study that there may be an overlap between the manner national and political communities are delineated.

The article discusses defense ownership and the different campaigns for ownership in the security policies of South Korea and Japan. Defense ownership is defined as the possession of military assets necessary for national and international security. The ownership campaign of South Korea focuses on national autonomy while Japan emphasizes international reputation. It is stated that the ownership campaigns of the two countries can be understood within the context of national identity issues.