Search

The Golden Age of South Korean cinema was served a healthy dose of social realism soon after the April Revolution of 1960 with such outstanding films as Kang Dae-jin’s Mr. Park and A Coachm...

Since its humble beginnings about three decades ago, South Korea’s national hip hop scene (gukhip) has grown to a formidable industry that runs the gamut from cutting-edge underground artists to mainstream K-pop idol rappers. In recent years, the cable TV audition programme Show Me the Money (SMTM) has become the gukhip industry’s ultimate gatekeeper as many aspiring hip hop artists increasingly depend on making it on the show to advance their careers. In this article, we focus on XXX, an underground hip hop duo who bucks this commercial trend of gukhip in both sound and message. Their noise-filled beats and shifting grooves echo the avant garde aesthetics and confrontational attitudes of industrial music, and their words are harshly critical of the money-driven gukhip culture as represented by SMTM. We provide a musicological analysis of XXX’s own version of industrial hip hop and examine what makes their “outsider” status sustainable vis-à-vis the gukhip industry.

The rise of Asian ODA donors - Japan, South Korea, China - and their divergence from traditional western donors put forward the question if a distinct Asian-style development cooperation is in the making. In this paper, we attempt to characterize the emergent Asian-style ODA based on donors’ own development experiences and assess its effectiveness in terms of fostering “true” ownership of development partners. One particular case, South Korea’s Knowledge Sharing Program to Vietnam, will illuminate the theoretical issues and practical challenges of the Asian-style ODA, which tends to avoid “political interference” while trying to increase capacities of development partners.

불과 30년 전 대규모 도시개발을 통해 탄생한 신흥 중산층 주거지역이 최근에서야 젠트리피케이션을 겪고 있다는 말은 어불성설이 아닌가? 이는 서양의 도시화 경험에 근거한 젠트리피케이션 개념의 외연을 확장하고 그 역사적 단계론을 해체 및 재구성함으로써만 어느 정도 의미가 통하게 된다. 즉 1960년대 말부터 개시된 강남 개발을 국가 주도형 ‘신개발’ 젠트리피케이션으로, 그리고 1997년 IMF 경제위기 이후 사적 자본이 주도한 아파트 재건축 및 초고층 주상복합 건설을 초(super-)젠트리피케이션으로 본다면, 강남에는 이른바 젠트리피케이션의 제 2파, 제 3파가 먼저 도착한 셈이다. 제 1파인 고전적 형태의 젠트리피케이션은 부동산 투기의 광풍이 휩쓸고간 일률적인 고층 아파트 단지의 틈새 공간으로 새로운 스타일의 보헤미안, 코스모폴리탄 문화를 추구하는 ‘창의적’ 자영업자 및 문화생산자들이 스며 들어온 일종의 역조현상으로 나타났다. 따라서 강남은 공간적 전치(spatial displacement)보다는 시간적 전이(temporal displacement)라는 측면에서 독특한 젠트리피케이션의 사례들을 낳았는데, 대표적인 것이 신사동의 가로수길과 방배동의 사이길이다.

Inhibitory activities of monocyclic nitroimidazoles against Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) deazaflavin-dependent nitroreductase (DDN) were modeled by using docking, pharmacophore alignment and comparative molecular similarity indices analysis (CoMSIA) methods. A statistically significant model obtained from CoMSIA was established based on a training set using pharmacophore-based molecular alignment. The leave-one out cross-validation correlation coefficients q2 (CoMSIA) were 0.681. The CoMSIA model had a good correlation (r2(pred)/CoMSIA = 0.611) between the predicted and experimental activities against excluded test sets. The generated model suggests that electrostatic, hydrophobic and hydrogen bonding interactions all play important roles for interaction between ligands and receptors. The predicted cell wall permeability (logP(app)) for substrates with high inhibitory activity against Mtb were investigated. The distribution coefficient (logD) range was 2.41 < logD < 2.89 for the Mtb cell wall membrane permeability. The larger the polar surface area is, the better the permeability is. A larger radius of gyration (rgry) and a small fraction of rotatable bonds (f(rtob)) of these molecules leads to higher cell wall penetration ability. The information obtained from the in silico tools might be useful in the design of more potent compounds that are active against Mtb.

The LGBT movement in Korea may have a relatively short history dating back to the mid-1990s, yet Korean queer cinema has had a unique role in breaking ground in the LGBT realm well before the onset of social activism. We break down the history of Korean queer cinema into three distinct chronological periods, according to the manner in which queer content is displayed and the reception of the films by both the government authorities and the public: the Invisible Age (1976–1998), the Camouflage Age (1998–2005), the Blockbuster Age (2005–present). The Invisible Age could reach as far back as the earliest days of Korean cinema, but two landmark films deserve attention: Ascetic and Broken Branches. The former in particular characterizes the period when its lesbianism was too invisible in the eyes of the public to create much of an impact. Even with the relaxed ‘ethical standards’ since 1998, homosexuality was still deemed too explosive. In the Age of Camouflage, therefore, such popular films as Memento Mori and Bungee Jumping of Their Own masked their homosexual content with horror and romance fantasies. The mega-success of The King and the Clown has proven that LGBT-themed films can compete in the box office, opening the Blockbuster Age of queer cinema. While the ‘flower boy’ formula of beautiful gay character in The King and the Clown has been widely adopted by the mainstream film and entertainment industries, No Regret exemplifies a genre-bending strategy to express queer sexualities in Korean independent cinema.

Like any other genre of Western popular music in the postwar period, rock was introduced to South Korea via the U.S. Armed Forces, a powerful symbol of postwar American hegemony. Until the late 1960s the U.S. military camp shows, clubs, and radio broadcast remained the main source of Western pop, providing opportunities for Korean musicians to hone their skills and enrich their repertoire. While this might be seen as a classic example of cultural imperialism, it actually developed a much more complex pattern of glocalization, especially in the case of rock music. The Korean appropriation of rock—which we refer to as “rok”—unfolded new sensibilities of the youth counterculture, mounting a considerable challenge to the conservative, militaristic nationalism of the Park Chung Hee regime. The supremely talented guitarist and composer Shin Joong Hyun and his band, the Add Four, led the way from the U.S. military base to the Korean audience in 1964, along with their rivals, the Key Boys. Other Korean rock bands, then known as the “group sounds,” followed suit. Group-sound rok flourished in the live music salons, outdoor festivals, and go-go dance clubs, captivating the youth in the 1960s and 1970s. As the authoritarian regime started noticing and clamping down on the “threat” of the youth culture, Shin Joong Hyun and other group-sound musicians were making a breakthrough in the mainstream popular culture. In 1975 the regime banned and censored Shin and other musicians, criminalizing the youth culture. In analyzing what sparked off this monumental culture clash, we find that rok's reimagination of nation as a community of peace and love caused the harsh reaction from the regime, whose doctrine of “national culture” was heavily influenced by the militaristic vision of the Japanese Empire.

Some ten years ago, a group of graduate students in South Korea started reading ‘canons’ of popular music studies, such as those by Simon Frith, Iain Chambers, Keith Negus, Tony Mitchell, and Roy Shuker, among others. No formal discipline, be it music, communication, sociology or economics, embraced the group with open arms. Its members did not even know of the existence of IASPM until a few years later. Being ‘local’ without global connection, at the margins of academia in the periphery of Anglo-American cultural/intellectual centres, was an uneasy position to say the least.

Various polypyrrole/titania hybrids were prepared using different synthetic methods including sol–gel processes. Their structures, morphology, and electrochemical behavior were examined in terms of their potential applications to organic solar cells. Four methods were used to prepare the hybrids. The photovoltaic cells, which were fabricated by sandwiching the hybrids between ITO and a low work-function metal, were examined for their current–voltage characteristics as well as their power conversion efficiency. The photoelectric conversion efficiencies were observed to increase in proportion to the polypyrrole content of the hybrids and the interfacial area between the electron donor and acceptor bulk heterojunction.

Carbon aerogels were prepared by pyrolyzing resorcinol and formaldehyde polycondensates, which were obtained in aerogel form by supercritical drying with carbon dioxide. Polypyrrole was impregnated into the carbon aerogels to prepare the carbon/polypyrrole nanocomposites, in which the pyrrole had penetrated the micropores of the carbon aerogels under a reduced pressure and then was polymerized by chemical oxidation. The carbon aerogels were tested for applications as electron-accepting materials in organic photovoltaic devices. The carbon/polypyrrole nanocomposite samples were controlled by varying the molar ratio of the monomers, conditions for gellation, drying methods, and pyrrole content in dichloromethane. Diverse photovoltaic cells were fabricated using this carbon/polypyrrole bulk heterojunction and their photovoltaic properties were analyzed.

This study attempts to build a causal model of attitudes towards the welfare state in Japan and to compare it to those of Germany, Sweden and the U.S., which represent conservative, socialist, and liberal welfare regime respectively. The effect of political preferences on attitudes towards the welfare state is the focus of the comparison. The basic premise of this comparison is that welfare attitudes vary across countries, bearing the characteristics of the given welfare regime that they belong to. Structural equation modeling and path analysis are conducted on a large-scale international survey dataset, ISSP 1996. Each country is first analyzed separately, and then all four countries are compared to each other. The single-country analysis reveals the cross-national diversity of welfare attitudes, while the effect of political preferences on the welfare attitudes exhibits a bifurcate pattern: in Sweden and the U.S. it is quite strong, relatively weak in Germany, and not even statistically significant in Japan. The comparative analysis further confirms this pattern. Therefore, I conclude that Japan is closest to the German conservative regime in terms of attitudes and political preferences, sharing welfare conservatism that credits the conservative party for building a welfare state.

This chapter examines the dynamic interplay between foreign aid management and capacity development of South Korea (hereinafter referred to as “Korea”) from 1945 to 1975. After its liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, Korea suffered from poverty, war, and underdevelopment during the 1950s. However, in a decade, the Korean government successfully implemented a series of long-term national development plans.1 These were national initiatives that required a high level of state capacity. As Rodriguez (2011: 28) put it, creating effective institutions and promoting bureaucratic efficiency were keys to the successful development. At the core of the Korean developmental state was the highly capable economic bureaucracy, with the Economic Planning Board (EPB) at the helm. The EPB had two critical functions — planning and budgeting — that effectively put it in charge of coordinating the work of different government ministries.

South Korea’s phenomenal economic development in the second half of the 20th century from one of the poorest “basket case” states to having an economy that can boast to being 13th in the world, has led to new global roles for the country. In January 2010, South Korea joined the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as its 24th member, signaling its growing role as a major donor of foreign aid. In November 2010, South Korea successfully hosted the first G20 Summit Meeting in Asia and introduced the development agenda. In November 2011, the fourth and final High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF-4), hosted by the OECD and the World Bank, took place in Busan, South Korea.

It has become almost a cliche within the global ODA (Official Development Assistance) community to stress South Korea’s unique position as a former aid recipient turned into an emerging donor. South Korea received foreign aid of nearly USD 13 billion over the latter half of the 20th century. In 2010 alone, however, it provided to the developing world an amount nominally equal to what it had received (although much smaller in real terms), and plans to increase its annual ODA to USD 30 billion by 2015. Not surprisingly, many developing countries show a keen interest in how South Korea achieved such a feat, and the South Korean government is eager to promote its past development experience as the distinctive strength of the “Korean ODA model.”

Background and Objectives:Vascular compliance is known to be decreased in hypertension, even at an early stage. The blood pressure response to exercise reflects the future risk of developing hypertension. A study was performed on the relationship between the vascular compliance and blood pressure response to exercise, to evaluate whether the vascular compliance is decreased in normotensive persons with a relatively higher future risk of developing hypertension. Subjects and Methods:The subjects of the study were adults with normal blood pressure (SBP