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One hundred and sixty-nine fibre samples from books in the Korean collection and 68 samples from books in the Japanese collection at the British Library were analysed. A further 15 samples of Korean paper from a private collection were also examined. The analysis confirmed that most of the papers contained mulberry species (Moraceae family) as the main papermaking material, and other materials, such as hemp, rice straw and reed, which have been commonly known as supplements to traditional Korean papermaking. However, 15 Korean papers and one Japanese paper dating betweenad 1498 and 1798 appeared to include coniferous wood fibres. This substantial find supports a previous single find of a coniferous wood fibre in Korean paper. The dates of most of these papers containing wood fibres precede the use of wood pulps in European paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what degree are historical animosities regarding another country relevant for foreign policy in the face of changes in the security environment? This paper seeks to answer this question in the context of Korea–Japan relations. While pundits have pointed to the Korean public's negative views of Japan—rooted in the colonial experience—as the explanation for the lack of cooperation between Japan and Korea in the security field, this paper argues changes in the level of common external threat can shift the public's priorities from perceived historical injustices toward the needs of security. Surveys from the period when the security environment was shifting markedly—the final years of the Cold War (1986–1990)—reveal that public opinion regarding Japan relative to other powers in the region began to deteriorate only after the security environment improved, pointing to a limit to the extent that "history" trumps security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In pre-modern Korea, paper was renowned for its white glossy surface and cloth-like strength, becoming an important item in both tributary exchanges and private trade. The unique material of the tak tree and related technical innovations, including toch'im, the repeated beating of just-produced paper that provides sizing and fulling effects, were crucial to this fame. However, the scholar-officials who integrated papermaking into the state production system in order to meet administrative and tributary needs initially made toch'im corvée and then penal labor, thereby dismissing it as simple toil. They were not alone, though, in denigrating a form of manual labor. Historiographies of modern science and technology are generally silent about such work, focusing instead on how we invented the human out of drudgery. However, papermakers in late Chosŏn Korea (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) chose to identify their artisanship with toch'im and eventually succeeded in securing recognition for that technique as a highly paid specialty. By examining this skilling of toch'im, this paper seeks to change the historiographical silence about toil. It overcomes the archival silence that accompanies manual skills by tracing toch'im's contours through its changing locations and associations in society's changing social and material networks, revealing paper artisans' social techniques, or everyday politics that eventually dignified their laborious technique. Paper artisans' changing relationships with tak barks, tools and facilities, central and local authorities, farmers, merchants, and scholar-officials reveal how such social skilling was made in late Chosŏn Korea, where papermaking became a most successful industry. This tracing of toch'im re-situates creative toil and everyday politics of artisanal hands in the interconnected transformation of social relations, craft, and knowledge practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the contextual conditions in each country, the United States, Korea, and China all have their own unique history of special education, which leads to different special education and service systems for students with special needs. The purpose of this paper is to compare the development and current status of special education in all three countries. The researchers did a comprehensive literature review primarily using the database of Academic Search Complete, in addition to national journals, published governmental reports, and official documents from Korea and China. The results of this review provide a better understanding of special education and trends in special education across all three countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Focusing on the late 1920s to the mid‐1930s, this paper determines and analyses the societal conditions and structures leading to the immiseration of Korean farmers during the colonial period. Specifically, these were the deterioration of aspects of traditional society, indebtedness, and interest rates. These led to wide‐scale smallholder bankruptcies, resulting in their transformation into landless tenants, and ultimately resulting in a bifurcation into the “haves” and the “have‐nots” in the Korean countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out to elucidate the role of Japanese Protestants in the education of Koreans during the early twentieth century. Scholarship has often assigned only marginal roles to Japanese Protestants within the history of Japanese imperialism, despite the remarkable success of western missionaries in Korea at the time. As imperial expansion progressed, Japanese Protestants intensified their efforts to take up a leading role in the education of Koreans in colonial Korea and in the metropole wishing to spearhead the assimilation of Koreans. By drawing on the colonial discourses of East Asian unity under Japanese leadership, Protestant churches strove to mediate and facilitate colonial policies in Korea. Yet there were also voices of dissent from prominent Japanese Protestants critical of the assimilation policies implemented by colonial authorities in Korea. This ambivalent stance of Protestantism towards Korea is further complicated by the fact that the Korean Young Men’s Christian Association in Tokyo served as an important venue of the Korean Independence Movement. Examining Christian magazines and journals of the time, this paper delves into the contentious debates among Japanese Protestants concerning the Korea Mission and the Japanese government’s strategy of assimilation through education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many scholars have stressed that regional dynamics led to the outbreak of the Musin Rebellion, the largest rebellion in eighteenth-century Korea. Scholars have examined the economic and political situation leading up to the violence and concluded that political marginalization caused Kyŏngsang Province elites (from the Southerner faction) to launch the rebellion. This paper analyses evidence from official sources about rebel motivations, rebel geographical associations and the court view of the causes. Although post-rebellion government statements acknowledge tensions between the court and many Kyŏngsang Province elites, rebel testimony showed no evidence of any anger about discrimination against elites from a single region. There is also inconsistent evidence of regional concerns in the membership of the rebel organization, which was drawn from three southern provinces and mainly concentrated around the capital. My findings challenge the conclusions of regionalist scholars and place the Musin Rebellion in a trajectory of late Chosŏn rebellion that was attempting to redress factional political discrimination and was not caused by regional concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper posits four ranked, generic goals of state foreign policy, maps them against the American ‘pivot,’ and concludes with possible handicaps of that shift. Drawn broadly from realism and liberalism, those abstract goals are as follows: national security, economic growth, prestige among the community of states, and the promotion of cherished national values. Applying this framework specifically to Northeast Asia, the USA, regarding security, is likely to increasingly ‘hedge’ China, and its North Korean client, with regional allies, off-shore balancing, and a shift toward AirSea Battle. On trade, the USA will continue its decades-long effort to reduce Asian mercantilism by tying Asian traders into multilateral, neoliberal rule sets. Regarding prestige, the ‘Beijing Consensus’ is a growing challenge to US soft power which the pivot seeks to refute. In addition, on values, the USA will continue to nag especially China to conform to US standards of law and human rights. The USA will continue to push the broad liberalization of Asian polities and economies. The democratic peace and liberal trade are the ideological frame and motivation of the pivot. Nevertheless, significant US handicaps may slow the pivot: American cultural distance from Asia means little public support and understanding of its necessity; strong regional allies will tempt the USA toward offshore balancing on the cheap; and the dire US budget shortfall will reduce the resources necessary to fund it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Soaring prices for minerals and energy are posing a major threat to the resource security of economies in Asia. As a result, many regional governments have launched new resource security strategies in the last few years. Most recent attention to resource security in Asia has focused on debating whether the Chinese government’s resource policies are mercantilist or liberal. This China-focused debate is too narrow to fully capture the nature of resource politics in Northeast Asia, since the governments of Japan and Korea have also recently launched their own resource security strategies. This paper considers regional-level trends in Asian resource politics by examining the causes, content and implications of the resource security strategies deployed by the consumer governments in Northeast Asia. It argues that growing resource security concerns, combined with a process of competitive policy emulation, have seen the Chinese, Japanese and Korean governments each adopt mercantilist resource security strategies over the last decade. Furthermore, the competitive nature of these mercantilist strategies is acting to intensify political and economic competition for resources between the Asian region’s three main economic powers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper briefly describes Internet development in the Republic of Korea (South Korea), which started research and development on computer networking in the late 1970s. Korea became one of the first countries to deploy the Internet in 1982 [1], and organized one of the first global Internet conferences in 1985 [2]. In the late 1990s, Korea put much effort into development of broadband networks, starting from a master plan in 1995. Korea became a world leader with widely available wired and wireless broadband networks. Korea also led in Internet applications including online games, search engines and social networking services. As one of the earlier Internet countries, Korea has been vulnerable to newly arising problems on the Internet such as cybersecurity, net abuse and game addiction. Korea has been trying to solve these problems in collaboration with other leading countries. Korea has also shared its Internet experience with other countries, in particular with developing countries. A book is in preparation on the early history of the Internet in Korea [3] together with another, co-authored with Internet pioneers in other countries, on the early history of the Internet in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Japanese Buddhist view of Korean Buddhism from 1877 to 1945 abounded with colonialist and imperialistic rhetoric. Japanese Buddhist missionaries declared that Korean Buddhism should be reformed and revitalized under their guidance. With this mindset, most Japanese Buddhists in colonial Korea did not find much in Korean Buddhism that was useful or worth learning about--a paternalistic approach that Korean monks found off-putting and that therefore undermined potential cooperation. This paper introduces an unusual Japanese priest who spent six years practicing Son (Jp. Zen) in Korean monasteries. Soma Shoei's identity as an unsui (itinerant monk)--a monastic class shared across the Buddhisms of East Asia--enabled him to develop friendships with Korean Son masters and fellow practitioners, relationships that were framed less by colonialist or nationalist discourse than by respect, empathy, and sincerity. This article presents Soma's firsthand experience with Korean monasticism based on essays he wrote for a Japanese Buddhist journal. Soma's case reveals how religious identity operates within and also beyond the colonial context. Soma's exceptionalism also provides a contrast to the views of his colleagues, which helps reveal greater complexity in the ways that Japanese Buddhists thought about Korean Buddhism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mummy studies in Korea are instrumental in reconstructing the health and disease status of pre-modern Joseon peoples using firm scientific evidence. However, this scientific approach to such investigations in Korea is a relatively new discipline which began only within the last decade. Previous studies on Joseon tombs and their contents were performed exclusively by dress historians because most of the artefacts recoverable from Joseon tombs were textiles. In this report, we examine some of the excavation records left by dress historians in order to elucidate the approximate number and preservation status of Korean mummies discovered prior to the advent of their scientific investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mummy studies in Korea are instrumental in reconstructing the health and disease status of pre-modern Joseon peoples using firm scientific evidence. However, this scientific approach to such investigations in Korea is a relatively new discipline which began only within the last decade. Previous studies on Joseon tombs and their contents were performed exclusively by dress historians because most of the artefacts recoverable from Joseon tombs were textiles. In this report, we examine some of the excavation records left by dress historians in order to elucidate the approximate number and preservation status of Korean mummies discovered prior to the advent of their scientific investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]