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Korea's Nine Years of Darkness: Part V - The Turning Point
[Series Index]I. Early Resistance From the start, Park Geun-hye was not merely unpopular with South Korea’s liberals. Rather, her election was offensive. Regardless of Park’s fairly legitimate...
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The Inter-Korean Summit
International relations is supposed to be a high-minded discipline. It is politics at the highest level, as the world knows no higher power than a national sovereign. The politicians in the...
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This Time Will be Different
So—a lot happened since I posted last in late April! The U.S.-North Korea summit was on, then off, then on again. Now that the summit is back on, so is the familiar chorus singing: “we’ve seen this...
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Save the Tigers
(source) Here’s the story of my immigrant family. We came from Korea to the United States in late 1997. I was 16 years old, my brother 14. Immigrant life was hard. Our immigration lawyer was a crook,...
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The Misplaced Props in Pachinko
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a good novel, fully deserving the rave reviews it has received thus far. But Pachinko is not merely good; it is important. Deep, literary exposition about Korea in English...
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The 2019 NK News Stuff is Here (With a Discount Code!)
As long time readers may know, this humble blog has shared long time friendship with NK News, the finest source in English to get the news about North Korea. One of the proudest moments of running...
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Goodbye 2018, and Happy New Year 2019!
It was a big year for me, although you wouldn't know it from the blog. But in real life, my career made big strides and I produced more writing than ever. Oh, and there is now TKDaughter2 in addition...
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K-pop in the Age of Cultural Appropriation
I.“We created them, we taught them how to speak and think, and when they rebel they simply confirm our views of them as silly children, duped by some of their Western masters.” - Edward Said, Culture...
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How to End a Forever War
Young Korean girl with her brother on her back during the Korean War, c. 1951 (source) North Korea and South Korea were never not at war, practically speaking. Less than two years after two governments...
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Korea's Nine Years of Darkness: Part VI - The Candlelight
[Series Index]A. The Choi Soon-sil Scandal Given how well the Choi Soon-sil scandal came to be known around the world (with a little help from yours truly,) only a brief summary of the scandal would...
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Korea-Japan and the End of the '65 System - Part I: Colonial Times
[Series Index]Newspaper illustration showing An Jung-geun's arrest after shooting Ito Hirobumi (source) The first prime minister of modern Japan was Ito Hirobumi, who took office in 1885. Ito is...
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Korea-Japan and the End of the '65 System - Part II: The '65 System
[Series Index] After An Jung-geun shot Ito Hirobumi in 1909, An demanded he be treated as a prisoner of war, a soldier who carried out an asymmetrical warfare campaign against an enemy general....
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Korea-Japan and the End of the '65 System - Part III: The Rise of the '65 System
[Series Index] For approximately 25 years, the ’65 System functioned exactly as intended. Japan and South Korea would build a close economic relationship, while the historical issue was in the...
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Korea-Japan and the End of the '65 System - Part IV: The '65 System's Decline
[Series Index] The most hopeful case in favor of the '65 System can be stated as the following: it was the politics of the possible. No, the core historical issue of whether Japan's colonization was...
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Korea-Japan and the End of the '65 System - Part V: the End of the '65 System
[Series Index]The ’65 System was a flawed one, based on an imperfect set of treaties that papered over the fundamental disagreement between Japan and South Korea. Yet it continued to survive thanks to...
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Korea-Japan and the End of the '65 System - Part VI: Taking Stock
[Series Index] The ’65 System is dead—but Americans are slow to wake up to this fact. Much of the foreign policy circles in and around Washington DC still think South Korea and Japan can patch things...
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On Impeachment Eve
I still need to finish the last part of the Nine Years of Darkness series. But hearing the news that Nancy Pelosi finally greenlighted an impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, I thought it would...
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Taking K-pop Seriously in the 2020s
Seo Taiji and Boys, c. 1993 (source)I. The 2010s is nearly over. What will the 2020s have in store for K-pop? Modern K-pop began around the late 1980s, fresh off South Korea’s transition into democracy...
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Hoya is Looking for a Home
Alright - here is something that is only tangentially related to Korea, but a chance to do some good for a very good boy in his holiday season. Meet Hoya. Hoya is a four year old, 40 pound Jindo mix....
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Book Review: A Team of Their Own by Seth Berkman (2019)
(Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book.) The women’s national team for South Korean ice hockey had a problem: it sucked. As the host country for the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games, the...
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The Forgotten Neoliberal Man of Parasite
[Spoiler Warning: This post discusses highly granular details of the movie Parasite, and it really wouldn’t make sense unless you watched the movie first.]I.Parasite is a story of three families. But...
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The Hater's Guide to KBO
Darius I is concerned that Persians are listening to K-pop. (source) There are a number of different ways to win the Sid Meier’s Civilization game series. Commonly, people go for “conquest victory,” a...
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Rescuing Our Parents from the Conservative Brain Rot (and Introducing The...
Diagram by "National Alliance for Tunnel Security", claiming to show the configuration of North Korean tanks under the Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul, infiltrated through a secret network of underground...
View ArticleAsian America after the Atlanta Shooting
Even though we were together, each member of my immigrant family—father, mother, me, and my younger brother—went through his or her own individual journey of immigrant life. Only recently have I come...
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Kim's Convenience, RIP
(source)It's been announced that the Canadian sitcom Kim's Convenience is ending after its fifth and latest season, but to me, the show ended around Season 3. TKWife and I dutifully carried on with the...
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