Browsing by Subject "Korea"

Brother Is a Street Musician – Viewing the Landscape of Modernity Through Popular Songs by Zhang Eujeong was originally published in Korean in 2006. Described as a “fascinating journey upstream into the past to understand where the current will bring the future of Korean pop music,” (Busan Ilbo Review, 2009) Brother Is a Street Musician does not deal with contemporary K-Pop; rather, it visits the first chapter of Korea’s popular music history, which coincided with Japanese colonization in the first half of the 20th century. Combining archival research with a critical analysis of the earliest popular songs, the early recording industry, the first modern era musicians and composers, and the first formation of the consumer masses, Zhang’s book seeks to address the essential question – how did a colonized people construct their own, unique form of popular culture? Today, popular music from Korea has established itself as a formidable, global cultural phenomenon, garnering the interest of not only the power players in the global music industry, but also scholars in many cross-disciplinary fields. As an academic inquiry into the first moment in the history of popular music from Korea, an English translation of this book will be an essential resource in today’s lively conversations around the emerging field of Korean popular music. Furthermore, as a companion to more books coming from Korea to meet the growing demand for resources with diverse perspectives in the study of popular music and culture from the periphery, this book can spur on thoughtful discussions about how dialogue between English academia and the academia of host-language countries/regions, facilitated by translation, can progressively enrich the way we expand knowledge about transnational phenomena as they flow across time, borders, and languages.

The Statue of Peace (2011), known as the Girl Statue in Korean, memorializes the “comfort women,” victims of military sexual violence in the colonial and occupied territories under the Japanese Empire (c.1931-1945). Created by artists Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung, the Girl Statue is a life-size, bronze, freestanding sculpture of an empty chair next to a seated girl, confronting the site of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. Since its installation in 2011, the Girl Statue image has proliferated across media, scale, form, and function by artists and the public. The Girl Statue has been reproduced as replicas, watercolor paintings, logo images, gigantic balloons, plastic miniatures, coinage, soft dolls, bracelets, 3D toys, wooden DIY models, LEGO, performances, AR Challenge on social media, and even tattoos.

This dissertation explores the expansion of the Girl Statue over the ten years (2011-2021). Despite its aim to raise awareness of the “comfort women” issue and foster solidarity, the Girl Statue has served the desires and motivations of its makers, consumers, and participants. The multiplication of the Girl Statues symbolically compensated for the dwindling numbers of “comfort women” victims. The narrative of vanishing victims is exemplified by novels and films that underscore the decreasing numbers of the last “comfort women” as an endangered group in need of rescue. The immediacy and intimacy of the Girl Statues as collectible souvenirs grant a sense of satisfaction that one is contributing to an important cause for justice. Through a close analysis of site visits, conversations, newspapers, television, social media, archives, and symposia, this research explores how our engagement with the Girl Statue shapes and reflects our values regarding humanity. The uncomfortable burden persists for the “comfort women,” who, in becoming images, continue to comfort the present.

Population aging is a global phenomenon occurring both in developed and less developed countries. While families are still playing an important role in providing support for elderly people, governments are also expanding their public old-age support programs in many societies. Public pensions are one of the major policy tools geared to social protection of the elderly. However, little is known about how the programs affect elders particularly in terms of their subjective well-being. Such effectiveness depends in part on the extent to which public pension income displaces or `crowds out' family elder support. Using the introduction of the Basic Old-Age Pension (BOAP), a non-contributory old-age pension in Korea, this dissertation examines the relationship among public support, family support, and life satisfaction of the elderly.

As an introductory chapter, chapter 1, "The continuing importance of children in relieving elder poverty: evidence from Korea," describes the actual financial status of elderly Koreans and the amount of financial support they receive from children. Analysis of the 2006 Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing shows that almost 70 per cent of Koreans aged 65 or more years received financial transfers from children and that the transfers accounted for about a quarter of the average elder's income. While over 60 per cent of elders would be poor without private transfers, children's transfers substantially mitigate elder poverty, filling about one quarter of the poverty gap. Furthermore, children's transfers to low-income parents tend to be proportionally larger, so elder income inequality is reduced by the transfers. Over 40 per cent of elders lived with a child and co-residence helps reduce elder poverty.

Using the introduction of BOAP, chapter 2, "Does money buy happiness?: Evidence from a new government pension in Korea," assesses how the program affected elders' life satisfaction. Notably, this study adds valuable evidence to the literature of whether money buys happiness, a question of great interest but notoriously difficult to answer given the difficulties associated with isolating income as a causal factor. To make the causal inference, this chapter utilizes a difference-in-difference research design and analyzes longitudinal data from the Korean Retirement and Income Study (KReIS). Results show that BOAP did raise elders' life satisfaction: annual benefits of 1,000 kW, approximately 1,000 U.S. dollars, raised elders' life satisfaction by 0.16-0.22 of one standard deviation and the effect was statistically significant.

Chapter 3, "Public support crowds out family support: Evidence from a new government pension in Korea," investigates how public financial provision affects family support. In particular, the present study provides a novel estimate of crowd-out by BOAP by using a combined measure of financial support and in-kind support received from all adult children regardless of their co-residence status with elderly parents. This paper also examines the impact on co-residence and is the first quasi-experimental study on the crowd-out question using data from an Asian nation. Results from difference-in-difference analyses of the KReIS data show that every $1 from the pension led to a 30-cent drop in children's support, netting a 70-cent increase in elders' income. The impact on the likelihood of elders' co-residing with children was positive but not statistically significant.

By showing that Korean children still play a crucial role in providing financial old-age security, chapter 1 demonstrates how important it is for the Korean government to design old-age policies that preserve the incentives for private assistance. The second chapter suggests that, at least in the context of modern-day Korea, pensions do buy happiness, or at least satisfaction. This finding suggests that researchers and policymakers need to pay further attention to public pensions as a tool to intervene people's subjective well-being. Finally, chapter 3 confirms that crowd-out of family support does occur in Korea and that increases in income, more so than other factors, have a positive impact on elders' life satisfaction found in chapter 2. These findings may generalize to other rapidly changing societies with a strong family elder-support tradition and emerging public elder-support system.

From 1868-1912, Japan underwent a rapid transformation into a modern nation state. This period of time became known as the Meiji Restoration, and practically all aspects of social and political life were affected including Japan's indigenous religious tradition Shintô. As a consequence of reform, Shintô was distilled into two broad categories--state and sect Shintô--with the former being associated with the Japanese State policy and projects. In particular, State Shintô would be utilized in assimilation attempts on the Korean peninsula.

In 1910, Korea was formally annexed and made a colony of Japan until Japanese defeat in 1945. During the roughly thirty-five year-long colonial era, Japanese officials sought to use state sponsored Shintô Shrines as a means to transform Koreans into loyal colonial subjects. The premier Shintô Shrine in Korea was the Chôsen Shrine erected in 1925 and housed the spirits of the tutelary Shintô Deity Amaterasu-Ômikami and, Emperor Meiji. This decision was not without contestation however, as a certain priests and the Japanese intellectual Ogasawara Shôzô (1892--1970) instead argued for the enshrinement of Korea's own progenitor god Tan'gun thinking that a native deity might make Shintô more appealing.

To examine this issue, this thesis will investigate several aspects: First, this thesis shows the development of a state sponsored Shintô and how this shaped colonial assimilation policies on the peninsula. Secondly, it examines Ogasawara's thought behind his reason to enshrine Tan'gun in Chôsen Shrine. Thirdly, this thesis explores Korean understandings of Tan'gun mythology and how this was utilized to create a Korean sense of uniqueness.

By examining these topics, this thesis aims to express a Korean voice in regards to the enshrinement issue. This thesis demonstrates that Korean agents during the Japanese occupation were able to construct their own understanding of Tan'gun through academic and religious avenues. This native agency in the matter would mean that even if Tan'gun had been enshrined, the implementation of State Shintô in assimilation efforts would still have been largely unsuccessful.

What do Buddhist monks really know about Buddhism? How do they imagine their religion, and more importantly, how does their understanding of their tradition differ from the one found in our typical introduction to Buddhism textbooks? In order to address these fundamental questions, this dissertation concentrates on the educational programs and curricular canons of Korean Buddhism. It aims to find out which part of their enormous canonical and non-canonical literature do Korean Buddhist professionals choose to focus on as the required curriculum in their training (and what do they leave out), why is it chosen and by whom, and how does this specific education shape their understanding of their own religion and their roles within it. It tracks down the 20th-century invention of the so-called `traditional' Korean monastic curriculum and delineates the current 21st-century curricular reforms and the heated debates surrounding them. Ultimately, it illustrates how instead of Buddhist academics learning from the Buddhists about Buddhism, it is actually often the Buddhists in their monasteries who end up simulating the educational agendas of Buddhist studies.

Research for this work involved diverse methodologies. Multiple-sited ethnographic fieldwork in monasteries was supplemented by archival digging in the Chogye Order's headquarters in Seoul and textual analysis of historical records, Buddhist media reports, and online blogs. I have visited the current official 17 monastic seminaries in Korea, as well as many of the new specialized monastic graduate institutes and lay schools, interviewed teachers and students on site, and inspected classrooms and schedules. During winter 2013-4 I have conducted a full-scale participant observation attending the Buddhist lay school of Hwagyesa, during which I engaged some of my classmates with in-depth interviews, and distributed a written attitude survey among the class.