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The Korea Times

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Asia

The Korea Times

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Sun, March 26, 2023 | 21:20

About the past - Robert Neff

Unrest on the Island of World Peace in 1903

Over the last couple of decades, Jeju has often been called the Island of World Peace. But in the spring of 1903, it was anything but peaceful to the small Japanese community - at least according to the Japanese press.

Horace N. Allen: Joseon's foreign royal physician

“The position of court physician [in the mid-1880s] was no sinecure,” especially if you were a foreigner, declared Horace N. Allen in one of his many publications of life in Korea.

Horace N. Allen: Treating the masses

In the summer of 1884, Korea was not a place for casual tourists or globetrotters seeking to impress their peers. It was especially not for missionaries lacking conviction and courage. Commonly referred to as “The Hermit Kingdom,” the peninsula was in the vortex of change. Chri...

Korea: deConstructed - David Tizzard

Sex, drugs, and The Glory

Revolutions do not happen often in popular culture. We normally just go through phases: cycling through a series of trends with things moving in and out of fashion over time.

Post-Colonialism and BTS

Until tigers learn how to write, every story will glorify the hunter. A mood of false consciousness will prevail, reifying the hunt, glorifying the kill. Now, in Korea, in RM, in its own culture, economy, and politics, the tiger has learned to write. It is telling its own stori...

Magic, anxiety, and modern Korean life

Life in 20th century Korea was a trip. The land bore witness to foreign invasion, the devastation of civil war, and the upheaval of rapid urbanization ordered by men in military uniforms. Rice fields gave way to apartments, bicycles to Sonatas. It was a whirlwind of ideological...

Parchment Made of Sheepskins - Scott Shepherd

Conformity and courage

For about five months now, two lines of Rudyard Kipling's poem “If” have been going around my head: “If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, / But make allowance for their doubting too.” The climax of the poem states that if you can indeed do this (and a dozen other t...

Resolution remains elusive for Seoul's disabled accessibility issues

Following some 75 protests on Seoul's subway network since December 2021, Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon declared a zero-tolerance approach in the last week of 2022.

The Blue House, Korean Age - what next?

I've never really been able to wrap my head around the Korean age system, although I can understand it in principle, I just can't figure out what it means when someone tells me that a person is 10 or 20 or 30 in Korean age. I find myself unable to picture a Korean-age 10-year-o...

Voices from the North - Casey Lartigue Jr.

North Korean refugee escape class of 2011

Four North Korean refugees in Freedom Speakers International (FSI) participated in a forum in Seoul, Thursday, with 25 students and staff visiting from the United States. There were three key similarities about the speakers. One: all four of them escaped from North Korea in 201...

North Korean defector seeks justice

Twelve North Korean waitresses and a male manager who worked at a restaurant operated by the North Korean regime in China arrived in South Korea in 2016. The waitresses had mostly maintained a low profile. But not anymore.-Ed.

2 Koreans from opposite sides of DMZ establish dialogue

If you want to write a book and it is the two of you writing it, you have to work together a lot, share a lot. It is challenging, especially when one is from North Korea, the other from South Korea.

Dialogues with adoptees

Dutch Korean artist's project: The Mother Mountain Institute of Sara Sejin Chang

Korean adoptee artists have garnered attention in the western countries where they live, but their works remain relatively unfamiliar to people in their country of origin. This obscurity isn't due to a lack of effort on the part of the adoptees. Despite their attempts to engage...

Adoptee's journey tracing her mother, origin and heritage

I feel the weight of knowing that I represent one out of hundreds of thousands of Koreans who were sent overseas through international adoption. I'm an independent film director and I have spent most of my adult life trying to find my way back to Korea to look for profound answ...

Today's inter-country adoption system is not fit for purpose

I will first comment on where we are today in terms of inter-country adoption (ICA) practice at the global level, then consider our experience of the outcomes of a suspension of ICAs, and finally - in all modesty as an outsider - offer some thoughts on what the path forward for...

Imbricated Chaos - Emanuel Pastreich

In defense of Donald John Trump

The lawyers employed by Donald Trump have amassed an impressive pile of arguments to defend him against charges that he incited a mob of his supporters to stage an armed insurrection in the Capitol and to murder people in an effort to stop the selection of his democratically el...

The nightmare born when technology took the place of science

Even small children are starting to sense that we live in an age when literally none of the information provided is reliable or believable. Information on a global scale is subject increasingly to Gresham's Law: low-quality information spreads everywhere and the truth is hoarde...

'Silhak' tradition as a solution to the current geopolitical crisis

South Koreans are having tremendous trouble grasping how familiar political and academic institutions in the United States have ceased to function as they once did. Koreans are confused to see Harvard professors promote nonsensical arguments about COVID-19 or to see politicians...

Top 10 Stories

1	Kyochon heralds 30,000 won fried chicken era

2	Yoon's labor reform drive sputters due to controversy over lengthening workweek

3	Horace N. Allen: Joseon's foreign royal physician

4	Apple Pay service limited by lack of NFC terminals

5	From mines to mobility: 140-year-old partnership between Germany and Korea

6	Chun Doo-hwan's grandson to apologize to bereaved families of Gwangju uprising

7	Unrest on the Island of World Peace in 1903

8	Foreign minister hosts Iftar dinner for Muslims in Korea

9	South Korea speeds up full-fledged deployment of US anti-missile battery

10	Firstborns account for record-high 63% of newborns

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