Sun, 24 January 2016
Korea has a culture rich in poetry, yet the language barrier makes it difficult for foreign audiences to access it. For this episode we spoke to Brother Anthony of Taizé about the history and the aesthetics of Korean poetry, about the difficulties translating it with all its nuances and context - and about Ko Un, who has been labeled as the People’s Poet of Korea and is one of the country’s most famous and prolific writers. Brother Anthony is Emeritus Professor in the English Department of Sogang University and Chair-Professor at Dankook University. In 1994, he was naturalized as a South Korean citizen under the name An Sonjae and since then has been awarded the Ok-gwan Order of Merit for Culture by the Korean government as well as an honorary Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) by HM Queen Elizabeth. He has received numerous awards for his translations of Korean poetry, including the Korea Times Translation Award, the Republic of Korea Literary Award (Translation), the Daesan Award for Translation and the Korea PEN Translation Prize. |
Sun, 17 January 2016
Defecting from North Korea is not only a tremendously difficult and perilous enterprise – it remains a lifetime challenge, even after one has successfully defected and resettled to South Korea. Many refugees struggle to adapt to their new life and must bear a sense of longing, guilt, and sometimes even an urge to go back. Most had to leave friends and family members behind, and while North Korea is certainly ruled by a brutal, ruthless regime, it remains home to those who were born there. Our guest for this episode is Hyeonseo Lee, who defected from North Korea at the age of 17 and eventually reached Seoul after ten years in China, where she lived in fear of arrest and deportation. She wrote about her experience in the international bestseller The Girl with Seven Names and delivered an acclaimed TED Talk in 2013 that was watched over five million times on Youtube and TED.com. She is now an outspoken activist for North Korean refugees and has been featured in major media outlets worldwide. Hyeonseo gracefully accepted our interview request and talked to us about life in North Korea, her “accidental” decision to defect and how it changed her life, the struggle to adapt to South Korean society and economy, the sense of guilt and various discriminations North Koreans defector all too often face, and the irony of her meeting with her future husband, Brian – an “American bastard”. |
Sun, 10 January 2016
One particular genre in the Korean musical tradition is pansori (판소리): a form of storytelling typically performed by a singer and a drummer. Pansori can be traced back to shamanistic practices and was only formalized and given its name in the 18th century, under the Choseon dynasty. A key element of contemporary renditions of pansori is the expression of han (한/恨) - a sentiment of pain or lament that many consider unique to the Korean national psyche. In this episode, we had the privilege of interviewing Professor Heather Willoughby, who has extensively researched the spirit of pansori and what she called the “sound of han”. We talked about the origins of this vocal tradition, how one becomes a pansori singer, and of course the relationship between pansori and han. Heather Willoughby is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies of EWHA Womans University. She received her Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University. |
Sat, 2 January 2016
Contemporary Korean music is not limited to K-Pop. South Korea boasts a vibrant indie music scene, and neighborhoods such as Seoul’s Hongdae have live bands performing across various venues every night. Our guest for this episode, Stephen Epstein, is probably one of the most acute observers and academic researchers of the Korean independent music scene. He kindly agreed to talk to us about the genesis of Korean indie rock since the 1980s, its political and societal underpinnings, the relationship between indie and mainstream, and of course some of the most influential bands in Korean indie music. Stephen Epstein is Associate Professor and Director of the Asian Studies Programme at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He earned his BA from Harvard and his MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Epstein has published widely on contemporary Korean society, popular media and literature, and has translated numerous works of Korean and Indonesian fiction. Recent work on Korean popular music includes the articles Girls’ Generation? Gender, (Dis)Empowerment and K-Pop (with James Turnbull), and Into the New World: Girls’ Generation from the Local to the Global. He is also the co-producer of the documentary Us and Them: Korean Indie Rock in a K-Pop World (2015), a follow-up to his earlier documentary Our Nation: A Korean Punk Rock Community (2002; both co-produced with Timothy Tangherlini). Both movies were selected by several film festivals worldwide. |
Sun, 27 December 2015
South Korea maintains a complex relationship with the United States. While many South Koreans remain grateful for their liberation from Japanese rule in 1945 and consider proximity with the United States a proven catalyst for security and prosperity, others believe the U.S. often behaves as a condescending hegemon, and that its military presence is preventing Korean reunification from ever taking place. As a result, South Korea is a country where several anti-American demonstrations took place but where at the same time, U.S. ambassador Mark Lippert received outpours of support when he was assaulted by a knife-wielding man in March 2015. To make sense of this dichotomy, we had the pleasure of hosting for this episode David Straub, the author of the recently published book: Anti-Americanism in Democratizing South Korea (Brookings Institution Press), which focuses on anti-American protests between 1999 and 2002.. David Straub is the associate director of the Korea Program at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. He retired in 2006 from his role as a U.S. senior diplomat after a 30-year career focused on Northeast Asia. He worked over 12 years on Korean affairs, first arriving in Seoul in 1979. Among various distinguished postings, Mr. Straub served as head of the political section at the U.S. embassy in Seoul from 1999 to 2002 during popular protests against the United States, and he played a key working-level role in the Six-Party Talks on North Korea's nuclear program as the State Department's Korea country desk director from 2002 to 2004. He also served eight years at the U.S. embassy in Japan and received his final assignment as Japan country desk director in Washington from 2004 to 2006. David Straub taught U.S.-Korean relations at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies in 2006 and at Seoul National University’s Graduate School of International Studies in 2007. He has published a number of papers on U.S.-Korean relations and is fluent in both Korean and Japanese - as well as German. |
Sat, 19 December 2015
Historical disputes between South Korea and Japan revolve around one key issue: how much, and in what fashion should Japan apologize for its colonial past. Many Koreans argue that Japan has never authentically and honestly apologized for the crimes it committed during the Imperial era. An increasing number of Japanese believe, to the contrary, that South Korea is using the “apology business” as a political bargaining chip, and that no amount of apologies, however heartfelt, will ever be enough. To make sense of this complex situation and see past the underlying politics, we had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Alexis Dudden about her book Troubled Apologies Among Korea, Japan and the United States (Columbia University Press, 2008). Professor Dudden is our first returning guest: we had a great conversation back in Episode 28 about Imperial Japan’s attempts to provide legal and moral legitimacy to its colonization of the Korean Peninsula, based on her first book, Japan’s Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power, published in 2005 (University of Hawai’i Press). Professor Dudden is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut; she received her BA from Columbia University and her PhD in history from the University of Chicago. She has published in various academic journals and news outlets, including the Journal of Asian Studies, Dissent and The New York Times. Professor Dudden is currently working on her third book, Islands, Empire, Nation: A History of Modern Japan, under contract with Oxford University Press. |
Sun, 13 December 2015
According to the PISA education ranking, Korean pupils perform significantly better than most OECD students in all categories tested (namely: math, reading, and science).Yet this success comes at a steep price: the Korean school system is often described as nothing short of brutal. Its students are among the least happy and most stressed worldwide. At the core of this system is the Suneung (수능) examination which determines university admissions. Because only a fraction of Suneung takers will ever be admitted to the best colleges, competition is fierce. Desperate to give their children an edge, parents invest in evening schools, private tutoring and bootcamps, fueling an entire industry now worth several billion dollars. For this episode, we had the pleasure of interviewing Steven Dhoedt, who co-directed Reach for the SKY, a documentary that premiered at the 2015 Busan International Film Festival and was selected for the DOK Leipzig festival in Germany. Reach for the SKY tells the story of several students, their families and teachers, as they prepare for the dreaded Suneung. Steven Dhoedt is a Belgian filmmaker, producer and cinematographer. He studied film at the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound (RITCS) in Brussels and worked for several years in Hong Kong as a freelance producer and director. He founded VISUALANTICS in 2003, a Brussels-based independent production house; his films have screened in numerous festivals worldwide and have been broadcasted in over thirty countries. He is also the director of State of Play (2013), a documentary that follows several South Korean professional video gamers. |
Fri, 4 December 2015
While Italy’s Sicilian Mafia, Hong Kong’s Triads, and Japan’s Yakuza may well be some of its best known examples, organized criminality is present in every country - and South Korea is no exception. Yet, while this is a popular topic for Korean movies, in practice the general public knows little about this criminal underworld – and even fewer can speak about it from personal experience. We were lucky to interview Jonson Porteux who spent a year doing research in the company of both gang members and law enforcement officials. Jonson Porteux is Assistant Professor at Hosei University in Japan. In his dissertation he explored how the Korean state and criminal gangs interact, and how the former tolerates and even utilized the violence offered by the latter. We spoke about his personal experiences, the historical origins of the Korean government’s cooperation with criminal gangs, and the modus vivandi of these criminals. Professor Porteux completed his B.A. in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and earned his PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan. |
Sun, 29 November 2015
On November 30th, 2015, high-ranking officials from most countries on Earth will convene for two weeks at the so-called “COP21” summit in Paris. The objective of this international conference is to reach a strong agreement, which many parties hope will be legally binding, to curb greenhouse gas emissions and keep global warming below 2° Celsius. To learn more about South Korea’s efforts and interests with regards to the COP21 negotiations, we had the pleasure of interviewing Chung Suh-Yong, who is a professor at Korea University and one of the leading experts on the political and economic aspects of climate change in South Korea. Professor Chung was a Member of the Presidential Committee for Green Growth, the Honorary Committee to Host the Green Climate Fund in the Republic of Korea and the Council of the Global Green Growth Institute. He sat on the Policy Advisory Board of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is currently the Director of the Seoul Center for Climate Sustainable Development Law and Policy. He also chairs the Committee on International Cooperation at the Seoul Climate Change Center. Professor Chung holds degrees in law and international relations from Seoul National University and the London School of Economics. He received his PhD from the Stanford School of Law. |
Sat, 21 November 2015
The Korean bar exam is one of the toughest in the world. While open to all, only a thousand candidates are admitted every year, less than 5% of test-takers. Hopeful applicants often study for years in the hope of passing the bar, yet with failure comes foregone income, young people joining the workforce at an ever increasing age and, of course, severe ailments such as depression and suicidal tendencies. The Korean government recently enacted a sweeping reform: the bar examination in its traditional format is gradually phased out and replaced with a law education system modeled after the United States’: students are now required to attend a graduate law school before sitting the bar exam, but have much greater odds of succeeding. But what does it mean for the education of the next generations of Korean lawyers, the Korean judicial system and its underlying philosophy? To learn more, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jasper Kim. Jasper Kim is Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies of Ewha Womans University. He is the Director of the Center for Conflict Management and was a visiting scholar at Harvard University. Professor Kim earned his bachelor from the University of California, San Diego, his MSc from the London School of Economics (LSE), and his J.D. from the Rutgers University School of Law. He is a U.S. licensed lawyer (in Washington D.C) and, prior to joining Ewha, worked for Barclays Capital and Lehman Brothers. |