North Korea

The East Asia Forum is a refereed multi-disciplinary journal published annually by the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada.

With contributions from graduate students the world over, the EAF enjoys a reputation for producing original graduate-level research that is at the forefront of the field of East Asian Studies.

Today it is common to demur from censuring collaborators with the Axis powers in World War II, citing the impossibility of putting oneself in the untenable position such collaborators then found themselves. Nonetheless contemporary moral philosophy has much to say about the choices men and women face when confronted by complicity with evil. Yi Kwang-su (1892-1950?), Korea's most distinguished modern novelist as well as one of its more notorious pro-Japanese partisans during the colonial period, offers an compelling test case for ways in which we might attempt to not only understand, but judge, his words and deeds in support of Japan's occupation of his country.

*CALL FOR ABSTRACTS*

*13th Annual Harvard East Asia Society Graduate Student Conference Facing East: Conversations and Connections*

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
February 26 - February 28, 2010

The Harvard East Asia Society (HEAS) Graduate Student Conference invites graduate students from around the world, conducting research in all disciplines, to submit abstracts for our 2010 conference:

*Facing East: Conversation and Connections
* As the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close, East Asia is exerting an unprecedented impact on global society. Now more than ever, we should explore every facet of East Asia, past and present, and engage in cooperative conversation.

Janet Poole teaches Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her translation of Yi T'aejun's "Eastern Sentiments" was recently published by Columbia University Press. A brief description of the book from the publisher's website has been copied below. For further information please visit the source: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14944-0/eastern-sentiments

The Confucian gentleman scholars of the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) often published short anecdotes exemplifying their values and aesthetic concerns. In modern Seoul one scholar in particular would excel at adapting this style to a contemporary readership: Yi T'aejun.

Nov. 5 2009 (Thursday) 2:00-4:00 @ 108N MCIS.

North Korea's national ideology of self-reliance, or Juche, is in its simplest form a rejection of Korea's subservient role in the hierarchical Sino-centric system of international relations that prevailed in East Asia through the late 19th Century. North Korean leader Kim Il Sung first introduced Juche in December 1955, at the height of an internal policy dispute over post-war development strategies that nearly subjugated Pyongyang to the Moscow and Beijing-dominated international communist movement.

The Harvard-Yenching Library is the largest university library for East Asian research in the Western world. Although as an organized library it dates only from 1928, the collection can trace its beginnings back to 1879, when Chinese was first offered as part of Harvard University's regular curriculum. In that year a group of Bostonians engaged in the China trade invited Ge Kunhua 戈鯤化, a Chinese scholar from the city of Ningbo in Zhejiang Province, to give instruction in Chinese at Harvard. The small collection of books that was bought for his courses, the first acquisitions in any East Asian language at the Harvard College Library, marked the beginning of a Chinese collection.

The Library's Asian collection began in 1869 with a gift of 10 works in 933 volumes from the emperor of China to the United States. Spanning a diversity of subjects from China, Japan, Korea, the South Asian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, the Library's Asian collections have become one of the most accessible and comprehensive sources of Asian language materials in the world. For further information about the collection, visit the Asian Division's Web site at http://www.loc.gov/rr/asian/

The Asian Division Friends Society announces the Florence Tan Moeson Research Fellowship for 2009. This fellowship is made possible by a generous donation of Florence Tan Moeson, for 43 years a Chinese Team cataloger in the Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division before she retired in 2001.

The purpose of the fellowship is to give individuals the opportunity to use the Asian collections in the Library of Congress, which are among the most significant outside of Asia and consist of nearly 2.8 million books, periodicals, newspapers, manuscripts and microforms in the languages of East, South and Southeast Asia.

Researchers wishing to submit applications should go to this Web site: www.lcasianfriends.org/fellowship.