[KS] Japan, Korea and the Asia-Pacific

[gkl1 at columbia.edu]

I quite agree with its owner and chief operator, Mark Selden, that
Japan Focus is well worth following for any Korea specialist,
especially modern Korea specialists. As he justly says in his
posting and self-advertisement, the Focus has lots of stuff on
Korea, and in spite of its name is really focused on Northeast
Asia, although I think it's fair to say that it's focused from
Japan. That's no disadvantage. Lest people think that somehow the
Korea angles come with a Japanese slant, I have found him often
featuring Japanese writers who have very objective spins on
Korea-Japan issues.
  The only thing in his posting that I might differ with is Mark's
surmise that "a Koreanist, in good conscience," might
understandably lean away from anything with a Japanese label. But
if one has a good conscience, one will also be fair-minded. And it
should be said that Koreans nowadays, especially the younger ones
and especially in the cultural area, are much more balanced and
open than they used to be with respect to Japan, and more and more
this is met by equal attention to Korea on the part of Japanese.
"Yonsama" may be a fad, but it's one with an increasingly deep
understructure. It's true that when the big-buzz issues pop up
periodically, such as Tokto and the history textbooks, one can
count on peninsular passions to come into play for a couple of
weeks. That is to be understood and taken in stride.
   Someone in the modern Korean field might well consider building
an internet feature like Mark's, maybe called Korea Focus, and aim
for the same kind of broad, outreaching coverage. Between North
Korea's nuclear specialists and diplomats that routinely flummox
the rest of the world, and South Korean pop culture and stem cell
technology that are state of the art, Korea is a world force. I
thought of this this morning, reading in the sports section about
an exploit of Dae Sung Koo, a relief pitcher for the NY Mets who
played four seasons with the Orix Blue Wave in the Japanese
leagues. He put four straight Yankees down with a handful of
pitches, then came to the plate in the bottom of the 7th and
promptly hit a Randy Johnson pitch to the center field wall for a
double. Then right away he scored from second on a sacrifice bunt
with a slide that took your breath away. OK, as he claimed, maybe
he hadn't had a hit since high school, or slid since junior high,
but can anyone doubt the "Korean Wave"? Why not put that into an
intellectually broad internet format that comes to you every week
with something new and interesting?

Gari Ledyard
Quoting mark selden <ms44 at cornell.edu>:

> Can a Koreanist, in good conscience subscribe to Japan Focus?
> True, the name of our electronic journal is
> something of an affront, and it is to be hoped
> that it changes in due time to reflect the
> Asia-Pacific thrust of the work that appears
> there, notably reportage and scholarship on
> Japan, China, Korea and the Asia-Pacific.
> In fact a great deal is being published that is
> central to Korea and to Northeast Asia: on the
> two Koreas, on Japan-Korea relations, on US-NK-6
> nation nuclear negotiations, on the future of a
> Northeast Asia community, on China-Japan-Korea
> conflicts over  territorial issues and war memory.
>
> We invite Koreanists to subscribe and contribute to the journal.
>
> Japan Focus is an electronic journal chronicling
> Japan and the Asia-Pacific in global perspective,
> encompassing politics, economics, society,
> history, culture, international relations, war
> and peace, and historical memory. In addition to
> Japan Focus exclusives, it presents translations
> from Japanese and other languages as well as
> reprints of important texts. Japan Focus draws on
> the writings of researchers, journalists, policy
> analysts and writers throughout Asia and the
> Pacific, North America, Europe and Australia. Its
> fully indexed website provides a permanent
> resource for researchers on the Asia-Pacific.
>
> Subscribers receive a weekly announcement of the
> latest posts and a link to each. Here are the
> articles posted during the last two weeks.
> Articles of particular reference to Korea are
> asterisked (*).
>
>   	Japan Focus Newsletter
>   New Articles Posted May 11, 2005
>
>   in this issue
> <#feature>Robert S. McNamara, Apocalypse Soon
> <#article1>*Utsumi Aiko, Japanese World War II
> POW Policy: Indifference and Irresponsibility
> <#article2>*Jess Bravin,	Prisoner Rights
> and International Law: Japanese and American
> Responsibility >From World War II to Guantanamo
> <#article3>Geremie Barmé, Mirrors of History: On
> a Sino-Japanese Moment and Some Antecedents
> <#article4>Mark Selden,	Remembering 'The Good
> War': The Atomic Bombing and the Internment of
> Japanese-Americans in U.S. History Textbooks
> <#article5>*Asahi Shimbun, Korean Slave Laborers:
> Repatriating and Burying the Dead
> <#article6>*Jin Hyung-joo, Textbook Nationalism:
> Perspetives on China, Japan and Korea
> <#article7>*Kaneko Masaru, Lost Horizons: The
> Flawed 'Nationalism' of the Koizumi Regime
>
> 	 New Articles Posted May 19, 2005
>
>   in this issue
> <#feature>Yuki Tanaka, Firebombing and Atom
> Bombing: an historical perspective on
> indiscriminate bombing
> <#article1>Andrew DeWit, Scientific Stereotypes East and West
> <#article2>Tony de Brum, BRAVO and Today: US
> Nuclear Tests in the Marshall Islands
> *<#article3>Karasaki Taro, Why Japanese Wartime
> Apologies Fail: A German perspective
> <#article4>Greg Mitchell, Incribing Hiroshima:
> The Photography of Matsushige Yoshito
>
>
>   For access to all Japan Focus articles, or to
> subscribe, go to http://japanfocus.org/
>
>
>
> mark selden
> ms44 at cornell.edu
> coordinator, japan focus