East Asian Studies

The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a 250-kilometer long and four-kilometer wide buffer zone, was created after the armistice of the Korean War in 1953. One of the most globally recognized militarized landscapes, it is also a site where the incidental convergence of defense activity and environmental protection has taken place. Since its establishment the DMZ has remained terra nullius, only open to non-humans, apart from occasional local military crashes. As the recent designation of the DMZ as a UNESCO biosphere reserve illustrates, this product of Cold War conflict is now widely recognized as a haven for endangered animals and plants. In his research, Postdoctoral Fellow Jaehwan Hyun examines how environmentalism, science, and geopolitics became intertwined by the military-supported fieldworks during the Cold War, enabling a new ecological vision for the DMZ. tivity with natural history surveying to identify national fauna and flora that represented the unique nature of the nation. Under a materialistic and symbolic regime competition with North Korea, local scientists continued the mountaineering-tradition practices through collaborative US-South Korea fieldwork at the DMZ, despite the definition of the project as an "ecological survey." They searched for national animals and plants, such as tigers and pine trees that were supposed to have been threatened by Japanese colonialism, in the bushes of the DMZ. Neither the financial supporter-the US military-nor the US scientific collaborators were interested in such work, and they sometimes quarreled with the local scientists, blaming the Korean side for being ignorant of ecology and "primitive" naturalists. However, they soon conceded that the South Korean fieldworkers should be allowed to pursue their work: only Koreans could work in the long-term base, and only they possessed local knowledge about the field. Finally, the Korean scientists incorporated the results of field surveys into a government propagandist book, which described the DMZ as a showcase of "the restoration of the Korean nature (Kŭmsugangsan)." This therefore turned environmental cooperation into a means of nation-building. The Ambivalent Legacy of Military Ecology The DMZ has recently been under the spotlight for the "greening" of security diplomacy by local government and outside observers. The South Korean President Moon Jae-In pledged to transform the DMZ into a "peace(ful) and cooperating district" at the United Nations General Assembly in Sep-tember 2019. His proposal is another articulation of the DMZ diplomacy that his predecessors have promoted since the early 1990s: environmental cooperation and research and ecotourism within the zone are its main tactics for bringing North Korea to the table. Current environmental diplomacy counts on a particular version of the environmental conception of the DMZ that was created by military ecologists. Yet the other side of their scientific activities during the Cold War remains under-recognized. Jaehwan Hyun' s project tells us the ambivalent legacy of military ecology: while claiming natural protection of and research on the borderland, for instance, US ecologists advised its military to use Agent Orange to clear plants and trees. This project seeks to further illuminate this ambivalent nature of military environmentalism, and the place of science in the Cold War formation of militarized landscapes. More research topics are available at: www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/researchtopics T +49 30 22 667 0 RESEARCH TOPICS ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jaehwan Hyun is a Postdoctoral Fellow based in Department III (Arti-facts, Action, Knowledge), directed by Dagmar Schäfer. His current research project focuses on how global environmental concerns and related scientific collaborations were entangled with the postcolonial nation-building of South Korea and Japan during the Cold War period.

El cine nos permite conectar con distintas culturas y sensibilidades del mundo. A través de la ficción, los cineastas buscan a menudo un reflejo realista de su propio tiempo, con sus logros e injusticias, con lo sucio y lo brillante. El cine de la isla de Taiwán, administrada por la República de China, permaneció durante varias décadas aislado del panorama internacional por su delicada situación política. En los años 80, época de intenso crecimiento urbano e industrial, llega la Nueva ola del cine taiwanés (o simplemente Nuevo cine taiwanés), su primer cine auténticamente internacional. Los 80 en Taiwán eran una época de choques entre lo rural y urbano, una época de nacimiento de nuevas formas de vida al compás del ajetreo de las ciudades y el desencanto con las falsas promesas del sistema económico. Hablamos en este artículo de un movimiento cinematográfico en el que directores de distintos trasfondos y atrevidamente críticos tuvieron cierto margen para producir, con insólito apoyo financiero de un gobierno todavía en ley marcial, películas de ficción que iban desde la crítica social e histórica hasta los dramas sobre familia y soledad en las grandes ciudades.

https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/smith-shuddering-century

This article examines the reception of European futurism in colonial Korea in the early-to- mid-1930s through the writings of Kim Ki-rim and O Chang-hwan, both of whom composed long modernist poems over the course of 1934 engaging with modern warfare and global imperialism—Kim’s “Weather Map” (Kisangdo, p. 1935) and O’s “War” (Chŏnjaeng, 1934, unpublished). My central proposition, based on close readings of these two poems in comparison with works by Italian and Japanese futurists, is that Korea’s unevenly developed colonial location and its experience with the violence of military occupation and with escalating warfare in China indirectly discouraged the celebratory posture adopted by the European futurists towards technology, speed, and mechanized violence.

According to both common belief and our history textbooks, the Cold War ended in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.  To the United States government and the American people, it seemed that Western-style democratic institutions and a capitalist economic system had finally won out over authoritarian politics and communism.  Samuel Huntington wrote an influential essay not long after, titled “The Clash of Civilizations,” in which he put forth his hypothesis for how international politics would play in the post-Cold War world.  To Huntington, “the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic.  The great divisions among humankind will be cultural.”  While cultural differences do indeed create friction in the modern world of international politics, Huntington's dismissal of other factors was premature. In particular, the continued existence of the People's Republic of China seems to defy Huntington's theory.

Quinter, David. 2018. “Mantras and Materialities: Saidaiji Order Kōmyō Shingon Practices.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 45, no. 2: 309-40.

Mantra of Light (kōmyō shingon) practices have been among the most popular esoteric Buddhist rituals in Japan since the thirteenth century. Chinese scriptures recorded that reciting the mantra and distributing sand empowered by it could erase transgressions and ensure rebirth in the Pure Land. Subsequently, teachings on the significance of the sand empowered by the mantra received a strong boost from lectures and commentaries by Myōe (1173–1232), which many scholars have emphasized in assessing the mantra’s spread. This article argues, however, that focus on the sand and such commentarial literature obscures another key to the mantra’s popularization in medieval Japan: the annual Mantra of Light assemblies implemented by Eison (1201–1290) at Saidaiji in 1264. In particular, based on both premodern sources and ethnographic observations, the article investigates the Saidaiji order’s use of contributor rosters for fundraising, recitation, and iconographic adornment to help illuminate the intertwined social, ritual, and material culture of the assemblies.

Hyaeweol Choi examines the formation of modern gender relations in Korea from a transnational perspective. Diverging from a conventional understanding of 'secularization' as a defining feature of modernity, Choi argues that Protestant Christianity, introduced to Korea in the late nineteenth century, was crucial in shaping modern gender ideology, reforming domestic practices and claiming new space for women in the public sphere. In Korea, Japanese colonial power - and with it, Japanese representations of modernity - was confronted with the dominant cultural and material power of Europe and the US, which was reflected in Korean attitudes. One of the key agents in conveying ideas of “Western modernity” in Korea was globally connected Christianity, especially US-led Protestant missionary organizations. By placing gender and religion at the center of the analysis, Choi shows that the development of modern gender relations was rooted in the transnational experience of Koreans and not in a simple nexus of the colonizer and the colonized.

Keynote speaker for the seminar Remapping Asian Studies II:

In this presentation, I explored the challenges, possibilities, limitations, and promises of establishing a shared paradigm of transformative knowledge based on the exchange of experiences from East Asian and the rest of the Global South, particularly Latin America. My goal is to reflect upon these challenges to understand better the struggles and resistences born against hegemonic epistemic impositions in East Asia. My proposal is for the construction of bidirectional bridges that assume and acknowledge differences but work with common grounds in order to design a paradigm that can expand our understanding of Epistemologies of the South. I will work then with Boaventura de Sousa Santos' concepts of sociology of absences, sociology of emergencies, and abysmal to articulate a working approach with decolonial roots that can foster the exchange of knowledge and practices to and from East Asia.

With the inter-linkage of social problems under the context of global capitalism, there is an increasing tendency that activists from different regions build up exchange network on their own, in a self-organized and autonomous way. This trend suggests a growing urgency in developing a trans-local perspective in reading such dynamic, and a new geographical imagination across different borders and localities. This article aims to outline the linkages and interaction of the left-wing cultural activist groups in East Asia. I would take “No Limit Tokyo Autonomous Zone”, a self-organized festival of cultural activism took place in September 201616, as an example, to illustrate the historical trajectory and the synergy generated by this platform. For this analysis, I would adopt both local and trans-local perspectives, while also considering the local actors and the activist groups around East Asia which contribute to the formation of the network, including the impacts of their subsequent extensions. Furthermore, this article attempts to discuss the meaning of running this autonomous cultural festival and what would be the ethical and heterogeneous values that activist try to advocate, in the context of countering cultural governance in the neoliberal creative economy.

Séptima sesión del curso "El Pacífico, ¿nuevo eje mundial?", dictado en el Instituto de Humanidades Francisco Petrarca, en 2019. Dedicamos esta sesión al estudio de la China actual, de su proyección global y sus debilidades y potencialidades.

Sexta sesión del curso "El Pacífico, ¿nuevo eje mundial?", dictado en el Instituto de Humanidades Francisco Petrarca, en 2019. Recorremos acá la historia del Japón contemporáneo luego de la Segunda Guerra Mundial.  Analizamos también el estancamiento relativo de Japón durante el siglo XXI y sus implicaciones.