Earticle

North Korea has sharply confronted South Korea with totally different politics and ideologies for the last half century. Since the death of Kim Il Sung, the serious economic recession in North Korea has caused food shortage and poor conditions of people's health and quality of life. This study was conducted to provide basic data for developmental and future-oriented model for integration of North and South Korean medical care system through comparatively analyzing the two Korean systems. It goes without saying that contrastive medical care system is developed in North and South Korea. North Korea has pursued 'universalization of medical security' through national monopoly of means of production. Medical care system of North Korea is characterized as free medical treatment system, the system of district assigned to individual doctor, valuing of preventive medicine, and cooperative medical care between Oriental Medicine and Western medicine. On the other hand, in South Korea the compulsory health insurance program has been implemented for the entire population. Medical Assistance Act has been also introduced to provide medical service to those without the means to pay. Studies of North and South Korean medical care system must be continued in order to explore how the weak points of North and South Korean medical systems make up for, and to minimize social conflict and economic burden in the process of peaceful unification.

China and Japan have a long thirteen hundred-year history of relations since the early seventh century. From the turning point of the twentieth century, China and Japan have been simmering. In their relations, after Japanese invasion of China in WWII, there are some causes of aggravation: the limited punitive role of the Tokyo Trial, the controversy about the Nanjing Massacre, the hurried China-Japan Joint Statement of 1972, the history and textbook related problem, perspective on Official Development Assistance program, the dispute over natural gas fields, and military build-up. What’s more, both societies have changed. Through the generational shift, anti-Japanese resentment movements in China and nationalistic political leaders such as Koizumi and Abe in Japan have appeared. However, along with globalization in the world, some ideas on economic integration or community for harmony and peaceful development in Northeast Asia have been suggested by experts and scholars in this region

The purpose of this paper is to explore a possibility of the unification of the Korean Peninsula through permanent neutrality that would contribute to the peace in the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia. This paper lists five steps to realize the unification of the Korean Peninsula in permanent neutrality. The first step is the period of confidence building between South and North Korea; the second one is to change the existing political system, in which each party pledges to confront the other; the third one is that the two Koreas will accept a confederation or federation system as the unification process of the Korean Peninsula. In this stage, both sides should revise their constitution to include articles recognizing a permanent neutralized state; the fourth one is available for South and North Korea to separately put themselves into the permanent neutral state in continuing the current system; the fifth is the last one in which South and North Korea will achieve their unification as a permanent neutral state. In order to realize the unification of the Korean Peninsula through permanent neutrality, the peoples and leaders of South and North Korea should express their strong will for neutralization to the four great powers

The purpose of this paper is to present an outlook on the changes and future developments of the U.S.-Europe relations regarding security issues after the launch of the Obama administration. For this purpose this paper will first focus on how the central axis of the world's security has shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific in the Post-9/11 era, and attempt to define the correlations between the new security strategy of the EU and U.S. strategies regarding the Pacific region after the launch of the Obama administration. This paper will also attempt to explain the security dilemma between the discussions on Europe's unilateral security strategy, which is being debated around a variety of security issues, and discussion on its share of responsibility as a global actor. Finally, this paper will present a way for mutual assistance and cooperation between the United States and Europe through three scenarios and the issues that exist as the United States continues to maintain its war against terrorism and policy regarding the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which serve as the basis of the U.S. foreign policies

The main idea of this paper is to discuss the spiritual aspects of the shamanic festivals expounding the Korean concept of peace and coexistence that are being integrated with the colorful rituals and unique cultural presentations. The shamanic festivals and rituals symbolize the spirituality of inter-relatedness that asserts balance to the concept of time and history as moving forward to the fulfillment of the cosmic peace. I have sought to describe coexistence as a perfect state of peace and evolving human mind is the expression of relational beings that embrace the whole and all its parts in a qualitative sense. The shamanic spirituality of peace can be understood as an emergent process with a radically relational form of coexistence in which individual creatures have their own integrity and a world that is evolving in time at every level. The shamanic spirituality of peace can be thought of as coexistence that constantly creates spiritual and ethical space in the shared dynamic life to be in the process of becoming towards the attainment of the perfect state of peace at every level of existence. The shamanic spirituality of peace underlies the co-existential relationships which constantly involve all those interactions and connections that incorporate components into a more complex whole and relate that complex whole into another level of unity. This process of creating a new sublimed level of unity is an essential principle of the shamanic spirituality of peace: towards ‘to-be-in coexistence’ and ‘to-be-in relationships.’

This paper purports to provide a counterfactual analysis of a non-event during the Second Republic of Korea, that is, the aborted Korea-Japan Normalization. The author argues that without General Park Chung Hee’s military coup on May 16, 1961, the rapprochement between the two former enemies would have been possible during the Second Republic of Korea. The ongoing process of negotiations for diplomatic normalization between South Korea and Japan would have been accelerated and have reached the ultimate goal but for the military’s unconstitutional toppling down of the first democratic regime in South Korea. Many experts argue that President Park’s strong leadership or the U.S. pressure is the main reason for the achievement of Korea-Japan Normalization. However, based on counterfactual analysis, this paper concludes that Korea-Japan Normalization would have been achieved much earlier than the year of 1965 when the two states actually reached an agreement only after spending four years of tough bargaining after the coup in South Korea.