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In this paper, we examine the transformation of women’s fashion in 1970s and 80s South Korea by analyzing the images and narratives of unisex clothing in print media. During the industrialization, modernization, and Westernization of South Korean society in the postwar period, women’s fashion underwent tremendous change. Korean society witnessed women’s daily clothes shifting from traditional hanbok 韓服 to simplified Western clothes (kansobok 簡素服) to unisex/androgynous styles. Fashion items such as pantalons, jeans, shirts, tailored jackets and suits, casual office wear, and neckties, conventionally identified as men’s wear, became wardrobe choices for women. One explanation for this is that these changes took place as a result of the influence of South Korean state policy and the national reconstruction movement to simplify women’s dress codes for the sake of economization. However, a closer investigation of the narratives of unisex clothing reveals the impact of feminist movements, a robust youth culture, and young women’s own desire to achieve gender equality and active social participation. Women’s choice of unisex styles came to be viewed as “the era of de-feminized culture: shock of daughters” (t’al yǒsǒng munhwa sidae: ttaltŭl ŭi ch’unggyŏk). There was increased social pressure to reinforce the existing gender-binary system in the face of gender-blurring styles or what was seen as the masculinization of women. Women’s cultural expressions of power, freedom, consumer choices, and modernity, nonetheless, became manifested through their fashion choices. By shedding light on the emergence of unisex clothing in South Korean modernity, this study ultimately seeks to undermine our view of the West as the epicenter of fashion and beauty and urges us to imagine alternative histories and spaces of fashion and bodily aesthetics.

With the growing popularity of K-pop, K-pop bands have become increasingly racially and ethnically diverse. However, is the diversity of K-pop bands—referred to as K-pop diversity—genuine? This article addresses this question by examining issues related to race and color and institutional racism within the K-pop industry. The discussion consists of four parts. First, the article visits three framing ideas that guide the article’s analysis, specifically Critical Race Theory (CRT), Koreanness, and neoliberal multiculturalism. Second, it examines the racial and ethnic diversity of K-pop boy and girl groups from 2010 to 2022, highlighting the implications of this trend. Third, it offers a critical analysis of EXP Edition, the first non-Korean K-pop band. Fourth, the article delves into ChoColat, the first mixed-race Korean K-pop band. Through these case studies, the article explores institutional racism, neoliberal ideas of racial diversity, and the notion of Koreanness in K-pop bands. Finally, the article discusses the future of K-pop diversity and K-pop bands regarding multiculturalism.

The “comfort women” issue is one of the most contentious and emotionally charged disputes between South Korea and Japan. Its political sensitivity is so acute that it has often been treated as a taboo subject, even within the field of Korean literature. In this study, I analyze the English translation of Han myŏng (One Left), the 2016 Korean novel devoted to the subject of comfort women by Kim Sum (Kim Soom). This work is unique in that it is based on testimonies from surviving comfort women and contains over 300 endnotes citing the sources of the testimonies. My analysis explores how the translation captures the experiences and memories of the victims. Specifically, I focus on eight key aspects: (1) the creation of a temporary shift in the narrator’s voice, (2) the complexities of thought representation, (3) the use of different spelling, (4) how the translation conveys expressive meaning, (5) the adoption of the generic “you,” (6) the metaphor of comfort women as consumables, (7) the clarification of cultural subtext for the reader, and (8) the endnotes. Following this analysis, I examine the omission of an episode from the translation—an authorial choice that could be misinterpreted as an unfaithful rendering of the original. My analysis suggests that the narrative surrounding comfort women can be expanded and refined through translation.

This study investigates the use of historical films as a tool for content activism in challenging the historical perspectives of the Japanese government and hawkish right-wing groups. The investigation involves the conceptualization, production, and dissemination of two South Korean historical films, namely, Kwihyang 귀향 and Kunhamdo 군함도, and an examination of the social and political ramifications of these films. The study identifies two revisionist movements in Japan: (a) the rebranding of the comfort women as women who had chosen prostitution and (b) the transformation of Hashima Island, a site of forced labor, into a site of industrial revolution. It then outlines how the two films confronted these issues and led to social activism in relation to them. The study demonstrates how content activism through historical films can effectively confront historical revisionism.

The tragic death of Crown Prince Sado in a rice chest in 1762 has been the subject of much discussion, not only in the academic world but also in South Korean popular culture. In contrast to historical data that suggest that Sado was mentally ill and a violent person whose death was necessary to safeguard the position of the Yi royal house, popular culture has presented him in a more sympathetic light as a victim, blaming political power struggles for his alienation from his father King Yŏngjo (r. 1724–76) and his eventual death. This article explores this glorification of Crown Prince Sado in South Korean popular culture. Cases in point are a wall-tile painting in downtown Seoul, which portrays the procession of King Chŏngjo to the grave of Prince Sado in 1795, the TV series Pimil ŭi mun (Secret Door, 2014), the film Sado (The Throne, 2015), and examples from pseudohistory that apply the Sado narrative to portray Korean history as an ongoing battle between good (us) and evil (them). To understand the narratological motivation behind the glorification of Sado, the article also makes use of historical sources such as Hanjungnok 閑中錄 (Records written in silence), the memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng, and Hyŏllyungwŏn chi 顯隆園志 (Hyŏllyung tomb epitaph), the epitaph King Chŏngjo wrote for this father. We argue that, for the public, Sado has become the epitome of a tragic hero who fell victim to the forces of the establishment.

This article explores the widowed mother figures in So Hyŏnsŏng rok 蘇賢聖錄 (The Record of So Hyŏnsŏng), particularly how a widowed mother successfully distinguishes herself as the head of the household through her relationship with her son. The story deals with the aspirations of mothers of elite yangban families who dream of achieving power despite the social limitations placed upon them. The Record presents the ideal mother–son relationship as both close and hierarchical. The closeness of their relationship enables the mother and son to achieve emotional unity when the boy is young. However, by demonstrating that she is more capable and has better judgment than her son, the mother ensures that their relationship remains hierarchical, enabling her to retain a superior position in the relationship into the boy’s adulthood. The story portrays the complicated relationship between a controlling mother and submissive son in a positive light, despite it being in sharp contrast to the compassionate mother and heroic son of earlier literary works. This article argues that Madame Yang, the widowed mother and main protagonist, reflects both the anxiety and aspirations of contemporaneous Korean women facing the major social changes of the 17th century.

This study analyzes the methods Imperial Japan employed in changing the names of Korean territories and examines how these changes related to the policies of the colonial power. The Japanese photo album Hantō no kin’ei depicts a variety of landscapes in colonial Korea. It also contains tables of contents in both Japanese and English, whose primary purpose was to Romanize Korean place names (generally written in Chinese characters) based on their Japanese pronunciation. This study argues that in order to superimpose its identity onto Korea, Japan transliterated Korean place names based on Japanese pronunciation rather than the original Korean. Through this strategy, Japan laid claim to such areas and made manifest its territorial expansion.

Canadian missionary James Scarth Gale (1863–1937) served in Korea from the 1880s until 1927, a time of momentous changes in Korean society and culture, and especially in Korean language, literature, and the development of a new vernacular literary language. During his last five years in Korea, Gale worked full-time for the Christian Literature Society (CLS) vetting and editing Korean-language submissions for publication along with his committee of three Korean Christian “pundits.” This paper introduces for the first time the unpublished working notes of Gale and his committee and through examining their work, finds that they were engaged in a conservative project of “verbal hygiene” designed to 1) save the riches of traditional Korean literary culture from oblivion, 2) mobilize Korean literature and literary translation into Korean under the aegis of the CLS for the Christian salvation of the Korean people, and 3) save “beautiful, idiomatic Korean” from misguided attempts at literal word translation and newfangled trends in Korean literary style based on foreign (especially Japanese) models that threatened to turn the new modern literary idiom into “mongrel Korean.” The work of Gale and his pundits at the CLS provides us with a first-hand account of the changes in and foreign influences on modern Korean, especially modern literary Korean, at a pivotal moment in its development, the early 1920s.