American and South Korean Engineering Students’ Communication Motives and Their Student–Instructor Communication Satisfaction

The purpose of this study was twofold. The first purpose was to compare American and South Korean engineering students’ motives (i.e., relational, functional, excuse-making, participatory, and sycophantic) for communicating with their instructors and their student–instructor communication satisfaction. The second purpose was to examine the extent to which both American and South Korean engineering students’ motives for communicating with their instructors are related to their student–instructor communication satisfaction. Undergraduate students (N = 168) recruited from public universities in the United States and South Korea participated in this study. The results of a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), an independent sample t-tests, a series of zero-order Pearson correlational analyses, and Fisher z-tests revealed significant cultural differences and that the relationship between students’ communication motives and their student–instructor communication satisfaction largely are consistent between the two cultures.     

Cold War and the contested identity formation of Korean filmmakers: on Boxes of Death and Kim Ki-yo˘ng's USIS films

The definition of the Korean national cinema in the course of modern and contemporary history of South Korea has provoked controversy. This article examines the negotiations in the identity formation of Korean filmmakers examining specific objects from years of reconstruction following the Korean War. It pays attention to the time when state-building and nation-building became combined enduring heterogeneity of this process. Kim Ki-yo?ng's films depict such characters. His public information short films reflect the legacy of American war films. However, they also contain self-conscious moments when the director refuses to be identified as a mere successor of American documentary filmmakers. Kim's first commercial film, Boxes of Death (1955), an anti-communist thriller, shows great influence from Hollywood, but also with a strong auteurist impulse, theatrical tradition, and the Japanese colonial legacy. However, the most important aspect is the standing presence of America and the USIS-Korea in the identity of Kim Ki-yo?ng and his film. American agencies intervened in the work of Korean filmmakers in the interest of “Free World” bloc-building, and those filmmakers used such agencies to obtain resources. The heterogeneity in the process of the subject formation in Korean national cinema was one common characteristic of many filmmakers of the post-Korean War era.     

Korean military brides in New York

ABSTRACT

This article tells the stories of five Korean military brides in the predominantly middle‐class neighborhood of Newburgh, New York, focusing on their association with the American military bases in South Korea and their daily struggles in cross‐cultural marriages in the United States. It examines the particular contexts in which personal and sexual relations developed between American soldiers and Korean women in the ‘camp‐towns’ or ‘GI towns’ (kijich’on). It also looks at the ways in which some Korean women employed fraternization as a survival strategy in a war‐torn society, and in which they struggled to come to terms with the American mainstream society after their migration to the United States. These life histories provide us with a unique lens through which to explore the unequal power relations between the United States and South Korea within the dialectical framework of militarism, gender and migration.     

“I am well-cooked food”: survival strategies of North Korean female border-crossers and possibilities for empowerment

Abstract

More than the half the people who cross the North Korea–China border are women, with most leaving home to seek food, economic benefits and a more comfortable life. From the human rights perspective, it is clear that the dangerous nature of their journeys across the border and their illegal status in China place them in a very vulnerable position with regard to human trafficking and many types of sexual and physical violence. However, some women voluntarily and strategically use migration, marriage and gender as arenas of agency through which to improve their lives and empower themselves. This paper aims to reveal the complexity of these experiences, which occur where specific forms of gender, intimacy and mobility meet. In doing so, I hope to argue for the possibility of agency beyond an overly simplified victim discourse of North Korean border-crossing. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea and China to reveal the trajectories of North Korean female border-crossers who developed survival strategies, and employed their gender and sexuality to skilfully use marriage-migration for their own purposes, empowering them to settle or keep moving on to better places. This instrumental orientation to empowerment worked alongside a more normative orientation to helping their “blood” families back in their homeland through remittances or through being able to bring along children from previous marriages. They were willing to adopt the role of temporary “wife” in order to be good “daughters,” “sisters” and “mothers” both now and later. In this sense, the North Korean women and their experiences imply an ambivalent approach to marriage and family.     

Theaters of war: Tracing the strange careers of Shina No Yoru in the military contact zones of the Pacific, 1937–1954

This article examines the ways in which multiple traditions of camp shows and the overlapping and relational layers of Imperial Japan and U.S. presence in Korea shaped Korean entertainers’ lives after 1945, producing their idiosyncratic performances in response to rapid shifts in Korea’s relations with Japan and the United States in the 1940s–1950s. When the United States sought to reposition Japan at the top of the newly emerging American hegemonic order of Asian countries, Korean entertainers who served the Imperial Japanese Army a few months earlier found themselves performing for American soldiers. The stage of the Korean native camp shows became a “strange and exotic” yet “familiar and even comforting” place where inconsistent logics, such as Imperial Japan’s pan-Asian ideology and American Orientalist fantasy, mingled. Under the complicated legacies of overlapping militarization and colonization in Korea, militarization has constituted a structuring force that enabled Korean women camp show entertainers generating their hybrid performance styles in ironies, contradictions, and complexities. Building on postcolonial theorists’ notion of hybridity, I argue that Korean entertainers’ performances were being shaped or negotiated in contact with different audiences and expectations as well as Korean entertainers attempted to navigate the acceptable ground of performances and womanhood in the constantly changing political and ideological environment.     

A true original

Abstract

This study analyzes Japanese and Korean ethno-national (minzoku-kokumin) education in postwar Japan. During a period of political unrest in Japan (1945–1955), some of the Korean residents and Japanese worked together to overcome the culture of Imperial Japan and its assimilative education. They also regarded themselves as people colonized by the United States, and pursued a political-cultural movement for their liberation and independence from American imperialism. The Koreans in Japan rejected compulsory education in the Japanese language. As a result, since 1956, Korean schools (Chōsengakkō), funded and supported by North Korea, were founded all across Japan. Their ethno-national education was in fact incorporated into North Korean politics, and has been considered in many studies as having overcome Japanese assimilation and ethnic inequalities. Such a view was a result of many academic Zainichi Korean studies that come from an “insider's perspective” to criticize Japanese colonialism and discrimination. In order to go beyond this insider's view, I focus on the political alliance between Zainichi Koreans and the Japanese people in their pursuit of ethno-national education. Since 2010, the Japanese state funding for Korean schools has become a major controversy in Japan. By tracing the historical background, this article intends to explain why this political issue has arisen. The ultimate purpose of this article is to suggest an ethical perspective to resolve the current political conflict regarding Korean schools in Japan.     

Performance of social integration programs for immigrants and influential factors: Evidence from the Korea Immigration and Integration Program (KIIP)

The purpose of this study is to analyze by immigrants’ characteristics their participation in and social integration performance on the Korea Immigration and Integration Program (KIIP), which the Korean government provides for education in Korean language and basic knowledge about Korea to support the social integration of immigrants; on that basis, it suggests policy implications. For this purpose, I surveyed 1,014 immigrants, including 800 participants and 214 non-participants of the KIIP; among these individuals, 46.1 % had experienced discrimination. There were several reasons they felt they had been discriminated against; general prejudice against immigrants in South Korea and lack of Korean language ability were the most common. The immigrants who participated in KIIP included several groups: visiting relatives, those who had moved to be with their families, immigrants living in Seoul, Vietnamese people, non-Korean spouses, longer-term non-Korean residents, and non-Han Chinese individuals. Those immigrants who participated in KIIP showed a high degree of adaptability to Korean culture. Korean language proficiency, a key output of KIIP, was the most important factor in improving immigrants’ cultural adaptation, sense of societal belonging, and economic conditions.     

Detraditionalization of society and the rise of cultural studies in South Korea

ABSTRACT

The Korean government has started to introduce neoliberal economic policies since the late 1980s and has strengthened its policies even more since the Asian Financial Crisis. Korea has opened markets in almost every sector and applied restructuring policies to every sector, and the Korean government has eagerly concluded Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). The first FTA was signed with Chile, and after signing that agreement the trade deficit with Chile doubled compared with before the Korea–Chile FTA. Now, the Korean government has been playing a very active role at the global level, including multilateral trade institutions. The Korean government is now negotiating with the US for another North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) +plus.     

Intercultural Communication Training for English Language Teachers: A Case Study of an Immersion Program for South Korean Teachers

Little research has been conducted that explores connections between the fields of intercultural communication and English-language instruction. To address this gap, we report on an intercultural communication course delivered as an integral part of a short-term professional development immersion program for English-language teachers from South Korea. Study results indicate that intercultural communication training served to enhance participants’ pragmatics awareness along with sensitivity regarding sociocultural influences on communication that they experienced in situ. After the four-week course, most of the participants expressed desire and readiness to integrate intercultural communication into their teaching in South Korea. Intercultural communication training promises to complement pragmatics instruction aiming at improving English-language learning and teaching.     

Relational Tensions and Optimal Listening in the Communication Relationships of American and Finnish Legal Professionals

Drawing on relational dialectics, this study examines definitions of optimal listening, the tensions affecting it, cultural differences in both of these and strategies for managing tensions. The participant sample (N?=?101) consists of 76 American attorneys and 25 Finnish judges. The results suggest that differences in national communication cultures and the requirements of professional communication affect the definitions of optimal listening. The American participants perceived this as a people-oriented and the Finns as a fact-oriented activity. Both groups experienced reported tensions between real and ideal listening, autonomy and connection, the public and the private, and also between equality and inequality. Culturally, specific tensions were also reported.     

Narratives about the Media,Diet, and Body Image: A Cross-Cultural Comparison between Young Female Adults in the Midwestern United States and South Korea

This paper focuses on analysing college women’s narratives to discover their interpretations of thin ideals and dieting experiences and to compare cultural differences between the USA and Korea. Narrative analysis revealed that US women and Korean women have a different understanding of thin ideals. Both groups experienced social comparisons, social pressure to be thin, and emotional distress regarding appearance. Similarly, they revealed their emotional fluctuations associated with changes in weight. However, there were cultural differences in both groups’ ultimate goals for weight control. Consequently, this study suggests that feelings towards weight control have culturally grounded implications. Future directions are discussed.     

We or they? A summit,accents and South Korean stereotypes toward North Koreans

The effects of verbal accents on intergroup attitudes are well documented. This study aims to enrich our understanding by exploring how those effects vary according to the speaker's gender and the political context. We conducted two online survey experiments in which South Korean citizens were randomly exposed to speakers exhibiting one of four accent conditions – South Korean male and female accents and North Korean male and female accents – a week before and two days after the 2018 Singapore summit between North Korea and the United States, in order to test hypotheses based on literatures from political science, social psychology and evolutionary biology. The results indicate that only exposure to a North Korean male accent, not a North Korean female accent, strengthened stereotypes about North Koreans among South Koreans prior to the summit. Further, this negative effect disappeared immediately after the summit.     

Globalizing Korean queers? Project L(esbian), the first exhibition of lesbian arts in South Korea

This paper deals with the influence of queer and visual culture in South Korea by concentrating on the example of Project L, the first exhibition organized by self-proclaimed lesbian artists and curators in South Korea in 2005, followed by the group's second exhibition, Gender Spectrum, in 2008. Conflicts between the dominant curatorial approach toward feminist arts and the identity politics of the Project L team are investigated in order to illustrate major theoretical predicaments in which lesbian activists and artists find themselves in feminist organizations and art exhibitions in Korea. As the title “Globalizing Korean Queer” suggests, this paper also examines contradictory circumstances related to the influence of queer theory in non-western countries. A close analysis of Gender Spectrum sheds light upon how a non-western lesbian group utilizes queer theory to understand the distinctive cultural conditions underlying homophobia, beyond merely importing “advanced” theories from the west.     

Immigrant women’s acculturation stress and coping strategies in Korea: A qualitative analysis

The aim of this study was to explore the coping strategies used by migrant women experiencing acculturation stress in Korea. A qualitative content analysis of 20 transcribed individual interviews was used to describe and explore women’s experiences of acculturation into a Korean family and Korean culture. The findings could be summarized by the theme “A life with a family rooted in the 2nd homeland,” consisting of the following coping strategies: agreeing on cultural differences, accepting one’s limitations, respecting one’s own decision, sharing problems, learning about the Korean culture, enjoying one’s homeland culture, caring about identity diffusion, and helping survival. The results showed that the women experienced considerable acculturation stress, and they made tremendous efforts to align themselves with the Korean culture and with women’s lives in a Korean family. The processes and strategies that these women used to manage acculturation stress can be used by professionals to develop empirical guidelines to help other women experiencing acculturation stress. More research on various acculturation conditions and populations is required to generalize the results of this study.     

Theorizing difference and difficulty: “wreading” Asian American poetics in South Korea*

ABSTRACT

Reflecting on a personal experience teaching and studying Asian American poetry in South Korea, this paper examines how and why Asian American poetry in South Korea has been marginalized in the academia and argues that Asian American poetry needs to be newly dealt as a frontier that vigorously experiments the role of cultural poetics and humanities in and out of the university programs. The reception of Asian American poets and their poetry in South Korea is inseparable from the interpellation and understanding of Asian Americans as subject. This essay, rather than inscribing Anglo American critical frame that has focused on the reductive reading of essentializing racial traits and minority identities, tries to build a platform for inviting inter/cross-cultural thinking under the umbrella of poetry reading. Through the process of “wreading” Asian American poetry, I argue that difficulty and difference can be reinterpreted as practical monitors for alternative reading of Asian American poetry against the grain of the white Anglican national self of America.     

Fantasy island: oceanic imaginings in Paul Yoon's Once the Shore

Paul Yoon's short story collection, Once the Shore, recently won the fiction award at the 13th Asian American Literary Awards, sponsored by the Asian American Writers' Workshop. Once the Shore is set on the fictional Solla Island, the inspiration for which came from time Yoon spent on the real Jeju Island. Solla is an abstract or heterotopic space through which Yoon describes specific moments in the lives of local islanders as they are shaped both directly and indirectly by the brutal histories of colonialism and the Cold War, past and present, in the region. Yoon imagines Oceania from below, from the perspective of farmers, divers, fishermen, orphans, renegades, and castaways who form strange friendships across barriers of age, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. While Once the Shore can be read in relation to several overlapping literary traditions – Asian American, Korean, Pacific Islander – I situate the collection at the intersection of Epeli Hau'ofa's utopic vision of Oceania and the Islands of 20, an emergent organization based out of the World Peace Program at Cheju National University, which aims to move the G20 toward recognition of the uneven and disastrous effects of globalization, climate change, and militarism on small islands.     

Cross-cultural differences in apology

The current study examined the effects of national culture (U.S., China, and Korea) and interpersonal relationship type (a stranger and a friend) on apology. Findings revealed that participants (N = 376) from the three cultures differed in their perceptions of the offended person's emotional reaction and their propensities toward apology use (i.e., desire, obligation, and intention to apologize, as well as their perception of normative apology use). Regardless of their cultures, participants showed stronger obligation and intention to apologize to a stranger than to a friend. With regard to the intention to apologize, both American and Korean participants showed a greater discrepancy between themselves and their estimate of most people in their own culture than did Chinese participants. Although participants from the three cultures did not differ in their propensities toward apology use for a friend, both American and Chinese participants showed greater discrepancy than did Korean participants for feeling obliged to apologize to a stranger. For intention to apologize to a stranger, both American and Korean participants, compared to Chinese, showed greater discrepancy between themselves and their estimate of most people in their own culture. Other findings and implications thereof are discussed in more detail in the paper.     

Looking for other stories: women's writing,Self-Respect movement and the politics of feminist translations

ABSTRACT

The primary purpose of this essay is to survey the recent zombie craze in Northeast Asian films from Japan and South Korea. While the concept of the zombie may have originated in colonial Haiti, with its ghoulish images and supernatural lore, zombies were later imported to North America and reformulated as popular cultural entertainment by Hollywood. They are now flourishing in an East Asian cinematic context preserved in a globalized form. The films under investigation – I Am a Hero and Train to Busan – share similar cultural subtexts despite their incommensurable experiences of global capitalism in Asia and its latest ideological phase, neoliberalism. Both films critique the current neoliberal order and were nurtured by historical traumas experienced by both countries as well as the pandemic spread of viruses, both real and imaginary, that have ravaged the region. Nevertheless, the most prominent issue explored by Japanese and Korean zombie films is the continuity of society and its reproduction: as cultural artifacts of the neoliberal world, these films offer dystopian visions in which exploitation accelerates to such an extent that states cannot protect themselves against the viral and capitalist onslaught.     

Refugee,returnee, borderland: the accidental activists and Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean

ABSTRACT

Working through the entanglements of diaspora, national identification, and minority formation in the protracted aftermath of the Korean War, this article intends to take the dyadic subject of North Korean defector/refugee as an entry point for unpacking the rhetoric of freedom and salvation. Taking a cultural studies approach that regards literature as a terrain of political engagement for reconsidering the narratives of freedom in relation to the hierarchy of nationhood embedded in the protracted Cold War in Asia, I examine Krys Lee’s novel How I Became a North Korean (2016), an Asian American text that weaves together the story of an Asian American returnee with those of North Korean refugees in the North Korean-China borderland. Conflating refugee and returnee, Lee’s novel occasions an exploration of the ethics of co-presence that undergirded Asian American studies, to consider both the predicaments of North Korean refugees and the linkage between Asian America and Asia. Taking literature as a form of activism, this article furthermore seeks to reflect on the promise of activism by asking how the demands for the right for return may complicate the orthodox of humanitarian imagination, and render a moment for relational thinking beyond representation.     

Translation of ‘America’ during the early Cold War period: a comparative study on the history of popular music in South Korea and Taiwan

Abstract

The evaluation of the cold war influences played by the US on the rest of the world should not only be accounted economically and politically, but also culturally. In this paper we see the US influences on South Korea and Taiwan from the value‐laden concept of Americanization and through which we examine comparatively specific practices of domestic popular music development in these two countries. Setting this paper as a historical comparative study, we see the working of Americanization in relation to popular music as a value regime in which American is constructed as an ideal model imaginatively and discursively, which was made possible by economic, social and cultural forces in South Korea and Taiwan. Focusing on the Cold War period, circa 1950s to 1960s, levels and aspects of Americanization were therefore ways of translation, to use Said’s concept of traveling theory analogically; Anglo‐American music genres traveled to these countries to be incorporated contextually as new or trendy conventions of music‐making, which in turn helped form local music genres. The socio‐historical contexts of South Korea and Taiwan, with respect to the presence of American army forces, and similar postwar anti‐communist political forces, in nation‐building (north–south Korea, red China–free China antagonism respectively) are central to our understanding of the visibility of Americanization in different music cultures in these two countries. This paper will go into each country’s historical trajectory of music practices that took Japanese colonial influences up to the postwar time and then blending with Anglo‐American genres in indigenizing that eventually marked their different paths, as we comparatively reveal their institutional, political and national cultural conditions, which were necessary in shaping each country’s music‐making conventions, entertainment business, and consumption cultures of popular music – and that might implicitly inform tentatively the present rivalry between ‘offensive’ Korean Wave and ‘defensive’ Taiwanese ‘rockers’ in the globalization era.