STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Cheehyung Harrison Kim (Columbia University Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. In North Korea in the decade following the Korean War, labor became the defining means of state control and national unity. In pursuit of rapid industrial growth, the North Korean state stressed order and consistency in … [Read more...]
Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Sayaka Chatani (Cornell University Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. By the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of young men in the Japanese colonies, in particular Taiwan and Korea, had expressed their loyalty to the empire by volunteering to join the army. Why and how did so many colonial … [Read more...]
A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, and Sino–North Korean Relations, 1949–1976
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia (Columbia University Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. Today, the People’s Republic of China is North Korea’s only ally on the world stage, a tightly knit relationship that goes back decades. Both countries portray their partnership as one of “brotherly affection” based on … [Read more...]
Buddhas and Ancestors: Religion and Wealth in Fourteenth-Century Korea
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Juhn Y. Ahn (University of Washington Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. Two issues central to the transition from the Koryo to the Choson dynasty in fourteenth-century Korea were social differences in ruling elites and the decline of Buddhism, which had been the state religion. In this revisionist … [Read more...]
Engineering Asia: Technology, Colonial Development, and the Cold War Order
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Edited by Hiromi Mizuno, Aaron S. Moore, and John DiMoia (Bloomsbury Press/SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. Weaving together chapters on imperial Japan's wartime mobilization, Asia's first wave of postwar decolonization, and Cold War geopolitical conflict in … [Read more...]
