Sequels seldom seem as good as the works from which they spring. Many seem to repeat the originals, simply going over the same ground in a similar way. Such is thankfully not the case with Fyodor Tertitskiy’s new book, Pyongyang on the Brink: Sixteen Crises That Shaped North Korea, his sequel to last year’s Accidental Tyrant: The…
A number of books in English have given us histories of Korean emigration to the United States and Canada, but the story of those who left Korea for Japan in the decades of Japanese imperial rule is relatively unknown. Sayaka Chatani, a professor of history at the National University of Singapore, writes in this book…
Diplomats, soldiers, and spies tend to take centre stage in stories of war, as author and former journalist Evelyn Iritani writes in her history of the United States and Japan in the Second World War. In this book, the author tells a tale of civilians, rather than one of military men, a tale of victims,…
Biographies, at least in English, about Japanese who played key roles in the Second World War are relatively rare. Chiang Kai-shek, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin—each the subject of dozens of biographies—have all attracted a great deal of attention. General Tojo Hideki, Japan’s leader for…
A new book offers what many readers will find surprising insights into the circulation of texts in the Cold War among three neighbouring countries at odds with one another: North Korea, South Korea, and Japan.
Russia came late to Japan, but devoted considerable energies to grappling with one of the world’s great intelligence challenges and penetrating the insular Asian nation once the Japanese shifted in the latter half of the 19th century from a policy of restricted contact with the outside world to one of imperial competition with Moscow and…
Japanese painters, printmakers, and sculptors who produced artwork in support of Tokyo’s war efforts in the period between 1931 and 1945, had to pivot as they continued their careers in the shadow of empire during the seven-year US occupation occupation, which began with Japan’s defeat in 1945 and ended in 1952 under a Cold War…
Fyodor Tertitskiy, a young and prolific academic specialist on North Korean affairs working in Seoul, has written a biography of the first North Korean leader that is both highly readable and extensively researched.
In 1946, Kornel Chang’s Korean grandparents fled south from Pyongyang across the border at the 38th parallel, leaving the zone under Soviet military occupation for the one occupied by the US military. Years later, his family left South Korea for the United States. This book is born of conversations heard by Chang growing up in…
One of the publisher’s most recent of its national anthologies, The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories provides portrayals of the country in the years 1905 to 1945, when the nation was under imperial Japanese rule, as well as glimpses of life in the Republic of Korea (ROK, aka South Korea), which came into existence…
Translators have made books from around the world available through the centuries to those unable to read the language in which a work first appears. Translation allows us to gain insights and grapple with the arguments of authors from around the globe. A world without translation would be, for most readers in the Anglosphere, a…
Washington officials have long found Pyongyang a bedeviling problem. Much of their frustration has come from a lack of information on a country that Donald Gregg—a Korea expert who served in Seoul as US ambassador and before then as chief of the CIA station there—called Washington’s “longest-running intelligence failure”. Without information, as Gregg argued in…
It seems that so little solid, verifiable information has reached the outside world from North Korea since the nation’s founding in 1948 that we might as well, in the manner of medieval cartographers, inscribe maps of the Korean Peninsula between the Yalu River and the Demilitarized Zone with illustrations of dragons and lions as an…
Janet Poole, a professor at the University of Toronto, in Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories has translated into English a collection of works by Choe Myong-ik, a writer whom she calls in her introductory essay an “exquisite architect of the short story form”. Following her essay, Poole presents nine stories, five from the…
Yu Miri in her novel The End of August tells an extraordinary tale: the saga of her Korean family and the story of their nation. Her story spans space and time, giving voice to both the living and the dead. It is a tale of Korea, from the brief, failed attempt to stand at the…