Korean Kontext

K-pop had an explosive year in 2018, but it didn't arise from a vacuum. Since 1998, one web community - Soompi - has been sharing the latest information about Korea's thriving pop culture scene and steadily building a community. It would be no exaggeration to claim that a lot of South Korea's soft power is built on this community.  Korean Kontext sits down with Soompi's founder, Susan Kang - who is also the 2019 Korean-American Day honoree for her contributions to advancing awareness of Korean culture in the United States. But as the interview with her reveals, the community she built was more than a place for K-pop fans to gather - it was a safe place, a home away from home, and a place of understanding. And perhaps that's the biggest takeaway from the Korean Wave: that we are not all that different from one another.  

2018 has been an incredibly eventful year for both the Koreas and the U.S.-Korea relationship: from North Korea’s participation in the Winter Olympics at the start of the year to the Trump-Kim Summit in June, things moved at a dizzying speed. But it was more than just the summitry - there were developments on social and economic fronts. South Korea’s foreign policy looked to Southeast Asia, women rallied against harassment, and people debated the country’s energy mix. This and much more on this final episode of the year.

Interest in the Korean peninsula is generally very narrow in the United States - it tends to be focused on North Korea and security issues, particularly the country's ballistic and nuclear weapons developments. Given the security challenges, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but how do we begin to engage with a society that we don’t quite understand? What are the aspirations of the North Korean people? What is their world view? Making the task particularly difficult, North Korea is a notoriously isolated country - doing field studies in the country is not an option. But there is one discipline that presents a window into the collective imagination and perceptions of the North Korean society: literature. Dr. Dafna Zur joins Korean Kontext to address how literature can be used to better understand North Korea - and also tells us about the complex history of children’s literature on the Korean Peninsula.  Also check out her lecture at the Library of Congress on science fiction in North Korea: https://youtu.be/mH8RPQWd-ho

Last Friday, on November 30, 2018, President George H.W. Bush passed away. In the days that followed, there were many discussions in the foreign policy community about the late president's handling of the many dramatic events during his tenure: the collapse of the Soviet Union, unification of Germany, democratization of Eastern Europe, the Gulf War, etc. Here, the Korean Peninsula often gets sidelined - however, President Bush senior should be remembered for strengthening not only the U.S.-Korea relationship but also extending critical support to the nascent democratic institution in South Korea. Moreover, it was during the Bush administration that the two Koreas joined the United Nations and began discussing the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. To talk about these developments in greater detail, KEI sat down with Donald Gregg who served as ambassador to South Korea between 1989 and 1993.  A good accompanying piece for this episode is the article on President H.W. Bush's legacy in Korea by our president, Ambassador Kathleen Stephens, on KEI's Peninsula Blog. Find the post here

What does a unified Korea look like? Beyond the question of whether the government of this new country will be a unitary or federal one, how will the people - separated not just by time, but also increasingly language and worldview - interact with one another? This goes to the heart of the research by Christopher Green (PhD candidate, Leiden University) and Steven Denney (PhD candidate, University of Toronto) who are examining how the broader Korean perspective on what defines a Korean nation is evolving over time. You can find their research paper for KEI's Academic Paper Series here   

On this week’s episode, we welcome back Victoria Kim, a researcher and multimedia journalist. When she last joined us in 2016, Victoria discussed her project “Lost and Found in Uzbekistan: The Korean Story” which chronicled the stories of the Korean diaspora in Central Asia, including her own grandfather. This time, she sat down with KEI Program Manager Juni Kim and discussed her experiences and impressions from her recent trip to North Korea, and what the trip meant to her as she followed the same route her ancestors used across the Tumen River from North Korea into Russia. Link to Victoria's presentation at Johns Hopkins SAIS:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI_m29wVSqg Link to previous Korean Kontext episode with Victoria:http://keia.org/podcast/korean-diaspora-central-asia  

This is a re-broadcast of an episode from January - KEI's Jenna Gibson interviews Min Jin Lee, award winning author of Pachinko. Spanning nearly a century and multiple generations, Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel Pachinko tells the story of a Korean family struggling to find their place in Japan before, during, and after the Korean War. Praised by The Chicago Tribune, NPR, CNN, and others, the novel touches on a myriad of themes, including identity, the role of women, war, and discrimination, all within a rich historical background. In this episode, Jenna spoke with Min Jin Lee about why she started writing Pachinko, how the story evolved over time, and what she's working on next.

When we think about the threat posed by North Korea, we tend to narrowly talk about the missiles and nuclear weapons that are inside North Korea. But North Korea is also a prolific international arms dealer - it is largely responsible for the missile programs in Iran and Pakistan, not to mention small arms proliferation in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite this, other than the occasional news stories about a boat load of North Korean guns in the Caribbean and gas masks that were heading to Syria being intercepted on the high seas, media coverage of North Korea’s arms sales abroad has been scant. And when public attention comes short, it runs the risk of getting left behind in diplomatic negotiations. Here to give us a better sense of what is going on, our guest today is Dr. Bruce Bechtol, author of “North Korean Military Proliferation in the Middle East and Africa: Enabling Violence and Instability” (Amazon page link here). We discuss how Pyongyang’s global arms sales activities have implications for both the effectiveness of our sanctions policy towards North Korea and Pyongyang’s ability to make its own weapons program more deadly.

From the United States, events on the Korean Peninsula have moved quickly and dramatically - we were first surprised to find that North Korea had ballistic weapons that could reach continental United States and before we knew it, the president of the United States was meeting Kim Jong-un face-to-face. But what did this all look like in South Korea? The South Korean people have lived with the risk of war for decades - they have also seen their presidents travel to Pyongyang in the past to talk about peace.  In this context, what has the past year looked like for South Korean audiences? We speak with veteran journalist and Seoul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal Jonathan Cheng to get a sense of how things look from the ground.   

What happens if there is a war on the Korean Peninsula? In addition to the incalculable cost of lives lost, a potential conflict on the Korean Peninsula would have an immense, tangible impact on the livelihood of Americans far away from the front lines. Our guests, Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Senior Consultant Robert Powell and Korean-Americans for Action Executive Director Sam Yoon, explain exactly what is at stake if the current peace process falters.  You can also find Robert Powell's special report on this issue here 

Are negotiations with North Korea headed in the right direction? Between the high-profile summit meetings and images of an inter-Korean team competing in the Olympics together, are we any closer to denuclearization than we were before? We can start answering these questions by examining where we erred in the past. Ambassador Chun Yung-woo represented South Korea in the final rounds of the Six Party Talks - he watched a deal come together then fall apart. Building on his unique experience, he shares his outlook on current prospects for denuclearization and what might be required to ensure peace on the Korean Peninsula

Life in North Korea is difficult. But when defectors make their way to South Korea, they confront new challenges. This is particularly true for children who have to deal with not only adapting to South Korean society, but also its infamously rigorous education system. To get a glimpse into their lives, Jenna Gibson sat down with administrators and students from Keunsaem, an afterschool program dedicated to defector-migrant youth from North Korea. In this special episode of Korean Kontext, students from this program tell Jenna about their hopes and aspirations for a unified peninsula. Meanwhile, the school's directors, themselves defectors from North Korea, highlight the role that these students will play in the near future as ambassadors for unification.      

It started in 2009 with a few audio lessons. Within just six years, Talk to Me in Korean has grown into a huge hit, with millions of listeners from all over the world visiting the site to improve their Korean language skills. The organization has now expanded to include video lessons, textbooks, and even a coffee shop. In this episode of Korean Kontext, host Jenna Gibson connects with TTMIK founder Hyunwoo Sun to discuss how how he got the idea for the site, how they have dealt with its popularity, and his thoughts on teaching Korean culture along with teaching language. *Rebroadcast from 12/2/15

As part of KEI’s annual commemoration of Korean-American Day on January 13th, KEI honors exceptional Korean-Americans in various fields and industries for their respective contributions to both their professions and the Korean-American community.  For 2018, KEI honored three Korean-American journalists. Jenna Gibson also sat down with honoree Chang Lee, a photojournalist from  the New York Times. He spoke with Jenna on how he first became interested in photography and his experiences of covering everything from war zones to the Olympics.  The New York Times featured Chang Lee and his photographs from the Pyeongchang Olympics in a February 15th article, which can be found in the link below. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/lens/a-times-photographers-journey-home-to-the-winter-olympics.html Note: The interview took place on January 12th and prior to the start of the Pyeongchang Olympics. *Rebroadcast from 2/23/2018

From February 9-25, athletes and fans from around the world gathered in PyeongChang for the 2018 Winter Olympics. But while the athletes competed for gold, the Olympics also had major political implications, especially after the North Koreans decided to send a high-level delegation to the Games and agreed to field a joint women's hockey team with South Korea. In this episode of Korean Kontext, host Jenna Gibson spoke with Jonathan Cheng, the Seoul Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, about how he and the Journal's team chose to cover all these different aspects of the Olympics, how Korea prepared for the Games, and, of course, the rise of Korea's famous Garlic Girls curling team. *Rebroadcast from 3/2/2018