• Date: November 28th, Tuesday, 2019 15:00-17:00
• Location: Room 303, SNUAC (Bldg. 101)

2019 ICAS Book Prize Korean Edition Winners’ Book Talk Series 3

Wan Bom Lee. Jimmy Carter and Two Koreas. Seongnam: The Academy of Korean Studies Press, 2017.

Yungjin Lee. Death and Nationalism: Commemoration of Kamikaze Soldiers and Politics of Mourning in Post-war Japan. Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2018.

SNUAC has planned a book talk series for outstanding scholarly publications for the purpose of introducing 2019 ICAS Book Prize Korean Edition winners to researchers and readers in Korea. In the third event held on November 28th, Professor Yungjin Lee (Kangwon University) and Professor Wan Bom Lee (The Academy of Korean Studies) were invited to give talks on their publications.

Prof. Lee explained the background of his interest in the Japanese kamikaze during the Pacific War in the context of intellectual history on Japanese post-war memorial of those killed in action and the Japanese nationalism and raised the question whether the tragic death from kamikaze operations was a pure and holy martyrdom for the nation, or merely a useless death mobilized for the war of invasion. Based on his fieldwork experience in Kagoshima, Japan, the so-called mecca of kamikaze, Prof. Lee talked of how the memory and evaluation of kamikaze deaths changed and came to have a dual nature in the regional community, and how this duality is related to the current conservative swing in Japan. He introduced the “politics of mourning” as a methodology related to war, death and memory politics, and noted that his research interests are extending beyond Japan into East Asia.

Prof. Wan Bom Lee explained how his book Jimmy Carter and Two Koreas is the first of a series of monographs on Korean history of politics and diplomacy, and gave illuminations on the background of the Carter administration’s rather idealistic conception of the three-party talk among the U.S. and two Koreas in the late 1970’s, and how such an attempted was revived in 1994 to be connected to the discussions for a South-North Korean summit and North Korea-U.S. talks (Geneva protocol) in response to the new post-Cold War situations, further becoming the origin of the contact among U.S. and Korea and various forms of talks to date. After this interesting presentation based on Prof. Lee’s resources in Korea’s history of modern diplomacy, a Q & A session and discussion followed.

SNUAC has hosted and judged ICAS Book Prize Korean Edition since 2017, with the purpose of proliferating Asia studies in Korea and introducing outstanding Korean research to foreign researchers. 2019 ICAS  Book Prize Korean Edition received 51 books written in Korean and published from November 2016 to October 2018 from 23 domestic publishers. An independent judge committee of four experts carried out an impartial evaluation to select 6 outstanding books.

2019 ICAS  Book Prize Korean Edition Webpage

https://icas.asia/en/shortlist-and-winner-korean-language-edition-ibp2019