(529) Fighting Monks The 20th century was a difficult time for Korean Buddhism. Over the hundred years, Korea saw the rapid rise of Christianity while Buddhism was in retreat. This vulnerability of the traditional Korean religion has many explanations, most of which ar..
(528) Eulsa Treaty For how long did Japan rule Korea? Most textbooks note that the colonial period lasted for 35 years, from the 1910 annexation to the 1945 liberation.
(527) Dawn of Modern Korea Koreans are crazy about education. This statement might need many caveats and qualifications, but in general it is true.
(526) Traffic in 1920s-30s In the late 1920s and early 1930s officials of the Seoul municipal administration undertook some very interesting research. Every year the City Hall officials spent an entire autumn day sitting next to major roads and painstakingly counting all the..
(525) Korean Migrants Korea is one of the few countries that have large diasporas or overseas communities of their compatriots. Indeed, Koreans now live across the globe in large numbers. Some 72 million reside in Korea (North and South) and an additional 6 million live..
(524) Foreigners As every resident of Seoul knows only too well, the Korean capital is becoming a multinational, multiethnic city. For decades, a foreign face on a Seoul street would attract much attention, but this is not the case anymore.
(523) First Students Abroad Who was the first Korean to study in the United States? It is a bit difficult to say. Most books would suggest Yu Kil-jun, a young intellectual, writer and political activist, who studied in America in the mid-1880s.
(522) Island Life When Koreans refer to ``Yeouido talk," everyone understands immediately what it means. It stands for talking politics, since the island of Yeouido is the major seat of political power. This is where the Korean parliament, as well as major corporati..
(521) House of Moonlight There were no restaurants in old Korea. Well, this might be a bit of exaggeration, since a hungry traveler could usually find some place to eat, at least in a major city.
(520) Extramarital Sex Communist regimes tended to have a rather suspicious attitude toward sex. Well, this statement is a sort of generalization, since attitudes have changed over the course of communist history.
(519) Who Listened to the Radio? In 1915, the Governor General's Office and the Korean branch of the Japanese Imperial Post conducted an experiment
(518) Founder of The Korea Times Kim Hwal-lan, also known as Helen Kim, is widely remembered in Korea nowadays. A religious activist, the first Korean female Ph.D. holder, a politician and an educator, she was the first native to be appointed head of Ewha College.
(517) Merry Widows! In old Korea, widows were viewed with deep suspicion. Everybody with even a cursory knowledge of pre-1900 Korean literature knows that widows were usually depicted as lecherous creatures, driven by their insatiable and immoral sexual desires and..
(516) Signs of the Times They say that statistics tell you everything. I am not sure whether this is really the case, but sometimes the reach of Korean statistics is quite impressive.
(515) Working Girls One of the most frequently discussed topics in the Korean press of the 1920s was the rise of a new social group: employed women. This was seen as a novelty and indeed it was one.
(514) Daehan-minguk Most of our readers live in the country whose official name in English is the ``Republic of Korea.'' But how does that name sound in Korean? And how did this name come into being in the first place?
(513) First Red Koreans In the early 1920s, everybody in the maritime province of Russia knew one fact very well: the local Koreans were for the Reds.
