Reviews for Towards Korean Reconciliation: Socio-Cultural Exchanges and Cooperation

The average rating for Towards Korean Reconciliation: Socio-Cultural Exchanges and Cooperation based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-10-09 00:00:00 Rodolphe Gautier For many reasons the author deserves kudos for having produced a stellar piece of scholarship. First, he reviewed a wide array of Korean, Japanese, and English language primary and secondary sources. For those readers who wish to follow up on these they are clearly footnoted in the text and then at the back of the book. Second, the book is very well organized. Each chapter reviews some specific aspects of the interactions which took place between the Japanese who were trying to colonize Korea and the Koreans who were trying to cope with and in many cases struggle against having their country and their lives taken over. Third, despite KBE being an academic book it is quite readable. Its chapters are broken down into sections which focus on narrower elements of the topic at hand. For the most part Schmid's prose is concise and direct. His analyses of the issues he depicts are clear, thorough, and nuanced. In fact, there are sections of the book where the info is so comprehensive as to become a bit tedious. As one moves through the text one can get a sense of the complexity of the political, social, and intellectual conflicts which took place between the Japanese occupiers and their Korean subjects between 1895 and 1919. IMHO there are two modest flaws with this book. First, it is quite dense. Ie, as noted above there is so much information with names, dates, etc that it is slow going. If the reader wants to assimilate, let alone recall, much of what is being presented, he/she has to read very carefully and probably in chunks of 10-15 pages at a time. Second, Schmid is careful to provide English translations of Korean or Japanese terms when he first uses them. But about midway through the book he stops doing that for words he has already used a few times. This was not a problem for me with the Japanese terms because I have heard or read of most of them elsewhere. It was a challenge, however, with the Korean ones because I am completely unfamiliar with that language. I often found myself having to go back to remind myself what the term meant. This got to be annoying as I progressed into the later stages of the book. Overall, though, I recommend KBE highly for one who wants to learn a great deal about the Japanese colonization of Korea from the latter's perspective. I would add one other proviso besides the fact that it is dense/occasionally a case of TMI: it will be a bit easier for the reader who already knows the basic dates, issues, etc of the colonization of Korea by Japan. Those not having that foundation of knowledge may find it very slow going indeed. Given its modest flaws I would rate it a 4.5.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-10-16 00:00:00 William Ohara very lucid, elegantly written contribution to studies on modern korean history (/historiography), esp. production of national knowledge within (/in response to) capitalist modernity. i probably should have read this years ago, but blah that's how it goes.