Gender Equality Solutions a Problem in Korean Workforce
by Ji Soo Kim Recovering from Japanese colonization and the Korean War, under the strong U.S influence, the Republic of Korea displayed an amazing yet abrupt economical development throughout the 20th...
View ArticleYasukuni Shrine and Korean Identity
by Lilia Yamakawa In his research on nationalism, Craig Calhoun talks about when and how nations were formed. Some people say nations are primordial, that they have been around forever, that they are...
View ArticleK-Pop Beauty Factory
by Adelle Tamblyn Coming in at US$180 million in 2011, Kpop (Korean pop) has become South Korea’s largest export. After watching a handful of Kpop music videos, it’s not hard to see why it’s become...
View ArticleGlobalization in Japan
by Kaho Nagao Since our generation has been in school, teachers, the media and so on often say that “Globalism is important and you guys might to be an global person.” On the other hand, the definition...
View ArticleFlower Men of Korea
by Lilia Yamakawa “Beauty” and what one considers beautiful depend a lot on a person’s own culture and ethnicity. On the streets of Korea, it is not unusual to find Flower Men (FMs), called “kkotminam”...
View ArticleYasukuni and Nationalist Identities, Japanese and Korean
by Lilia Yamakawa In 1985, US President Ronald Reagan agreed to visit a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany to lay a wreath in honor of Germany’s war casualties. Reagan’s team of advisors did not do their...
View ArticleSymbiosis in the World of Beauty: The Cosmetics Industry and the Western...
by Kyungyeon Chung Upon walking into a drug store in Japan, one will find an array of cosmetic products that promises hopeful transformation into what today’s Japanese society perceives as beauty....
View ArticleFrom Ebony to Ivory: Colorism in the Philippines
by Jiyang Shin The ever-expanding skin whitening market in the Philippines seems to have distinctive characteristics compared to the markets of other countries that also value lighter skin tones. In...
View ArticleEchoes of female transnational migration: Care-giving jobs in Korea
by Yoon Jee Hyun (JeeJee) According to United Nations (2013), female migrants represent about half of all transnational migration. Among women migrants, there has been an increase of number of women...
View ArticleColor? Look for beauty in its own
by Kanae Mukaihara “Hey!” When a person sees another person and exchanges a word, they likely have already distinguished the other person’s race according to their appearance. This is the reality. In...
View ArticleOfficial Nationalism and the Japanese Annexation of Korea
Student post In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the emergence of “official nationalism” was, to a large degree, incited by the national movement in the American nations. Old...
View ArticleWhite Normality and the Mass Media
by Marcel Koníček Before I took my international sociology class, I had never heard about skin lightening and the issues connected to it. I did not even imagine that something like that could even...
View ArticleReforming surgery and the self: Plastic surgery, historical traumas, and...
by Lisbeth Lyngs Plastic surgery and skin whitening have in recent years become a hot and very normalized topic in Asia. Especially in South Korea, where one in five women has undergone some sort of...
View ArticleColourism, plastic surgery, and trying to look Caucasian
by Tommy Pass In class we talked about the ongoing trend of lightening ones skin to appear more attractive as well as where this trend in doing so may have come from. Evelyn Nakano Glenn discusses the...
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