James L. Huffman
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780824872915
- eISBN:
- 9780824877866
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824872915.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
This work examines the daily lives of Japan’s very poor—the kasō shakai or underclass—during the last half of the Meiji era (1868-1912). Focusing on urban slums (hinminkutsu), it attempts to ...
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This work examines the daily lives of Japan’s very poor—the kasō shakai or underclass—during the last half of the Meiji era (1868-1912). Focusing on urban slums (hinminkutsu), it attempts to understand how poor people themselves experienced life. After examining the dominant popular views of hinmin or poor people in this era as a baseline, the author looks at what brought masses of hinmin to the cities, where they lived, and what work they did: everything from pulling rickshaws to making textiles, from carrying night soil to providing sex. It looks too at the daily challenges of stretching budgets, grappling with educational issues for children, and preparing meals. One chapter concentrates on the major problems, such as illness and disasters, that made the poverty-stricken life especially difficult, while another examines the endless ways in which the very poor acted as agents, filling life not just with hope but with activism and celebration in the here and now. Final, comparative chapters take up the nature of rural poverty and the lives of poor Japanese immigrants in Hawai’i’s sugar plantations as a way of understanding what was unique about urban poverty. The work contends that despite massive difficulties, the hinmin attacked life as intelligent agents, experiencing a range of life experiences similar to those that typified the more affluent classes.Less
This work examines the daily lives of Japan’s very poor—the kasō shakai or underclass—during the last half of the Meiji era (1868-1912). Focusing on urban slums (hinminkutsu), it attempts to understand how poor people themselves experienced life. After examining the dominant popular views of hinmin or poor people in this era as a baseline, the author looks at what brought masses of hinmin to the cities, where they lived, and what work they did: everything from pulling rickshaws to making textiles, from carrying night soil to providing sex. It looks too at the daily challenges of stretching budgets, grappling with educational issues for children, and preparing meals. One chapter concentrates on the major problems, such as illness and disasters, that made the poverty-stricken life especially difficult, while another examines the endless ways in which the very poor acted as agents, filling life not just with hope but with activism and celebration in the here and now. Final, comparative chapters take up the nature of rural poverty and the lives of poor Japanese immigrants in Hawai’i’s sugar plantations as a way of understanding what was unique about urban poverty. The work contends that despite massive difficulties, the hinmin attacked life as intelligent agents, experiencing a range of life experiences similar to those that typified the more affluent classes.
Minjeong Kim
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780824869816
- eISBN:
- 9780824877842
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824869816.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
With the unprecedented number of foreign-born population, South Korea has tried to reinvent itself as a multicultural society, but the intense multiculturalism efforts have focused exclusively on ...
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With the unprecedented number of foreign-born population, South Korea has tried to reinvent itself as a multicultural society, but the intense multiculturalism efforts have focused exclusively on marriage immigrants. At the advent and height of South Korea’s eschewed multiculturalism, Elusive Belonging takes the readers to everyday lives of marriage immigrants in rural Korea where the projected image of a developed Korea which lured marriage immigrants and the gloomy reality of rural lives clashed. The intimate ethnographic account pays attention to emotional entanglements among Filipina wives, South Korean husbands, in-laws, and multicultural agents, with particular focus on such emotions as love, intimacy, anxiety, gratitude, and derision, which shape marriage immigrants’ fragmented citizenship and elusive sense of belonging to their new country. This investigation of the politics of belonging illuminates how marriage immigrants explore to mold a new identity in their new home, Korea.Less
With the unprecedented number of foreign-born population, South Korea has tried to reinvent itself as a multicultural society, but the intense multiculturalism efforts have focused exclusively on marriage immigrants. At the advent and height of South Korea’s eschewed multiculturalism, Elusive Belonging takes the readers to everyday lives of marriage immigrants in rural Korea where the projected image of a developed Korea which lured marriage immigrants and the gloomy reality of rural lives clashed. The intimate ethnographic account pays attention to emotional entanglements among Filipina wives, South Korean husbands, in-laws, and multicultural agents, with particular focus on such emotions as love, intimacy, anxiety, gratitude, and derision, which shape marriage immigrants’ fragmented citizenship and elusive sense of belonging to their new country. This investigation of the politics of belonging illuminates how marriage immigrants explore to mold a new identity in their new home, Korea.
A. Robert Lee (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780824872946
- eISBN:
- 9780824877873
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824872946.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Karen Tei Yamashita’s novels, essays, and performance scripts have garnered considerable praise from scholars and reviewers, and are taught not only in the United States but in at least half a dozen ...
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Karen Tei Yamashita’s novels, essays, and performance scripts have garnered considerable praise from scholars and reviewers, and are taught not only in the United States but in at least half a dozen countries in Asia, South America, Europe. Her work has been written about in numerous disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory is the first anthology given over to Yamashita’s writing. It contains newly commissioned essays by established, international scholars; a recent interview with the author; a semiautobiographical keynote address delivered at an international conference that ruminates on her Japanese American heritage; and a full bibliography. The essays offer fresh and in-depth readings of the magic realist canvas of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990); the Japanese emigrant portraiture of Brazil-Maru (1992); Los Angeles as rambunctious geopolitical and transnational fulcrum of the Americas in Tropic of Orange (1997); the fraught relationship of Japanese and Brazilian heritage and labor in Circle K Cycles (2001); Asian American history and politics of the1960s in I Hotel (2010); and Anime Wong (2014), a gallery of performativity illustrating the contested and inextricable nature of East and West. This essay-collection explores Yamashita’s use of the fantastical, the play of emerging transnational ethnicity, and the narrative tactics of reflexivity and bricolage in storytelling located on a continuum of the unique and the communal, of the past and the present, and that are mapped in various spatial and virtual realities.Less
Karen Tei Yamashita’s novels, essays, and performance scripts have garnered considerable praise from scholars and reviewers, and are taught not only in the United States but in at least half a dozen countries in Asia, South America, Europe. Her work has been written about in numerous disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory is the first anthology given over to Yamashita’s writing. It contains newly commissioned essays by established, international scholars; a recent interview with the author; a semiautobiographical keynote address delivered at an international conference that ruminates on her Japanese American heritage; and a full bibliography. The essays offer fresh and in-depth readings of the magic realist canvas of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990); the Japanese emigrant portraiture of Brazil-Maru (1992); Los Angeles as rambunctious geopolitical and transnational fulcrum of the Americas in Tropic of Orange (1997); the fraught relationship of Japanese and Brazilian heritage and labor in Circle K Cycles (2001); Asian American history and politics of the1960s in I Hotel (2010); and Anime Wong (2014), a gallery of performativity illustrating the contested and inextricable nature of East and West. This essay-collection explores Yamashita’s use of the fantastical, the play of emerging transnational ethnicity, and the narrative tactics of reflexivity and bricolage in storytelling located on a continuum of the unique and the communal, of the past and the present, and that are mapped in various spatial and virtual realities.
Camilla Fojas, Rudy P. Guevarra, and Nitasha Tamar Sharma (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780824869885
- eISBN:
- 9780824877859
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824869885.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
From the perspective of the U.S. continent, Hawai‘i is a land of aloha that enjoys all manner of peace and harmony, particularly among the races and for peoples of mixed heritage. It is a tourist ...
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From the perspective of the U.S. continent, Hawai‘i is a land of aloha that enjoys all manner of peace and harmony, particularly among the races and for peoples of mixed heritage. It is a tourist paradise where visitor, local and Native mingle without incident. Ethnic difference is celebrated as a sign of multicultural globalism that designates Hawai‘i as the crossroads of the Pacific. The contributors of this volume reimagine these ways of thinking about Hawai‘i as a model of racial and ethnic harmony. Beyond Ethnicity examines the dynamic between race and ethnicity to challenge the primacy of ethnicity and ethnic difference for examining difference in the islands. This original and thought-provoking volume poses questions about the role of race in the current political configuration of the islands and in so doing, challenges how we imagine and conceptualize race on the continent.Less
From the perspective of the U.S. continent, Hawai‘i is a land of aloha that enjoys all manner of peace and harmony, particularly among the races and for peoples of mixed heritage. It is a tourist paradise where visitor, local and Native mingle without incident. Ethnic difference is celebrated as a sign of multicultural globalism that designates Hawai‘i as the crossroads of the Pacific. The contributors of this volume reimagine these ways of thinking about Hawai‘i as a model of racial and ethnic harmony. Beyond Ethnicity examines the dynamic between race and ethnicity to challenge the primacy of ethnicity and ethnic difference for examining difference in the islands. This original and thought-provoking volume poses questions about the role of race in the current political configuration of the islands and in so doing, challenges how we imagine and conceptualize race on the continent.
Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780824866693
- eISBN:
- 9780824876937
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824866693.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Rethinking Japanese Feminisms offers a broad overview of the great diversity of feminist thought and practice in Japan from the early twentieth century to the present. Drawing on methodologies and ...
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Rethinking Japanese Feminisms offers a broad overview of the great diversity of feminist thought and practice in Japan from the early twentieth century to the present. Drawing on methodologies and approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies, and sociology, each chapter presents the results of research based on some combination of original archival research, careful textual analysis, ethnographic interviews, and participant observation.
The volume is organized into sections focused on activism and activists, employment and education, literature and the arts, and boundary crossing. Some chapters shed light on ideas and practices that resonate with feminist thought but find expression through the work of writers, artists, activists, and laborers who have not typically been considered feminist; others revisit specific moments in the history of Japanese feminisms in order to complicate or challenge the dominant scholarly and popular understandings of specific activists, practices, and beliefs. The chapters are contextualized by an introduction that offers historical background on feminisms in Japan, and a forward-looking conclusion that considers what it means to rethink Japanese feminism at this historical juncture.
Building on more than four decades of scholarship on feminisms in Japanese and English, as well as decades more on women’s history, Rethinking Japanese Feminisms offers a diverse and multivocal approach to scholarship on Japanese feminisms unmatched by existing publications.Less
Rethinking Japanese Feminisms offers a broad overview of the great diversity of feminist thought and practice in Japan from the early twentieth century to the present. Drawing on methodologies and approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies, and sociology, each chapter presents the results of research based on some combination of original archival research, careful textual analysis, ethnographic interviews, and participant observation.
The volume is organized into sections focused on activism and activists, employment and education, literature and the arts, and boundary crossing. Some chapters shed light on ideas and practices that resonate with feminist thought but find expression through the work of writers, artists, activists, and laborers who have not typically been considered feminist; others revisit specific moments in the history of Japanese feminisms in order to complicate or challenge the dominant scholarly and popular understandings of specific activists, practices, and beliefs. The chapters are contextualized by an introduction that offers historical background on feminisms in Japan, and a forward-looking conclusion that considers what it means to rethink Japanese feminism at this historical juncture.
Building on more than four decades of scholarship on feminisms in Japanese and English, as well as decades more on women’s history, Rethinking Japanese Feminisms offers a diverse and multivocal approach to scholarship on Japanese feminisms unmatched by existing publications.
Arnhilt Johanna Hoefle
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780824872083
- eISBN:
- 9780824876852
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824872083.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
How can one author be among the most bitterly rejected writers in one cultural context, while being one of the most celebrated in another? For decades, the works of the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan ...
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How can one author be among the most bitterly rejected writers in one cultural context, while being one of the most celebrated in another? For decades, the works of the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) have been fiercely attacked by critics and scholars in Europe and North America who questioned their literary value and naïve Habsburg nostalgia. Yet in other parts of the world, such as in China, Zweig’s works have enjoyed not only continued admiration but also truly exceptional influence, popularity, and even canonical status. China’s Stefan Zweig unveils the extraordinary success story of Zweig’s novellas in China, from the first translations in the 1920s, shortly after the collapse of the Chinese Empire, through the Mao era to the contemporary People’s Republic. Extensive research in China has unearthed a wealth of hitherto unexplored Chinese-language sources which evidence that Zweig has been read in an entirely different way there. Traversing a truly global system of cultural transfer and several intermediary spaces, Zweig’s works have been selected and employed for very different literary and ideological purposes throughout turbulent times in China. Declared to be a powerful critic of bourgeois society, the Chinese way of reading Zweig reveals important new perspectives on one of the most successful and, at the same time, most misunderstood European writers of the twentieth century.Less
How can one author be among the most bitterly rejected writers in one cultural context, while being one of the most celebrated in another? For decades, the works of the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) have been fiercely attacked by critics and scholars in Europe and North America who questioned their literary value and naïve Habsburg nostalgia. Yet in other parts of the world, such as in China, Zweig’s works have enjoyed not only continued admiration but also truly exceptional influence, popularity, and even canonical status. China’s Stefan Zweig unveils the extraordinary success story of Zweig’s novellas in China, from the first translations in the 1920s, shortly after the collapse of the Chinese Empire, through the Mao era to the contemporary People’s Republic. Extensive research in China has unearthed a wealth of hitherto unexplored Chinese-language sources which evidence that Zweig has been read in an entirely different way there. Traversing a truly global system of cultural transfer and several intermediary spaces, Zweig’s works have been selected and employed for very different literary and ideological purposes throughout turbulent times in China. Declared to be a powerful critic of bourgeois society, the Chinese way of reading Zweig reveals important new perspectives on one of the most successful and, at the same time, most misunderstood European writers of the twentieth century.
Mieko Nishida
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780824867935
- eISBN:
- 9780824876951
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824867935.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Migration Studies (including Refugee Studies)
Much has been published on the history of Japanese immigration to Brazil, Japanese Brazilians in Brazil, and Japanese Brazilians’ “return” labor migrations to Japan (known as dekassegui). Yet none ...
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Much has been published on the history of Japanese immigration to Brazil, Japanese Brazilians in Brazil, and Japanese Brazilians’ “return” labor migrations to Japan (known as dekassegui). Yet none has gone beyond and above the essentialized categories of “the Japanese” in Brazil and “Brazilians” in Japan. This book demonstrates that Japanese Brazilian identity has never been a static, fixed set of traits that can be counted and inventoried. Rather it is about being and becoming, a process of identity in motion responding to the push-and-pull between being positioned and positioning in a historically changing world. The book is based on the author’s painstaking research in Brazil and Japan between 1997 and 2013, involving extensive life history interviews (and follow-ups) with 116 Japanese Brazilians of several generations and diverse social backgrounds, in combination with substantial archival research and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork. This book examines Japanese immigrants and their descendants’ historically shifting sense of identity that comes from their engagement or experience of historical changes in socioeconomic and political structure. Each chapter illustrates how Japanese Brazilian identity is in formation, across generation, across gender, across class, across race, and in the movement of people between nations.Less
Much has been published on the history of Japanese immigration to Brazil, Japanese Brazilians in Brazil, and Japanese Brazilians’ “return” labor migrations to Japan (known as dekassegui). Yet none has gone beyond and above the essentialized categories of “the Japanese” in Brazil and “Brazilians” in Japan. This book demonstrates that Japanese Brazilian identity has never been a static, fixed set of traits that can be counted and inventoried. Rather it is about being and becoming, a process of identity in motion responding to the push-and-pull between being positioned and positioning in a historically changing world. The book is based on the author’s painstaking research in Brazil and Japan between 1997 and 2013, involving extensive life history interviews (and follow-ups) with 116 Japanese Brazilians of several generations and diverse social backgrounds, in combination with substantial archival research and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork. This book examines Japanese immigrants and their descendants’ historically shifting sense of identity that comes from their engagement or experience of historical changes in socioeconomic and political structure. Each chapter illustrates how Japanese Brazilian identity is in formation, across generation, across gender, across class, across race, and in the movement of people between nations.
Ji-Yeon O. Jo
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780824867751
- eISBN:
- 9780824876968
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824867751.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Migration Studies (including Refugee Studies)
Homing Diaspora Koreans revolves around the experiences of legacy migrants—later-generation diaspora Koreans who have migrated to South Korea—from China, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and ...
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Homing Diaspora Koreans revolves around the experiences of legacy migrants—later-generation diaspora Koreans who have migrated to South Korea—from China, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the United States. This book is based on interviews with sixty-three legacy migrants and thirty secondary informants. In Part I, I provide insights on how diaspora subjectivities formed through the sociohistorical and political specificities of each diaspora and were further shaped by diasporans’ efforts to embody inherited images of Korea/n even as they negotiated belonging in their countries of diaspora. Part II is devoted to four intangible “borders”—social spaces, citizenship, Korean language, and family—and how each border shapes the affective conditions of legacy migrants. It goes on to demonstrate how their evolving psychoemotional responses, which I call “affective topography,” contribute to the (re)making of Korean peoplehood. Diaspora Koreans who migrate to Korea must navigate belongings that are situated in the nexus between ethnic nationalism and neoliberalism and mediated by how their affective topographies shift as expectations meet reality. Through this process, they form different degrees of “affective investment,” which, in turn, contributes to a Korean peoplehood that is still evolving.Less
Homing Diaspora Koreans revolves around the experiences of legacy migrants—later-generation diaspora Koreans who have migrated to South Korea—from China, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the United States. This book is based on interviews with sixty-three legacy migrants and thirty secondary informants. In Part I, I provide insights on how diaspora subjectivities formed through the sociohistorical and political specificities of each diaspora and were further shaped by diasporans’ efforts to embody inherited images of Korea/n even as they negotiated belonging in their countries of diaspora. Part II is devoted to four intangible “borders”—social spaces, citizenship, Korean language, and family—and how each border shapes the affective conditions of legacy migrants. It goes on to demonstrate how their evolving psychoemotional responses, which I call “affective topography,” contribute to the (re)making of Korean peoplehood. Diaspora Koreans who migrate to Korea must navigate belongings that are situated in the nexus between ethnic nationalism and neoliberalism and mediated by how their affective topographies shift as expectations meet reality. Through this process, they form different degrees of “affective investment,” which, in turn, contributes to a Korean peoplehood that is still evolving.
Diane Austin-Broos and Francesca Merlan (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780824867966
- eISBN:
- 9780824876920
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824867966.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Pacific Studies
Since the advent of European settlement, indigenous Australians have been subject to continual change and entrenched inequality. This has been their shared experience even as regional histories have ...
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Since the advent of European settlement, indigenous Australians have been subject to continual change and entrenched inequality. This has been their shared experience even as regional histories have diverged. These essays address the lives of indigenous Australians through a focus on the person. Various contexts are described including family and community groups, regional diaspora and inter-racial relations, along with a striking range of experience, from indigenous heavy metal gangs and rebellious, forthright women to the social dynamics of childhood and the effects of long-term unemployment. Issues are discussed against a backdrop of different regions including the remote north, the desert center, and the densely populated southeast of Australia.Convinced that accounts of indigenous Australians must become more dynamic and diverse, People and Change traces the development of Australianist ethnography as a tool for understanding personhood and places this research in a comparative and theoretical perspective. The collection provides new and nuanced insights on the past, the present and likely trajectories of indigenous Australians today.Less
Since the advent of European settlement, indigenous Australians have been subject to continual change and entrenched inequality. This has been their shared experience even as regional histories have diverged. These essays address the lives of indigenous Australians through a focus on the person. Various contexts are described including family and community groups, regional diaspora and inter-racial relations, along with a striking range of experience, from indigenous heavy metal gangs and rebellious, forthright women to the social dynamics of childhood and the effects of long-term unemployment. Issues are discussed against a backdrop of different regions including the remote north, the desert center, and the densely populated southeast of Australia.Convinced that accounts of indigenous Australians must become more dynamic and diverse, People and Change traces the development of Australianist ethnography as a tool for understanding personhood and places this research in a comparative and theoretical perspective. The collection provides new and nuanced insights on the past, the present and likely trajectories of indigenous Australians today.
Roald Maliangkay
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780824866655
- eISBN:
- 9780824876845
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824866655.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
Broken Voices is the first English-language book on Korea’s rich folksong traditions, and the first study of the effects of Japanese colonialism on the intangible heritage of its former colony. ...
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Broken Voices is the first English-language book on Korea’s rich folksong traditions, and the first study of the effects of Japanese colonialism on the intangible heritage of its former colony. Maliangkay demonstrates that South Korea’s cultural preservation system, one of the world’s most elaborate, is deeply rooted in the period of Japanese colonial rule. He describes how the three largest folksong traditions, which have all been passed on in and around Seoul, have developed prior to and after becoming recognized as national cultural properties. Although continued government funding for Korea’s national heritage has won over many skeptics, close analysis of the traditions reveals that they have changed significantly since their official designation as Important Intangible Cultural Property. Those changes are, however, not caused by the prevailing image of Japan only, or the system per se, but by a combination of socio-political and economic factors. Since traditions that fail to attract practitioners and audiences are unsustainable, compromises may be unwelcome, but imperative.Less
Broken Voices is the first English-language book on Korea’s rich folksong traditions, and the first study of the effects of Japanese colonialism on the intangible heritage of its former colony. Maliangkay demonstrates that South Korea’s cultural preservation system, one of the world’s most elaborate, is deeply rooted in the period of Japanese colonial rule. He describes how the three largest folksong traditions, which have all been passed on in and around Seoul, have developed prior to and after becoming recognized as national cultural properties. Although continued government funding for Korea’s national heritage has won over many skeptics, close analysis of the traditions reveals that they have changed significantly since their official designation as Important Intangible Cultural Property. Those changes are, however, not caused by the prevailing image of Japan only, or the system per se, but by a combination of socio-political and economic factors. Since traditions that fail to attract practitioners and audiences are unsustainable, compromises may be unwelcome, but imperative.