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125516 results in Asian Studies

Page 1963 of 6276

  • Seoul and Nanking, Baghdad and Kabul: A Response to Timothy Brook and Michael Shin

  • John Whittier Treat
  • Journal:
    The Journal of Asian Studies / Volume 71 / Issue 1 / February 2012
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    16 February 2012, pp. 121-125
    Print publication:
    February 2012

  • I begin my rejoinder to Timothy Brook and Michael Shin by reiterating the important question with which Brook ends his piece. “[W]hen Hamid Karzai's government falls in Afghanistan, or Nouri al-Maliki's does in Iraq, who then will be the nation's heroes and who the collaborators?” Questions such as this and other present-day conundrums (including the choices I make living in a national security state) were certainly on my mind when I began thinking about collaboration during the Second World War and particularly within the Japanese empire. The line between then and now is direct and short for me. Timothy Brook himself has been the target of an internet smear campaign assailing his work on Chinese collaboration for purportedly preparing an alibi for American mischief in Iraq and Afghanistan. Paramount among my own thoughts was always: what would I do, were I faced with the choices a Yi Kwang-su, a Liang Hongzhi or a Wang Jingwei was? It seems an irresistible reflex to me that we place ourselves in the position of those in the past who wagered and lost, and rehearse their calculations as our own: judgment of their decisions is as inevitable as it is necessary. The question is not if we will judge—to refuse risks our claims to moral agency—it is how. Timothy Brook, whether he once declined or now hesitates, indeed does make ethical judgments (he is on the record, for example, against advocating “collaboration as a morally positive or politically advisable course” [2008]), and indeed he should. That we have not come to similar conclusions only points to our missing consensus on a moral calculus, and not to the lack of an imperative to possess one.

  • Choosing to Collaborate: Yi Kwang-su and the Moral Subject in Colonial Korea

  • John Whittier Treat
  • Journal:
    The Journal of Asian Studies / Volume 71 / Issue 1 / February 2012
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    16 February 2012, pp. 81-102
    Print publication:
    February 2012

  • Today historians hesitate to judge collaborators with the Axis powers in World War II, citing the impossibility of putting oneself in the often untenable position collaborators found themselves. Nonetheless, contemporary moral philosophy continues to ponder the ethical choice of complicity versus resistance. Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950?), Korea's most distinguished modern novelist as well as one of its more notorious pro-Japanese partisans during the colonial period, offers a compelling test case for how we might attempt to not only understand, but also morally adjudicate, his support of Japan's occupation of his country. With the ongoing debate over collaboration with the German Reich in mind, I contend that the case of colonial Korea presents us with important first-order ethical issues to resolve.

  • Editorial Foreword 71.1 (February 2012)

  • Journal:
    The Journal of Asian Studies / Volume 71 / Issue 1 / February 2012
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    16 February 2012, pp. 1-5
    Print publication:
    February 2012
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Page 1963 of 6276