In this third annual volume in the Korea Briefing series, experts analyze key aspects of contemporary Korean society. Included this year is an in-depth assessment of North Korea as well as chapters on politics, economics, women's issues, security on the Korean peninsula, and the development of the Korean press.

This edition of Korea Briefing, the fourth in the series, is issued in conjunction with The Asia Society's Festival of Korea, a yearlong, nationwide celebration of Korean history, culture, and contemporary life.

Korea Briefing examines a period of far-reaching change in the two Koreas. Kim Il-Sung's death has marked the end of a political regime that dominated the North since before the Korean War. In the South, internal political challenges, difficult North-South issues such as economic relations, and new relationships with China, Russia, and other countries forecast momentous changes. Chapters on recent events, the state of current economic, political and international relations, and the directions of bellwether reforms in language policy and education are at the core of this study.

This text examines a period of far-reaching change in the two Koreas. Chapters on recent events, the state of current economic, political and international relations, and the directions of bellwether reforms in language policy and education are at the core of the study.

Dangerous Women addresses the themes of Korean nationalism and gender construction, as well as various issues related to the colonialization and decolonialization of the Korean nation. The contributors explore the troubled category of "woman," placing it in the specific context of a marginalized and colonized nation. But Korean women are not merely configured here as metaphors for an emasculated and infantilized "homeland;" they are also shown to be products of a problematic gender construction that originates in Korea, and extends even today to Korean communities beyond Asia. Representations of Korean women still attempt to confine them to the status of either mother or prostitute: Dangerous Women rectifies that construction, offering a feminist intervention that might recuperate womanhood.

These critical essays examine East Asian culture through an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural lens. Readings of film, television, and visual and literary texts reveal the historical condition as well as the contemporary impulses driving East Asian culture today. We feel the muted tension in a rural South Korean village; we walk down the bustling streets of Hong Kong and witness the city's protean possibilities for a postrevolutionary reality. The boisterous tarento shows on Japanese television force us to rethink the nature of information and image production in relation to leisure management; cinematic spectacles in Japan, North Korea, Taiwan, and China point to complex issues of agency, the formation of the public sphere, and postnationalist identities. We see contemporary fiction from China and Japan engage themes of desire and remembrance as metaphors to express a profound historical anxiety. Mirroring the fast-moving and multifaceted landscape is our ability to move freely through time as we confront legitimizing narratives of modernization in early-twentieth-century Japan and, against an emerging regime of global capitalism, reexamine the approaching century in imagined historical hindsight. By anticipating the geocultural shift to the Asian Pacific Rim in the twenty-first century, this volume serves as both an introduction to contemporary East Asian culture and an exploration of its global context.

In June 1994, the USA went to the brink of war with North Korea. Few Americans know the full details or realise the impact such an event could have had on the US's post-Cold War foreign policy. This book offers an inside look at the crisis.