From the back cover: Between 100,000 and 200,000 women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military between the early 1930s and 1945. Yet successive post-war Japanese governments have refused to acknowledge what took place and no reparations have been made to the mainly Korean victims. The international community, in awe of Japan’s economic … [Read More]
Booklist: Memoirs and biography (page 9)
Hamel’s Journal And A Description Of The Kingdom Of Korea 1653-1666
Publisher’s description: The first Western account of Korea is the story of a group of sailors shipwrecked on Cheju-do. Some thirteen years later, after escaping to Japan, Hamel gave the outside world a firsthand description of Korea, an almost unknown country until then. Dr. Jean-Paul, who is Dutch, has made the first translation based on … [Read More]
The Zen Monastic Experience: Buddhist Practice in Contemporary Korea
Publisher description: Robert Buswell, a Buddhist scholar who spent five years as a Zen monk in Korea, draws on personal experience in this insightful account of day-to-day Zen monastic practice. In discussing the activities of the postulants, the meditation monks, the teachers and administrators, and the support monks of the monastery of Songgwang-sa, Buswell reveals … [Read More]
From Pusan to Panmunjom: Wartime Memories of the Republic of Korea’s First Four-star General
From Pusan to Panmunjom presents a wartime memoir of the soldier who, at the age of thirty-two, became South Korea’s first four-star general. This book provides a perspective to a cataclysmic war. [Read More]
So Far from the Bamboo Grove
From the back cover: In the final days of World War II, Koreans were determined to take back control of their country from the Japanese and end the suffering caused by the Japanese occupation. As an eleven-year-old girl living with her Japanese family in northern Korea, Yoko is suddenly fleeing for her life with her … [Read More]
Hye Ch’o Diary: A Memoir of the Pilgrimage to the Five Regions of India
From the publisher’s website: The first English translation of the travel diary of a Korean Buddhist monk who traveled from his homeland to India in the eighth century. While the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims have been much studied, Hye Cho’s pilgrimage has not been given the consideration it deserves. His description of the Silk Road communities, … [Read More]
Dictée
From the publisher’s website: Dictée is the best-known work of the versatile and important Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictée is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha’s mother Hyung Soon Huo (a … [Read More]
Nanjung Ilgi: war diary of admiral Yi Sun-sin
The text of Korea’s 76th national treasure, listed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World registry. Second-hand copies are occasionally available, for a price (eg, at the time of writing Amazon has a copy available at over £1,000); and you can find it in specialist libraries. LTI Korea advertise the title as being available to purchase … [Read More]
Never Ending Flower
From the dust jacket: Seven years ago, Susie Younger went to South Korea. She has lived there ever since and hopes to remain for the rest of her life. She paints most vivid pictures of this charming and little-known country and of its gay, patient, hard working and desperately poor people, whose life she shares. … [Read More]
Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood
From the publisher’s website: In this autobiography, Richard E. Kim paints seven vivid scenes from a boyhood and early adolescence in Korea at the height of the Japanese occupation during WWII, 1932 to 1945. Taking its title from the grim fact that the occupiers forced the Koreans to renounce their own names and adopt Japanese … [Read More]
Korea and her Neighbours: A Narrative of Travel, with an Account of the Recent Vicissitudes and Present Position of the Country
From the back cover of the Pacific Basin Books edition (Kegan Paul, 1985): Isabella Bird’s account of her journeys in Korea in 1898 represents one of the very rare accounts of that country in the latter part of the nineteenth century. At that time Korea was virtually a forbidden land and had only been open … [Read More]