NE Asia History Quiz 03


Can you match each of the residential architecture below among the three countries: Korea, Japan and China?

What made you think each scene belongs to the country you matched it to?





   



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Religious landscape and politics in Korean society-Understanding Korean society and politics [2/3]

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       The 2012 Machael Sandel lecture at Yonsei University, Seoul. He later reminisced,"it was like the Athens gathering at the Pantheon."           Prof. Michael Sandel, the author of 'Justice', had “an unforgettable experience” when he made lecture in June 2012 of Seoul. The tickets had been sold out readily and the organizer had to turn back many young students, who couldn’t even get the ticket from the scalpers for the lecture-debate event held at the outdoor theater in Yonsei University. The heat of the debate with the mostly young audience of fifteen thousand didn’t show the sign of subsiding until it got completely dark in that balmy night early summer in Seoul.            The surge of public attention on the issue of justice could well be ascribed to the growing criticality of the “wealth redistribution” issue as their economy was bustling through the corridor of middle-income countries towar...
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Geopolitics and political terrain of the Northeast Asia - Understanding Korean Society and Politics[3/3]

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        Introductory     In January 2025, the busiest tourist street in Shanghai, named Wukang Road, suddenly became the stage for the Supercar Parade by the volunteering wealthy youths from all over the country with their Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bugatti and you name it. They were not from an association or a body of any kind, yet the parade was so well coordinated through SNS, making three sessions a day with the shared purpose of showing the wealth of China to Korean tourists.   According to the account on Chinese side, the phenomenon was first triggered by a SNS posting by a Chinese guy who claimed, unverifiedly, to have come across an online query by a Korean back from Shanghai tour, questioning whether Shanghai had any luxury cars, to which the most popular comment went, "We cannot let Koreans look down on us and leave with a sense of superiority." The voluntary supercar parade lasted for weeks under the support of the public as the pol...
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Koreans come back to Europe May 2022

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The Korean Wave Comeback in Europe May 2022   No one with open eyes and ears in Europe could possibly have avoided the news of the Koreans coming back to their continent in the month of May 2022. No sooner the pandemic had shown signs of amenability than the K-Pop fans from 84 nationalities filled the Deutsche Bank Park stadium in Frankfurt chanting and rejoicing in the comeback of the musical performers from Korea in the two-day event named KPOP FLEX Frankfurt starting May 14. 1)  One week later when the Premier League of U.K. had just wrapped up its 2011-2022 season, you could hear the soccer attacker Son’s name cited in the news as winner of the Golden Boot, award given to the most goal scorer in the most prestigious league of the world. The following week at Cannes Film Festival in France, two Koreans were called out as winner, one for Best Director and the other for Best Actor. The movie that gave Song Gang Ho the Best Actor award was directed by the Japanese Kore-eda Hi...
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Winter Rain

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  This song titled "Winter Rain" by Jo Dong-jin is the first song for this corner to introduce the modern Korean songs before the age of what we know as K-Pop these days. I dubbed the Korean popular music before the K-pop as Analog K-pop because the rise of the current K-pop came with the arrival of the worldwide digital environment. One of the distinctive differences between K-pop and the music before it is that the soloist music used to be the mainstream while the group performance has been representing K-pop, perhaps because of the importance of the visual factor in the media now with the capability to deliver full high-definition images. I chose this song for the inaugural for this section, not because of the quality of the song for its obvious distinction in atmosphere from that of the K-pop, but because of its universal feel of the past everybody misses when every thing used to be slow but ran deep.   This song was released in 1979.       ...
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Why Koguryo/Kori can not be Chinese history even partly !!

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Koguryo/Kori is not just one of the ancient Korean states to the modern-day Koreans. The ancient state, that commanded the northern part of Korea Peninsula and the Liaodong ( East of Liao River ) part of Manchuria for most of its active period, is at the core of the Korean national identity. [] I will use here ‘Koguryo’ in place of ‘Goguryeo’, because I note the fact the name Korea came from this ancient state. I believe the state name’s quality of being origin to the name Korea should be beyond the observance of the current Korean-English spelling guidelines. Koguryo/Kori Tomb Mural in Jirin, circa 5C AD, lower Manchuria What Koguryo means to modern-time Koreans First of all, the very country name Korea derived from this state that had existed for more than 700 years until 668 AD. The Koguryo people called themselves Koryo and the current international country name Korea, Coree and Kaori , as widely used in Asia, all came from the name of this ancient Korean state. Th e name came to ...
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The Tale of Ji Zi : the lie that changed the history

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  The Great Chinese Gentleman Zhou Enlai.  He epitomized in his person the Chinese dignity and cultural power  as  a CCP founder along with Mao Zedong. He was a big man. In 1963 he officially apologized to the visiting Koreans for the history distortion by Shiji  史記   of Sima Qian  馬遷撰   about Ji Zi    箕子,  or Gija in Korean .   If you are a student of Korean history, you may have heard of Ji Zi 箕子,   or Gija as pronounced in Korean. Koreans believe the founding father of their country is a culture hero figure called Dangun, who was born to a being that came down from the heaven to benefit the land and people. They celebrate October 3rd as national holiday every year to celebrate the coming of the heavenly being to the land, that the legend says took place four and half millennia ago. That first ancient Korean state was called Joseon and to tell it from the last Korean dynasty that had used the same name before de...
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How the Mongol rule delivered Korean culture to Ming China

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  明朝 高丽样 汉服 服饰  :  Korean style Hanfu in the Ming Dynasty, which followed the Mongol rule.  <明宪宗元宵行樂圖卷 part of Scroll painting Ming Emperor Xianzong (Chenghua) Enjoying the Lantern Festival, circa 1486 >       There are many postings in the internet space about the cultural influences between Korea and China especially about the traditional fashions.  Hanbok  韓服  is the name of the Korean traditional wears, while the Hanfu  漢服 refers to all the Chinese traditional clothes from Han period of two millennia ago down to Ming Dynasties. The name Hanfu was coined and began to be used in early 2000s by the initiatives of the young generations in China, who were stimulated by the rise of the Korean Wave or Hallyu  韓流, in which the Hanbok was presented as symbol of the Korean traditional beauty.       While it was a nice thing for the Chinese to get conscious of their traditions, their commendable  new...
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"Tang's Influence"-True or false, why it matters (2/3)

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               The Formation of the centralized government and rule of law           We often see the emergence of the Nara Japan illustrated like a quantum move to the state of centralized government under rule of law, or Ritsuryo State  律令國家 , triggered by the influence from Tang China.   If no one has intended to present it that way, that is the impression the most of us get left with from the popular narratives on the grand opening of Japan as state that we associate with Nara.          Here again, we see a lot of fallacies working behind those narratives. To begin with, there is no evidence that the Japanese copied the Chinese law system. More importantly, even if they had done it, the written law is only a part of the social culture. Japan took the very different course of social development from that of China after the seventh century when, accord...
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