Issues
Between Gulf Capital and East Asia’s Football Culture: Imagining a New Champions League 🇰🇷 🇯🇵 I am watching the UEFA Champions League final in Budapest. A season of long journeys has been compressed into a single night. What this match evokes is not merely a comparison between two teams. There is
Issues
East Asia, a Laboratory of Demographic Crisis 🇰🇷 🇯🇵 I read yet another news story about Japan’s shrinking population. I say “yet another” because the article feels like an obituary updated every year under almost the same headline. Deaths outnumber births. The population lost in a single year is said to
Books
From Han Kang to Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, ten years of East Asian books on the world stage of translated literature 🇰🇷 🇯🇵 The International Booker Prize is one of the literary awards that best reveals how translated literature reaches readers around the world today. The prize is awarded to novels and short
Places
Reading Kyoto’s Time on Foot 🇰🇷 🇯🇵 Kyoto is a city that draws closer at walking speed. Its texture reveals itself less from a passing car window than when one moves slowly through its alleys, riversides, and sloping streets. The low lines of roofs, the darkness beneath the eaves, moss on
Books
Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter and the Politics of Memory in East Asia 🇰🇷 🇯🇵 When a society can no longer imagine the future, where does it turn? Georgi Gospodinov’s novel Time Shelter offers a strange and unsettling answer to that question. People do not move forward. They want to go
Memory
Civic Time from Gwangju to Seoul, and to the Streets of Hong Kong 🇰🇷 🇯🇵 May 18 is one of the most painful dates in modern Korean history. But it is not only a date of tragedy. Gwangju in May 1980 was a city that revealed the brutality of military violence, but
Memory
The Memory of a Palace Burned, Emptied, and Rebuilt 🇰🇷 🇯🇵 Gyeongbokgung is a place so familiar that we often know it less well than we think. Seoul’s representative palace. The symbol of the Joseon dynasty standing behind Gwanghwamun. The historical site most foreign visitors seek out first. We naturally think
Places
Tradition in the Present Tense, Encountered at Gyeongbokgung at Night 🇰🇷 🇯🇵 Gyeongbokgung at night is different from Gyeongbokgung during the day. If the palace by day is a historical building, the palace by night is closer to a scene. Darkness pushes the noise of the city slightly into the background, while
Objects
On writing instruments and slow time, from a fountain pen counter at Ginza Itoya 🇰🇷 🇯🇵 Standing in front of the fountain pen counter at Ginza Itoya, one feels as if time has slowed down a little. Under the glass, dozens of pens are arranged in neat rows. Black, silver, gold, deep
Places
On redevelopment, memory, capital, and the rapidly changing face of a city 🇰🇷 🇯🇵 Seoul is a city that never stays still. Cities change by nature. Buildings age, people leave, new roads appear, and old shops close their doors. But Seoul’s transformation often feels less like a natural process of change
Letter
A note on reading East Asia through cities, books, objects, and memory.