This article analyzes questions of literary production and literary value in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) using quantitative methods and data sets covering a significant part of the country's literary and intellectual output over forty years (1977–2016). The first part of the article adopts a thematic approach, using topic modeling and time series, to map the DPRK's literary output and investigate the influence of genre on literary consecration. The second part looks at questions of style and literary quality in the DPRK through a comparative analysis of multiple novels grouped by degree of literary prestige. It introduces a method to evaluate the originality of an author's writing style using a masked language model (BERT) and uses it to assess the role of conformity and originality in the DPRK's literary field. Even though writers consecrated by the state display a high level of stylistic conformity when writing mandated biographies of the ruling family, their independent output ranks higher in originality than nonconsecrated writers.

As existing scholarship demonstrates, although the Chosŏn state (1392–1910) aimed to be a society “without litigation,” people understood the use of law and employed it to resolve various disputes in the local community. At the same time, a plethora of legal cases reveal that many parties chose alternative ways of airing their grievances rather than going directly to the local court. Centered on the eighteenth-century litigation over a case of attempted rape, this article examines the complex, multifaceted factors that influenced people's use of different strategies to appeal their justice at the local level. It asks what resources ordinary people in the late Chosŏn had in navigating legal conflicts, how they strategized over the choices they had, and why they finally exercised particular options when trying to win their cases. Investigating these questions, this article not only offers insights into the meaning of litigation that entailed strenuous document preparation to inscribe grievance, but also probes the impulses of individual actors in the legal terrain when attempting to achieve their goals through the dynamics of social interactions and existing resources in eighteenth-century Korea.

What is the legal source of legitimacy in political authority? This pressing question made a striking appearance on the South Korean scene when, since its inception in 1948, a popular backlash against a liberal democracy perceived as foreign and unjuridical erupted in the forms of terror, insurgency, mutiny, and putsch. Park Chung Hee's successful assumption of power through his 1961 coup d’état provided an implicit response, recasting the Korean concepts of legality and legitimacy. Han T'ae Yŏn was a key figure in this national dispute. Armed with Carl Schmitt's canon, Han gave a decisive verdict on how Korean liberal democracy had been eclipsed under the two spuriously liberal governments of Syngman Rhee and Chang Myŏn. His legal apology for Park's authoritarian constitutional regime echoed Schmitt's defense of the Führer by invoking the president as an incarnation of the will of the people as a whole. This article intends to revisit Schmitt's accusation of judicial positivism for its failure to deliver a genuine voice of the people in the case of a non-Western society.

The military victories of the Northern Expedition (1926–28) ended nearly two decades of political fragmentation and ushered in a new era of centralized government in China. A key concern of the Nationalist government, based in Nanjing, was bringing the haphazard array of private schools that had emerged since the republic's founding in 1911 in line with the Nationalists’ political agenda. The Nationalist leadership also hoped to use their educational reforms to bring the frontier regions, many of which were only tenuously allied with Nanjing, more formally under their control. Thus, the new regime set out to achieve the twin goals of regulating private schools and cultivating ties among the frontier region's population. These two goals became entangled in an unexpected manner at the private Muslim Chengda Teachers School. Although the Nationalists banned private teachers schools in 1933, they deliberately exempted Chengda from such regulations to further their frontier agenda. Later, when the central government's frontier political calculations changed, the Nationalists rescinded such protection and forced Chengda to abide by the original regulations.

Over a hundred thousand US servicemen were stationed in post–World War II China, resulting in the largest grassroots interactions in Sino-US history. Reexamining this unprecedented encounter in the context of American global military empire, this article investigates the sociocultural tensions caused by GIs’ sexual relations with Chinese women between 1945 and 1949. While conservatives maligned “Jeep girls” out of racial and sexual anxieties, liberals and self-identified Jeep girls invoked the language of modernity and patriotism. However, in the wake of the Peking Rape incident in 1946, the once diverse debate quickly ended as nationwide protests raged against American imperialism. In contrast with previous studies highlighting how Communist propaganda led to new anti-American sentiments, this research, by uncovering the complexities of Chinese women's experiences and their stories—which have been muffled or filtered through patriarchal agendas—foregrounds the key role of gendered nationalism in Sino-US relations.

This study examines the revolution of ideas surrounding the body in 1950s Japan from the perspective of two women dancers, Noh dancer Tsumura Kimiko (1902–74) and butoh dancer Motofuji Akiko (1928–2003). By contrasting one mid-twentieth-century view—that the postwar era offered a chance to “liberate” individual bodies—with the backdrop of continued control over bodies exercised by large institutions, I first show that this perceived rupture was not as stark as it initially appears. Moreover, I show how Tsumura and Motofuji rejected popular ideas about the body's purpose to forge their own. This allowed them to critique and confront the issues that popular views presented, particularly for disabled or gendered bodies. These issues involved increasing urbanization and the treatment of bodies based upon their desirability. This article argues that Tsumura's and Motofuji's conceptions of “body” challenged gender norms and presented new ideas about how to live.