Korea's “nationalist historiography” (minjok sahak) school has taken another hit, this time from historian Brandon Palmer's nuanced examination of Korean military participation in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. The tendency to portray Japan's colonial regime as an omnipotent “totalitarian and fascist political machine that wrung out the lifeblood and economic vitality of the Korean people,” rendering them “powerless victims” who endured endless suffering (pp. 7–8), is mostly spent among scholars. At this writing, the government of the Republic of Korea is debating the merits of returning to a single, state-approved secondary school history textbook, which will no doubt reflect the anti-Japan sentiments of the Pak Kŭnhye administration, and thereby revive minjok sahak's fortunes. But according to Hankyoreh, a whopping 97 percent of South Korean history educators expressed opposition to the single-text proposal.16 Despite the bitter legacies of history-related issues in contemporary ROK-Japan...

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