2004 Posts located
In recent years, South Korea has been addressing climate change, including through investments in hydrogen, the Green New Deal, and international pledges to cut emissions by 40 percent from 2018…
In recent years, North Korea has faced economic shocks from UN sanctions and the pandemic. As Dr. Jongkyu Lee (Senior Fellow at the Korea Development Institute) writes in his new…
Following a record number of North Korean missile launches, as well as tests by South Korea, assertions have been widely and uncritically made that Seoul is participating in an inter-Korean…
Although the Korean Peninsula has been divided for over 70 years, North and South have not been able to make lasting progress in terms of reconciliation. While there are multiple…
Although it is happening more rapidly in South Korea, an aging society is a common feature in post-industrial societies around the world. With the number of retirees growing and the…
In March, Seoul suffered from the worst air pollution on record. Enough that the South Korean government has officially designated the problem as a "social disaster." But what is causing…
Over the past few years, Korea and Koreans have experienced incredible political, social, and diplomatic shifts. It is hard keeping up with all these new developments as a Korea Watcher,…
Even before the meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, foreign policy practitioners and observers were talking about the difficulties of sequencing international sanctions relief for North Korea…
By Jenna Gibson Every language has "untranslatable words" - a word that perfectly encapsulates a feeling or situation which lacks an exact equivalent in other languages. German's "schadenfreude" famously describes the feeling of deriving pleasure from another person's pain. Korean has plenty of these words. Some commonly cited examples are 정 (jung), a deep love…
By Juni Kim Notoriously chilly relations between South Korea and Japan received encouraging news this week. In a new joint survey conducted by the South Korea-based East Asia Institute and the Japan-based Genron NPO, fewer South Koreans and Japanese hold negative impressions of each other than in previous years. South Korean unfavorable impressions of Japan…
By Jenna Gibson After a rough 2015 marred by a major health scare, tourism to South Korea has bounced back and then some. In newly released data from the Korea Tourism Organization (KTO), 8.1 million tourists entered South Korea so far in 2016, a 21 percent increase over the same period in 2015. If the…
By Jenna Gibson In Thailand, students applying to college will soon have the option of using Korean as their foreign language. Beginning in 2018, Korean will become the seventh foreign language available on the test, along with Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, French, German, and Pali. English communication is also a required part of the exam. This…