Editorial

EDITORIAL· lhe field of Korean studies in the Western world unfortunately lags far behind those of China and Japan. Active programs in a few major universities did not get under way until the late 1950s. Nevertheless , in the last few years there has been a significant increase in the number of publications on Korea and in the number of scholars trained in a variety of disciplines. The editors feel that the time has arrived to provide a vehicle for introducing the best work of a new generation of scholars to the interested public, a task we had been attempting to do through the publication of the Occasional Papers on Korea. We feel confident, furthermore, that despite the disciplinary variety of approaches to the study of Korea, an abiding interest in the history, culture, and recent development of the Korean people as a whole provides an overriding focus of interest for all scholars and that a journal devoted to the study of Korea will help to maintain a catholicity of view that is all to often lost as a result of disciplinary specialization . The Journal of Korean Studies is planned as an annual publication to serve the needs of Korean specialists. We seek articles that meet the highest standards of objective scholarly research and at the same time make positive contributions to our understanding and interpretation of the experience of the Korean people in both traditional and modern times. We hope to present a mix of extensively researched articles on topics that present new information together with analytical pieces that present new or different ways of looking at problems. We feel that our book review section, in particular, should be able to fill a serious gap in the field, since many books of merit in Western languages have been neglected in existing journals devoted to East Asian Studies in general. Furthermore, we hope to begin the 2 Journal of Korean Studies process of reviewing major works in Korean and Japanese that have been almost totally ignored in Western publications. We hope also to attract review articles that discuss that state of different scholarly fields and provide a more general, interpretive framework than the usual book review. In addition to introducing Western scholars to more detailed and advanced work abroad, our reviews should serve to add new perspectives to research often done without reference to Western scholarship. Finally, as is the case with our first issue, we hope to be able to present symposia consisting of papers presented at scholarly conferences so that our readers may benefit from the extended discussion of certain unified issues in the Korean field. ...