United States-Korea Relations (review)

180BOOK REVIEWS Here and there Lautensach makes succinct coments on other peoples. For those who view Korea as a deforested land, he points out that along the YaIu, "the Chinese have carried the destruction of the forests much farther than the Koreans on their side." (247) In the towns he notes that "Christian churches . . . are always among the tallest buildings." (205) And not far from Chirisan, he noted that "at an elevation of 1300-1400 m the American missionaries in southern Korea have built themselves a summer resort with single-family houses." (349) On the Japanese he is for the most part formally correct, and noncommittal where possible. He notes that the Japanese gave up efforts to grow sugar beets near P'yöngyang in 1932, (266) and that in the Naktong Basin "the traditional Korean rice varieties have been almost completely replaced by higher yield Japanese varieties." (344) Finally, he obviously had fun writing that in Seoul the granite Government-General building "conflicts flagrantly with the architecture of the other buildings of the former royal residence [the Kyôngbok Palace]." (295) Nor is he above touches of humor about the West: he cites fifty-five alternate spellings for P'yöngyang that he found in European (non-Cyrillic books), maps, and globes. (9) Though Lautensach does occasionally repeat from the literature Japanese and missionary remarks on Korean character (172-73), it is not hard to feel that this author had a real affection for the country. He calls Suwon "the Potsdam of the Chosön dynasty," (288) and notes approvingly that "around the turn of the century Seoul was the only city in East Asia that had telegraph and telephone, a public water supply, an electric streetcar and electric lighting simultaneously ." (294) The cost of the Dege translation of Lautensach's Korea is more than all but the most dedicated of Korean scholars can afford. Yet it would be tragic if libraries with any claim to be an East Asian collection failed to order a copy or two. No other work in Korean geography in English has surpassed Lautensach's classic exposition. We are all grateful for the herculean labor that Katherine and Eckart Dege undertook to bring this work into English. Forrest R. Pitts University of Hawaii United States-Korea Relations, edited by Robert A. Scalapino and Han Sung-joo. Research Papers and Policy Studies 19. Berkeley : Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1986. xii + 226 pp. $20. The 1980s have been a remarkable decade for Korea, particularly for the southern half of the peninsula. Fundamental social, economic, and political changes have occurred, changes that will most likely have a profound impact on Korea's immediate future. Given such dramatic changes, United States-Korea Relations, BOOK REVIEWS181 edited by Robert A. Scalapino and Han Sung-joo, is a most welcome addition to the field of Korean studies. This book is the product of an academic forum held at the University of California at Berkeley, from August 26 to 29, 1985. Sponsored and funded by the Asia Foundation, and hosted by the Institute of East Asian Studies of UC-Berkeley and the Asiatic Research Center of Korea University, the conference brought together a broad assortment of specialists from both the public and private sectors . As a compilation of conference papers, United States-Korea Relations joins a growing list of books published in the 1980s that focus on rather general trends in Korean-American relations.1 The volume under review, however, differs from these other conference compilations in at least two significant ways. First, it is not intended to be a historical survey. Indeed there is almost no mention made of early Korean-American relations, nor even of the 1882 Robert Shufeldt treaty that first inaugurated official relations between the two countries. Of the sixteen authors included in the volume, not one is a historian, at least not formally . This lack of a historical focus is not necessarily a shortcoming in the book; rather it reflects the primary focus of the Berkeley forum: to direct our attention toward specific problems in contemporary Korean-American relations. The contemporary nature of the volume raises the second point that I wish...