Adultery was treated as a crime throughout Korean history until 2015, when the Constitutional Court of South Korea ruled the adultery law unconstitutional. The global trend of decriminalizing adultery began in the twentieth century: Denmark in 1930, Sweden in 1937, Japan in 1947, Germany and Italy in 1969, Malta in 1973, Luxembourg in 1974, France in 1975, Spain in 1978, Portugal in 1982, Greece in 1983, Switzerland in 1990, Argentina in 1995, and Austria in 1996. The movement for decriminalizing adultery was based on the notion that adultery law discriminated against women and violated

It is common that a narrative of Japan’s invasion of Chosŏn Korea in 1592 starts with some words on what Hideyoshi, the de facto ruler of Japan at that time, had in his mind: a goal of conquering China and beyond. Such a narrative has been dominant regarding the warfare that unfolded in Chosŏn for seven years until 1598. The narrative has perpetuated the myth that Hideyoshi invaded Chosŏn in order to conquer China through the Korean peninsula. To be sure, Ming China eventually sent troops to Chosŏn and fought against the Japanese invaders during the war. However, Hideyoshi’s alleged goal of

This talk will be delivered in Korean. Students with advanced-level Korean are welcome!

In 1824 a young newlywed samurai woman of Kōchi castle town in southwestern Japan named Mori Nao wanted to divorce her samurai husband because she did not like him. Nao's husband adamantly refused to give her a divorce and the legal system said that only a man had the right and privilege to do so. After overcoming some resistance from her own family, she was able to get them on her side, and then her husband's family on her side and finally even the government of her domain allied with her and pressured him to divorce her.  His relatives forced the divorce and put him in a cage in his

The 30th International Conference on Chinese Language Instruction, sponsored by the East Asian Studies Program and Princeton in Beijing, will be held in-person on the campus of Princeton University on Saturday, April 29. Registration deadline is March 31, 2023. Feel free to refer others who may be interested in attending this conference to http://www.princeton.edu/clp/pedagogy-conference/ to view the conference program,

See https://pjpf.princeton.edu for details and archival documents.

The current translation project has sprung forth from an enduring fascination with the Vocabulario da lingoa de Iapam, the monumental Japanese-Portuguese dictionary produced by the Jesuit mission in Nagasaki in 1603 and 1604. The Vocabulario is the oldest and first dictionary of the Japanese classical language, written by people who lived there. My hope for this dictionary is to achieve, especially outside Japan and a small circle of linguistic experts, a broader recognition and wider usage as an unparalleled, lexicographical tool for the study of the Japanese language of the late