Like the scholar that she was, she always brought a pen and a notebook in front of the stove and recorded all the things I did to cook a certain dish. She said she wanted to know in detail the “secrets” of my cooking so she could replicate the taste of the dish when she cooks it! But it was not only in cooking where she showed her scholarly attitude. With a special maternal pride, she showed me her small books about Angela after she and Jojo first got her: Angela’s first English words, which later on proved to be unwieldy because of the speed of Angela’s progress in speaking English; Angela’s “firsts” . All these she recorded painstakingly, in handwriting, in different small notebooks.

We’ve always wanted to make your web reading experience a lot less difficult and without those annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles. Now, with the help of technology, this has been realised. You get the whole story and nothing but the story.
For Safari Users:
It works like this: As you browse the web, Safari detects if you’re on a web page with an article. Click the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field, and the article appears instantly in one continuous, clutter-free view. You see every page of the …

The works uploaded here reflect collective endeavors of KASEAS and its members to correct this imbalance and to “catch up.” The individual articles demonstrate common interests in the relationships between Korea and Southeast Asia in spite of their diverse disciplines, perspectives, subjects, and methods.

Orientalism…is not just a complicated reworking of theories about imperialism or of ‘culture bias’: Said…uses the production of the ‘knowledge’ called ‘Orientalism’ to raise questions about the production of any knowledge, and the meaning of any interpretation in any scholarly discipline – Birch (1983, 12)

When Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino III, or Noynoy, threw his hat into the presidential contest in September 9, 2009, a pundit labeled the decision as a game changer. Prior to the death of his mother, former President Cory Aquino on August 1, 2009, there were more than a handful of contenders who were angling for the presidency, whose voter preference shares remained relatively stable, except for the break of the then “front-runner”, Senator Manuel Villar, whose preference share went up by 11 percentage points from the May 2009 to the August 2009 survey.

We hope that this paper, which is a record of these voices, which have gone through a laborious process of hard work, will remain as a historical document of review and reflection not only for the development of Southeast Asian Studies in Korea but also for that of Area Studies in general. We also extend our comradeship and appreciation towards all the presenters, who wholeheartedly supported our idea and spared their time and efforts to contribute to this cause.

We are proud to upload this special issue on Korean studies on Southeast Asia. New developments that expanded links between their country and Southeast Asia have dramatically increased in the last two decades, and today “the Korean wave” is an enduring part of everyday life in the region. In this issue our Korean colleagues look back at that evolution of Southeast Asian Studies, the challenges the faced, and the prospects that it will catch up with the “more advanced” studies on China and Japan.