This study covers not only the cause of Korea’s entry into the world affairs with the United States in 1882, but also it is a study of modern power politics in the Far East, in which Korea played a significant role. The importance of the Korea position in international affairs has been dimly treated by the Western World - yet, she is a nation populated by approximately thirty millions; the thirteenth largest nation in the world, and Koreans are the most homogenous people in the world; the nation, which is thrust down off the coast of Asia between the thirty-fifth and forty-fifth parallels and separating the Sea of Japan form the Yellow Sea, greatly contributed her civilization to mankind at a time when the great Roman Empire was busy conquering the world at an excessive speed

Qiu Miaojin is known for her unapologetically lesbian fiction and tragically short writing career. Her novels were among the first in Taiwan to deal outrightly with lesbian identity and the social dysphoria that can accompany same-sex desire in these societies. Published in 1994 and winning the China Times Award for Literature in 1995, The Crocodile Diaries is a portrait of Taiwanese lesbianism amid the tumultuous decade of the 1990s, during which time Taiwan experienced a powerful feminist movement and opening up of society due to the lifting of marital law in 1987.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the representations of transgender in Takako Shimura’s manga Wandering Son (Hōrō Musuko). Wandering Son (2002 to present) is a manga that focuses on their group of middle school friends with two transgender characters, a boy that wants to be a girl and a girl that wans to be a boy, at its center. The story follows the friends’ lives and their struggles with their transgender status in their everyday lives. I explore this work in two ways. First, I look at the transgendered characters’ navigation of gender and their gender roles within the realm of school. The characters’ subversion of school uniforms and their transgendered activities during school festivals serve to show difference in acceptance of transgender by who performs it and where it is performed in the manga. Second, I look at the way that characters, both transgendered and gender-normative, negotiate their gender identities through the use of language. I look at linguistic features such as final particle and personal pronoun to explore how these features are used to define and display the characters’ actual and desired gender identities. Shimura uses gendered languages to explore characters’ creation of their gender identity, resulting in clear gender identities for those who use gendered language and unclear gender identities for those who do not.

In this thesis, I present a translation of Yun-T’aek Yi’s Faust in Blue Jeans accompanied by an introduction discussing my decision making process. Yun-T’aek Yi’s eighth play for the theater, Ch’ŏngbajirŭl ibŭn p’ausŭt’ŭ, is a Korean adaptation of Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, set in twentieth-century Korea with contemporary Korean characters. Given the English title Faust in Blue Jeans, I consider this text for purposes of a staged performance and point out the difficulties in the replacement of one culture by another, especially in consideration of my personal situation as a Korean born translator living in the United States. I discuss strategies and choices in translation with reference to scholarly works in the fields of translation studies and dramaturgy. I also offer a glimpse into my translation process by attaching a literal crib of the opening act, a preliminary step taken before further shaping the translation for the stage, and a graph comparing my first draft to its revision after a staged reading. Often referred to as a “cultural guerilla” in South Korea for his active work as playwright, producer, writer, and poet, Yun-T’aek Yi colorfully portrays South Korean society and culture of the eighties in this play and I strove to preserve the dynamicism and vitality of the original. The playwright’s foreword, in which he discusses his reasons for creating an adaptation of Goethe’s work, and a brief excerpt on the motif and summary of the play as told by the South Korean playwright have also been translated.

In 2004 Japanese author Ashibe Taku published his novel Murder in the Red Chamber, in which he adapted Cao Xueqin’s eighteenth-century Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber as a compelling murder mystery. In 2008 I would take on the challenge of translating Ashibe’s novel into English. This required me to draw on a wealth of primary and secondary materials. Not only did I have to familiarize myself with the novel’s peculiarities, but also with those of its Chinese source. Over these layers of text I fashioned yet another from my own engagements with Western detective fiction. In order to reconcile these disparate cultural understandings of detection and law, I assumed the role of detective myself in navigating at least two cultural milieus at any given time. Consequently, I found myself empathizing with Ashibe’s characters in an entirely new way. This thesis is a case study that investigates two questions: (1) What does it mean when the translator’s method mimics—in the target text—that of the author of the source text? (2) How have murder mystery paradigms been displaced and/or embedded in my chosen text through this process of cross-cultural rewriting? In exploring these questions I have developed a kinship with Ashibe, for we are both rewriters seeking to flesh out the evidence laid before us into admissible testimony. Whether or not I “solved the case” of this translation matters less than the adding of another layer in another language with the intent of enriching the whole.

Shūsaku Endō (1923-1996) is well known in Japan and abroad for his novels and his Christian faith. The present work offers for the first time an English translation of his 1973 play, Menamugawa no Nihonjin, which deals with the career of Nagamasa Yamada, a Japanese adventurer who traveled to Siam in the early seventeenth century and became one of the most powerful men in that kingdom. The introduction to the translation looks back at Endō’s career and his little known relationship with theater. The focus shifts to the play’s historical background, inquiring into Endō’s motivations in choosing this subject and how he manipulated his sources to achieve certain goals. The translation is defended and compared to a previous Italian translation. The analysis of the original work and the process of translating it is informed throughout by M.M. Bhaktin’s concept of chronotopes as used in the field of translation studies by Annie Brisset. The introduction is followed by the translation of the entire play of three acts and twelve scenes.

In 1923, the poet Kitahara Hakushū wrote an essay entitled “Dōyō shikan” 童謡私観 or “Philosophy of Dōyō.” In it, he described a perspective on children that valued their innately creative potential. Hakushū felt that this potential was something that every child had and that could be enriched and drawn out through dōyō 童謡 (children's songs.) Hakushū’s views in this sense challenged the prevailing attitudes in the Taishō period toward children and toward the function that children’s songs and poetry should serve. Despite Hakushū’s prominence as a poet, the “Dōyō shikan” has never been translated or closely analyzed in English. The analysis of the “Dōyō shikan” provides a lens through which to view Hakushū’s poetry for children. The principles that Hakushū described in this essay for writing dōyō can be seen both in Hakushū’s own work and the work of children who submitted poetry to Akai tori, a literary magazine for which Hakushū managed poetry. Those principles stressed the need for the poet to replicate the child’s voice, mind, and imagination for the purpose of writing dōyō that were creative, artistic, and meaningful to children.

Interest in Muslim and Arab societies has been on the rise in South Korea, especially since 2001, with many books and various documentaries being published on the subject. Since 2005 there have been a number of television shows and documentaries that include Muslim, and sometimes Arab characters. This study will examine how images of Muslims and Arabs are presented in Korean popular culture through the analysis of various dramas and variety shows, as well as how these images fit into the context of Korean ethno-nationalism and the history of Islam in East Asia. In addition to this analysis this study will also be exploring how these images have been changing from negative to a more sympathetic or realistic depiction of Muslims and Arabs, as well as explore which groups are responsible for this change.

This thesis is a comparative study of the teachings of a number of Eastern sages and a representative of modern Western depth psychology in connection with the problem of abstraction versus experience (or, thinking about instead of experiencing}. This problem is considered by the writer as the central cause in the suffering of mankind everywhere. The introductory chapter will present the problem being investigated, why and how it is considered significant, and how it will be dealt with in this study. The second chapter will contain a presentation of the various sages to be considered here, how and why they were selected, and some biographical and historical data about each. In the succeeding chapters the discussion will include what each of these sages claims to be the nature of: A. The human soul. B. God and the. universe. C. The problems of mankind (how they developed, what man can do about them; how he can do it .) Following the Bibliography is an appendix which contains comparative statements from each of the sages about a variety of universal themes.

Over the decades, research on heritage language learners has been quite popular, but most studies concern Russian, Spanish and other languages rather than Chinese. The Chinese heritage language learner’s studies focus mainly on K-12 students and their learning motivations, writing characteristics, and identification recognition and those concerned with language acquisition address their vocabulary and verbal Chinese development. There have been very few studies about learning grammar. This study emphasizes on the acquisition of the aspect marker LE among advanced learners. To investigate the acquisition characteristics of advanced CHL learners, this study adopted the advanced CHL learners as the research group and the advanced CFL learners and native speakers as the control groups. A questionnaire survey was designed to investigate the participants' acquisition abilities. The survey utilized "similar semantics, different contexts, and English similarities" related to the aspect marker LE as the interference factors to investigate comprehension abilities and presented five different situations of using LE to investigate production abilities. There were 198 participants in the survey, and 183 effective questionnaires were collected. Analysis of the data showed the following results: all three groups of subjects are equally affected by "similar semantics" and "different contexts" in comprehending the meaning of LE. But CHL and CFL learners are more affected by English interference than NS. In the production survey, CHL learners did better than CFL, but not as well as NS. In terms of comprehension on the aspect marker LE, CHL learners did better than CFL, but not as well as NS. The understanding and production abilities of CHL learners in the United States are better than those of CHL learners in China, and the influence of English on both CHL groups is quite similar. The most important findings of this research are as follows: (1) Even when CHL learners reach the advanced level, they behave nearly native-like at language level, but cannot reach to the level of a native speaker. (2) Advanced CHL learners share similarities with CFL learners in production abilities. (3) The target Chinese language environment has no obvious influence on advanced CHL learners. The results of this study have the following teaching implications: 1) Students are more likely to acquire LE in context; 2) Students are more likely to understand LE after they have clearly understood the semantic meaning of LE; 3) It would benefit advanced Chinese learners in acquiring LE if their study program could tailor classes for them; 4) If the teachers are explicit in explaining the meaning of LE, students will be more likely to understand the semantic meaning of LE and utilized it correctly.