Helen J S Lee

Biographic Data

ID247917
NAMEHelen J S Lee
GIVEN NAMESHelen J S
FAMILY NAMELee
SIGNATURELEE H J S
AFFILIATIONSModern Japanese Literature and Postcolonial Studies, Underwood International College, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS7
TOTAL CITATIONS2
AUTHOR COUNT7
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2008
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2021
H-INDEX1

  • Living as a Colonial Girl: The Sonyǒ (少女) Discourse of School Curriculum and Newspapers in 1930s Korea

    Open AccessKyung-Sook Shin, Helen J S LeeARTICLEInternational Journal of Asian…2021

    This essay explores how the term ‘girl,’ or 少女 ( sonyŏ ), in 1930s colonial Korean society simultaneously created and resisted homogeneity. We analyze the different contexts and cultural forces that shaped the term ‘girl’ in colonial Korea in order to illustrate some phases of the relationships that historical girls of colonial Korea had with their nation and state, the nation, that is, to which they thought they belonged at births and the state …

  • Little citizens, big missions in Manchuria: The Shōkokumin as imperial pedagogy

    Helen J S LeeARTICLEInter-Asia Cultural Studies2019References: 4

    The wartime shōkokumin discourse of Japan rested on two competing premises, each catenated with a different part of the compound word: the “shō” that emphasized children’s immaturity and vulnerability and the “kokumin” that activated them immediately as mobilizable citizens. This paper charts how the tensions innate in shōkokumin discourse became manifest both at home and in the colonial territories abroad, focusing especially on the exceptionall…

  • Rule in the Name of Protection: The Japanese State, the Ainu and the Vocabulary of Colonialism

    Open AccessKomori Yoichi, Michele M Mason et al.ARTICLEJapan focus2016

    Many Japanese and others today understand Hokkaido as an ancient part of Japan, and do not know that the island was only formally absorbed in the mid-19th century. This article explains the process by which the island of Ezo was annexed by the Japanese in 1868 and renamed Hokkaido ("the path to the northern seas"). The Japanese also began transforming Ezo, now Hokkaido, in order to thoroughly incorporate the island into the new central polity. Th…

  • Dying as a Daughter of the Empire

    Helen J S LeeARTICLEpositions asia critique2013References: 3

    During wartime Japan (late 1930s – 1945), the Japanese women in colonial Korea were pounded by ideological injunctions and practical imperatives demanding better service to the empire. This article explores the negotiations and struggles of Asano Shigeko (1922 – 42), a Keijō-born female Japanese student who died of tuberculosis at age twenty-one, through a reading of her Yamatojuku nikki, the Diary of Yamato School. Asano's diary documents most f…

  • Rule in the Name of Protection: The Japanese State, the Ainu and the Vocabulary of Colonialism

    Open AccessKomori Yoichi, Helen J S Lee et al.ARTICLEJapan focus2013

    By any measure, Japan's modern empire was formidable. The only major non-Western colonial power in the twentieth century, Japan at the height of its empire controlled a vast area of Asia and numerous archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean. Its reach extended from Sakhalin Island north of the Japanese archipelago to the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific and expanded into Manchuria, areas of China, Korea, and much of Southeast Asia and Micronesia. Ov…

  • Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique

    Helen J S Lee, Michele Mason et al.BOOKReading Colonial Japan2012

    Coupling translated primary texts from Japan's colonial era with critical interpretive essays by scholars in Japanese Studies, Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique illuminates the specificities of Japan's many and varied colonial projects and elucidates how the case of Japan, —the only major non-western colonial power—, can complicate and expand our knowledge of colonialism(s)

  • Writing Colonial Relations of Everyday Life in Senryu

    Helen J S LeeARTICLEpositions asia critique2008Cited by: 2References: 3

    This article uses the comic poetic genre senryu as a source through which to explore the dynamics of lived experience of working-class Japanese immigrants to Korea. Challenging the dominant paradigm by which we view colonial reality, as a neatly divided portrait of colonial society between the empowered colonizer and powerless colonized, this study complicates our understanding of Japanese settler culture by considering the poetic representations…