One major challenge within the relatively small field of Korean studies, for both researchers and students, is availability of translated primary sources. As the editors of Imperatives of Culture note in the introduction, this lack is even more acute for material from Korea's Japanese Colonial period (1910–45), a period where the abundance of recent scholarship across disciplines including literature, history, film, and religious studies has not been matched by translations of primary source material into English. Through careful selection, translation, and annotation of twelve essays by major Korean intellectuals from the Japanese colonial era, Imperatives of Culture goes a long way toward filling this void.

Each of the twelve essayists, who address different facets of Korea's cultural identity as they crystallized during the colonial regime, receives careful treatment by an expert on that writer: translations are consistently fine, and both the annotations on the text and the substantial introduction to each writer help readers appreciate nuance as well as historical and theoretical context. Even browsing through these introductions one acquires a three-dimensional sense of the intellectual landscape of the colonial era.

One of the many virtues of this collection, which should serve as an example for similar projects in the future, is careful attention to balance—which, given only twelve essays to cover such a complex period, comes down more to deft choices than any possibility of being comprehensive. As one would hope, this collection includes the most representative authors from the colonial era, on a diverse range of topics such as history, literature, gender, diaspora, nationalism, and others. But it also includes a few less familiar names, whose inclusion and function within the volume are carefully considered. Yi Kwangsu, the star intellectual of the era, opens the volume, and following him is the lesser-known Marxist intellectual Sin Paegu. This opening makes a statement of balancing left and right political perspectives, a balance maintained throughout the book, while also at least inviting curiosity about things less familiar. While the field of literature gets strong and welcome representation in essays by Kim Kirim, Ch'oe Chaesŏ, Kim Namch’ŏn, and Kim Tongni, the book also attends to other topics such as gender (Mun Ilp'yŏng, Kang Kyŏngae), history (Chŏng Inbo, Son Chint'ae), Korean identity (Ch'oe Namsŏn), nationalism, diaspora, and socioeconomic circumstances of Korea (Paek Namun). Through it all, the book's editors, Christopher Hanscom, Walter Lew, and Youngju Ryu, never lose track of how each piece contributes to the larger whole.

The soundness of this publication reduces my criticisms to nitpicking. In that spirit, I would have liked to see at least one essay from the Patriotic Enlightenment Period, just before Korea became a formal colony of Japan. This would have been appropriate given inclusion of an essay from 1948, three years after the colony ended. Together the two essays could have served as bookends hinting at trajectories beyond the colonial era. Inclusion of precolonial material by enlightenment thinkers in particular, such as Sin Ch'aeho, Pak Ŭnsik, or Chang Chiyŏn, might have provided insights into how topics and discussions took shape later in the period the book studies. Another observation, which is not even a nitpick, is the welcome inclusion of gender as a topic, including an essay by a woman writer, Kang Kyonghae. The other gender article, by Mun Ilp'yŏng, thus claims that author's representation in the book, and while it serves well in showing that even leading male intellectuals devoted time to thinking and writing about gender, some may have wished for the inclusion of one of his more famous essays alongside this one, to help represent his work more fully. But again, winnowing such a complex period down to just twelve essays necessarily limits the potential to be comprehensive, and if one must choose only one of his essays, it seems appropriate to demonstrate both that intellectuals were diverse in their inquiries and that gender was not just a women's issue. Again, representation comes down to astute choices, which are a hallmark of this volume.

Accurate translation is difficult in any case, but the essays included here posed a particular challenge given the rapid evolution of the modern written Korean language at the time and the influx of new, modern, and foreign concepts that had to be adapted or coined. Navigating through newly minted or appropriated Sino-Korean words, neologisms, and words imported from Japanese, English, German, Russian, and French, as well as individual experiments with language, including occasional misappropriation of a concept, only amplified this challenge. Imperatives of Culture is to be appreciated for handling this complexity so competently.

This book, the third in the University of Hawai‘i Press's new “Korean Classics Library” series, and the first in its “Historical Materials” category, is a most welcome addition, one that deserves to become an essential text for the study of Korea, the Japanese Empire, nationalism, and modernity outside the West.