This volume explores the possibility of North Korea's'soft-landing' as the most desirable outcome on the Korean Peninsula. The collection of essays by noted students of Asian security examines the perspectives and interests of North and South Korea, the United States, China, Russia and Japan regarding North Korea's future, including the possibility of its neutrality.

IT technology engineering changes everyday life, especially in Computing and Communications. The goal of this book is to further explore the theoretical and practical issues of Future Computing and Communications. It also aims to foster new ideas and collaboration between researchers and practitioners.

In Selling the Future, Ryan Moran explains how the life insurance industry in Japan exploited its association with mutuality and community to commodify and govern lives. Covering the years from the start of the industry in 1881 through the end of World War II, Moran describes insurance companies and government officials working together to create a picture of the future as precarious and dangerous. Since it was impossible for individual consumers to deal with every contingency on their own, insurance industry administrators argued that their usage of statistical data enabled them to chart the predictable future for the aggregate. Through insurance, companies and the state thus offered consumers a means to a perfectible future in an era filled with repeated crises. Life insurance functioned as an important modernist technology within Japan and its colonies to instantiate expectations for responsibility, to reconfigure meanings of mutuality, and to normalize new social formations (such as the nuclear family) as essential to life. Life insurance thus offers an important vehicle for examining the confluence of modes of mobilizing and organizing bodies, the expropriation of financial resources, and the action of disciplining workers into a capitalist system.

This collection critically reflects on the state-of-the-art research on Korean-as-a-heritage-language (KHL) teaching and learning, centering KHL as an object of empirical inquiry by offering multiple perspectives on its practices and directions for further research. The volume expands prevailing notions of transnationalism and translanguaging by providing insights into the ways contemporary Korean immigrant and transnational families and individuals maintain their heritage language to participate in literary practices across borders. Experts from across the globe explore heritage language and literacy practices in Korean immigrant communities in varied geographic and educational contexts. In showcasing a myriad of perspectives across KHL research, the collection addresses such key questions as how heritage language learners’ literacy practices impact their identities, how their families support KHL development at home, and what challenges and opportunities stakeholders need to consider in KHL education and in turn, heritage language education, more broadly. This book will be of interest to families, teachers, scholars, and language program administrators in Korean language education, heritage language education, applied linguistics, and bilingual education.