Don Baker

Synthesis of branched-chain nitro and amino sugars by the nitromethane route

Abstract Addition of 5- O -benzyl-1,2- O -isopropylidene-α- d - erythro -pentofuranos-3-ulose ( 1 ) to excess nitromethane and 1 molar equivalent of sodium methoxide in methanol gave 5- O -benzyl-1,2- O -isopropylidene-3- C -nitromethyl-α- d -ribofuranose ( 2 ) in 60% yield. Under essentially the same conditions, 1,2:5,6-di- O -isopropylidene-α- d - ribo -hexofuranos-3-ulose ( 4 ) yielded 1,2:5,6-di- O -isopropylidene-3- C -nitromethyl-α- d -glucofuranose ( 5 ) in 71% yield. Treatment of the ketose 4 with nitromethane and sodium hydride gave 5 and the allo -epimer 5a in a total yield of 91%. The proof of structure of the branched-chain nitro sugars is described. Selective hydrolysis of 5 gave the partially blocked into sugar 6 , which was converted by catalytic hydrogenation into the branched-chain amino sugar 9 (characterized as its N -acetyl derivative). Oxidation of 6 with sodium metaperiodate, followed by reduction of the aldehydo-derivative with sodium borohydride, afforded 1,2- O -isopropylidene-3- C -nitromethyl-α- d -xylofuranose ( 7 ). Reduction of 7 yielded the partially blocked amino sugar 13 . Compounds 7 and 13 were unblocked to afford the unsubstituted, branched-chain, nitro and amino sugars. The 3-acetate of 5 was converted by a Schmidt-Rutz reaction into a nitroolefin (not isolated), which was hydrogenated with sodium borohydride in ethanol to yield mainly 3-deoxy-1,2:5,6-di- O -isopropylidene-3- C -nitromethyl-α- d -glucofuranose ( 17 , assigned on basis of its n.m.r. spectrum).

Oriental Medicine in Korea

Oriental medicine goes under several different names in Korea, varying according to the time and place. In North Korea, it has usually been called Dongui (Eastern medicine), a traditional term used to distinguish the Korean practice of Oriental medicine from the Chinese versions of the same basic medical system. Recently, North Koreans have started referring to Oriental medicine as Goryeo uihak (Korean medicine) to emphasize their view that Korean medicine is a medical system in its own right and should not be seen as the eastern form of a broader pan-national medical tradition. In the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Hanui is the preferred name for Oriental medicine. Until the 1970s, Hanui was written with Sino-Korean characters which can be literally rendered as “Chinese medicine”. The word Hanui is still used in South Korea, but the original Sino-Korean character for the first syllable, han,1 has been replaced with a homophone which means Korea, so that today Hanui, just like Dongui, literally means “Korean medicine”. However, when South Koreans discuss their traditional medicine in English, they generally refer to it as “Korean Oriental Medicine” or simply “Oriental Medicine”. This variety of names for Oriental medicine in Korea reveals how ambivalent Koreans have become about acknowledging the Chinese roots of their traditional medicine and how proud they are of the modifications they have made in the medical practices they adopted from China. However, when the theory and techniques of Oriental medicine first arrived on the Korean peninsula over 2,000 years ago, the Chinese origins of Oriental medicine were no cause for embarrassment. Quite the contrary. Oriental medicine came to Korea bundled together with a package containing mathematics, astronomy, architecture, sculpture, literature, law, government institutions, music and ritual, all seen as intertwined and inseparable components of the only advanced civilization Koreans knew, the Chinese. Exactly when the concepts and techniques of Oriental medicine first began to be utilized in Korea is, however, still disputed. Some nationalists claim that needle-shaped bits of stone found in excavations of Neolithic villages on the Korean peninsula prove that Koreans were using acupuncture before the

The Transformation of the Catholic Church in Korea: From a Missionary Church to an Indigenous Church

A Catholic community emerged in Korea at the end of the eighteenth century but Korea’s Catholics were not allowed to practice their faith openly until the end of the nineteenth century. The official persecution Catholics endured for most of the nineteenth century left the Catholic community in Korea weak and battered, and dependent for survival on foreign missionaries. The Korean Catholic Church did not become a truly Korean church, one with a clergy that was predominantly Korean, until after the Korean War. Today, however, the vast majority of Catholic priests and nuns are Korean, and every bishop is Korean, a sharp contrast with the 1930s when none were. This Koreanization of the clergy has been accompanied by a Koreanization of Catholic rituals and parish life, including the use of Korean rather than Latin in major rituals and a greater role for lay believers in the management of parishes. In addition, since its leadership is now Korean, the Korean Catholic Church has taken a much more active role in such local issues as democratization and protection of the environment. As a result, the Korean Catholic community has attracted many more members, almost tripling in size since 1985.

Exacerbated Politics: The Legacy of Political Trauma in South Korea

The theme tying together the various chapters in this book is collective memory. Memory can inflame relations between two nations when they disagree on how to remember their encounters in years past. Such is the case in competing Korean and Japanese memories about the impact of Japan’s colonial rule and in competing Japanese and Chinese memories of what happened in Nanjing in 1937. These memory wars are well worth our examination. In this chapter, however, I will focus on how one people, the Korean people, remember and represent their own past.

A Slippery, Changing Concept: How Korean New Religions Define Religion

The term “religion” is relatively new to Korea, having being introduced at the end of the 19th century. Since it is an imported term, it still is a rather loose fit for the various organizations and phenomena in Korea that outsiders often label as religious, since not all such organizations or phenomena meet all of the criteria often used to determine what is and what is not religious. Moreover, governments in Korea have often tried to limit the religion label to “respectable” religions, those with organizational structures that made them more amenable to government control. At the same time, many new religions have tried to avoid the religion label because they see it as implying an exclusive rather than an inclusive community. Religion, therefore, remains a problematic term in Korea, lacking agreement regarding how it should be applied.

Branched-chain amino sugars. stereospecific synthesis of 3-C-(2-acetamidoethyl)-3-deoxy-1,2-O-isopropylidene-β-l-lyxofuranose

Abstract Condensation of 1,2:5,6-di- O -isopropylidene-α- d - xylo -hexofuranos-3-ulose ( 1 ) with diethyl cyanomethylphosphonate afforded a mixture of the cis - and trans -3-cyanomethylene-3-deoxy-1,2:5,6-di- O -isopropylidene-α- d - xylo -hexofuranoses ( 2 ) in 80% yield. Catalytic reduction of 2 yielded 3- C -cyanomethyl-3-deoxy-1,2:5,6-di- O -isopropylidene-α- d -gulofuranose ( 4 ) exclusively. Palladium and hydrogen was found to rearrange the exocyclic double bond of 2 to give the 3,4-ene ( 3 ). Catalytic reduction of 3 also proceeded stereospecifically to yield 4 . Selective hydrolysis of 4 yielded the diol 5 , which was cleaved with periodate and the product reduced with sodium borohydride to afford crystalline 3- C -cyanomethyl-3-deoxy-1,2- O -isopropylidene-β- l -lyxofuranose ( 6 ) in 87% yield. Catalytic reduction of the latter with hydrogen and platinum in the presence of acetic anhydride and ethanol gave the crystalline l -amino sugar, 3- C -(2-acetamidoethyl)-3-deoxy-1,2- O -isopropylidene-β- l -lyxofuranose ( 7 ) in 92% yield.

Impotent Numbers: Korean Confucian Reactions to Jesuit Mathematics

In the eighteenth century, Korean Confucian scholars began reading and discussing books from China explaining the European approach to mathematics. Those books, written by Jesuit missionaries in China and their Chinese disciples, were intended to shatter confidence in Neo-Confucianism and lead those to read them to accept Western reasoning as superior in mathematical as well as ethical and theological reasoning. However, because the analytical and abstract character of Western mathematics conflicted with the Neo-Confucian preference for a concrete and contextualized approach, the use of mathematics to convert Confucians to Christianity was, with a few exceptions, ineffective. Koreans were usually able to extract useful formulae from those Western books while ignoring the logic behind them.

Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea by Albert L. Park, and: Populist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896–1910 by Yumi Moon (review)

If you sit a group of historians of modern Korea around a table and ask them to discuss Korea in the first half of the twentieth century, it is likely that, before too long, an argument will break out. Seventy years after the Japanese empire collapsed, ending Japanese colonial rule over Korea, the question of how to interpret the colonial period continues to provoke heated discussions both within the academic community in Korea and between scholars in Korea and those based elsewhere. The first issue that is likely to cause trouble is the impact of thirty-five years of Japanese rule, from 1910 to 1945, on Korea’s post-1945 economic and political development. A minority of Korean historians argue that independent Korea was able to benefit from the railroad and communication networks laid down by Japanese colonial authorities, as well as from the industrialization and improvements in public education and public health that proceeded during those thirty-five years of colonial rule.1 The majority, especially vocal in Korea itself, adamantly reject any suggestion that Korea benefited from Japanese rule, declaring instead that when the Japanese seized control of the peninsula they kept Koreans from modernizing on their own in their own way.2 These nationalistic historians often go on to maintain that those who contend otherwise are trying to excuse the brutality of the Japanese colonial authorities. A related, and equally contentious, issue concerns collaboration: identifying who assisted the Japanese colonial government and explaining why they did so. In 2009, well over half a century after the end of Japanese colonial rule, a massive biographical dictionary of collaborators with the colonial authorities was published in Korea.3 Since many of the individuals named are related to members of the current political elite in South Korea (for example, Park Chung-hee, former president of South Korea and father of current president Park Geun-hye, is listed because he trained in the

Seoul and Salem: Contrasts in How States Treated Female Performers of Licentious Rituals

If one feature of modernity is the degree of tolerance a state or society affords a religious minority, then for much of the Chosŏn dynasty Korea was more modern than Western Europe or North America. In contrast with the witch-hunts we see in the West, which took the lives of tens of thousands, Korea marginalized but did not usually kill its shamans. The Chosŏn state exercised ritual hegemony over its subjects, but that meant it attempted only to control their religious activities. Unlike in the West until a few centuries ago, Korea did not execute many religious non-conformists for their nonconformity. This changed in the late eighteenth century, when the Chosŏn government began killing members of Korea’s emerging Catholic community for being Catholic. Moreover, when Korea began killing Catholics, it tortured and executed women as well as men, though in the past any legal attacks on nonconformists were usually limited to men. In Korea today, we find the legacy of pre-eighteenth-century Korea to be stronger than the legacy of the nineteenth-century persecutions. Nevertheless, Korea continues to differ from the West in its relationship between the state and religious communities.

Medicine in Korea

“Oriental medicine” is the English name Koreans prefer for what is known in most of the rest of the world as Chinese medicine. Among themselves, Koreans call it “Korean medicine.” They believe their traditional medicine is as much Korean as it is Chinese, since for around 2,000 years they have adapted medical theories, practices, and even prescriptions from China to fit Korean needs (Cha et. al. 2007) (Fig. 1). Koreans probably acquired elements of Chinese medical theory and practices for the first time a little over two millennia ago, after China’s Han dynasty established four outposts in and around the peninsula late in the second century BCE. Not long after the last of those outposts disappeared early in the fourth century, Buddhist monks from China and farther West began arriving and teaching not only their religion but also the more advanced civilization of China, including its medical theory and practice (Baker, 1994). Exactly how much Koreans learned about Chinese medicine from those outposts and from those monks is not clear, since we have few written records from that period. The oldest extant history written by Koreans, the Samguk Sagi (History of the Three Kingdoms), dates back only to the twelfth century. However, statements in that book, as well as scattered references in Chinese and Japanese records from centuries earlier, indicate that Koreans were reading Chinese medical manuals and applying what they read in them during the Three Kingdoms period (300–668) as well as during the Silla period (Yeo et al. 2012, pp. 668–936).