Our Stamp Chat guest  joins us from Great Britain. An anthropologist and Methodist minister, James H. Grayson served with the Methodist Church in Korea from 1971 to 1987, and was then appointed as a Lecturer (= U. S. Assistant Professor) in Korean Studies at The University of Sheffield in the UK.  He retired in 2009 as Professor of Modern Korean Studies.  His philatelic interests are in stamps and the postal history of East Asia generally and in Korea particularly, and in the first issues of a country.  Prof. Grayson is interested in the semiotics of stamp design, that is, stamps are government documents and someone has made a decision to issue a particular stamp with a particular design.  Why? And what is (are) the meaning(s) of this design?  Prof. Grayson is a member of the Korea Stamp Society, the Sheffield Philatelic Society (founded 1894), and the First Issues Collectors Club.   

Korea had been occupied by Japan since 1910 until it was liberated as a result of the defeat of Japan in the Second World War.  As in Europe, Korea was divided at the end of the war for the purpose of taking the Japanese surrender, which meant a Soviet zone was formed in the northern part of the peninsula, and an American zone in the south.  In this talk, I will examine comparatively the different types of stamps issued by the occupying powers and then by the new states up to 1953.   I will look at the semiotics of the design stamps issued north and south to illustrate how even subtle features of stamp design reveal a different political agenda.