Who was Kim Yung-kun? What made him devote himself to so many things for which he worked in the 1930s and the 1940s? And how should we comprehend the significance of his efforts to blaze a trail in the field of Vietnamese research? These three inquiries are pursued serially in this study. Born in 1910 and graduating in 1927 from Gyeongseong Second Superior School, Kim Yung-kun came to Hanoi in 1931 as an assistant librarian, an experience that would give him a deeper understanding of Vietnamese history and culture with which he might be unfamiliar. Ten years later, he left Indochina and returned to Korea in order not to be involved in the Japanese military occupation of Vietnam.
Back in his country, Kim Yung-kun tried to apply himself to Korean studies, strongly influenced by Mun Il-pyeong and some other Koreanologists. However, after joining in with other leftists, his desire arose for a more active social and political engagement in order to deal with acute n ational problems. Since that time Kim Yung-kun endeavored to integrate academic work with concrete social and political engagement, leading to a number of action research studies covering Korean history, tendency literature, criticism of arts and so forth. These academic interests and militant engagement have originated from Kim Yung-kun’s experiences in Vietnam. Having devoted a part of his life to Hanoi earned Kim Yung-kun the reputation of being an expert on Vietnamese studies and won him the enduring friendship of Lê Dư. In the early 1940s, the Korean Vietnamologist also published in a book his earlier works on Japanese relations with Vietnam, Champa and Cambodia, which he had been continuously writing since about 1936. Years later, he met with numerous difficulties when carrying out a study of Vietnam as he was deeply involved in various political movements. And so, his vision of Southeast Asia turned out to be incomplete.
