Korean race

Korean ethnic nationalism, or racial nationalism, is a political ideology and a form of ethnic (or racial) identity that is widely prevalent in modern North and South Korea. It is based on the belief that Koreans form a nation, a 'race', and an ethnic group that shares a unified bloodline and a distinct culture. It is centered on the notion of the minjok (Korean: 민족; Hanja: 民族), a term that had been coined in Imperial Japan ('minzoku') in the early Meiji period on the basis of Social Darwinian conceptions. Minjok has been translated as 'nation', 'people', 'ethnic group', 'race', and 'race-nation'.In trying to understand Korea and Koreans, we must recognize how important blood is to Korea. Koreans love blood, both in the real sense and metaphorically. They like to shed blood, sometimes their own in cut fingers and sometimes animal blood, in protest. They hold 'blood relations' as supreme, above other links and connections. They often add 'flesh' and 'bone' to their rhetorical statements and preferences. In short, Korea is quite fond of thinking of itself and its people in terms of blood... Korean ethnic nationalism, or racial nationalism, is a political ideology and a form of ethnic (or racial) identity that is widely prevalent in modern North and South Korea. It is based on the belief that Koreans form a nation, a 'race', and an ethnic group that shares a unified bloodline and a distinct culture. It is centered on the notion of the minjok (Korean: 민족; Hanja: 民族), a term that had been coined in Imperial Japan ('minzoku') in the early Meiji period on the basis of Social Darwinian conceptions. Minjok has been translated as 'nation', 'people', 'ethnic group', 'race', and 'race-nation'. This conception started to emerge among Korean intellectuals after the Japanese-imposed Protectorate of 1905, when the Japanese were trying to persuade Koreans that both nations were of the same racial stock. The notion of the Korean minjok was first made popular by essayist and historian Shin Chaeho in his New Reading of History (1908), a history of Korea from the mythical times of Dangun to the fall of Balhae in 926 CE. Shin portrayed the minjok as a warlike race that had fought bravely to preserve Korean identity, had later declined, and now needed to be reinvigorated. During the period of Japanese rule (1910–1945), this belief in the uniqueness of the Korean minjok gave an impetus for resisting Japanese assimilation policies and historical scholarship. In contrast to Japan and Germany, where such race-based conceptions of the nation were discredited after the Second World War because they were associated with ultranationalism or Nazism, postwar North and South Korea continued to proclaim their ethnic homogeneity and pure bloodline. In the 1960s, President Park Chung-hee strengthened this 'ideology of racial purity' to legitimate his authoritarian rule, while in North Korea official propaganda has portrayed Koreans as 'the cleanest race.' Contemporary Korean historians continue to write about the nation's 'unique racial and cultural heritage.' This shared conception of a racially defined Korea continues to shape Korean politics and foreign relations, gives Koreans an impetus to national pride, and feeds hopes for the reunification of the two Koreas. Despite statistics showing that South Korea is becoming an increasingly multi-ethnic society, most of the South Korean population continues to identify itself as 'one people' (Korean: 단일민족; Hanja: 單一民族, danil minjok) joined by a common 'bloodline'. A renewed emphasis on the purity of Korean 'blood' has caused tensions, leading to renewed debates on multi-ethnicity and racism both in South Korea and abroad. In South Korea, Korean racial nationalism has been described as constituting a civic religion of sorts. Contrary to popular belief that the contemporary Korean ideology of a 'pure Korean race' began only in the early 20th century when the Japanese annexed Korea and launched a campaign to persuade them that they were of the same pure racial stock as the Japanese themselves, this ideology existed since ancient times, similar to the Mongolian or Han race system. In the colonial period, the Imperial Japanese's assimilation policy claimed that Koreans and Japanese were of common origin but the former always subordinate. The pure blood theory was used to justify colonialist policies to replace Korean cultural traditions with Japanese ones in order to supposedly get rid of all distinctions and achieve equality between Koreans and inlanders. The policy included changing Korean names into Japanese, exclusive use of Japanese language, school instruction in the Japanese ethical system, and Shinto worship. Brian Reynolds Myers, a professor at Dongseo University, argues that seeing the failure of the pure assimilationist policy, Japanese imperial ideologues changed their policy into creating a Korean ethnic-patriotism on par with the Japanese one. They encouraged Koreans to take pride in their Koreanness, in their history, heritage, culture and 'dialect' as a brother nation going back to a common ancestry with the Japanese. Shin Chaeho (1880–1936), the founder of the nationalistic historiography of modern Korea and a Korean independence movement activist, published his influential book of reconstructed history Joseon Sanggosa (The Early History of Joseon) in 1924–25, proclaiming that Koreans are descendants of Dangun, the legendary ancestor of Korean people, who merged with Buyo of Manchuria to form the Goguryeo people. Borrowing from the Japanese theory of nation, Shin Chaeho located the martial roots of the Korean in Goguryeo, which he depicted as militarist and expansionist which turned out to inspire pride and confidence in the resistance against the Japanese. In order to establish Korean uniqueness, he also replaced the story of Gija Joseon, whose founder (Gija) was the paternal uncle or brother of the Chinese Shang emperor Zhou, with the Dangun legend and asserted that it was an important way to establish Korea’s uniqueness.