ABSTRACT
The Republic of Korea is on the southern half of the Korean peninsula, which lies between Japan and China. It is 98,190 square kilometres in land area with a population estimated in mid-1997 of 46 million people. Korea has existed as an identifiable autonomous, cultural and political region since the establishment of the first Korean kingdom, Chosun, by Tangun in 2333 BC. The decline of the Kingdom of Chosun and the Chinese occupation paved the way for the gradual emergence from tribal groupings of three states in southern Korea: the Kingdoms of Paekche and Shilla in the south, and the Kingdom of Koguryo in the north. With the defeat of Japan in 1945, Korea was jointly occupied by the United States and the Soviet Union, divided at the thirty-eighth parallel. The first company law in Korea was the Japanese Commercial Code which ‘forcedly applied’ in Korea in 1910 after colonization.
