Japan and the two Koreas

Japan's relations with the Korean Peninsula have been troubled since the late nineteenth century, marked most prominently by Japan's colonization from 1910 to 1945. And since the end of the Second World War and the peninsula's division into two ideologically hostile regimes, both Koreas have seen Japan as the underlying source of the division and the consequent frustration of Korean nationalism. In the phrase of Richard J. Samuels, Japan ‘has been the most significant negative other in the making of modern Korean national identity and nationalism’. ¹