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Concept
Korean ethnic nationalism
Summary
Korean ethnic nationalism, or Korean racial nationalism, is a racist, chauvinist and ethnosupremacist political ideology and a form of ethnic and racial identity that is widely prevalent by the Korean people in Korea, particularly in 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 (), a term that had been coined in Imperial Japan ("minzoku") in the early Meiji period. 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, leading to Korea's colonization by Japan. The Japanese then tried to persuade the Koreans that both nations were of the same racial stock to assimilate them, similar to what they did with the Ainu and Ryukyuans. 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 mainstream race-based conceptions of the nation were discredited after the Second World War because they were associated with ultranationalism or Nazism (Blood and soil, Herrenvolk and the Völkisch movement), with such views leading to the Holocaust, postwar North and South Korea continued to proclaim their ethnic homogeneity and pure bloodline. In the 1960s, South Korean president Park Chung-hee strengthened this "ideology of racial purity" to legitimize his authoritarian rule.
Official source
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