[muawiyah]

The Korean aristocracy was destroyed. The old titles of nobility abolished. In fact, the Japanese "terminated" their own titles of nobility in the 1920s (except for the royals, and those were substantially limited).

Koreans make a great deal out of having an equalitarian society (in terms of hereditary class).

To say the least the Korean people were "divided" when it came to the Japanese occupation, as were the Japanese themselves about Korea.

And no, they are not the same people. 40% of modern Japanese have a tooth type found only among the ancient Jomon and present day Ainu. The Shan Dynasty Chinese who fled Shan at the start of one or the other of our various Dark Ages who ended up in Korea on the South Coast moved on to Japan quite early and never mixed cultures with the later Mongol arrivals to Korea.

The Japanese royal family was recently found to descend from Korean invaders from the 500s.

It gets quite complex from there, but the two nations are more different than they are alike. There have also been many centuries of voluntary immigration into Japan from Korea. Japanese fishermen certainly established small villages on the coast of Korea. Both nations also went through periods of total rejection of the outside world with bouts of what can only be called "ethnic cleansing".

Politically, claims that both nations use cognate languages are considered a legacy of the Japanese militarist's excuses for the conquest of Korea. In reality, there are similarities - mostly in terms of vocabulary, like English and French, but the Polynesian grammatical elements in Japanese have no equivalent in Korean. In time English will supplant both languages, albeit an English without an "L" sound!

Still, you have to remember Mr. Rhee got started in 1897 demonstrating against YI. One doubts that he ever really changed his mind.

[maro]

Do you mean "destroyed" as in killed or destroyed as in "titles abolished"?

My belief that the 2 peoples are genetically very close is based on DNA analysis by a Stanford professor. I also read somewhere that the Japanese have about 30% of their gene pool that is directly attributable to Korean immigration. The idea that there was a heavy Shan Dynasty influence on either Korea or Japan strikes me as unlikely. The aboriginal peoples were Mongol/Tungusic types, like the Manchus and Mongols. (Look at paintings of the ancient Mongols--they look very Japanese.) Some have speculated that the ancient Koguryo language was very similar to Old Japanese. In fact, vocabulary is just where the 2 languages share less than might be expected. The Japanese vocab has a lot of Polynesian substrate in it, and only 30% of modern Korean is truly native. The 2 are very close grammatically though, and Japanese/Korean grammatical studies is a subfield unto itself, of which my old professor Kuno (also of Harvard) was a pioneer.