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Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

Historically, Korea was repeatedly invaded by Japan. More recently, Korea was a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945, during which the Japanese ruled with an iron fist and did their best to destroy Korean identity by forcing people to take Japanese names etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_under_Japanese_rule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan%E2%80%93Korea...

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The identity-destroying part only came after 1938. They were trying to do 내선일체 [內鮮一體] (not sure how to translate this in English).

Before that, they actually helped Koreans learn Hangul. I was also very anti-Japan as a I grew up under typical Korean parents.

But after reading the actual history, there were some good parts during the colonization. Although, I'm not denying the horrific parts caused by war. But that's just war. It's horrible to begin with. Not to mention what Koreans did in the Vietnam War to the locals.

I think part of the hostility from either of the countries is caused by only seeing part of the reality.

I guess the word you are looking for is "cultural assimilation". 内鮮一体 is the specific case of Japan and Korea.

The Japanese were fresh out of their own industrial revolution so had plenty of experience to do the same thing in Korea. The legacy of that is that Korean and Japanese societies have a lot in common eg Chaebol and Keiretsu. Following the war Japan sheltered people persecuted by the ROK dictatorship (eg Kim Dae-jung, Lee Byung-chul)

> I think part of the hostility from either of the countries is caused by only seeing part of the reality.

It's tribal. East Asian People are racist against each other and each other's countries, but East Asian Persons get on just fine.

> The identity-destroying part only came after 1938. They were trying to do 내선일체 [內鮮一體] (not sure how to translate this in English). Before that, they actually helped Koreans learn Hangul.

Banning Hangul and erasing Korea's independent cultural identity intentionally traced the pattern of Japan's nearly identical actions a few decades earlier in conquering Ryukyu, including classifying each suppressed language as a "dialect" of Japanese.

As a contrast to Korea, the former Ryukyu Kingdom is now fully subsumed as the Okinawan islands and its original languages, religions, and culture are, in practice, nearly extinct.

Which certainly explains why Korea doesn't like Japan, but why does Japan seem to dislike Korea so much?

Xenophobia and belief in Japanese racial superiority:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron#Specific_theses

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_Japan#Pre-war...

Much of it can be blamed on propaganda driven by economic decline and political scapegoating. While Korean music, drama, and movies are popular in Japan, consumers are mostly women. Among small but growing and very vocal population of Japanese men, Korea-bashing books and manga are popular. Later trend is not unrelated to continuing economic decline of Japan. And Japanese politicians are leveraging and fueling that trend to divert the blame.

Maybe because they're not Japanese enough.

See https://www.upi.com/TOP_NEWS/WORLD-NEWS/2019/04/17/ANTI-KORE...

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