[duckonomy]

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.

[rangibaby]

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.

[user982]

> 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.