By the end of the Second World War, four million Koreans were living outside Korea, and more than seven hundred thousand Japanese civilians and troops were living inside Korea. But the loss of the Japanese Empire meant that a new theory of Japanese identity was required. In postwar Korea and Japan, a rhetoric of racial purity thrived. Within the Korean Peninsula, the newly independent North and South competed to see which could more thoroughly eradicate Japan’s influence, in an effort to become the Korean people’s legitimate homeland.
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