The topic I chose to write about from today’s class is the complex, interwoven history of empire and nation building in Japan and Korea. In the span of less than a century, Japan transitioned from an agrarian empire restricted by choice to its own archipelago to a fully-industrialized imperial superpower on the global stage–only to be toppled and forced into submission by the USA in WW2. In the same time span, Korea went from a largely independent tributary kingdom of China to a mere colony under oppressive Japanese rule to a divided nation used as the staging ground for a proxy war between the USA and USSR. Such rapid and wide-reaching changes are bound to leave many people displaced, and among such displaced peoples were the Zainichi, a population of 600,000 ethnic Koreans living in Japan who were unwilling or unable to be repatriated to the new Korean states after the end of the war. As a contradiction to the image of postwar Japan as a unified ethnostate, the Zainichi were and are subjected to intense social and legal discrimination, which the Japanese government has been sluggish to combat.