KOREA

Korea is a small, politically divided country that occupies the strategically important Korean peninsula in East Asia. The peninsula is 600 miles long, 200 miles wide, and it shares land borders with China on the north and Russia on the northeast, while Japan lies just 120 miles to the east, on the other side of Tsushima Strait. Most of the land, like Japan, is full of rugged forest-covered mountains; only about 20% of the whole Korean peninsula is suitable for settlement and cultivation, meaning that most of the population of both republics is concentrated in small, isolated coastal plains and inland valleys that open onto the western coast. The name by which we call the land is derived from Koryo, the dynasty that ruled the peninsula from 935 to 1392, which in turn is an abbreviated form of Koguryo, the name of an older kingdom.(1) Pyongyang is the capital of North Korea; Seoul is the capital of South Korea. Both republics seek eventual reunification of the peninsula through the political overthrow of the other. Following the devastation of the Korean War (1950-53), both nations had to rebuild their economies; South Korea looked outward, developing a successful export-oriented economy. North Korea, one of the world's most highly regimented and isolated societies, focused on economic self-sufficiency. The estimated population of South Korea (2002) is 48,324,000, while that of North Korea is 22,224,195. For South Korea that works out to a population density of 1,261 per square mile, going up to 43,700 per square mile in Seoul, making it one of the most crowded places in the world. There are also an estimated 7 million ethnic Koreans living just across the Yalu River, in the Manchurian provinces of China. Finally there is a community of slightly more than 600,000 Koreans living in the United States, immigrants who have come over since the late nineteenth century, and an equal number live in Japan as descendants of domestic servants, brought there during the years when Korea was under Japanese rule.