Could Japan assimilate Korea?

Assuming that Japan begins a program of assimilating Korea (teaching only in Japanese, forcing Koreans to adopt Japanese names and culture, offering full citizenship to Koreans who assimilate etc.) and assuming that Japan controls Korea to the present day (no Pacific War), how well assimilated could Korea become? After more than a century, would most Koreans identify as Japanese, or maybe as both Korean and Japanese? How popular might Korea nationalist movements be?
 

SsgtC

Banned
At best I think they identify as Korean-Japanese. Kind of the same way people in the United States will identify as Mexican-American or Cuban-American, etc. Basically a way to show that they're ethically Korean, but their nationality is Japanese
 
They pretty much did force the Korean people to adopt Japanese customs and cultures and a las, that was the problem.
By the time of annexation, Korean-ness was already a highly mature and distinct ethno-nationality. No amount of forced assimilation was going to change that; in fact, paradoxically it probably helped further it's development along.

That being said, had Japan eased up on the attempted cultural genocide and treated the Koreans as equals, you may see natural assimilation by fiat accompli over the long term.
 
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In a way, I'd argue it was psychologically impossible, less because of what Koreans thought and more because of what Japanese thought. I mean, racism isn't just an affirmation of hierarchy among races, but also of the idea that members of different races are immutably different. As was mentioned above, some of the suggested assimilation measures were adopted IOTL, but at the same time, there was also racial discrimination against Koreans baked into the system. That led to an internal contradiction in Korea policy - on the one hand, they attempted to extinguish Korean as a distinct culture. But on the other hand, they dug their heels in on the question of Koreans as a separate race.

In a way, the premise may well be flawed - in order for Japanese policy to have attempted to erase all meaningful differences between Japanese and Koreans, they'd first have had to believe themselves that it was possible to erase those differences, that all that divided the two groups were cultural trappings. Unfortunately, the prevailing racial attitudes mean that they can't have accepted that as a possibility.
 
Yes, 100 years of colonisation can probably do that. You do need Japanese to accept Koreans as one of them though, which might be doable by the 60's or later.

Taiwan itself was nearing this after only what, 60 years?
 
Read by meyers the cleanest race. For an elite the japanese could be benign. the poor are held ndown the middle class, survive slowly, the elite is copted.
 
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