and culture to adopt the concept of han. South Korea Sandra So Hee Chi Kim's article on han says that "the term han itself emerged as a significant ideological concept during the 1970s" and "[s]ome contend that it was during the Park Chung Hee regime that the idea of han transformed from a personal sense of sorrow and resentment to a broader, national experience of unrelenting suffering and injustice". Han was used politically to promote "Korean uniqueness" and ethnic-national solidarity through a sense of "shared suffering". Han acquired a biologistic aspect, as seen in descriptions of han by the poet Ko Un, "We Koreans were born from the womb of Han and brought up in the womb of Han", and the film critic Ahn Byung-Sup, "Han is an inherent characteristic of the Korean character ... It becomes part of the blood and breath of a person". Korean theologians anachronistically argued that han was a national sentiment in premodern Korea. During the authoritarian regime of Park Chung Hee, the idea of han, and thus resentment and suffering, as a national characteristic of the Korean people may have been an ideological state apparatus to indoctrinate the working class into accepting the hardships of rapid industrialization and economic inequality; the idea of sadness being an inherent Korean trait had served a similar purpose during the Japanese occupation to naturalize the suffering of the colonized Koreans. Sunghee Choi, an art education scholar, said that her inculcation of han in education started as early as elementary school. According to Minsoo Kang, han has declined significantly since the late 1990s. Criticism Yanagi Sōetsu's theory of the "beauty of sorrow" has received criticism in both Korea and, more recently, Japan. It has been described as prejudiced, imperialistic, orientalist, sentimentalist, colonialist, and under-theorized. Yanagi's interpretation of Korean history and art has been disputed. The "beauty of sorrow" was criticized by Koreans as early as 1922. In 1974, the poet Choe Harim published an influential article that established the "aesthetics of colonialism" and accused Yanagi's theory of imperialism, colonialism, sentimentalism, and a "superficial interpretation of Korean history". Choe criticized Yanagi's view, that Korean art has a "beauty of sorrow" because Korea has long suffered at the hands of foreign countries, as being in accordance with Japanese colonial policies, which, he said, were intended to instill a sense of defeat and shame in Koreans about Korean history. Mark Peterson disagrees