of Dangun Joseon with the Buyeo kingdom. This raised a sense of ethnic homogeneity which persists as a major element in the politics and foreign relations of both Koreas. A survey in 2006 showed that 68.2% of respondents considered "blood" the most important criterion of defining the Korean nation, and 74.9% agreed that "Koreans are all brothers and sisters regardless of residence and ideology." Noted Korea scholar Brian Reynolds Myers argues in his 2010 book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters that the North Korean ideology of a purest race arose from 20th century Japanese fascism. Japanese collaborators are said to have introduced the notion of racial unity in an effort to assert that Japanese and Koreans came from the same racial stock. After Japan relinquished control of Korea, Myers argues, the theory was subsequently adjusted to promote the idea of a pure Korean race. A poll by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in 2015 found that only 5.4% of South Koreans in their twenties said they saw North Koreans as people sharing the same bloodline with South Koreans The poll also found that only 11 percent of South Koreans associated North Korea with Koreans, with most people associating them with words like military, war or nuclear weapons. It also found that most South Koreans expressed deeper feelings of "closeness" with Americans and Chinese than with North Koreans. Nationalist historiography Shin Chaeho was the first historian to focus on the Korean minjok (민족, 民族, "race" or ethnicity) or Kyŏre(겨레), and narrated Korean history in terms of its minjok history. There is no direct English language equivalent for the word minjok, though commentators have offered "race" and "ethnicity" as being the closest analogues. For Shin, minjok and history were mutually defining and as he says in the preface of the Doksa Sillon, "if one dismisses the minjok, there is no history." Shin emphasized the ancientness of the Korean minjok history, elevated the status of the semi-legendary figure, Dangun, as the primordial ancestor of the Korean people and located the host minjok, Puyo. Shin launched a vision of the Korean nation as a historically defined minjok or ethnicity entity. In an attempt to counter China's controversial Northeast Project and Goguryeo controversies that ensued, the South Korean government in 2007 incorporated the founding of Gojoseon of the year 2333 BCE into its textbooks. Notes References Bibliography