How two Pentagon officials split Korea on a map in 1945

An arbitrary line drawn on a National Geographic map by two American officials with no knowledge of Korea divided the peninsula in August 1945 — a split that has defined the fate of millions for more than eight decades, according to a Korea Times opinion column published Friday.

The decision, made in a matter of hours by Pentagon officials Charles Bonesteel and Dean Rusk, continues to shape the lives of Korean Americans in Orange County and beyond — from mandatory military service obligations for male relatives in South Korea to the cultural weight of a homeland that has never been reunified.

Japan colonized Korea from 1910 to 1945, a 35-year occupation during which Koreans were forced to speak Japanese, worship the Emperor and abandon their names and culture. The legendary Korean artist Paik Nam June, who lived through that era, captured the experience in one sentence: "When you count in a foreign language, you have to concentrate so hard, you almost forget who you are," according to the Korea Times.

That occupation ended abruptly when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing more than 200,000 people. Japan surrendered Aug. 15. As Soviet troops advanced southward, American officials scrambled to establish a dividing line.

Bonesteel and Rusk — neither of whom had expertise in Korea or knowledge of the language — were handed the task on a Friday night in August 1945. They opened a National Geographic map and selected the 38th parallel, partly to keep Seoul within the American zone. Rusk later admitted the division "made no sense," the Korea Times reported.

Korea had long been wedged between China, Japan and Russia — a precarious position its people came to describe in a lasting phrase. The peninsula sometimes calls itself the "Shrimp Among Whales," according to the Korea Times. The postwar settlement treated Korea differently from other occupied lands: Germany was de-Nazified, Japan retained its Emperor under an American military guarantee, and both Vietnam and Germany have since reunified. Korea has not.

The division reshaped how Koreans spoke about geography far beyond the peninsula. The column's author recalled that a grandmother once told her friends, "I was going to South Croatia" — instinctively applying a North-South qualifier to a country that had never been divided, a linguistic habit shaped entirely by life in a partitioned nation, the Korea Times noted.

Two figures who worked toward a unified Korea, Kim Gu and Lyuh Woon-hyung, were assassinated in the years immediately following the split. South Korean men today serve nearly two years of mandatory military service as a direct consequence of the unresolved division. Of the 38th parallel, the column's author wrote that "that line is perhaps the most dangerous line in the world," the Korea Times reported.

Unlike Germany and Vietnam, which eventually reunified, the Korean peninsula remains severed by a boundary drawn on a paper map more than 80 years ago. For the more than 100,000 Korean Americans living in Orange County, that line is not a chapter of history — it is a living condition.