What all of this amounts to is a Korean Peninsula in East Asia that is valued strategically, but not intrinsically. That is, the designs of great powers to control Korea in the late nineteenth century were not about craving something intrinsically special about Korea, its land, its economy, its culture, or its people. The motivations were cruder than that and stemmed from an underlying desire not to allow any other competing power to control it.

The Russo-Japanese war was the first victory of an Asian power over an occidental power (it was also one of the first wars where the number of battle deaths outnumbered that of deaths by disease) and constituted a tremendous source of pride for Japan.

Between 1932 and 1945, tens of thousands of Korean, Chinese, Southeast Asian, and European women were forced to serve Japanese soldiers in “comfort stations,” mainly in Japanese-occupied China. Some of these girls were barely teenagers and were either forcibly abducted or told lies that they were being recruited to train as nurses. They were then sent to brothels and forced to have sex with soldiers in filthy, violent, and disease-ridden conditions. The Japanese government destroyed documents at the end of the war, so there is no official record (though scholars have unearthed some), and controversy continues to this day over denials by some Japanese that the practice ever existed, and over two agreements between Japan and Korea to compensate these victims, which are deemed insufficient by Koreans.

American unpreparedness for the occupation was profound. Hodge received no detailed instructions from Washington for nine months after arriving in September 1945.12 This absence of guidance led to a number of controversial policies. Hodge initially directed Japanese colonial authorities to help administer affairs, but this met with such Korean outrage that the order was promptly reversed. The US also kept the colonial police system in place to maintain order, retaining hated Japanese and Korean officers.

But the dismissive attitude of the US was partly due to this cacophony of voices. When Hodge asked to meet with two representatives of the political parties in Korea, 1,200 people showed up.

the growing Cold War competition with the Soviet Union on the peninsula posed a dilemma: if the US occupation forces could not guarantee that tolerating the moderates would not lead to communist takeover, then they would have to side with the far right.

In Blair House meetings, the president exclaimed, jumping up and down, “We can’t let the UN down! We can’t let the UN down!”

By highlighting the communist threat in Asia, the Korean War benefited Japan in ways that still enrage Koreans today. The US occupation of Japan turned from an operation to emasculate the Japanese state into a program to build it into a bulwark against communism in the region.

Under seongbun, every North Korean is classified into one of three main groups: core, wavering or basic, and hostile. There are subdivisions within each group, up to a total of around fifty categories. Each adult North Korean belongs to one of these categories, with around 30 percent of North Koreans belonging to the core, 40 percent to the wavering, and 30 percent to the hostile. What determines one’s classification? Above all, family background for up to three generations. From the beginning, the core included pro-independence fighters, revolutionaries, or factory workers and peasants. The wavering included ordinary North Koreans. And the hostile included landowners, religious leaders, or North Koreans who supported the South during the war.5 Also from the beginning, it became almost impossible to improve one’s classification, which is maintained by security and party officials and updated regularly. But it certainly was possible to be demoted.

The personality cult of Kim Il-sung reached new heights in 1972—literally. No one visiting Pyongyang can fail to see the 72-ft-high statue of Kim in the Mansu Hill Grand Monument. Most foreign tourists visiting the city are taken to see the statue. As no North Korean tour guide fails to mention, it was erected to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Kim’s birth. It symbolized the trajectory that the Kim regime was taking in the 1970s: image over substance, propaganda over performance. As the economy faltered, Kim doubled down on the symbols that showed his power over the country and its people.

In July 1994, Kim Il-sung passed away. This was a shock to North Koreans. News programs across the world carried footage of distressed North Koreans crying, wailing, screaming, and mourning. In future years, North Korean defectors would report that their feelings for the late Kim were real, unlike the mourning for his son in 2011.13 North Koreans had only known one leader throughout their lives. They were not aware that living conditions in South Korea and many other countries across the world were much better than their own. Therefore, they mourned for a leader who they thought had protected them from becoming poor and subservient to the US. In their minds, this was the fate that had befallen their “brothers and sisters” in the South.

Starting from 1992, serious cracks had started to show in the central government’s public distribution system. The government had launched the “Let’s Eat Two Meals per Day” campaign, since it had become unable to provide food to its own population for more than that.

But it was women who became the main traders in these markets. Often “free” from having to hold a government job, and with patriarchal family structures crumbling as the state and—as a result—men became unable to feed their families, women became central to the operation of the country’s markets. As North Korean escapees to whom the authors have spoken over the years attest, this was the first time in North Korean history that many women became the main breadwinners. Most men were forced to continue to go to factories or government jobs, even if they were paid a pittance at best, and also had to do years of military service. Women, on the other hand, could go to markets to buy and sell food, clothes, and other items. They could also move more or less freely across the country, which men—having to attend to their daily jobs—could not. Thus, in many families women were the ones putting food on the table. In this context, many became more willing to challenge the “traditional” view that a man’s place was at work and woman’s place was at home: a seismic change for North Koreans.

The defining moment of the Sunshine Policy was yet to arrive though. For the authors, watching this on TV overseas, it was the most moving of times. Imagine how it felt for the tens of millions of Koreans living in what many felt remained a split country. On July 13, 2000, Kim Dae-jung exited the Blue House and took a car to the airport, with his wife Lee Hee-ho sitting by his side. Thousands of South Koreans lined the streets of Seoul, all the way to Gimpo Airport. At the airport, Kim gave a speech, and took a plane together with his aides. Within an hour, the plane touched down in Pyongyang International Airport. Waiting on the tarmac was none other than Kim Jong-il. Kim Dae-jung exited the plane, walked down the steps, and went straight to the North Korean leader. The leaders of the two Koreas held hands and looked at each other.36 Fifty-two years had passed since Korea had been divided into two. This was the first time that the leaders of the two countries had ever met.

The population was told that each person had one week to exchange their won notes for newer ones. The goal seems to have been to ensure the government’s control over the activities of private markets, and the traders that had benefited the most from them. Thus the government set a cap of KRW 100,000 per individual, roughly US $40 at the unofficial exchange rate and enough for no more than a 110-pound sack of rice. The cap was lifted as a result of widespread panic. But the result of the reform was that private individuals who had accumulated previously unimaginable levels of wealth lost most of it within a week, unable to use their old notes anymore. A few months later, the architect of the reform was executed.

Kim Jong-nam had been Kim Jong-il’s heir apparent until 2001, when he was caught trying to get into Japan to visit Tokyo Disneyland using a fake passport.

Watching the two leaders at this pre-summit photo opportunity, he noticed Kim looking a bit like a deer in the headlights of the West’s press, but more comfortable than he had been in Singapore eight months earlier. By contrast, Trump looked tired and stressed, probably because he had spent the entire flight to Hanoi watching the testimony of his former lawyer Michael Cohen revealing all of his misdeeds. Indeed, the investigations into Trump may have played a bigger role in US–North Korea relations than many think. Kim seemed to believe that Trump needed a “win” to take attention away from his domestic travails; and he may have been persuaded to think this way by the South Korean leader, Moon. Kim thus thought that he could get Trump to lift economic sanctions against his country for minimal concessions on denuclearization.

Most of the younger Koreans in the audience were hearing these positive words about unification for the first time. After all, they were born after the Korean War and knew only one Korea—the South. For many, their defining moment was not the division of Korea in 1945 but South Korea’s financial crisis in 1997. So, the discussion of unification usually elicited negative feelings about the economic burden of absorbing the much poorer North.