Why was the country called land of morning calm divided at the 38th parallel at the end of WWII?
it divided the country approximately in half
Title: Korean War
Passage: On the night of 10 August in Washington, American Colonels Dean Rusk and Charles H. Bonesteel III were tasked with dividing the Korean Peninsula into Soviet and U.S. occupation zones and proposed the 38th parallel. This was incorporated into America's General Order No. 1 which responded to the Japanese surrender on 15 August. Explaining the choice of the 38th parallel, Rusk observed, "even though it was further north than could be realistically reached by U.S. forces, in the event of Soviet disagreement...we felt it important to include the capital of Korea in the area of responsibility of American troops". He noted that he was "faced with the scarcity of US forces immediately available, and time and space factors, which would make it difficult to reach very far north, before Soviet troops could enter the area". As Rusk's comments indicate, the Americans doubted whether the Soviet government would agree to this. Stalin, however, maintained his wartime policy of co-operation, and on 16 August the Red Army halted at the 38th parallel for three weeks to await the arrival of U.S. forces in the south.
Title: Names of Korea
Passage: An early attempt to translate these characters into English gave rise to the expression ``The Land of the Morning Calm ''for Korea, which parallels the expression`` The Land of the Rising Sun'' for Japan. While the wording is fanciful, the essence of the translation is valid.
Title: Division of Korea
Passage: At the Tehran Conference and the Yalta Conference, the Soviet Union promised to join its allies in the Pacific War in two to three months after victory in Europe. On August 8, 1945, three months to the day after the end of hostilities in Europe, and two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Soviet troops advanced rapidly, and the US government became anxious that they would occupy the whole of Korea. On August 10, 1945 two young officers -- Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel -- were assigned to define an American occupation zone. Working on extremely short notice and completely unprepared, they used a National Geographic map to decide on the 38th parallel. They chose it because it divided the country approximately in half but would place the capital Seoul under American control. No experts on Korea were consulted. The two men were unaware that forty years before, Japan and pre-revolutionary Russia had discussed sharing Korea along the same parallel. Rusk later said that had he known, he ``almost surely ''would have chosen a different line. The division placed sixteen million Koreans in the American zone and nine million in the Soviet zone. To the surprise of the Americans, the Soviet Union immediately accepted the division. The agreement was incorporated into General Order No. 1 (approved on 17 August 1945) for the surrender of Japan.
Division of Korea Names of Korea