Why was the country where the last name Shin comes from divided at the 38th parallel at the end of WWII?
it divided the country approximately in half
Title: Education in Vietnam
Passage: In Vietnam, a school year is divided into two semesters: the first begins in late August and ends in December, while the second begins right after the first, which is about late January and lasts until the end of May.
Title: Shin (Korean surname)
Passage: Shin is a Korean family name. It is cognate to the Chinese family names Shēn and Xin. According to the 2000 census in South Korea, there were 911,556 people carrying the Shin surname.
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 Shin (Korean surname)