When I left Korea in July of 1934, there were already many indications that Japan was preparing for war on a large scale. “The Manchurian Incident” of September 1931 was the beginning of Japan's inroads into China, which were expanded and intensified until they resulted in the full scale war with China in 1937. The rest is very recent history—Pearl Harbor—Japan's rapid spread throughout the Pacific Islands, and Southeast Asia—Three and a half years of war, the atomic bombs—and surrender aboard the battleship Missouri.

Korea is well recognized as a distinct political unit. The country has a definite area on the surface of the earth and is delimited from the surrounding areas by definite boundaries. These boundaries of water and land have certain characteristics and functions which merit description. Moreover, within Korea geographic divisions are recognized. The provinces have well defined physical boundaries which have been important in compartmentalizing Korea. With the collapse of Japan, Korea was divided between American and Russian military zones by a purely artificial line, the thirty-eighth parallel, North. This imposition of a new boundary within Korea may affect the future activities of the people. The description of its physical character reveals its inadequacies as a boundary.

Decades of propaganda have made students in the Western world so familiar with the Japanese interpretation of the population problem of Japan that even international commissions considered population pressure as an extenuating factor in the successive acts of military aggression by which Japan acquired hegemony over Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria. Few realized that the population pressure within Japan was minimal in comparison with that which already existed in the conquered areas; that, furthermore, Japanese imperial policy tended toward an increasing imbalance between population increase and employment opportunities. The deepening poverty of the Korean masses was often reported, only to be challenged by the citation of production statistics, but the provincialism of the West was such that discussion remained in the realm of charge and countercharge. Few students dared the linguistic hurdles barring factual analysis of the impact of Japanese political, economic, and educational domination on the traditional Korean patterns of fertility, mortality and migration. Whatever the explanation for this myopia of the social scientists of the interwar decades, its conquences were serious. No backlog of technically competent and conceptually mature research on the demography of Korea exists to guide either the analysis of the present or the assessment of the future.

In the Korean records, the relations between Korea and Japan are termed kyorin, meaning neighborly relations with a neighboring country. That term contrasts sharply with the term used for the relations between China and Korea usually called sadae, serving the great. Korea always demonstrated an attitude of great deference to the Chinese Empire, her communications being often almost servile in tone; whereas, in regard to the Japanese, the position was almost reversed. The Japanese were treated peremptorily; envoys were frequently scorned and their requests considered as coming from a suppliant.

As compared with some other countries of the world, Korea is a well mapped land. This brief review lists some of the major maps and sets of maps of the peninsula which are useful to those interested in Korea.

Old Korean maps. Korean scholars for their use in studies of Chinese and Korean literature and for their administrative work if they were chosen for government posts prepared small hand atlases. Some of these atlases have been collected by Western scholars and copies are found in the Library of Congress, American Geographical Society Library, New York Public Library and a number of other map collections. These atlases are usually made up of maps of the world, China, Korea, the eight provinces of Korea, Japan and the Loo Choo Islands.They are hand drawn and copied from some prototype. On their margins or on the reverse side of each map are brief gazetteers or comments. A description of the China-centered world map was given by Homer B. Hulburt, “An ancient map of the world,” Bulletin of the American geographical society, 36 (1904), 600–05. The atlas was described and reproduced in part by H. Cordier in Description d'un atlas Sino-Coréen. Manuscript du British Museum (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1896). A Japanese, Otani, prepared a 37 page catalogue of old Korean maps which was published by the Keijo Imperial University, Seoul, in 1933, but a copy of this has not been found in American libraries.

Dr. Hermann Lautensach has made an outstanding contribution to the study of Korea. Since his publications are mainly in German geographical periodicals, they may have escaped the attention of many Korean and American scholars.

Dr. Lautensach is one of the best trained German geographers. His reputation was established by his classic work on Portugal. He became closely associated with German geopoliticians and wrote articles for the Zeitschrift für geopolitik. He was one of the authors with Haushofer, Obst and Maull of the Bausteine zar geopolitik (Berlin: Kurt Vonwinckel Vertag., 1928).