Korea

Korea is a civilization, a formerly unified nation, and a geographic area currently composed of two sovereign states located on the Korean Peninsula in East Asia. It borders China to the northwest, and Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the east by the Korea Strait. Korea was divided in 1948, with the southern portion of the peninsula controlled by the capitalistic democracy South Korea, formally the Republic of Korea. In 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed on the surrender and disarming of Japanese troops in Korea; the Soviet Union accepting the surrender of Japanese weaponry north of the 38th parallel and the United States taking the surrender south of it. This minor decision by allied armies soon became the basis for the division of Korea by the two superpowers, exacerbated by their inability to agree on the terms of Korean independence. The two Cold War rivals then established governments sympathetic to their own ideologies, leading to Korea's current division into two political entities: North Korea and South Korea.