Homeless children, generally orphans. The term originated during the Arduous march period, but has since expanded in definition to generally encompass wandering homeless individuals, including adults and the elderly.
The “minjok” (민족, 民族) is a key concept for all Korea watchers, but can be difficult to slot neatly into Western frameworks of statehood and nationality. The concept of “minjok” arose contemporaneous to Woodrow Wilson’s “self-determination,” the idea that a people sharing an established territory, common language, history, culture, and race have a right to sovereignty and statehood. This last point is perhaps the most controversial since it fails to account for ethnically heterogeneous melting-pot nations, including the United States itself. The early notion of Korean nationhood that arose during the Korean Independence movement focused on these shared characteristics of Korean-ness, especially race (perhaps in direct response to the race-based rhetoric of the Japanese colonizers). The Korean minjok is an ideal of the Korean people, an ethnically homogeneous group that despite a long history of influence under the Chinese and Japanese remained ethnically pure with a distinct language an...
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