For Japan and Korea, 2005 held anniversaries perhaps more fraught than commemorations Japan shared with many other nations last year. Throughout the world, it was the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II, but Japan was not at war with Korea in 1945. Rather, Japan's August 1945 surrender to the Allies ended the nation's harsh colonization of Korea, an occupation that began in 1905 when Japan won protectorate rights over Korea as a war prize for defeating Russia. Recognizing 2005 in centennial tones was not in the cards, however, because the history and legacy of Japan's colonization remain so violently disputed. Rather, Tokyo and Seoul recognized last year as a “Year of Friendship” to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and South Korea. As James Card neatly summarizes, the year devolved daily into bitter acrimony as Koreans responded angrily to Japan's claims to the Takeshima (Dokdo) Islets that it had initially seized in 1905, and South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun called for a review of Korean collaborators under Japanese colonial rule, a call that has immediate repercussions in contemporary politics. Compounding these problems are deep differences between Japan and South Korea on the normalization of Japan and North Korea. Normalization is complicated by the fact that North and South Korea did not exist during the colonial era — only Korea did. This last conundrum reminds us that 2005 was the sixtieth anniversary of Dean Rusk's famous line at the 38th parallel that has divided the Korean peninsula ever since.