Inminban (; meaning "neighbourhood units" or "people's units") is a neighbourhood watch-like form of cooperative local organization in North Korea. Almost no North Korean person exists outside the inminban system; with the exception of active-duty military personnel and some other exempt groups of people, everyone is a member. An inminban is a group of households in a particular place of residence headed by a designated person called an inminbanjang. The tasks of the inminban system are surveillance of the population, organizing labor mobilizations, and neighborhood maintenance.
Inminban (; meaning "neighbourhood units" or "people's units") is a neighbourhood watch-like form of cooperative local organization in North Korea. Almost no North Korean person exists outside the inminban system; with the exception of active-duty military personnel and some other exempt groups of people, everyone is a member. An inminban is a group of households in a particular place of residence headed by a designated person called an inminbanjang. The tasks of the inminban system are surveillance of the population, organizing labor mobilizations, and neighborhood maintenance.
==History== The inminban network grew out of the aegukban, or "patriotic groups" system, which was introduced by the Japanese in colonial Korea in 1940. The duties of the aegukban included pro-Japanese education, neighborhood maintenance, managing food rationing, and coordinating labor mobilizations. After the end of Japanese rule, the aegukban were reconstituted as the inminban in North Korea. Surviving documents from the 1940s indicate that inminban groups were often created by merely changing the names of existing aegukban groups. The aegukban also survived in South Korea as "citizen's groups", but they gradually lost significance and disappeared by the early 1960s.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).