In several decades after the liberation of Korean peninsula (1945), South Korean agronomy was still influenced by Japanese agronomy, which was the only major enterprise for Japonica rice research. The change was brought by the international “Green Revolution” in rice in the 1960s. The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines became a new source of reliable information and a training center for agronomists and agricultural administrators. In 1966, Mun Hue Heu, a Korean research fellow in IRRI, succeeded in hybridization of Japonica and Indica rice. This new hybrid rice, highly productive and disease-resistant, was named as Tongil (reunification), and earnestly promoted by the government in the 1970s. Although Tongil was mobilized to justify Park Chung-Hee’s dictatorship in the mid-1970s for its superior productivity, it also made an epoch for South Korean agronomy. Heu’s achievement had long been believed to be impossible by Japanese scholars, but was made possible with the help of Henry Beachell, an American staff in IRRI. It could be interpreted that Korean agronomists could, from then on, go through a different way from the one Japanese had paved. Thus it is not surprising that Korean agronomists have taken Tongil as a sign of “independence” of South Korean agronomy. In addition, the development of Tongil might be the only internationally recognized scientific achievement in South Korea in the 1960s and the 1970s.