Organizer and Chair: Chunghee Sarah Soh, San Francisco State University

Discussant: Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago

The year 2005 was named as the "Year of the South Korea-Japan Friendship" to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the normalization of the bilateral relationship. However, despite the passage of sixty years after liberation, conflicting public memories of the colonial past continue to generate impassioned political debates in the legislature and in the civil society alike in South Korea, rendering such terms as pro-Japanese "collaborators," "comfort women," and "Volunteer Corps" into important present-day issues. In particular, the task of "settling the history" has become a major political agenda of the Roh Moo-hyun administration, which helped establish multiple legislative committees to examine the "dark" past of wrongdoings perpetrated during colonial rule (1910-1945) and crimes committed since the establishment of the Republic of Korea in 1948.

This panel proposes to critically re-examine four major topics of Korea’s nationalist discourse on colonial history and historiography from social scientific perspectives: Japan’s "economic exploitation" of colonial Korea (from an economic historical perspective); wartime "forced labor" (from a historical perspective); "comfort women" and Women’s Labor Volunteer Corps (from an anthropological perspective); and Korean "collaboration" with imperial Japan (from a sociological perspective). To maintain a common thread, each panelist intends to first unpack the construction of the collective memory and popular discourse on each topic in South Korea by investigating its portrayal in the history textbooks. Then, the research findings and main arguments will be discussed from a critical comparative perspective with a view to contributing to the search for the historical truth and reconciliation.

Younghoon Rhee, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea

Most South Koreans today believe that imperial Japan as their colonial master (from 1910 to 1945) perpetrated brutal economic exploitation unprecented in human history.  They think, for example, imperial Japan appropriated 40% of the farmland and snatched 50% of rice production to be delivered to Japan. These "facts" established in South Korean public memory have been taught by the secondary school Kuksa (National History) textbooks.  The strong antipathy against Japan fostered in this manner has functioned as a causal factor to occasionally generate serious diplomatic frictions between Korea and Japan under certain circumstances.  By analyzing the South Korean Middle and High School Kuksa textbooks, this paper aims to demonstrate that serious distortions in Korean collective memory of the colonial era have been constructed after liberation, especially from around the 1965 normalization of bilateral relations between South Korea and Japan.  The ethnic nationalist sentiments against Japan shared by the majority Koreans today, I argue, have been formed as a part of the national ideology by the newly created nation-state with a purpose to transform "the Choson people of colonial era" into the "nationals of the Republic of Korea."

Soon Won Park, Howard University

In the globalization of the history redress in the 1990s,  the nationalist historiography of the colonial period, typically inscribed in government-written Kuksa history textbooks as one-dimensional perspective on the past has been challenged and reexamined.    More self-reflective debates on the problems of Korean national historiography, its own double standard, the problem of one single textbook on the past, and the ambivalence of their victim/aggressor identity have been examined in both  academic historiography and  public discourse and thinking.   This paper seeks to examine and analyze the separation of academic historiography and the public memory in this post-Cold War decade focusing on the case of the Korean forced labor victims of the World War Two.

More recently, the forced labor issue has become South Korea’s domestic history redress issue revealing many new truths about the facts, compensation, and healing process.  By examining the changes in major issues surrounding the forced labor case in the 90s, from the nationalistic Kuksa description to the multiple activists’ public discourses,  the paper will address the role of the history redress movement on the  academic nationalist historiography in Korea and on a growing tendency to approach the historical injustices, both internal and external in the twentieth century,  from a  more multiple, non-monolithic, human rights-oriented perspectives.  It will also address a lingering critical gap in Japan-Korean  historical understanding of the forced labor mobilization in the colonial period.  

Chunghee Sarah Soh, San Francisco State University

Ever since the early 1990s when South Korean women activists began to mount their battle against the Japanese government to uncover the truth about the forced recruitment of Korean women for imperial Japan’s war efforts, the "comfort women" (now represented as "sex slaves" of the Japanese military) and the Chongsindae (Korean pronunciation of the Japanese wartime legalese Teishintai, or Volunteer Corps) have come to epitomize Japan’s systematic exploitation of the Korean people during colonial rule (1910-1945).  Consequently, in South Korean public discourse both comfort women and chongsindae are portrayed uniformly as helpless victims forcibly recruited for the wartime mobilization. In their hegemonic nationalistic discourse, moreover, many Koreans misuse the term chongsindae to refer to comfort women, obliterating the institutionally-based formal differences of manual labor exploitation (of chongsindae for the war-related industries) versus sexual servitude (of comfort women for the military).

Drawing on the data collected for a larger project, this paper aims to unpack the Korean homogenization of "comfort women as chongsindae" (1) by interweaving the institutional history of the Chongsindae as part of imperial Japan’s wartime labor mobilization policy with personal memories of individual women’s experiences; (2) by examining the descriptions of the Chongsindae and comfort women in the school history textbooks; and (3) by probing into the political psychology of such homogenization. 

Do-Hyun Han, Academy of Korean Studies, Republic of Korea

As part of the movement of history redress, in May 2005 the Korean National Assembly introduced the new laws: Special Act for the Fact Finding and Investigation on the Pro-Japanese, anti-National Behavior and Special Act for the Return of the Wealth Earned by Pro-Japanese Activities. In the process of legislation of the two acts, there were many debates over the role of the governments and political parties in dealing with the issue of collaboration. Some groups tried to take the issue out of the National Assembly in fear that the party interest would abuse the question of collaboration. The debates showed that the problem of collaboration might not be so simple. Before tackling the question of Pro- and Anti-Japanese activities in real politics, many people assumed that the demarcation of Pro- and Anti-Japanese activities was clear. This assumption was embedded in history education in Korea. In this paper, by criticizing the dichotomy the author will focus on the complex aspects of the issue of collaboration. To unpack the simplistic discourses of Pro-Japanese collaboration in Korea, this paper will discuss the political abuse of the issue in real politics. Finally the author will show the relation between history education or historiography and political abuse of the issue of Pro-Japanese activities. For this purpose, the author will analyze Korean History Textbooks of Middle Schools and High Schools currently used in Korea.