Victims Twice Over: Return Narratives of Ethnic Korean Atomic Bomb Survivors

Abstract

After World War II, more than two million people returned to their homeland, Korea, from Japan, Manchukuo, and the battlefields in the Asian Pacific area. Among them, it was reported that over ten thousand migrants were repatriated from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the liberated Korean Peninsula. While preceding studies of Korean atomic bomb survivors have focused on their experience of victimization, their historical migration experiences were rarely given attention by social scientists. As the new national governance was reordered following the collapse of Imperial Japan, the returnees were represented as natural members to be incorporated into the new nation. From a sociocultural perspective on Korean atomic bomb survivors return migration experiences and based on family registries and life history interviews, this paper traces how their identities and sentiments toward the homeland were intertwined with their life experiences and sociocultural networks they had built in colonial Japan. In spite of national integration propaganda, the returnees from Japan were often discriminated against as pro-Japanese, and were sometimes excluded from sociocultural reintegration at the community level because of anti-Japanese nationalistic sentiment. This paper concludes that Koreas liberation in 1945 needs to be studied more critically and ethnographically, not as an integrated space of nationalistic purity to be taken for granted but as a differentiated, subtle place in which sociocultural identities conflict.