Solji Park
Konkuk University

Received June 24, 2025; Revised version received August 5, 2025; Accepted August 20, 2025

Abstract

This article critically examines the limitations of officially sanctioned histories and state-curated commemorative dates by foregrounding the lived experiences and memories of Koreans residing in Manchuria (chaeman Chosŏnin) surrounding Japan’s defeat in August 1945. Commemorative dates marking Imperial Japan’s defeat currently differ among the Korean peninsula, the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan. These divergences reflect each nation-state’s construction of selective “histories” through processes of selective memorialization, undertaken to establish political legitimacy while forming “liberated” nation-states amid the emergence of the Cold War order following the collapse of the Japanese Empire. For Koreans in Yanji and other regions of Manchuria, liberation is remembered not as an event occurring on August 15, but as unfolding several days later with the entry of the Soviet Army and the actual surrender of the Kwantung Army. Yet the empire’s defeat did not immediately bring peaceful liberation. In the ensuing turmoil of the Chinese Civil War, Koreans in Manchuria were exposed to renewed violence, shaped not only by ideological confrontation but also by accumulated interethnic tensions rooted in the colonial period. The enduring image of Koreans as “second-class citizens” or erguizi 二鬼子 (collaborators or lackeys) became a catalyst for ethnic conflict with Han Chinese communities and for acts of retributive violence after liberation, leaving deep and unresolved traumatic memories among Koreans in Manchuria. Accordingly, this article explores the contemporary meaning of “liberation” in relation to the healing of individual traumatic memories that have been excluded from official state narratives.

Key Words : Koreans in Manchuria (chaeman Chosŏnin), 1945, August 15, liberation, historical trauma