This study reexamines the meaning of “liberation” as experienced by Koreans in Japan after independence from the diasporic perspective and analyzes the historical and cultural significance of self-narratives in Korean–Japanese literature. For Koreans in Japan, liberation marked not only a rupture from colonial rule but also the onset of a condition of being “abandoned people” (kimin 棄民), deprived of a nation to which they could belong. Subjected to institutionalized discrimination and assimilationist pressures within Japanese society, as well as to the structural constraints imposed by the division of the Korean peninsula, Koreans in Japan endured a triple fracture of nationality, language, and identity, existing as an “externality that must be internalized.” Focusing on works by Korean–Japanese writers such as Kim Saryang, Kim Sokpom, Lee Hoesung, Kim Sijong, and Yu Miri, this article demonstrates that post-liberation Korean–Japanese literature has articulated collective memory and historical experience beyond individual lives through autobiographical narratives and the “I-novel” (shishōsetsu 私小説) form. In particular, it shows that the disjunction between mother tongue and national language, the spatial condition of being chaeil 在日 (“in Japan”), and the lack of agency surrounding repatriation and settlement emerged as central dynamics of literary expression. In Korean–Japanese literature, liberation is thus represented not as the fulfillment of a singular ethnic belonging, but as an ongoing process of confronting the trauma of division while seeking possibilities for listening and coexistence. This perspective offers important humanistic insights in the present moment, as the 80th anniversary of liberation invites renewed reflection on complex post-division subjectivities beyond frameworks that define ethnicity and language in singular or essentialist terms.

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.