Anti-Japanism as a strategy for reshaping national identity in post-liberation South Korean fictions (1945–1948)

This article argues that South Koreans' anti-Japanism in the post-liberation period can be regarded as an ideological construction, which was inevitably required to reshape their national identity, rather than as a reasonable and serious critical consideration of colonial Japan. Anti-Japanism functions as an identification framework in an era when Koreans needed to develop a new discourse which reflects the rapid politico-socio-cultural changes of that period. Under military control of the United States and the Soviet Union, Koreans made Japan the other in a number of ways in order to unite their nation state and national identity, relying specifically on racial difference and hierarchy. First, Korean intellectuals, who once cooperated with colonial Japan in the political sphere or in their ordinary lives, explicitly revealed their anti-Japanese sentiments in their writings right after liberation. Second, after liberation, anti-Japanism emerged from a process that Koreans would exploit, after demarcating the moral difference between themselves and the remaining Japanese migrants, to exclude the Japanese from their community. Finally, anti-Japanism in the post-liberation period can be detected in Koreans' tenacious attitude, as they tacitly restricted the articulation of filial or cultural hybridity with the Japanese people in order to reconfigure their national identity.