| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
For many years, victims of Japanese wartime enforced labour have published or contributed to collections of memoirs and testimonies. These testimonies and the subsequent historical analyses by researchers since the early 1960s have often been framed against contemporaneous issues. What started out as a way to help stir activism and a historical consciousness among resident Koreans in Japan has morphed into a struggle over textbooks and a fight against historical revisionism. This article identifies some of the historical and methodological issues present in constructing a historical discourse of enforced Korean labour that began in 1939. It reassesses the politicised meaning of the phrase ky?sei renk? (forced recruitment) and argues that both researchers, who acknowledge the wartime system of enforced labour, and revisionists, who deny it, have cogent arguments. These arguments, however, are often narrow in scope and fail to take into account testimonies that present a more complex picture of the period and system in question.
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