earticle

영어

This paper discusses the lives and experiences that Japanese immigrants to Manchuria underwent during the 20th century. From 1932 to 1945, some 270,000 Japanese immigrants were sent to Manchuria for the purpose of supporting the Japanese army stationed. Out of them, 80,000 died during six months after August 9th 1945, 170,000 repatriated to Japan from May 1946 to
1949, and about 10,000 remained in China even after 1958. Accordingly, their lives were complicated and multi-facet, as settlers in ‘Manchukuo’, as refugees during the war, as repatriates, and as Japanese people who were left-behind in China. Since their experiences have been suppressed in societies both in Japan and China in the post-war period, they have never alluded to these experiences to outside. Manchukuo being formally a ‘puppet regime’ for China and Japan, those Japanese people who were left behind in China had carefully interacted with Chinese, and repatriates in Japan, with Japanese. The main reason for this is that their lives and experiences in ‘Manchukuo’ have been denied as a part of ‘dark’ history of a ‘puppet regime’. So, their memory was struggling with dominant histories narrated in Japan and China. That is the ‘politics of memory’.