기억의 남단, 전장의 얼굴 없는 존재들: 아시아･태평양전쟁 남방전장서사 속 현지인-여성-동물의 자리

Abstract

The southern battlefields of the Asia-Pacific War, pivotal for colonial warfare execution and resource acquisition, remain insufficiently commemorated in the public and social memory amid the postwar geopolitical order of victimization- perpetration dynamics in East Asia, despite their overwhelming scale of casualties. This paper sheds a light on the specific contextual intricacies surrounding the strategic neglect or remembrance of these southern battlefields by analyzing student soldiers’ handwritten accounts and novels, with a focus on the representation of locals, women, and animals. Student soldiers, the colonial elite, historicized their war experience as an escape/anti-Japanese movement through collective testimonies such as “Cheongchunmanjang” (청춘만장) and “1･20 Student Soldier Saga” (1･20학병사기), while isolating and localizing the narrative of the southern battlefields that deviated from it. Park Soon-dong’s memoir, “An Era of Despair” (모멸의 시대), recounting his escape from the Burma battlefield and OSS training, uniquely succeeds in reimagining narratives of the southern battlefields as national narratives by transcending the southern battlefields, which lead to reinstating male-citizen identity. Similarly, Lee Byung-koo also seeks to shape southern battlefield narratives into national ones through his novels, whether by glorifying the killing of locals (“The Heart of passage bird” (후조의 마음)) or justifying killings as essential for a return to national authentic spirit (“Before the revelation of the baby” (해태이전)). In contrast, Lee Ga-hyung’s “River of Fury” (분노의 강) dropped out from elite circles, actively incorporates locals, women, and animals into the narrative. The protagonist Lee Myeong-eon, a colonial and national pariah, mourns their individual names, fostering a shared mourning among peripheral figures on the battlefield. However, wild animals and nameless locals, reminding of Lee Myeong-eon’s perpetration, are pre-excluded from the mourning. Before “River of Fury,” Lee Ga-hyung had already introduced Lee Myeong-eon in his postwar reminiscences novels, “On the Return Trip” (귀항로에서) and “A Violent Death” (비명), where Lee Myeong-eon grapples with identity ruptures through encounters with the ‘faceless,’ who reminds him of his perpetration at the southern battlefield. This proximity, shaped by perpetration and discord, challenges linguistic identities and may offer an avenue to embed the face of the southern battlefields into social memory.