Generational Struggle: Postwar Korean Views of Anti-colonial Violence in Minshu Chōsen and Hinawajū no uta

Considering a variety of historical incidents, this study examines how liberated Koreans living in postwar Japan wrote about resistance movements of the colonial period. I argue that as part of the mission to develop a new founding mythos for the modern Korean nation (envisioned as a single unified state) several of these authors focused on establishing the necessity for violent anti-Japanese resistance, valorizing the historical incidents of it, and tying these acts to the development of Marxist political consciousness. By juxtaposing the agitprop editorials of a Korean centered postwar magazine, ‘Democratic Korea’ (Minshu Chōsen, 1946-1950), with Ho Nam-gi’s 1951 epic poem The Song of the Musket (Hinawajū no uta), I connect the efforts of political activists with the budding movement of Korean cultural workers using the Japanese language as a medium. In both cases, Koreans voiced their anti-colonial critique directly to the former colonizer and situated Korean resistance movements within a broader and ennobled historical context.