YoungSeon.Ahn

I am an ordinary person.

30 minute read

The Persistence of Japanese Everyday Honorifics in Rural Korea After Liberation: A Microhistorical Study of the ‘Arai-san’ Case in Beondong, Eomdari, Hampyeong, South Jeolla

Introduction: Problem Statement and Significance of the Study

Although Japanese colonial rule ended with the Liberation of 1945, did the linguistic customs forced upon Koreans during the colonial period really disappear at once? It is generally understood that the use of Japanese-style names (the Sōshi-kaimei, or name-change policy) imposed on Koreans in the late colonial period was, for the most part, quickly liquidated after Liberation. However, oral testimony that Japanese-style Sōshi-kaimei names persisted as everyday appellations even after Liberation calls this conventional wisdom into question. This study focuses on oral testimony from the village of Beondong, Eomdari, Eomda-myeon, Hampyeong County, South Jeolla Province, according to which a farmer of the surname “Park” was, from after Liberation until the 1960s, referred to by his Japanese-style name combined with the honorific “Arai-san (アライさん).” Drawing on this oral case, the study aims to critically illuminate the indifference of the historical profession toward colonial residues in the everyday life of ordinary people after Liberation and toward the changes that came after Liberation. In doing so, it raises the need to reconstruct the sociocultural transformations of the immediate post-Liberation period from the perspective of a “history from below” rather than a “history from above.”

Current research on Sōshi-kaimei has mainly dealt with the background and impact of the policy, as well as cases of resistance and collaboration in the process of name changes; yet its focus has leaned toward macro-level narratives centered on the local notable (yuji) class or on intellectuals. For example, the contemporary intellectual Yi Kwang-su (pen name Chunwon) actively complied with the Sōshi-kaimei, even publicly declaring that “since the goal of Koreans lies in the unity of Japan and Korea (naisen ittai), it is most natural to discard Chinese-style names and adopt clan names indistinguishable from those of the Japanese.” On the other hand, cases such as the collective resistance in which all 115 residents of Singaeul village in Boeun, North Chungcheong, refused Sōshi-kaimei, or anecdotes of independence activists who refused to adopt Japanese clan names to the very end, have received comparatively more attention. However, almost no research exists on how ordinary rural residents dealt with their colonial-era changed names in everyday life after Liberation—particularly cases such as the one in this paper, in which a specific person’s Japanese-style name remained current in the life-world for a long time. This is a research gap caused by the scarcity of records on post-Liberation popular life and by the absence of scholarly interest. To fill this gap, this paper first examines the legal structure of the Sōshi-kaimei system and the tendencies of existing research, then conducts an in-depth analysis of the Beondong, Eomdari case and considers the background and meaning of its persistence. Through this, it seeks to reassess the continuity and rupture of grassroots society after Liberation and to propose the necessity of a life-historical approach going forward.

Sōshi-kaimei (創氏改名) was a system that, in accordance with the revision of the Joseon Civil Ordinance (Ordinance No. 19) promulgated by the Government-General of Korea in November 1939, compelled Koreans to create Japanese-style clan names (氏, ssi) starting on February 11, 1940. Until then, the Korean “surname (姓, seong)” had been a marker of the great lineage groups sharing the same ancestral seat (bongwan); but Japan sought to dismantle this and introduce the household-head-centered “clan name (ssi)” of the Japanese family system. The colonial authorities sought, through the creation of clan names, to break down the kinship- and ancestral-seat-centered traditions of Koreans and to reorganize them into a unitary structure of loyalty with the Emperor at its apex. This was, ultimately, a measure of social integration aimed at mobilizing Koreans for the war effort.

Formally, the Sōshi-kaimei was propagated as “the creation of clan names by voluntary application,” but in reality it was a semi-coercive policy. At the end of 1939, the Government-General had anticipated roughly 20 percent of households would apply for clan-name creation, yet within six months about 80 percent of households had completed it. This dramatic rise was the result of mobilizing every kind of coercion—administrative pressure and inducement, as well as legal punishment of those opposing clan-name creation (application of the Peace Preservation Law). Whereas the creation of a clan name (sōshi) was a legal obligation, the changing of one’s given name (kaimei)—altering it to a Japanese-style personal name—was optional, so the actual rate of given-name change came to only about 10 percent. In other words, the majority of Koreans changed only their surname to a Japanese style, choosing a compromise that left as many traces of the original name as possible. Indeed, there is research showing that at the time of the Sōshi-kaimei many people, like Park Chung-hee, employed a strategy of “concealed resistance” by taking some of the Chinese characters from their original names and disguising them as Japanese-style. In this way, the Sōshi-kaimei policy was enforced through a combination of legal coercion and violent mobilization, and right up until the August 15, 1945 Liberation it brought about an unprecedented situation of mobilization in which roughly four-fifths of all Koreans came to bear Japanese-style names.

After Liberation, the U.S. Military Government and the Korean government immediately pursued the restoration of Koreans’ original names. In the days right after Liberation, scenes unfolded in the streets of taking down nameplates inscribed with Japanese-style names and replacing them with original names, and at schools the work of correcting Japanese-style names in student rosters was carried out. Legally, in October 1946 the U.S. Military Government promulgated the “Ordinance for the Restoration of Korean Names” (Military Government Ordinance No. 122), which stipulated that names created as Japanese-style under Japanese rule would be collectively restored to their original names even without a report by the individual. Under this measure, the Japanese-style clan names registered in the family register were nullified, and the original names were officially restored by drawing a red line over the existing clan-name entries. As an exception, however, those who wished to continue using a Japanese-style given name were permitted to retain the changed given name if they reported it within 60 days—though even then the retention of the Japanese-style “clan name (ssi)” was not allowed. In addition, those born after 1940 who had no Korean-style original name were required to change their names through a report within six months; but quite a few cases remained in which people, unaware of the procedure, simply continued to use Japanese-style names. In the end, by the close of 1947 nearly all citizens in South Korea had reclaimed their Korean names, yet traces of Japanese-style names still remained in some administrative records and family registers. For example, in the land registration of a Korean who had owned real estate under a clan name just before Liberation, a Japanese-style name remained, and there were even cases in which, on this basis, the land was later mistaken for being owned by a Japanese person and was confiscated by the state. In 1971 the Supreme Court of the Republic of Korea handed down a ruling that “in light of the circumstances before and after Liberation, the mere fact that a Japanese-style clan name is recorded in a registration must not be taken as grounds to presume the registrant to be Japanese.” This shows that for a considerable period after Liberation, residues of Japanese-style names remained in the legal and social spheres.

The Bias and Gaps in Existing Sōshi-kaimei Research: The Problem of Narratives Centered on Notables and Intellectuals

Prior research and historical narratives concerning the Sōshi-kaimei have concentrated mainly on the policy-making process, the context of the national movement, and the conduct of prominent figures who responded to the Sōshi-kaimei. This tendency appears largely along two lines. First, there are narratives centered on the cases of pro-Japanese elites or local notables. The Sōshi-kaimei of bureaucrats and intellectuals who collaborated with colonial power has frequently been treated at the level of illuminating an individual’s pro-Japanese conduct. Yi Kwang-su, mentioned earlier, is a typical example: in February 1940 he contributed an article titled “The Creation of a Clan Name and I” to a daily newspaper, justifying the Sōshi-kaimei and urging Koreans to step forward actively. His Japanese-style name “Kayama Mitsurō” (香山光郞, Hyangsan Gwangrang) was praised to the point of being called, by himself, “a vow to become a true son of the Emperor,” and he went so far as to advertise that even his family “uses only the national language (Japanese) at home.” In this way, the Sōshi-kaimei discourse of the pro-Japanese intellectual class is frequently cited as a case of complying with Japan’s assimilation policy. Second, there are narratives concerning the refusal of Sōshi-kaimei by national leaders or local communities. For example, there is the anecdote of the 115 residents of Singaeul village in Sandae-ri, Boeun, North Chungcheong, who collectively refused to create clan names in 1940, or cases of certain independence activists and religious figures who stubbornly refused the Sōshi-kaimei and the suppression that resulted. These stories are frequently brought back into the spotlight in the context of highlighting the injustice of the Sōshi-kaimei policy and the resistance of the people, and have sometimes led to commemorative monuments and documentation projects.

There are several problems with this notable- and intellectual-centered research tendency. First, it fails to represent the experience of the great majority of ordinary people. The Sōshi-kaimei was a universal event experienced by more than 80 percent of the population, yet its historical narration is concentrated on extreme collaborators or resisters. The great majority of ordinary people are often simplified into having followed the forced policy reluctantly and having reclaimed their original names after Liberation as if nothing had happened, going on with their lives. But the subtle confusions of identity, the pragmatic adaptations, or the desensitized everyday practices that appeared in this process have not been deeply illuminated. Second, there is a lack of interest in the life-historical continuity and rupture after Liberation. Research on the Sōshi-kaimei itself strongly tends to be confined to the late colonial period, and how people’s use of names changed and settled after 1945 has not received scholarly attention. This is of a piece with the flow in which the social history of the immediate post-Liberation period has been narrated mainly in terms of political and institutional history, while changes in the life-world of the people have been treated as secondary. As a result, the concrete forms in which colonial residues remained in everyday life after Liberation—such as Japanese-style appellations persisting in a certain region, or Japanese-style names circulating orally in addition to administrative records—were left in the blind spot of research.

In short, existing research, by concentrating on the cases of leading figures and on national-discourse evaluations, has missed the everyday traces left by the Sōshi-kaimei and the continuity of ordinary people’s lives after Liberation. To fill this gap, oral testimony and a microhistorical approach—which do not appear well in records and documents—are essential. In the next chapter, as a concrete case demonstrating the importance of such an approach, we examine the experience in the Eomdari area of Hampyeong, where a Japanese-style clan name was used as an everyday appellation for decades.

Case Analysis: The Persistent Use of a Clan-Name Appellation in Beondong, Eomdari, Hampyeong

Beondong, Eomdari, is the seat of the township office of Eomda-myeon in Hampyeong County, South Jeolla, and is a rural village that has served as a comparatively bustling administrative center since the colonial period. According to oral testimony from Beondong village, a distinctive case has been handed down in this rural community in which, for decades after Liberation, a Japanese-style name obtained through the colonial-era Sōshi-kaimei became established as a person’s appellation. The villagers continued, even after Liberation, to call a self-cultivating farmer who had undergone the Sōshi-kaimei in the 1940s by his Japanese-style clan name; that is, he came to be known as “Arai-san.” “Arai” (アライ) was the Japanese-style clan name (氏名) that this person had chosen at the time of his Sōshi-kaimei, and “-san” (～さん) is a Japanese honorific suffix in a modified form. Surprisingly, this use of the appellation did not remain a temporary phenomenon limited to the period right after Liberation, but persisted even into the 1960s.

Why was it precisely this person to whom a Japanese-style-name nickname became attached, and why was it maintained for so long? Synthesizing the testimony of the oral informants and the context of the local society, the following circumstances can be discerned. First, there is the social status and role of the person so named. The figure called Arai-san was, in the latter half of the colonial period, a self-cultivating farmer with a comparatively solid economic base in the village and an elder who enjoyed the trust of the local community. He had been comparatively compliant with the Sōshi-kaimei in the late colonial period and belonged to a generation accustomed to a Japanese-speaking life. Even after Liberation, he maintained influence in matters such as the running of the village, the management of land, and the lending of work implements; it is highly likely that residents of his generation, who shared the colonial experience, continued to call him by his Japanese-style name—more so than the younger people or the tenant farmers. This can be seen as one facet of the inertial persistence of the village’s hierarchical order and naming customs even amid the chaotic period right after Liberation. The Japanese honorific “-san (さん)” remained for some time in everyday language, and it took time to replace it with newly established Korean appellations such as “～ssi.” In the case of Beondong village, “Arai-san” can be seen as an extreme instance of this, having hardened into the personal sobriquet of a specific individual.

This is a phenomenon that was not observed among the poor farmers or tenant farmers of the same village. For instance, even if there were poor farmers who had undergone the Sōshi-kaimei, there were no cases of their being called by Japanese-style names in the village after Liberation. Only Mr. Park, who had been economically influential, was exceptionally called by a Japanese-style appellation, which suggests that the persistence of colonial linguistic habits was linked to socioeconomic status. In other words, it can be seen that the higher a person’s social rank, the greater the possibility that the naming practices formed during the colonial period would persist.

Yet not everyone who was simply wealthy maintained such an appellation. It is judged that several conditions for the persistence of linguistic habits underlay the occurrence of the specific case of “Arai-san.” First, there is the regional environment. Beondong, Eomdari, was where the township office, the market, and the like were located, where Japanese officials and policemen were stationed, and the area around the township office was the space into which colonial power had penetrated most deeply. And “Arai-san’s” house was right beside the wall of the township office. In such an environment, a local notable like “Arai-san” was very likely to have naturally acquired Japanese appellations through interaction with the Japanese. That is, the broader a place’s contact surface with the colonial-ruling institutions, the easier it was for Japanese usage to become a part of everyday life, and the more likely it was that traces of it would remain even after Liberation.

Second, the closedness of the local community and the restriction of exchange with the outside are also pointed to as background to this phenomenon. Although Beondong, Eomdari, functioned as a local center, it was not the case that nationalist discourse or “liquidation of Japanese residues” campaigns, as in the big cities, immediately permeated into every corner of the village. In particular, from the 1950s on, during the Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-hee governments, the liquidation of pro-Japanese residues, rather than being highlighted as an official agenda, was instead buried under Cold War logic, and the liquidation of residues at the level of everyday language was pushed down the list of policy priorities. Therefore, within local village communities there was room for the maintenance of their own memories and practices, distinct from the “official memory” of the liberated nation. The prolongation of the appellation “Arai-san” can be understood precisely within this context—the cultural inertia internal to the local society and the convenient communication agreed upon among its members.

Third, there is cultural inertia. People do not easily change appellations they have used for a long time. In particular, a nickname or appellation that has been current within a group for a long period hardens into social memory. In Beondong, Eomdari, “Arai-san” was likely not a mere name but had become something like an idiomatic phrase designating that person. The oral informants testify that “if you said Arai-san, everyone immediately knew who it was.” There is even an anecdote revealing an intergenerational difference in awareness: when a child of the younger generation asked, “Why do you call grandfather Arai-san?” the adults explained, “That’s a name he used long ago.” In particular, this custom persisted while the generation that had been adults in the 1940s remained alive into the 1960s; it appears to have disappeared only after “Arai-san” himself died in the 1960s and that generation passed away one by one. In the end, the appellation “Arai-san” can be interpreted as a case maintained through the combination of collective memory and linguistic inertia.

Furthermore, the dimension of individual psychology and identity also needs to be considered. There are circumstances indicating that Arai-san himself showed no particular aversion to being called by the Japanese-style name. Many of that generation regarded the Sōshi-kaimei as a humiliation and discarded it the moment Liberation came, but some, out of long habit or for practical reasons, left a certain attachment to their Japanese-style name or a part of their identity in it. For example, in the Zainichi Korean community there appeared the phenomenon of continuing to use Japanese-style assumed names (tsūmei) even after Liberation, which was for the sake of avoiding discrimination or for the convenience of daily life. Although the context differs, in the case of Beondong it is said that Arai-san himself also accepted his Japanese-style nickname as a kind of social sobriquet. His attitude of personal acceptance would have lowered the psychological barrier for the people around him to keep calling him Arai-san. As a result, the old man of the surname Park, who passed away long ago, is, as of 2025, still remembered as “Arai-san.”

The descendants of Mr. Park, who was called “Arai-san,” are now all called by the Korean-style surname “Park,” and although they still live in Beondong village today, they no longer use the Japanese-style appellation. That is, the appellation custom in question can be seen as having naturally died out after the 1960s. Behind this process lie generational change and a shift in the social atmosphere. As the 1970s and 1980s arrived, the generation that had directly experienced the colonial period aged, and the younger generation had no experience of or attachment to Japanese-style appellations. Above all, as awareness of liquidating Japanese-language residues rose throughout Korean society, openly using Japanese-style nicknames became taboo. In fact, from the 1980s on, efforts to remove Japanese-style expressions in broadcasting and publishing were active, and school education also emphasized writing correct Korean. In such an atmosphere, even if the appellation “Arai-san” had remained, it would have been difficult to express it outwardly. Within the village as well, the younger people gradually came to find the appellation unfamiliar and stopped using it, and naturally its frequency of use declined.

In sum, the case of the persistent clan-name appellation in Beondong, Eomdari, is grasped as an example in which an identity assigned during the colonial period was not completely extinguished after Liberation but was reproduced in a particular context. This is not a mere happenstance of appellation, but rather reveals the complex aspects of the people’s life-world in the transitional period called the “liberation space” (haebang gonggan). Law and institutions achieved the “restoration of Korean names” in a single stroke, but it suggests that the everyday culture and memory of reality changed at a far more gradual pace. In the next section, we discuss, in a somewhat more generalized way, the hierarchical and sociocultural conditions that supported this case.

Conditions for the Class-Based Persistence of Appellations and the Social Context

The post-Liberation persistence of the clan-name appellation revealed through the case of Beondong, Eomdari, shows that several general conditions and contexts underlay its occurrence. These can be summarized as follows.

1) The established-generation group sharing the colonial experience, and the hierarchical order: The established generation that remained in the same local society even after Liberation partially continued the common experiences and ways of life of the colonial period. They were accustomed to calling one another by Japanese-style names or Japanese appellations, and could not change all of these abruptly. In particular, with the village’s elders or those of the upper economic stratum, there existed a “social inertia” by which their authority led the people around them to keep using their former appellations. That Arai-san was continuously called Arai-san in Beondong village was possible because his social role (landowner, elder) was continuous with the colonial period. That is, the persistence of hierarchical superior-subordinate relations and of power relations was connected to the persistence of the appellation. Had he left the village after Liberation or had his status weakened, the nickname would have been difficult to maintain; because that was not the case, the past appellation hardened.

2) The gap between official discourse and the life history of reality: After Liberation, the state and society’s leading class emphasized the liquidation of Japanese residues and the establishment of the national spirit, but this remained mainly a symbolic and city-centered discourse. The system for putting it into practice and monitoring it down to the everyday life of rural villages was feeble. From the late 1940s through the 1950s of left-right confrontation and war, and under the developmental-dictatorship regime from the 1960s on, an atmosphere of problematizing the minute colonial residues of everyday culture was in fact hard to find. Therefore, from the standpoint of the local residents, continuing to call by the name they had used in the past did not lead to sanctions and was not regarded as a serious problem. Rather, the logic of reality—”Liberation has come, but life goes on”—strongly took effect. As in the case of Beondong, practices current within the village were regarded as a private sphere outside the field of vision of public regulation and were often left alone. This is a part that oral history starkly reveals: although it does not appear in state records, the actual changes in people’s lives proceeded with a time lag between discourse and reality.

3) The complexity of memory and identity: For an individual or a community, the colonial-era name was not merely a symbol of oppression but was also a part of the memory and life of that era. Not everyone after Liberation perceived and rejected the traces of the colonial era in the same way; at times, owing to ambivalent feelings or practical considerations, some traces were maintained. In the case of Beondong’s Arai-san, the person concerned and those around him did not take the Japanese-style nickname as a great problem and accepted it as a part of everyday life. This may be because that name was perceived as depoliticized, more like “an appellation once used” than as a marker of intended pro-Japanese conduct. In the clan-name appellation that hardened almost like a nickname, the projection of the social group’s memory and a mixture of identity are contained. While using the appellation, the residents on the other hand knew that it no longer signified “subjugation to Japan.” That is, a transformation in the meaning of the appellation occurred. The word Arai-san had, in the 1940s, been the very Japanese-style name imposed on him, but for the residents of the 1960s and 1970s it was used as a proper-noun-like title designating “the elder so-and-so of our village.” It was because this change in meaning occurred that its persistence, too, was possible.

4) Survival as oral memory: Finally, one of the reasons this phenomenon was possible is the absence of official records. Continuing to call by a Japanese-style name was not something that would remain in documents or be captured in statistics. In the end, this fact remained, after a long time had passed, only as oral testimony—which at the same time attests that such a practice was not greatly problematized at the time and passed by naturally. Had it become a matter of conflict or dispute, records would have remained in the form of newspaper articles, complaints, administrative guidance, and the like. But, as in the case of Beondong village, life-historical fragments that quietly persisted and then disappeared were only secretly transmitted within oral memory. From the standpoint of academic research, this is a kind of blind spot, and at the same time it is a part that shows the autonomy of the life-world.

The above conditions go beyond the particular case of one region; they are the forms of life-historical continuity that likely occurred here and there throughout Korean society right after Liberation. There would be differences of degree, but the time during which the scars and effects of the Sōshi-kaimei remained in people’s minds and customs was probably longer than one might think. However, because it went unrecorded and remained as “forgotten history,” it long escaped the field of vision of our historical scholarship.

Why This Experience Went Unnoticed Academically: The Absence of Oral History and the Rupture of Records

The experience of the persistent clan-name appellation in Beondong village is in itself an interesting historical case, but at the same time it raises a question that cannot but be asked. Why has such an anecdote, until now, gone without the spotlight of academia? This can be seen as a problem directly connected to the limitations of research on post-Liberation popular life history. Two main factors can be pointed out.

First, there are the limitations of the available source base and the lack of an oral-history approach. Historical research on the everyday life of the people after Liberation has traditionally run up against a dearth of documentary materials. Official documents and newspapers concentrate only on state policy, political events, and major figures; they do not even capture what country villagers called whom. Private records such as diaries and letters may exist, but they mostly remain at the individual level and were not made public. In such a situation, the oral-history method is a useful alternative, but in the Korean historical profession the full-fledged use of oral history was only revitalized after the 1990s. And even then it was concentrated mainly on recording individuals’ memories within the “big history” of the Korean War experience or the process of industrialization, and cases of collecting and studying the fine details of rural life right after Liberation are rare. The same is true of Beondong village: had it not been for the oral accounts of the local residents, it would very likely have gone forever unreported to academia. Historical researchers lacked the sensitivity to lend an ear to “unspoken history,” and even where some oral recording was done, the effort to interpret it and connect it to a larger historical significance was insufficient.

Second, there is the marginalization of life history in the post-Liberation narrative. The period right after Liberation has long been viewed from the perspective of the history of national founding or the history of division. Politically, because of the continuous upheavals of the U.S. Military Government, left-right confrontation, the establishment of the government, and the Korean War, the focus of academic narratives, too, was fixed on changes in power and ideological struggle. The research tendency to break away from this macrohistory-centered approach and focus on changes in the everyday life of the people was relatively weak. It is not that social-history research on the liberation-space period is nonexistent, but it dealt mainly with urban workers, youth culture, the press, and the like, and there was little interest in changes in the life of rural residents or in their cultural attitudes. As a result, the scholarly question itself—of how the people right after Liberation accepted and transformed colonial residues—was scarce. For example, the question “How did people deal with their Japanese-style names?” would seem like something that obviously should be discussed, but in existing discourse it was passed over at the level of the conjecture that “of course everyone went back to their original names.” In public discourse, it is narrated that all colonial residues were liquidated along with Liberation, and in history textbooks and general-history narratives there were many schematic accounts of the form “Koreans gladly abolished the Japanese Sōshi-kaimei and reclaimed their names.” Within such a narrative tendency, a heterogeneous case like Beondong village had no place to stand. Rather, even if such a thing had occurred, it would have been dismissed as an exceptional deviation or an irregular case and would not have been granted academic significance.

Another factor that can be pointed out is the problem of sensitivity. Having used a Japanese-style name even after Liberation could, if handled carelessly, brand the region or person in question as a shameful case that had failed to liquidate the residues of pro-Japanese collaboration. It is also possible that the local society or the descendants were reluctant to disclose such a story publicly. This is also connected to the absence of official records: the parties themselves may not have left records, or even if they wrote memoirs, they may have intentionally omitted such parts. In the end, a rupture of memory occurs, and once a generation passes, such matters become an “unmentionable past” or a forgotten anecdote. This phenomenon becomes an even greater obstacle for the historical researcher. The gap in memory makes access difficult, and at the same time the very problem-consciousness becomes blurred.

To summarize, that the Beondong village case went unilluminated academically can be said to be the combined result of (1) a lack of interest in the microscopic topics of life history, (2) insufficient effort to unearth alternative sources such as oral history, (3) the bias of post-Liberation historical narration toward macro-discourse, and (4) the self-censorship of memory due to sensitivity. This is also indicative of a blind spot in the study of modern Korean history. However, efforts to recognize and overcome this blind spot have been gradually emerging in recent years. As one example, some historians have developed an oral-history movement to restore suppressed memories, arguing that “everyone has the right to speak before history.” There also appear movements to collect and exhibit the experiences of the general public around the time of Liberation through life-history museums and local-history projects. Such changes, though faint, will become the soil from which cases like Beondong village can be raised into historical narration.

The case in which the Japanese-style Sōshi-kaimei name “Arai-san” persisted as an everyday appellation in Beondong village, Eomdari, Hampyeong, after Liberation, well demonstrates how multilayered and complex the historical image of the liberation-space period was. At the level of the state, the laws and institutions left by Japan were liquidated and a new order was built up, but in grassroots everyday life the shadow of colonialism remained for a while. Through this microscopic case analysis, this study has sought to call attention to a domain that the mainstream narratives of our historical profession have missed—the life history of the grassroots populace.

To answer the research question raised in the introduction: colonial residues of the life-world that persisted even after the Sōshi-kaimei certainly did exist in reality. The oral testimony of Beondong, Eomdari, is only one facet of this, and it is highly likely that there were similar phenomena, large and small, in various places across the country. Only, because they went unrecorded and remained only in memory, the gaze of academia did not reach them. This means that the influence of colonial rule was not severed abruptly but exited gradually, with continuity and rupture intersecting. Historical scholarship has the responsibility to depict this process in three dimensions. Nevertheless, for a long time we grasped Liberation as a single completed narrative and did not deeply explore the detailed changes in life that came afterward. This paper critically illuminates that point and argues that we must extend our gaze all the way down to the bottom of historical narration.

The academic contributions of this study can be summarized in two points. First, it presented a case of microhistorical research that complements the existing elite- and official-discourse-centered historical image. By unearthing and analyzing the case of the Arai-san appellation, it concretely revealed one aspect of post-Liberation popular life history. Through this, it confirmed that the sociocultural image of the liberation-space period was not uniform but unfolded in differing forms according to region and class. Second, it demonstrates the source value of oral materials and raises the necessity of life-history research. By showing that historical truths that cannot be grasped through official records alone are contained in oral testimony, it called attention to the need for more systematic oral recording and analysis in future historical research.

As future tasks, one may first cite the additional unearthing of similar cases and comparative research. If one investigates whether there are examples of Sōshi-kaimei names or Japanese-style appellations persisting in other regions or groups, one will be able to arrive at a more generalized understanding. For example, comparing the appellation problem in other rural areas, among the urban lower classes, or in spaces of contact with Japanese residents in Korea who returned home after Liberation could yield interesting aspects. There is also a need to expand into research on post-Liberation living culture as a whole. If one traces the afterimages of colonialism and the process of change in various aspects of living culture—not only names but also linguistic habits, rituals, clothing, dwelling, and so on—one will be able to reinterpret the event of Liberation more three-dimensionally. This can also lead, beyond the level of national history, to comparison with the world-historical experience of decolonization. The ways in which various formerly colonized societies erased the traces of empire from everyday life after liberation will have commonalities and differences, and the Korean case can contribute to academia as a particular instance of this.

Finally, I wish to close this essay with a reflection on the role of historical scholarship. Historical research can constitute a complete history not only by recording the deeds of heroes or political elites but also by recording the memories and life-trajectories of ordinary people. Although the story of Beondong village, Eomdari, concerns an event that once took place in a small country village, within it both the light and the shadow of Liberation are reflected, and it contains how the great turning point of national history was embodied in ordinary people. Such restoration of life history will make our historical narration richer and more humane. I hope that, going forward, ever more “hidden stories” will be unearthed so that everyone may have the right to tell their own story before history. I believe that only when the historical profession lends a more attentive ear to the life history of the grassroots populace will the total landscape of Liberation finally be completed.

Sources of Oral Materials

The oral testimony utilized in this study was obtained through in-depth interviews conducted in August 2025 with residents of Beondong village, Eomda-myeon, Hampyeong County: Park XX (female, age 91) and An OO (male, age 69).

References

This paper was assisted by ChatGPT and Gemini.

EOD

20250919

Leave a comment

You may also enjoy