The Politics of Collaboration in Post-liberation Southern Korea

Abstract

This chapter deepens our knowledge of a decolonizing and divided Korean peninsula in the violent interregnum between the fall of the Japanese empire and the outbreak of the Korean War. What did it mean to collaborate in a empire? How are collaborators to be judged? When should justice rule? When political expediency? This chapter deepens our understanding of the contradictions and ambiguities at the heart of the early post-1945 Korean state’s attempts to address colonial-era collaboration through legislation and law. In so doing it reveals much about the postimperial afterlives of Koreans who served the Japanese empire, their relationship to the post-1945 politics, how many evaded punishment, and the grey areas of nationalism in a colonial empire. In so doing it shows how the politics of collaboration unfolded in a postcolonial and transnational key, delving through the records of the United States military government and into the heart of the high politics and judicial arguments of Korean post-1945 leaders.