Transitional Justice, Reconciliation, and Political Archivization

This chapter discusses so-called Transitional Justice in post-conflict societies, and the archivization of deaths in commemoration, through a comparative study of South Korea and Japan. The study addresses the following three questions. First, ‘How does a nation-state such as South Korea that once committed massacres of its own people address and redress those deaths in the context of Transitional Justice?’ Second, ‘How are the deaths caused by such massacres archived, and how do they represent the status of moral objects in official commemoration?’ Third, ‘How do the families of the dead seek to restore justice through the politics of mourning in non-national contexts, such as the Zainichi community in Japan?’ To investigate these questions, this chapter will analyze the April 3 Incident, which took place on Jeju, the southernmost island of the Korean peninsula, and its aftermath between 1947 and 1954. The chapter will then shift its focus to the major tasks of the National Committee for Investigation of the Jeju April 3 Incident and Recovering the Honor of Victims (usually called the 4.3 Committee), established in 2000 as one of the Transitional Justice strategies of the South Korean government. ¹