ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the lives of Japanese women in South Korea during the postwar period, and considers their movement and settlement, and how they returned home and were sent back, against the backdrop of the political negotiations between Japan and South Korea. The collapse of the Empire of Japan in 1945 ended Japan’s colonisation of the Korean peninsula. However, a group of Japanese remained: Japanese women who had married Koreans before the end of the Second World War and lived in Korea. They faced many problems, but they chose to live in the independent former colony as nationals of both the former colonial ruler and a defeated country. Another group was the Japanese wives of Koreans returning to the peninsula from Japan. These Japanese women married to Koreans thought they would be able to travel freely between Japan and Korea in the future and decided to accompany their Korean husbands to Korea. There is little empirical research into the movements, settlement and returning home of Japanese women in South Korea. By clarifying these processes, this chapter presents a little-known aspect of postwar migration across the ‘new frontiers’ created by the collapse of the Japanese empire.