ABSTRACT
Pak Kyǒng-sik (1922–1998), a prolific Korean scholar in Japan in the Cold War era, was born in southern Korea but grew up as an imperial Japanese subject in Japan. After Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War and the subsequent birth of the two opposing Koreas, Pak joined the North Korea-aligned organization Chongryon and Chongryon-sponsored schools and university in Tokyo as an instructor and sought to reclaim his Korean identity as a zainichi, an ethnic Korean resident in postwar Japan. Embodying North Korea’s Marxism-Leninism-inspired nationalist historical paradigm of struggles between Japanese imperialist aggressors and victimized Korean people, Pak’s 1965 monograph depicted all prewar and wartime Korean workers in Japan as victims of Japan’s exploitation and forced mobilization, or kyōsei renkō, and defined the zainichi today as the descendants of these victims. Despite Pak’s selective use of information at the expense of accuracy and objectivity, many writers and scholars in Japan and South Korea by the 1990s adopted his concept of kyōsei renkō as a tool to reproach Japan’s colonial rule over Korea.
