Abstract:
Gunkanjima serves as a symbol of Japan’s rapid industrialisation during the Meiji period, as well as conveying a dark history of the use of forced Korean labourers during the Asia-Pacific war. The two conflicting historical narratives of unkanjima rose to attention when the island was registered as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2015, as a part of “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining.” Gunkanjima thus joins controversies such as Japanese textbook revisionism, ‘comfort women,’ and the Yasukuni Shrine visits as part of East Asia’s ‘memory problem.’ This thesis aims to explore the popular representations of Gunkanjima in South Korean and Japanese popular culture and, in doing so, hope to enrich the existing literature of Japan and Korea’s memory problem by providing two unique new perspectives: first, by focusing on the understudied topic of Gunkanjima as a new memory site of conflict, and; second, by analysing discourses of popular culture as an alternative, informal, but equally important, perspective on the formation of collective memories surrounding Gunkanjima. In today’s digitalised world, collective memories disseminated by popular culture have a greater impact on the public than those taught by official narratives found in museums and school textbooks. This thesis therefore analyses numerous recent case studies from Japan and Korea, including television, film, social media, and a promotional mascot, to discuss how the popular representations of Gunkanjima have been constructed in each nation. This comparative approach and transnational perspective demonstrate that Gunkanjima is not confined to a single historical narrative, but that its collective memories in Japan and Korea are intertwined with and influenced by each other and wider international influences.
