Remembering and Silencing: (Re)presentations of World War II in Korean National Curriculum and Textbooks

• In Event: (Re)membering the History of World War II from the Asian Theater

Abstract

This paper examines how World War II is (re)presented in South Korea’s middle school history education, with particular attention to how collective memories of the war are selectively reproduced, silenced, or contested in the national curriculum and textbooks. Rather than treating history education as a neutral transmission of facts, the study views it as a pedagogical and political arena in which collective memory is constructed, legitimized, and challenged. The analysis draws on theoretical frameworks from the pedagogy of memory (Yamana, 2022) and the teaching of difficult history (Epstein & Peck, 2017; Gross & Terra, 2018). These perspectives emphasize that how the past is taught shapes not only historical understanding but also identity, morality, and citizenship.
Methodologically, the paper employs critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010) of the 2022 Revised National Curriculum of South Korea alongside seven authorized middle school history textbooks. Passages related to World War II were identified and analyzed to trace how dominant discourses are constructed and what dimensions of the past are foregrounded or omitted. The findings reveal that “World War II” rarely appears as a global event in its own right. Instead, the war is framed primarily through Japanese imperial aggression and Korea’s struggle for independence. This framing produces two dominant narratives of memory: Japan as the aggressor and Koreans as patriotic victims and resisters. While this binary lends moral clarity and reinforces national pride, it forecloses more complex interpretations of wartime experiences and entanglements.
The omissions in these curricular and textbook narratives are equally instructive. The experiences of women and girls forced into Japanese military sexual slavery, the suffering of other Asian populations under Japanese occupation (including those in China and Southeast Asia), and the contributions of Japanese individuals who supported Korea’s liberation are marginalized or excluded. Such silences illustrate how South Korea’s history education operates as a pedagogy of memory that privileges nationalistic interpretations while downplaying inconvenient or transnational aspects of the past. These exclusions narrow historical understanding and also delineate the moral and emotional contours of Korean national identity.
By situating South Korea’s curricular narratives within a transnational framework, this paper contributes to broader debates on how World War II is remembered across Asia. Comparative attention to Korea and neighboring contexts demonstrates how selective remembering intersects with, yet diverges from, other nations’ memory politics. While the Korean curriculum frames the war largely as a moral project of nation-building, a transnational perspective opens the possibility of reimagining World War II as a shared history of empire, violence, resilience, and survival that exceeds national boundaries.
The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of selective memory and silenced histories for educators and researchers globally. In the United States, for example, where K–12 history education often privileges Eurocentric narratives of the war (An, 2022), attention to the Asian theater underscores the importance of these perspectives for critical reflection. By engaging in the difficult histories of Asia and beyond, educators can foster dialogic reflection on the politics of memory and develop pedagogies that honor remembrance, justice, and peace.

Authors

• Jongsung Kim, Hiroshima University

• Sunun Park, Cheongju National University of Education