Past Present: Reinterpreting "War Heritage" through Jeju Island’s April Third Peace Park in South Korea

• In Event: Curating Resilient Memory and Reconfiguring War Heritage in Northeast and Southeast Asia

Abstract

On South Korea’s Jeju Island, the April Third Peace Park memorializes what is regarded as the deadliest of civilian massacres in Korea’s modern history. Officially called the “April Third incident,” the mass killings actually occurred over several years beginning in 1948, a prolonged episode of devastating ideological conflict and political violence that has been described as a microcosm of the Korean War. With accounts of the massacre silenced by government censorship for five decades, Jeju previously signified the past suppression of traumatic memory rather than its memorialization. Since its opening in 2008, the Peace Park has therefore served to counter such erasure, and the site includes a museum dedicated to public education about the massacre’s history and implications. Although considered an example of the phenomenon of “dark tourism,” the Peace Park in many ways challenges the island’s relationship to tourism by laying bare the irony behind Jeju’s development as a domestic and international destination for escapist leisure. Moreover, a notable constituency of visitors to the Peace Park are those who come to the island not for leisure tourism, but rather to participate in a local movement opposing the construction of a nuclear naval base, a process of militarization clearly at odds with Jeju’s official designation as an “Island of World Peace.” The Peace Park thereby highlights the complex temporality of Jeju’s “war heritage,” whereby grappling with the island’s tragedies of mass death in the past overlaps with understanding how their ongoing legacies extend into the present.

Author

• Nan Kim, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee