The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 7 | Issue 29 | Number 4 | Article ID 3193 | Jul 20, 2009

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Remembering the Unfinished Conflict: Museums and theContested Memory of the Korean War

Tessa Morris-Suzuki

Remembering the UnfinishedConf l i c t : Museums and theContested Memory of the KoreanWar

Tessa Morris-Suzuki

Forgotten by Whom?

On 27 May 2009, the government of theDemocratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK,North Korea) provoked worldwide alarm andprotest by announcing that it no longerconsidered itself bound by the 1953 armisticeending the Korean War. Amongst the mass ofwestern media reports deploring thisannouncement, however, only a few noted thefact that the armistice has never been signedby the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea),because its then President Yi Seungman[Syngman Rhee] did not accept that the warwas over, and wanted to go on fighting. Thearmistice was therefore signed only by some ofthe belligerents, and, since negotiations on theKorean Peninsula in the UN framework provedabortive and the US and North Korea have notpursued bilateral peace negotiations, there hasnever been a peace treaty. [1] More than half acentury after the ceasefire, Korea remainsuneasily divided along the 38th Parallel, one ofthe world’s most dangerous mil i taryflashpoints. Of all the conflicts over history andmemory which trouble the Northeast Asianregion, this is surely the one most directlylinked to contemporary politics: for rivalunderstandings of the unfinished war lie at theheart of continuing political tensions on theKorean Peninsula.

As Sheila Miyoshi Jager asks, “how does onecommemorate a war that technically is still notover?” [2] In English language writings, theKorean War is referred to, with almostmonotonous regularity, as “the Forgotten War”.This description, however, begs an importantquestion: forgotten by whom? Certainly not bythe people of North Korea, where education,propaganda, TV dramas and repeated air-raiddrills ensure that the conflict is experienced asan ongoing reality. Nor, I would suggest, havemany South Koreans (particularly those ofolder generations) forgotten the Korean War.The term “Forgotten War”, then, refers largelyto an American amnesia, although this amnesiais probably also shared by some of America’smajor allies, including Australia, Britain andJapan. (The latter, of course, though not acombatant in the war, was deeply involved inproviding bases and material support for theUN forces engaged in the conflict). Or perhaps,as Bruce Cumings has suggested (quotingFrench literary theorist Pierre Macherey), weshould see the silence less as amnesia than as“structured absence”. [3]

The Return of the Past

Even in America, however, frequent recentreferences to “the Forgotten War” suggest thatflashes of irrepressible presence are starting tobreak through the structured absence. Youhave to remember something in order to beable to describe it as “forgotten”, and indeedPhilip West and Suh Ji-Moon’s collection ofessays Remembering the ‘Forgotten War’ isjust one of a growing number of works which,over the course of the past decade or so, haveexamined the production of US amnesia about

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the Korean conflict. [4] Recent English-language studies have looked at the war inKorean literature, in photography and inSeoul’s War Memorial of Korea, its presence inKorean movies and its general absence fromHollywood box-office hits. [5] Ha Jin’s award-winning novel War Trash has also offered avivid if contentious evocation of the events ofthe war, directed at a US audience but writtenfrom a Chinese perspective. [6]

In US popular culture itself, there have alsosigns of the emergence of an uneasy contest ofwar memories. 2008 saw the release of a moviewhich I believe to be the first Hollywoodblockbuster to acknowledge the dark side ofthe actions of US troops in the Korean War:Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino. Eastwood’scentral character, Walt Kowalski (played by thedirector himself), is a Korean War veteranhaunted by the cruelties of the war, andparticularly by the face of a young enemysoldier whom he killed as the soldier attemptedto surrender. The resurfacing of Kowalski’srepressed memories comes a decade afterrevelations by a team of US journalists aboutthe massacre of Korean civilians at Nogun-Ri,and follows the circulation and debate on theInternet of the BBC’s haunting 2002documentary “Kill ‘em All: The AmericanMilitary in Korea”. [7]

On the other hand, and perhaps partly inreaction to these troubling ghosts from thepast, 2009 marked the opening (“thanks to agenerous gift from Turtle Wax Inc.”) of theinitial stage of the first, only and stillincomplete national Korean War museum in theUnited States. Created by a group of warveterans and their supporters, the Korean WarNational Museum in Springfield, Illinois, setsout to present an unabashedly triumphal visionof the war – “the forgotten victory” – as “thefirst time that the advance of communism washalted”. [8] The theme of victory is highlightedby the museum’s logo, defiantly focused on abright red letter V surrounded by a laurel

wreath. Images of the planned museum postedon its website show a flowing design ofexhibition spaces featuring large photographicpanels and life-size reconstructions of villagesand dugouts. (See this link)

The museum’s prospectus and its archive ofphotographs focuses firmly on the USexperience of the war, in which, we are told“54,246 soldiers paid the ultimate sacrifice” (afigure which leaves a strange haze of silencearound the estimated 3-4 million Koreansoldiers and civilians, several hundredthousand Chinese “volunteers”, more than3,000 soldiers from other countries of theUnited Nations Command and 120 Soviet pilotswho were also killed in the war). The imageswhich illustrate the museum website, however,do include one striking picture of Koreancivilian suffering – a picture also featured inChina’s Memorial of the War to Resist USAggression and Aid Korea (discussed in moredetail later in this paper). This is a photograph,taken during the Incheon Landing, of a lonesmall girl sitting weeping outside what appearsto be a bombed factory. On the US museum’swebsite the photograph is accompanied by thewords, “during the war, the American armedforces saved thousands of Korean lives.” [9] Inthe book I purchased at the Chinese memorial,the same photograph is captioned. “Americanruffians of aggression brought extremelyserious catastrophe. An unfortunate girl inflames of war crying loudly on the street”. [10]I wonder what became of the little girl, and, ifshe is still alive, how her memories of warwould relate to these divided pronouncementson the meaning of her grief.

http://www.theforgottenvictory.org

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Child amid the ruins of the Korean War

In this essay I want to approach the question ofcontested memories of the Korean War byconsidering how the conflict is represented inthe museums of several key participant nationson the western side of the Pacific: in the WarMemorial of Korea in Seoul; the VictoriousFatherland Liberation War Museum inPyongyang; the Memorial of the War to ResistUS Aggression and Aid Korea in Dandong,China; and the section of the Australian WarMemorial devoted to the Korean War. Thenames of the museums themselves speakvolumes about the contrasting ways in whichthe war is remembered.

Museum displays can be examined from manyperspectives: which historical facts arepresented and which are omitted? Whatnarrative of the past does the museum tell?How do its design, layout and use of mediaengage the attention and emotions of visitors?How do visitors experience past events as theywalk through the museum’s halls? Whatpolicies and controversies surround themuseum’s creation and the evolution of its

displays? In order to understand the role thatthe museum plays in creating contendingmemories of war, we need also to knowsomething about the place of each museum inpublic memory. Who visits the museum? Does itpresent an unquestioned national narrative ofthe past, or are its displays open to multipleinterpretations or challenged by alternativediscourses? [11]

Here I have chosen to take a snapshot in time.Although I make some comments about thehistory of the museums themselves, I focusmainly on examining the images of the KoreanWar displayed at the time of writing (2009). Iam particularly interested in understandinghow each museum’s representation of the warinfluences perceptions of the contemporarycrisis on the Korean Peninsula. For this reason,I shall consider how each addresses certain keyquestions about the origins and consequencesof the conflict. What was the background to theoutbreak of the Korean War? How did the warstart? Who were its heroes, villains andvictims? How did the war end? What was itsaftermath and what are its implications for thepresent? To answer these questions involveslooking at the factual narratives presentedthrough written information, photos, artifacts,video displays etc. But it is also important toconsider the media through which the story istold. How do Korean War museums use designand technology to evoke the experience of thewar, particularly for those who have no directmemory of its events?

In the final section of the paper, I shall bringtogether some reflections on the museums toassess the links between their representationsof the past and contested understandings of thepresent. Here I want to draw again onCumings’ notion of “structured absence”. Anexploration of these museums offers glimpsesof the way in which remembering andforgetting are intertwined. Each memorialpresents a narrative of the war carefullyconstructed in response to the complex

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political, social and cultural context in whichthe memorial operates. Each narrative, byshining a bright light on certain faces of thewar, intensifies the darkness that shrouds otherfaces. The task, I shall argue, is complicated bythese monuments’ ambiguous status as both“memorials” and “museums”. By comparingthem, and (metaphorically) laying theirconflicting displays side-by-side, can we fill theabsences with presence, and discover somepointers to paths which might take us beyondconflict?

The War Memorial of Korea, Seoul

A visit to a museum is always a conversation.As visitors, we arrive with our own memoriesand preconceptions, and these influence theway in which the museum’s displays speak tous, and the way in which we respond.Sometimes we wander round museums on ourown; sometimes in the company of others,whose comments add to the conversation,further affecting the way we see the displays.My perceptions of the War Memorial of Korea,which I visited on a rainy day in May 2009,were influenced by the fact that I had recentlycompleted a short stay in North Korea, and hadjust come back from a bus trip to the southernside of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividingNorth from South. The bus dropped me off inItaewon, the area of Seoul next to US ArmyGarrison Yongsan, which occupies two-and-halfsquare kilometers of city centre. I walked downthe long road bisecting the base, bordered byhigh walls topped by razor wire. This took medirectly to a side entrance to the War Memorialof Korea, which stands next door to the base.The wide grass-and-paved area around themuseum is full of those outsized weapons ofwar which cannot be accommodated within themuseum itself, and to reach the main entranceI walked under the wing of a vast US B-52bomber: one of the prize exhibits.

US B-52 bomber exhibited in the groundsof the War Memorial of Korea, Seoul

My perceptions of the War Memorial weretherefore slightly different from those of SheilaMiyoshi Jager and Jiyul Kim, whose carefulstudy of this remarkable edifice was writtenduring the presidency of the late Roh Moo-Hyun, at a time when the Sunshine Policy ofengagement between North and South was atits height. For Jager and Kim, a key issue wasto understand how the Memorial approachedits task of commemorating the Korean Warfrom a South Korean perspective while thegovernment was engaged in rapprochementwith the enemy: “the problem for South Korea’sleaders”, they wrote, “was how to fashion anarrative of triumph that would leave openpossibility for peninsular reconciliation”. [12]After all, as they point out, the Memorial itselfis a “post-Cold War” construction, opened in1994, during the period when then PresidentRoh Tae-Woo was engaged in his “Nordpolitik”,a predecessor to the Sunshine Policy ofPresidents Kim Dae-Jung and Roh Moo-Hyun.

Several strategies were used by the Memorial’sdesigners to weave together the tasks ofcommemoration and reconciliation. One was toplace the Korean War in the broader expanse ofnational history. Although the largest part ofthe Memorial is taken up with displays on the1950-53 conflict (which in South Korea is most

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often called the 6.25 War, a reference to itsstarting date of 25 June 1950), the first floor ofthe main building is occupied by a display onearlier wars, including 13th century struggleswith the Mongols and the 16th century Koreanvictory in the face of Japanese warlordToyotomi Hideyoshi’s attempted invasion. Theemphasis here is overwhelmingly on unitednational resistance to outside foes. As theopening words of the War Memorial’s English-language guide put it:

Korea is a nation that has beencruelly subjugated by foreigncountries throughout much of itshistory. But despite the rise andfall of native dynasties and foreignsuzerains, the Korean people havemaintained an independence thatdates back to 668 when the SillaKingdom succeeded in achieving apolitical union of the country. Thisachievement provided the basis forthe development of Korea as adistinct nation. [13]

This theme of a nation united against foreignthreats is carried through into the design of theKorean War Monument at the centre of theMemorial’s main plaza. This massive statue isinspired by the form of an ancient Koreandagger, which is seen (as Jager and Kim note)as a symbol of the “earliest Korean race”. [14]A second symbol of reconciliation is the “Statueof Brothers” standing at one corner of theMemorial precinct. Based on a photograph oftwo brothers from opposite sides of the KoreanWar who met on the battlefield, the statueshows a large and muscular South Koreansoldier embracing and looking down upon hissmaller and frailer North Korean kinsman –thus simultaneously embodying messages oftriumph and of reconciliation. [15]

T h e d e s i r e t o l e a v e o p e n a p a t h t oreconciliation may also explain why the

Memorial’s displays on the Korean War containonly fleeting references to massacres ormaltreatment of prisoners-of-war by NorthKorean troops. This is in strong contrast to therhetoric of earlier South Korean regimes,part icu lar ly o f the Park Chung-Heedictatorship, which energetically kept alive thememory of cruelties inflicted on South Koreansby the Northern “Reds”. The l i fe-sizereconstructions of wartime scenes in the WarMemorial do include one graphic image of agrim-faced uniformed man pointing a gun at awoman, labeled “North Korean Secret PoliceSearching for the Patriotic People in theSouth”, but beyond this there are few specificdetails of acts of violence against civilians byNorthern forces.

Diorama entitled “North Korean SecretPolice Searching for the Patriotic People ofthe South”, War Memorial of Korea, Seoul

This, of course, has the convenient corollary ofallowing the Memorial to remain equally silenton the subject of massacres or maltreatment ofprisoners by Southern forces and their UnitedNations allies. For example, the Memorial’sexplanation of the lead-up to the Korean War,as presented in multilingual video clips, tellsvisitors that in 1948 North Korea “tried toimpede South Korea’s separate election, andespecial ly on Jeju Island, communistsympathizers attacked and set f ire to

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government offices and even killed people.” Nom e n t i o n h e r e o f t h e f a c t t h a t t h edemonstrations on Jeju were largely a responseto an earlier killing of civilians by ROK securityforces, nor of the fact that the brutally-suppressed 1948-49 anti-government uprisingon Jeju Island commonly known as the “Jeju 4.3Incident” is now believed to have claimed thelives of almost 30,000 people, most of themislanders killed by South Korean troops andmilitary auxiliaries. [16]

The contentious nature of the Memorial’sr epresen ta t i on ( o r r a the r , l a ck o frepresentation) of the killing of civilians bothbefore and during the Korean War is areminder of the fact that the Memorial itself ispart of a deeply divided and contested SouthKorean public discourse on national history.Far from offering a universally-accepted,authoritative narrative of the Korean War, theWar Memorial of Korea presents just oneinterpretation of the conflict – one with whichmany South Koreans would disagree. Aradically different perspective on the war has,for example, emerged from the work of theKorean Truth and Reconciliation Commissionestablished under the Roh Moo-Hyungovernment, which reached the conclusion thataround 100,000 South Koreans were killed bytheir country’s own security forces in 1950alone. [17] Predictably, too, the Memorialremains silent about topics such as the Nogun-Ri massacre of civilians by US forces, andabout similar dark events whose traces may befound in war archives, in recent academic andpublic debate and (in fictional form) in thenightmares of Gran Torino’s main characterWalt Kowalski. [18]

When I visited the Memorial in 2009, thependulum of politics had swung to the otherside of the divide: the Lee Myung-bakadministration had renounced the SunshinePolicy, and tensions on the Korean Peninsulahad reached a new peak. Against thisbackground, my impression of the War

Memorial of Korea was not so much of a placestruggling to balance a triumphal militarynarrative with a message of reconciliation, butrather of a place beset by multiple paradoxes.One of these was the uneasy relationshipbetween the Memorial’s defiant Koreannationalism and its propinquity to US ArmyGarrison Yongsan.

How, I wondered, did the nationalist symbolismof the Korean dagger fit with symbolism of thegiant US B-52 bomber, whose outspread wingsgreet visitors even before they enter theMemorial’s doors? How does the emphasis onunending Korean resistance to cruelsubjugation by foreigners relate to SouthKorean participation in the Vietnam and GulfWars and Afghanistan: events which arecelebrated in the memorial as Korea’scontribution to the maintenance of globalfreedom? (Of the Vietnam War, the Memorial’sbrochure tells us that the brave actions ofSouth Korean troops “heightened the nation’sinternational position and greatly contributedto the nation’s economic development by givingKorean corporations a springboard forlaunching overseas operations.”) [19] Whatshould one make of the ambiguous mottoengraved in stone outside the Memorial Hall:“Freedom is not Free” [which in Koreantranslates into the much more cumbersomeepigram: Jayu neun keojeo jueoji neun kos ianida]?

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“Monument in Remembrance of theKorean War”, in the grounds of the War

Memorial of Korea, Seoul

In the narrative of the war which the Memorialpresents to its visitors, South Korea is a small,fragile democracy attacked by the juggernautof international Communism, and saved by thebravery of the South Korean military andpeople with the support of the their US ally.The information accompanying the displays –both in written form and in ubiquitousmultilingual videos, with sound-tracks inKorean, Japanese, English and Chinese – goesout of its way to emphasise that at the time ofthe war (unlike today) North Korea was themore industrialized and better-equipped half ofthe peninsula:

The ROK Armed Forces werecaught off guard by the NorthKorean People’s Army (NPKA)

invasion. While the NPKA werearmed with tanks and fighters theSouth Korean had none. They alsohad less than half the North’seffective ground forces. They hadno choice but to fight against theNPKA’s tanks with suicide attacksand to drop bombs by hand fromtraining aircraft. Even with suchsuicidal tactics, there was nocontending against such heavyodds, and the city of Seoul fell intothe hands of the enemy in threedays. [20]

Of the four museums described here, the WarMemorial of Korea is the one that most vividlydepicts the sufferings of Korean civiliansduring the war. On the other hand, it is lessforthcoming on some aspects of the war whichare highlighted by other museums. Chineseparticipation in the Korean War is emphasised,but the Memorial’s account implies thatmilitary conflict stopped at the border betweenNorth Korea and China – a story (as we shallsee) very different from the one told byDandong’s war memorial. The Seoul Memorialacknowledges the presence of the sixteen othercountries who participated in the war alongsidethe United States under the United NationsCommand, but it does so in a way which(intentionally or otherwise) seems tomarginalize them from the main story. Whilethe US is omnipresent in the Memorial’snarrative of the war, the other sixteen nationsare largely confined to a separate room, whichoffers a very static display of uniforms, flags,and statistics. This is in strong contrast to thevivid and dynamic reconstructions of theheroism of South Korean soldiers andsufferings of civilians.

Through skilful use of video, photographs, andlife-sized dioramas of ruined cities and columnsof fleeing refugees, the Memorial seeks toconvey the horror of conflict to a generation

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who can remember nothing but prosperity andpeace (albeit an uneasy peace). Its CombatExperience Room mobilizes special effects tooffer visitors “a vivid vicarious experience ofthe front line”. [21] But here too it seems toconfront a dilemma. As I went round theMemorial examining its Korean War display, Iwas aware of the constant clamour of children’svoices in the background. Yet relatively fewchildren were actually in the Korean Warrooms, and those who were often seemedbemused by the scenes that confronted them. Itwas only as I left the Memorial that Iunderstood where the children’s voices werecoming from: in an effort to draw in youngvisitors, the Memorial had converted most of itslower ground floor into a giant play spacewhich was currently featuring a Thomas theTank Engine theme. This area was crowdedwith families. But although some of themprobably also ventured out into the Memorial’sother halls, I am fairly sure that most of theyoung visitors went home with much clearerimages in their heads of the Fat Controller andSalty the Dockside Diesel than they did of theIncheon Landing or the Panmunjeom armisticenegotiations.

Following the dramas of suffering and heroismdepicted in the Memorial’s narrative of war,indeed, the end of the Korean War comesalmost as anti-climax: “After more than twoyears of talks between the UN and Communistsides, from July 10, 1951, until July 27, 1953, aceasefire went into effect that has beenmaintained ever since… The ROK governmentwas not a s ignatory of the Armist iceAgreement.” [22] The Memorial is the onlymuseum I have seen which acknowledges thefact that the armistice was opposed by theSouth Korean government and provokeddemonstrations in the streets of Seoul. Butbeyond that, the rest is silence, and the storyends on a note neither of triumph nor ofreconciliation, but rather of a kind of uneasysadness.

The Victorious Fatherland Liberation WarMuseum, Pyongyang

The museums of Pyongyang are resolutelymodernist: great neo-classical edifices whichtell an immutable and monolithic narrative; orso it seems on the surface. Certainly, in theDPRK there is no scope for public controversyabout the nature and events of the Korean War.But the official narrative can be told in subtlyvarying ways; and visiting the VictoriousFatherland Liberation War Museum, I realisedthat it is in fact constructed in a form thatallows for just such variety.

This effect is achieved by size. The museumcontains a very large number of rooms: eightyin all, according to the guide who showed usround, although the plan attached to the officialEnglish guide-book shows thirty-four exhibitionspaces. This is not a museum where you canwander at will – all visits are guided tours givenby a uniformed member of the armed forces,and because of the size of the building theyinevitably include only a limited sample ofrooms; so the itinerary chosen affects the storytold to the visitor. On my visits (I have been tothe museum twice), the itinerary focused on thebackground to and outbreak of the war, thespoils of captured weaponry which illustratethe military feats of the Korean People’s Army,the evidence of ongoing US military aggressionon the Korean Peninsula, and some of thebattle panoramas which are among themuseum’s highlights. Relatively little was saidabout other crucial issues. For example, thecollaboration between North Korean, Chineseand Soviet forces was only briefly mentioned.But the published guidebook reveals that themuseum also contains a “Hall ShowingInternational Support” and a “Hall Showing theFeats of the Chinese People’s Volunteers”, andI am sure that these feature centrally in thetours given to Russian and Chinese visitors.

As the museum’s very name suggests, the storyof the Korean War told here is radically at odds

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with the story told in Seoul’s War Memorial ofKorea, and the differences between the twonarratives offer important insights into sourcesof contemporary tensions on the KoreanPeninsula. In the Victorious FatherlandLiberation War Museum, the story of theorigins of the Korean War goes back to theyears before 1945, and to the struggle ofKorean nationalists – particularly of partisansled by Kim Il-Sung – against Japanesecolonialism. On 15 August 1945, their strugglewas rewarded when Korea gained its freedomfrom Japan, but the “US troops illegallyoccupied south Korea on September 8 Juche 34(1945), forcibly dissolved the people’scommittees set up in accordance with the willof the people, and arrested, imprisoned andmurdered a large number of patriots.” [23]

Display representing the impact of the USmilitary presence on life in late 1940sSouth Korea, Victorious FatherlandLiberation War Museum, Pyongyang

Like other North Korean historical exhibitions,the Victorious Fatherland War LiberationMuseum presents its story in a format thatrelies heavily on the marshalling of archivalevidence to support particular truth claims.Unlike the War Memorial of Korea, thePyongyang museum makes (as far as I can tell)absolutely no use of documentary video, butabundant use of stil l photographs and

facsimiles of documents, including SouthKorean and foreign newspaper reports andletters from the US archives. These aredeployed, for example, to present a ratherdetailed and convincing image of the impact ofthe US military on South Korean society and ofthe arrests and killings of opponents of the YiSeungman regime. Less convincing are themuseum’s efforts to document one of thecentral North Korean contentions: that theDPRK was the victim of an unprovoked attackby US and South Korean forces. The key piecesof evidence offered here are newspaper reportsshowing that Yi Seungman was ready andeager to launch an attack against the North(which is indisputably true), and a letter fromJohn Foster Dulles (then America’s UNrepresentative) to South Korean ForeignMinister Lim, referring to the need for“courageous and bold decisions” – which couldmean almost anything.

In the Pyongyang museum’s version of events,it is not the South but the North that is weakand vulnerable. The newly created KoreanPeople’s Army is taken by surprise by theattack from the south, but, under the guidanceof the Great Leader Kim Il-Sung, launches acounter attack that aims to liberate the entirePeninsula within the forty days which it willtake the US to bring reinforcements in from itsbases around the world. This strategy is almostbut not quite successful, and after a massiveinflux of US troops, Kim Il-Sung orders thePeople’s Army to make a strategic retreat tothe north. However, US planes launch bombingraids across the border into China, promptingthe Chinese People’s Volunteers join the fightagainst imperialism, the re-invigorated KoreanPeople’s Army drives southward, and the warends in victory over the aggressors.

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Kim Il-Sung leads his people to victory:Painting displayed in the entrance to the

Victorious Fatherland Liberation WarMuseum in Pyongyang

The contrast between the Pyongyang and Seoulmuseums, however, lies not only in theirnarrative of events, but also in the overallimage of war which they convey. There can beno doubt that the people of North Koreasuffered horribly during the war. To give justone example, as Steven Hugh Lee notes in hishistory of the Korean War, in a single raid onthe North Korean capital on 11 July 1952, “US,ROK, Australian and British bomber pilots flew1,254 sorties against Pyongyang, droppingbombs and 23,000 gallons of napalm on theinhabitants. After two more major bombingcampaigns against the city in August theAmericans decided that there were too fewtargets left to justify a continuation of thebombardment.” [24] The portrayal of suchsufferings in the Victorious FatherlandLiberation War Museum, however, is verymuted, and this absence of reconstructions ofpain and death (such as those presented by theWar Memorial of Korea’s wax works of starvingand desperate refugees) appears to be part of aconscious strategy of presenting the war asvictory: a site of strength, heroism andtriumph. Depicting North Koreans as victims,particularly before the gaze of foreigners,might be taken as a sign of weakness.

Experiences of bombing, death, injury anddisplacement are depicted in other North Koreamedia, including magazines, novels and film.The sections of the museum which I saw,however, contained only brief references tothese events, and a few grainy photographs ofbombed cityscapes. There is one small roomdedicated “the US Imperialist Aggressor’sAtrocities”, which (to judge by the museum’sguidebook) contains more graphic photographsof civilian suffering, but this was not on ouritinerary. Rather than incorporating suchstories into the Pyongyang Museum, the NorthKorean authorities have separated them outinto a distinct site of memorial – the SinchonMuseum, south of Pyongyang, whichcommemorates a massacre in which NorthKorea claims that US troops killed more than35,000 people. In the Victorious FatherlandLiberation War Museum, it is US enemy troops,rather than Korean soldiers or civilians, whoare shown as wounded, captured and suffering.In this, the museum follows a tradition whichwas common in the Soviet Union and is alsoevident in some Chinese war memorials today:the narrative is one of triumphant heroismagainst overwhelming odds, a story to inspirethe soldiers of the future, rather than to remindthe populace of the misery of war.

The theme of victory is re-emphasised by themuseum’s extensive exhibits of captured USweaponry, and by its dioramas: for thePyongyang museum uses the technique of thediorama even more dramatically than its Seoulcounterpart. Its major dioramas (our guide toldus) are by far the most popular sections of themuseum, particularly with schoolchildren, andthey are indeed remarkable samples of thegenre. One depicts the struggle of the People’sArmy and local villagers to keep open thestrategic Chol Pass under a barrage of USbombing raids. This is accompanied by arecorded commentary and atmospheric music,with lighting and a variety of “special effects”creating the spectacle of lines of trucks snakingover the pass as enemy bombers swoop

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overhead. The second, a huge cyclorama whichshows the North Korean capture of the town ofDaejeon, south of Seoul, is said to contain amillion painted or sculpted human figures, andis viewed from a rotating platform, giving thespectator the sense of looking down on thescene from a hilltop in the midst of thebattlefield.

Section of the diorama illustrating theBattle of Daejeon, Victorious Fatherland

Liberation War Museum, Pyongyang.

Within this drama of heroism and victory, itshould be noted, there is almost no reference tothe involvement of any countries other than theUnited States in the UN Command. Theemphasis throughout is on US imperialism andaggression, and the war, in short, is narratedas a resounding victory of the DPRK over theUnited States. To quote the words of anotherNorth Korean book on the subject:

By winning victory in the war, theKorean people shattered the mythof the ‘might’ of US imperialism,the chieftain of world imperialism,and marked the beginning of adownhill turn for it, thus openingup the new era o f the ant i -imperialist, anti-US struggle. [25]

This view of the war is diametrically opposed tothe one presented in Seoul’s War Memorial ofKorea; but it does allow the VictoriousFatherland Liberation War Museum to achievean effect also pursued by its South Koreancounterpart . The image of Americanimperialism as the enemy, in other words,leaves open the possibility of reconciliationwith the South, whose people rarely appear inthe museum’s displays, either as victims or asaggressors.

But the constantly repeated theme of victoryover US aggression, in the end, strikes an edgyand insecure note. When wars are irrefutablyvictories, after all, it generally ceases to benecessary to label them “victorious”. In thecase of the Korean War, the North Korean needto pronounce the war a victory seems to havebecome ever greater, the longer the division ofthe Peninsula has continued and the more theSouth has prospered. The museum inPyongyang was originally opened in 1953 asthe “Fatherland Liberation War Museum”; itwas only when a new and grander museum wasunveiled in 1974 that the word “Victorious”was added to its title. In a sense, indeed, Icannot help being reminded of the yet-to-becompleted Korean War National Museum inSpringfield, Illinois, whose V-sign logocelebrating “the forgotten victory” seems like asimilar attempt to s i lence a nagginguncertainty. The desire of so many nationalmonuments to trumpet the term “victory”could, paradoxically, be read as a clear signthat this was a war that no-one won.

The Pyongyang museum’s proclamation ofvictory is in fact at odds with the message of itsdisplays, which seems to be that the war hasnever ended at all. The exhibit of war trophiesis ever-expanding, added to with the capture ofthe US intelligence-gathering vessel Pueblo in1968 and with wreckage and weapons from aseries of minor clashes on the 38th parallel,continuing into the 21st century. The theme ofunending US aggression and deceit is a much-

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repeated one, also emphasised in theexhibitions elsewhere in Pyongyang and on thenorthern side of the dividing line at the trucevillage of Panmunjeom. There, as in thePyongyang war museum visitors are remindedof the massive alien military presence on thedoorstep of the DPRK: a country which has hadno foreign troops on its soil for more than half acentury. The abiding impression, far from beingone of a confident victor flaunting its militarytriumphs, is of an embattled society whereconstant repetition of the word “victory” is amantra for warding off the unspeakable butalways present threat of annihilation.

The DPRK claims to have captured this USminiature unmanned submersible vessel(now on display in central Pyongyang)

close to its eastern coast in 2004

The Memorial of the War to Resist USAggression and Aid Korea, Dandong

To understand the present crisis on the KoreanPeninsula it is essential to understand theposition of China; and China’s position cannotbe comprehended without knowledge of theway in which Chinese people experienced andremember the Korean War. The Memorial ofthe War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Koreain the border city of Dandong is a vividembodiment of the deep and complex feelingswhich the Chinese government and people – or

at least the people of the northeasternprovinces of China – hold towards North Korea.From a Chinese perspective, the war was aheroic act of solidarity with a smaller andembattled neighbour, but also a war that theydid not want, and the appropriate response tothe crisis on the Korean Peninsula in 1950presented China’s leaders with profounddilemmas. The symbolism of the memorial istherefore replete with reminders of theChinese-Korean joint struggle against USimperialism, but also of the potential threat toChina which lurks on the Korean side of theircommon border. The DPRK, in short, ispresented as a small and vulnerable bufferbetween China and US military might in Asia,and is thus to be protected; but also as acountry whose problems have real andmenacing implications for China itself.

The memorial’s history goes back to 1958, theyear when the last of the Chinese “volunteer”forces withdrew from North Korea. InitiallyChina ’s par t in the Korean War wascommemorated in a more modest adjunct tothe Dandong historical museum, but in 1993, atthe time of the fortieth anniversary of theKorean War Armistice, it was reopened in animpressive granite and marble hall on a hilltopbehind the city. [26] To reach the memorial,you climb a long flight of steps surmounted bydramatic socialist-realist sculptures of Chinesesoldiers, their guns trained towards the menacethat approaches from the North Korean side ofthe Yalu river – just visible on the horizon fromthe memorial’s forecourt. Between the statuesstands a tall stone obelisk – built in a stylewhich is also widely used for monuments inNorth Korea – commemorating the armisticewhich (from the official Chinese viewpoint)marked the victory of the DPRK and its allies.

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Looking out towards North Korea – statuesoutside the Memorial of the War to ResistUS Aggression and Aid Korea, Dandong

The background to the war, as seen fromDandong, is very different from the backgrounddepicted in Pyongyang’s Victorious FatherlandLiberation War Museum or in Seoul’s WarMemorial of Korea. Here, the story starts withthe liberation struggles of the Communist Partyof China (CPC), whose victory celebrations aredisrupted and menaced by the events unfoldingin Korea:

In October 1949, the Chinesepeople, under the leadership of theCPC, achieved the great victory ofthe new democratic revolution andfounded the People’s Republic ofChina. The new-born China wasfaced with grave war scar anddifficulties in economy. A thousand

and one things waited to be done…Just when the Chinese peoplebegan to restore economy anddevelop product ion for theconsolidation of the new statepower, the Korean War broke outand the US immediately madeincursions into the DPRK andmoreover drew the flames of wartowards the Yalu River. At thesame time, the US sent its armyand navy to the Chinese territory,Taiwan. [27]

From the Chinese point of view, the timingcould hardly have been worse. The country wasexhausted from decades of civil war. As somehistorians have pointed out, there alsoappeared to be signs in 1950 that the US mighthave been willing to relinquish Taiwan andmove towards recognition of the PRC, but allthis was changed by the outbreak of the KoreanWar and by the use of Taiwan as a staging postfor US troops heading for Korea. [28]

The Memorial of the War to Resist USAggression and Aid Korea develops its accountof the conflict through a series of largeexhibition halls, making abundant use ofhistorical artifacts as well as photographs,written documents and sculpture. It alsocontains one great cyclorama, very reminiscentof the Pyongyang panorama of the Battle ofDaejon, but here representing the Battle of theRiver Cheongcheon [Qingchuan in Chinese], amajor engagements between Chinese troopsand US forces. Uniforms, knapsacks and otheritems of everyday war l ife are used todramatize the hardships faced by the Chinesevolunteers, who first crossed the Yalu River todrive back the advancing South Korean andUnited Nations forces on 19 October 1950.Interestingly, the Dandong memorial (unlike itscounterpart in Pyongyang) repeatedlyacknowledges the presence of a multinationalUnited Nations force, but presents this as

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having been essentially a front for US policy:the term “United Nations Command (UNC)” isalways written in scare quotes. The memorial’snarrat ive a l so argues that in terna ldisagreements among the states participatingin the UNC was a major factor impelling the USto seek a negotiated armistice. [28]

Statue of Mao Anying, Memorial of theWar to Resist US Aggression and Aid

Korea, Dandong

The faces of the heroic Chinese volunteers lineone entire exhibition room – a reminder of thefact that around one million Chinese people arethought to have been killed or injured duringt h e w a r . [ 3 0 ] A s i m p l e w h i t e b u s tcommemorates perhaps the most famous ofthem: Mao Anying, the eldest son of Chineseleader Mao Zedong, who was killed in battle inKorea in November 1950. Predictably, therelationship between Chinese volunteers andNorth Koreans is represented as an exemplaryone – Chinese forces come to the aid of theirKorean comrades-in-arms and help and feedinjured Korean civilians. If the South Koreanidealized image of reconciliation is embodied inthe War Memorial of Korea’s “Statue ofBrothers”, the Dandong memorial’s idealizedimage of the relationship between Chinese andNorth Koreans is represented by a giantphotograph of an elderly Korean womanembracing a young uniformed Chinese

volunteer. Here too, the implicit inequalitiesare striking: the tall, virile Chinese soldiertowering over the frail, wizened Koreanwoman. At the same time, though, there issomething genuinely powerful about thisphotograph. I try and fail to imagine a similarimage of the relationship between US forcesand South Korean civilians. It is reminder ofthe fact that the China which went to the helpof the DPRK in 1950 was not a nuclearsuperpower but was itself a poor agrariancountry. The social gap between Chinesevolunteers and North Korean civilians wasmuch smaller than that between US forces andlocal civilians in the south.

Korean civilian and Chinese volunteer –Photograph displayed in the Memorial ofthe War to Resist US Aggression and Aid

Korea, Dandong

The Chinese memorial in fact gives a fuller andmore vivid impression of the suffering of NorthKorean civilians than does the DPRK’s own warmuseum. Its photographs offer graphicdepictions of devastation produced by thebombing of North Korean towns and villages,and of lines of refugees fleeing the fighting –

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many of them heading across the Yalu Riverinto China. There are also exhibits dedicated tothe claim that US forces used biologicalwarfare in Korea – a claim echoed in the warmuseum in Pyongyang. [31] The dangers of warin Korea spi l l ing over into China aredramatized by photos, not only of the influx ofrefugees across the river, but also by images ofthe bombing of the rail-bridge spanning theYalu River between Dandong and the NorthKorean city of Sinuiju. One half of thedestroyed bridge still stands, and is amongDandong’s main tourist attractions. The warmemorial’s displays of photos of damagedbuildings and injured civilians in Dandong andsurrounding towns are a sharp reminder of thebombing raids across the border into Chineseterritory which were carried out by US planeson several occasions during the war.

One distinctive feature of the Chinese memorialis the fact that, as well as emphasising theimpact of the war on China and the relationshipbetween the Korean conflict and the Taiwanissue, it casts a somewhat unfamiliar light onthe contentious question of the maltreatment ofprisoners-of-war. In the United States and itsallies (including Australia) perhaps the best-remembered aspect of the war was the killing,maltreatment and “brainwashing” of prisoners-of-war by North Korea. It was during theKorean War that the term “brainwashing” cameinto general use in English. In the Memorial ofthe War to Resist US Aggression and AidKorea , on contrary , the d isp lays onmaltreatment of prisoners of war all relate tothe sufferings of Chinese and North Koreanprisoners in South Korean prisoner-of-warcamps.

An important obstacle to the signing of thearmistice was the question of whether allprisoners-of-war should be returned to theircountries of origin after the conflict, or whethersome would be allowed to defect. For example,would North Korean soldiers who wished tochange their allegiance to South Korea be

allowed to do so? Would Chinese soldiers whorenounced communism be allowed to go toTaiwan rather than being sent back to thePRC? The United States and its allies favouredallowing prisoners-of-war in Southern prisonsto determine their own destiny, while the DPRKand China insisted that all should be returnedto their place of origin.

However, as documented in the records of theInternational Committee of the Red Cross(which inspected Southern but not Northernprisoner-of-war camps) the US stance hadtroubling consequences. In the overcrowdedROK prisoner-of-war camps, violent contestsfor the allegiance of inmates broke out, bothbetween prisoners themselves and betweenprisoners and their guards, resulting inassaults, lynchings and even the forcibletattooing of political slogans on the skin ofsome inmates (events dramat ica l lyreconstructed in Ha Jin’s novel War Trash).Particularly widespread violence occurred atthe massive Koje-Do prisoner-of war camp, butthere were also serious incidents elsewhere,including one at a camp on Jeju Island where,on 1 October 1952, guards from the UNCommand fired on rioting Chinese prisoners-of-war killing over fifty people. [32] It is this issue(and not, of course, the mistreatment ofprisoners-of-war in the DPRK) that iscommemorated in Dandong, where it is used toemphasise both the courage of the Chinesevolunteers and the violence inflicted on bothNorth Koreans and Chinese by the US (whosecontrol over the camps is stressed in thememorial’s narrative).

The story told in the Memorial of the War toResist US Aggression and Aid Korea ends, notwith the armistice of 1953, but rather in 1958,when the Chinese volunteers who had stayedon in North Korea to work on postwarreconstruction projects finally returned home.Despite the memorial’s frequent references to afriendship between PRC and DPRK forged inblood, there is evidence that the continuing

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presence of Chinese troops on Korean soil afterthe armistice led to increasing tensions withthe local population. [33] Meanwhile, Mao’sChina was embarking on its ill-fated “GreatLeap Forward”, and had its own pressingconcerns. Against this historical background,and amid unsuccessful calls for the removal ofall foreign troops from the Korean Peninsula,North Korea was left to defend itself.

Like the Victorious Fatherland Liberation WarMuseum in Pyongyang, the Dandong monumentpresents an official, state controlled historywhose broad outlines are rarely challenged inpublic discourse. Its rhetoric of victory overbrutal American imperialism also echoes NorthKorean rhetoric. But looking at the interactionbetween visitors and exhibits in Dandong, Icould not help feeling that something else wasalso going on here. I visited the memorial withtwo British companions on a holiday weekend,when the building and its forecourt were full ofstudents and young families, many of themstylishly dressed in fashions that could havecome from Paris or LA. Several of the childrenclutched Hello Kitty balloons in one hand asthey surveyed the images of devastated Koreancities and of the Chinese victory on theCheongcheon. Many of the college studentswere eager to be photographed with us, andseemed much more interested in practicingtheir English than in perusing evidence of USimperialism on the Korean Peninsula – animperialism of which we, presumably, shouldhave been seen as representatives. Just one oldman (perhaps a veteran of the war) looked onwith an expression of quiet disapproval.

Visitors viewing the cyclorama of theBattle of the River Cheongcheon, Memorialof the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid

Korea, Dandong

From the perspective of China, North Korea isno longer a fellow struggling revolutionarystate. It is a society whose political economyand lifestyle stand in stark contrast to China’snew-found prosperity, but whose political criseshave the potential to interrupt the enjoyment ofthat prosperity. While China has opened itselfto the outside world and developed closeeconomic ties with former enemies such as theUS and Japan, North Korea for complexinternal and external reasons, remains frozenin the Cold War era. The changed Chineseperspective on its Korean neighbour does not,of course, mean that China’s narratives of theKorean War are about to be rewritten along USor South Korean lines. Rather, this shifthighlights the uncomfortable position of NorthKorea as the interstice between the long-standing US presence in Asia and the newly-emerged Chinese global power. In both the USand China, long-standing memories (orforgettings) of the Korean War face newchallenges. How the memory of the war isrewritten in both countries will affect, and beaffected by, the changing balance of power inAsia.

The Australian War Memorial, Canberra

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The Australian War Memorial occupies apowerful symbolic location in the geomancy ofthe planned capital of Canberra. Located at theend of one of the major avenues that radiateout from the core of the city – ParliamentHouse – its site embodies the insoluble bondbetween war and the nation. Within thememorial, though, the space dedicated to theKorean War is relatively small – one-and-halfrooms on the lower floor. To reach it, you mustpass a long line of photographs recallingAustralians’ involvement in a whole range ofconflicts, from the Boer War to Iraq. Pride ofplace belongs to the First and Second WorldWars. For Australia, as for China, the KoreanWar was an unwelcome event which arrivedjust as the nation was recovering from a muchlarger conflict. Australians, as the memorial’sdisplay reminds visitors, were among the firstto respond to the United Nations’ call for forcesto serve in Korea, but the scale of Australia’sinvolvement (compared to that of China or eventhe United States) was relatively small in termsof total numbers – around 17,000 Australiansserved in the Korean War, and 339 were killed.[34]

View of Parliament House from theforecourt of the Australian War Memorial,

Canberra

Like the War Memorial of Korea, the AustralianWar Memorial aims to convey the story of war

to young generations who know nothing butpeace (or, more precisely, who live in a countrywhere recent engagements in war have beenfar away events in foreign countries); and ituses similar techniques to draw in a youthfulaudience. In this case the theme (when Ivisited) was not Thomas the Tank Engine but“A is for Animal”, a special children’s display ofmammals, birds and even insects at war,featuring everything from camel-riding soldiersto carrier pigeons. The effect, however, seemedsimilar to that achieved in Seoul. There wereplenty of children in the building, but fewwandered into the rooms devoted to the KoreanWar, and those who did seemed to wander outagain rather quickly.

The design of the Australian War Memorial’sKorean War section, which was remodeled in2008, is surprisingly reminiscent of the muchlarger Memorial of the War to Resist USAggression and Aid Korea in Dandong. Like itsChinese counterpart, the Australian memorialmakes much use of artifacts – uniforms,backpacks, water flasks, packets of cigarettesetc. – to evoke the life of soldiers at the front.Since several of the main Austral ianengagements were with Chinese forces, theCanberra memorial includes a substantialdisplay of objects captured from Chinesesoldiers, including a rather touching array ofphotographs and other personal items from aChinese woman soldier killed in battle. Like allthe museums I have discussed here, theAustralian War Memorial also seeks to conveythe experience of battle through the use ofdioramas. Here it is the April 1951 Battle ofKapyong, in which Australians played a centralpart, that is immortalized in diorama form. Thisreconstruction brings the story of the battle tolife with the help of a soundtrack of the voice ofa veteran describing his experiences, but thesize and visual effect of the diorama itself is farless impressive than that of the Pyongyangmuseum’s reconstruction of the struggle for theChol Pass.

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After a rather cursory explanation of Koreanhistory, the Australian War Memorial tellsvisitors that on 25 June 1950 Soviet-backedNorth Korea invaded South Korea. The UNSecurity Council demanded the North Koreanswithdraw. When they refused, the UnitedNations intervened, led by the United States.Twenty countries, including Australia,eventually responded to the UN appeal. No onerealised the war would last for three years andthat occupation forces would be required forsome years after. [35]In the Australian War Memorial, then, theUnited Nations Command is centre stage, withthe focus (unsurprisingly) being on itsAustralian contingent.

Display illustrating Australianparticipation in the Korean War,

Australian War Memorial, Canberra

The unprovoked nature of the North Koreanattack is strongly emphasised in the AustralianWar Memorial, which cites a visit by twoAustralian officers to the 38th parallel shortlybefore the war broke out. On the basis of theirobservations, the officers concluded (accordingto the memorial’s account) that “South Koreanforces were organized entirely for defence”.[36] Missing from this account are the repeatedreports (some of them from Australianobservers) of the belligerence from theSouthern side which provided an important

part of the background to war. For example, in1949 the South Korean Prime Minister,proposing a toast to officials of the UnitedNations Commission on Korea (UNCOK),proclaimed that “his next drink would be inPyongyang”. The Commission’s Australian headtook this boast seriously: “Foreign Missions inSeoul agree that there is a possibility that theGovernment may feel sufficiently strong toembark on an attack of the North within a fewmonths”. [37]

Looking at the war from an Australianperspective, however, also has otherunexpected effects. For example, it reveals anintriguing aspect almost entirely absent fromthe other three war museums discussed here –the Japanese dimension of the Korean War.Because Japan was not a combatant, and wasunder allied occupation when the war began, itis easy to forget how significant a place Korea’sformer colonial ruler played in the conflict. But,as the Canberra memorial displays reveal,Australians were able to respond quickly to theUN call because they were already based inJapan. “Thousands of Australians,” thememorial notes, “visited Japan on their way toKorea or on leave from the war”. [38]Australian nurses who looked after thewounded were mostly based at hospitals inJapan. Indeed the headquarters of the UnitedNations Command itself was located in Tokyo,while the factories of Japan provided massivelogistical support for the UN forces fighting inKorea. Exhibited items from the everyday life ofAustralian servicemen fighting in Korea includebooklets on life in Japan and a language primerentitled Japanese in Three Weeks.

Among the exhibits are also letters home senthome to Australia by soldiers in Japan, waitingto go into combat in Korea, and these remindus of other neglected aspects of the impact thatthis mass of foreign troops had upon thesociety of Northeast Asia: an Australianserviceman (with rather endearing frankness)writes home to ask Mum for a large parcel of

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goods, including a large amount of saccharinewhich, he explains, is “intended for sale on thelocal black market, but if anyone asks it will dome no harm if you say that I have diabetes.”[39] Other social aspects of the war, such as itsimpact on the spread of prostitution, and thewhole dark topic of rape in war, are mentionedin none of the museums I have visited, thoughthe issue of rape is hauntingly evoked in someKorean fiction on the war period – works likePak Wanseo’s Three Days in That Autumn [Keukaeul eui saheul tongan]. [40]

Faces of Australian servicemen, as well aspaintings and photographs by Australianparticipants in the war, line the walls of theAustralian War Memorial’s Korean War display.There is, however, one noticeable differencebetween these images and the faces of theChinese volunteers in Dandong, or of SouthKorean servicemen on the walls of the WarMemorial of Korea. In China and Korea theservicemen remembered are heroes – peoplesingled out for exceptional deeds of valourduring the war. The Australian War Memorial,on the o ther hand , p r ides i t se l f onremembering the “ordinary digger” – soldierswho may have done nothing more remarkablethan to survive long enough to tell their tale.

On the other hand, this memorial conveys littleimpression of the wartime fate of ordinaryKorean civilians. A two-sentence statementreminds v is i tors that “the war had adevastating impact on Korea. Over two millioncivilians were killed”. But there are almost noimages of destruction to Korean life andproperty, and the documentary footage ofbombing raids shown on the video screenspresent the bombing always from the birds-eyeview of the pilot, not from ground level. Themost detailed description of human sufferingconcerns the plight of Australian prisoners-of-war, some of whom endured interrogation,isolation, extreme deprivation and torture atthe hands of their captors. The War Memorial’sdisplay on prisoners-of-war discusses the issue

of “brainwashing”, and rightly notes that“imprisonment under the North Koreans andChinese was extremely harsh. Little respectwas paid to the 1949 Geneva Convention”. Onthe other hand, the memorial’s narrative of thewar remains silent on the violence in Southernprisoner-of-war camps, and justifies the UNCommand’s stance on the prisoner-of-war issueby stating (incorrectly) that the “GenevaConvention forbade the forcible repatriation ofprisoners of war”. [41]

Unlike the museums in Springfield Ill.,Pyongyang and Dandong, the Australian WarMemorial seems to have no impulse to proclaimthe Korean War as a “victory”. Australians havea long history of fighting in other people’s war,with very mixed results, and this may help toexplain a willingness to depict the war’soutcome as a stalemate. The section devoted tothe Korean War flows almost seamlessly intoother Cold War conflicts in which Australianstook part: the Malayan Emergency, theIndonesian Confrontation, the Vietnam War.One war ended, but the Cold War went on. Thememorial’s bald account of the signing of thearmistice concludes with the words: “a peacetreaty has never been signed and Korea liveson a war footing, no closer to unification thanin 1950”. [42] By the time visitors read this,they are already being half-deafened by theroar of the genuine working helicopter which isthe highlight of the section dedicated to theVietnam War, just round the corner.

Beyond Structured Absence

The monuments we have explored here callthemselves by various names. Some describethemselves as “memorials”, others as“museums”. But in fact, all seek to combine thetasks of commemoration and of communicatinghistory – and therein lies a dilemma. Amemorial may have multiple purposes. At onelevel, memorials (like graves) are deeplypersonal. They are places where the relativesand comrades of the dead come to remember

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and mourn those they loved. In this sense,there is no need for a memorial to be impartialor judicious, or to tell the whole story of aconflict. All it needs to do is to provide comfortand a focus of memory for those who havesuffered loss. At another level, however, manymemorials (and certainly all the ones I havediscussed here) have a public and national role.They are intended, not simply to speak to thosewith personal connections to the war, but alsoto convey a message to the nation. In thisrespect all the monuments I have discussedspeak with one voice (though to differentaudiences): their message is always: “ourmilitary fought a heroic f ight againstunprovoked aggression”. Some would also addt h e p r o n o u n c e m e n t “ … a n d w o n . ”Superimposed upon this ambivalent role aspersonal and as public memorials, all fourmonuments also proclaim their credentials asmuseums. They aim, not simply to provide amaterial focus for commemoration, but also toconvey the story of the war to a generation whodid not experience it.How can these three roles possibly ber e c o n c i l e d ? H o w c a n a m e m o r i a lsimultaneously preserve the memories of theindividual dead (whose deaths may have beendramatic and heroic or messy and inglorious),provide a positive focus for national pride andtell a comprehensive and balanced story of thewar to future generations? The task is surely animpossible one, and this attempt to achieve theimpossible is one reason for the depth of thedivide between the versions of Korean Warhistory presented in the museums I havediscussed. This dilemma affects countrieswhere political debate is relatively free, as wellas those where it is tightly controlled. InAustralia and South Korea there is far morepublic scope to debate and criticize the contentof war memorials than there is in China orNorth Korea. But in Australia and South Korea,as well as in China and North Korea, thetensions between commemoration, nationalidentity-making and history-telling producestructured absence.

Politics and history flow into one another.Divergent memories of the Korean War fuel thefears that produce contemporary politicaltensions; political tensions in turn make itharder to create the dialogue that might help toreconcile divergent memories. Roland Bleikerand Young-J in Hoang, in their s tudy“Remembering and Forgetting the KoreanWar”, stress the value of “tolerating differentcoexisting narrative” of the war. [43] But it isalso equally important that different narrativesbe brought into contact with one another. Thetask for historians – particularly for historianswho live in countries where official versions ofhistory can be publicly debated – is to use allmeans made available by our globalised mediato set national narratives side by side. In thisway the war memorials of each country can (asit were) be virtually joined into a single space.So, perhaps, the wall surrounding each nation’smemorial may be broken down, or at leastperforated, allowing the light of every nationalnarrative (however faintly and distantly) toilluminate the darkness of the others, andenabling the perspectives of the many victimsof war to emerge from the shadows.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor of JapaneseHistory, Convenor of the Division of Pacific andAsian History in the College of Asia and thePacific, Australian National University, and aJapan Focus associate. Her most recent book isExodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan'sCold War. She wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.

Recommended citation: Tessa Morris-Suzuki,"Remembering the Unfinished Conflict:Museums and the Contested Memory of theKorean War," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol.29-4-09, July 27, 2009.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0742554422/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20http://www.amazon.com/dp/0742554422/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20

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This article is part of a seriescommemorating the sixtiethanniversary of the Korean War.Other articles on the sixtieth anniversary ofthe US-Korean War outbreak are:• Mark Caprio, Neglected Questions on the“Forgotten War”: South Korea and theUnited States on the Eve of the KoreanWar.• Steven Lee, The United States, the UnitedNations, and the Second Occupation ofKorea, 1950-1951.• Heonik Kwon, Korean War Traumas.• Han Kyung-koo, Legacies of War: TheKorean War – 60 Years On. Additional articles on the US-Korean Warinclude:• Mel Gurtov, From Korea to Vietnam: TheOrigins and Mindset of Postwar U.S.Interventionism.• Kim Dong-choon, The Truth andReconciliation Commission of Korea:Uncovering the Hidden Korean War• Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Cycles of History:China, North Korea, and the End of theKorean War.• Tim Beal, Korean Brinkmanship,American Provocation, and the Road toWar: The Manufacturing of a Crisis.• Wada Haruki, From the Firing atYeonpyeong Island to a ComprehensiveSolution to the Problems of Division andWar in Korea.• Nan Kim with an introduction by JohnMcGlynn, Factsheet: West Sea Crisis inKorea.

Notes

[1] One report which did raise this pointappeared in The Australian on 27 May 2009.[2] Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Narratives of NationBuilding in Korea: A Genealogy of Patriotism,Armonk, M. E. Sharpe, 2003.[3] Bruce Cumings, “The Korean War: What isit that We are Remembering to Forget”, in

Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter eds,Ruptured Histories: War, Memory and the postCold War in Asia, Harvard, Harvard UniversityPress, 2007, pp. 266-290.[4] Philip West and Suh Ji-Moon, Rememberingthe ‘Forgotten War’: The Korean War throughLiterature and Art, Armonk, M. E. Sharpe,2001. On changing Korean memories of thewar, see also Roland Bleiker and Young-JuHoang, “Remembering and Forgetting theKorean War: From Trauma to Recollection”, inDuncan Bell ed., Memory, Trauma and WorldPolitics: Reflections on the Relationshipbetween Past and Present, London, PalgraveMacmillan, 2006, pp. 195-212.[5] See for example, David R. McCann, “OurForgotten War: The Korean War in Korean andAmerican Popular Culture”, in Philip West,Steven I. Levine and Jackie Hiltz eds, America’sWars in Asia: A Cultural Approach to Historyand Memory, Armonk, M. E. Sharpe, 1997, pp.65-83; Paul M. Edwards, To Acknowledge aWar: The Korean War in American Memory,Greenwood Publ ishing Group, 2000,particularly pp. 23-26; West and Suh eds.,Remembering the “Forgotten War”; RolandBleiker and Young-Ju Hoang, “Rememberingand Forgetting the Korean War: From Traumato Reconciliation”, in Duncan Bell ed., Memory,Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on theRelationship Between Past and Present,London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp.195-212; Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Jiyul Kim,“The Korean War after the Cold War:Commemorating the Armistice Agreement inSouth Korea” in Jager and Mitter eds, RupturedHistories, op. cit., pp. 233-265; Bruce Cumings,“The Korean War” op. cit.[6] Ha Jin, War Trash, New York, PantheonBooks, 2004.[7] See Charles J. Stanley, Sang-Hun Choe andMartha Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri:AHidden Nightmare from the Korea War, NewYork, Henry Holt and Co, 2001; Kill ‘em All:The American Military in Korea (producer,Jeremy Williams), BBC TV “Timewatch” series,first broadcast 1 February 2002.

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[8] See the Korean War National Museumwebsite, accessed 1 June 2009.[9] Korean War National Museum website op.cit.; the photograph is uncannily reminiscent ofthe famous Life magazine photograph of anabandoned little boy taken among the ruins ofShanghai’s railway station after it was bombedby the Japanese in 1937.[10] Sun Hongjiu and Zhang Zhongyong eds., Ninggu de Lishi Shunjian: Jinian ZhongguoRenmin Zhiyuanjun Kangmeiyuanchao ChuguoZuozhan Wushi Zhounian, Shenyang: LiaoningRenmin Chubanshe, 2000 (English translationas in the original).[11] See Susan A. Crane, “Introduction: OfMuseums and Memory”, in Susan A. Crane ed.,Museums and Memory, Stanford, StanfordUniversity Press, pp. 1-16; 2000; SheilaWatson, “History Museums, CommunityIdentities and a Sense of Place: RewritingHistories”, in Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeodand Sheila Watson eds., Museum Revolutions:How Museums Change and Are Changed,London, Routledge, 2007, pp. 160-172; TessaMorris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us: Media,Memory, History, London, Verso, 2005, ch. 1.[12] Jager and Kim, “The Korean War after theCold War”, p. 242.[13] War Memorial of Korea, Seoul, n.d., p. 4.The emphasis on Silla as the origin of a unitedKorea is disputed by North Korean historians.[14] Jager and Kim, p. 252; Jager and Kim arehere citing the work of Pai Hyung-Il on Koreanarchaeology and national identity.[15] Jager and Kim, pp. 246-252.[16] See for example Mun Gyong-Su, Saishûtô4.3 Jiken: ‘Tamuna”no Kuni no Shi to Saisei noMonogatari, Tokyo, Heibonsha, 2008, p. 8.[17] Do Khiem and Kim Sung-Soo, “Crimes,Concealment and South Korea’s Truth andReconciliation Commission”, The Asia-PacificJournal: Japan Focus, 1 August 2008.[18] For recent discussions of the Nogun Ri andother massacres, see for example CharleyHanley, “The Massacre at No Gun Ri: ArmyLetter Reveals US Intent”, The Asia-PacificJournal: Japan Focus, 15 April 2007; Bruce

Cumings, “The South Korean Massacre atTaejon: New Evidence on US Responsibility andCover Up”, The Asia-Pacific Journal: JapanFocus, 23 July 2008.[19] War Memorial of Korea, op. cit., p. 28.[20] War Memorial of Korea, op.cit., p. 21.[21] War Memorial of Korea, op. cit., p. 27.[22] War Memorial of Korea, op.cit., p. 25.[23] Hyon Yong Chol, Victorious FatherlandLiberation War Museum, Pyongyang, VictoriousFatherland Liberation War Museum, n.d., p. 6.Since 1997 the North Korean governmentofficially has used the Juche calendar, underwhich years are numbered from 1912, the dateof the late DPRK leader Kim Il-Sung’s birth.[24] Steven Hugh Lee, The Korean War,Harlow, Pearson Education Ltd., 2001, p. 88.[25] Kim In Il, Outstanding Leadership andBrilliant Victory, Pyongyang, Korea Pictorial,1993, p. 63.[26] On the history of the memorial, seeDandong Municipal People’s Government,“Memorial of War to Resist US Aggression andAid Korea”, press release 19 June 2005,accessed 10 June 2009.[27] Explanatory panel in the Memorial of theWar to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea,Dandong; viewed 2 May 2009.[28] Gye-Dong Kim’s Foreign Intervention inKorea, Aldershot, Dartmouth Press, 1993, p.123, is among the works that points out theUS’s seeming hesitation about defendingTaiwan in 1950.[29] Gye-Dong Kim’s Foreign Intervention inKorea, Aldershot, Dartmouth Press, 1993, p.123, is among the works that points out theUS’s seeming hestation about defendingTaiwan in 1950.[30] Lee, The Korean War, p. 126.[31] Controversy has surrounded these claimsever since they were first raised in 1952. In1998 the Sankei, a right-of-centre Japanesenewspaper, published excerpts from a set ofdocuments which its Moscow correspondentclaimed to have found in the state archives ofthe former Soviet Union. These documentsostensibly proved that public statements by the

http://www.kwnm.org//index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1http://www.kwnm.org//index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1http://japanfocus.org/-C-Hanley/2408http://japanfocus.org/-C-Hanley/2408http://japanfocus.org/-Bruce-Cumings/2826http://japanfocus.org/-Bruce-Cumings/2826http://english.dandong.gov.cn/2106/EN_DDS_ZF_ZWGK.nsf/0/9FB473314172410A482570250004EFA8?OpenDocument

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DPRK and its allies that the US had usedbiological weapons were deliberate liesfabricated for propaganda purposes. However,questions stil l surround the Japanesejournalist’s research. The Sankei reporter issaid to have copied the documents by hand(since photocopying was not permitted), and noother researcher has since managed to obtainaccess to the originals. Nor has the USgovernment pressed the Russians to releasethese documents. For further details of thecontroversy surrounding this issue, see KathrynWeathersby, “Deceiving the Deceivers:Moscow, Bei j ing, Pyongyang and theAllegations of Bacteriological Weapons Use inKorea”, Cold War International Project Bulletin,no. 11, 1998; Peter Pringle, “Did the US StartGerm Warfare?” New Statesman, 25 October1999.[32] G. Hoffmann, “Rapport confidentialconcernant l’incident au Compound no. 7 deUN POW Branch Corps 3A, Cheju-Do du 1eroctobre 1952”, in archives of the InternationalCommittee of the Red Cross, Geneva, filenumber B AG 210 056-012, Incidents dans lescamps, 08.02.1952-13.04.1953.[33] In December 1957, the Soviet Ambassadorin Pyongyang, A. M. Ivanov recorded thecontent of a meeting with his Chinesecounterpart in his official diary. During thismeeting the Chinese Ambassador remarkedthat the withdrawal of Chinese volunteers fromNorth Korea would benefit China-DPRKrelations because it would “help to reducecertain abnormalities in the relationshipbetween the [Korean] population and theChinese volunteers” which were associatedwith “breaches of military discipline on the partof the latter”. See “Dnevnik Posla SSSR vKNDR A. M. Ivanova za period s 14 do 20Dekabrya 1957 Goda”, in archival materialfrom the state archives of the former SovietUnion, held by the Jungang Ilbo newspaper,Seoul; file no. 57-4-1-3, entry for 20 December1957.[34] Ben Evans, Out in the Cold: Australia’sInvolvement in the Korean War – 1950-1953,

Canberra, Commonwealth Department ofVeterans Affairs, 2001, p. 89.[35] Explanatory panel in the Australian WarMemorial, viewed 14 June 2009.[36] Explanatory panel in the Australian WarMemorial, viewed 14 June 2009.[37] Department of External Affairs, Canberra,Departmental Dispatch no. 23/1949 fromAustralian Mission in Japan, “United NationsCommission on Korea”, 25 February 1949, p.20, held in Australian National Archives,Canberra, series no. A1838, control symbol3127/2/1 part 4, “Korea – Political Situation –South Korea”.[38] Explanatory panel in the Australian WarMemorial, viewed 14 June 2009.[39] Explanatory panel in the Australian WarMemorial, viewed 14 June 2009.[40] Pak Wanseo, Three Days in That Autumn(trans. Ryu Sukhee), Seoul, JimoondangInternational, 2001.[41] Explanatory panels in the Australian WarMemorial, viewed 14 June 2009. As the officialhistory of the International Committee of theRed Cross points out, there was debate aboutincluding such a clause in the 1949 GenevaConventions, but in the end it was shelved. TheConventions include a statement that sick andinjured prisoners-of-war may not be repatriatedagainst their will while hostilities arecontinuing, but in relation to repatriation afterthe end of a war, state only that “prisoners ofwar shall be released and repatriated withoutdelay after the cessation of active hostilities”;see Catherine Rey-Schyrr, De Yalta à Dien BienPhu: Histoire du Comité internationale de laCroix-Rouge, 1945-1955, Geneva, InternationalCommittee of the Red Cross, 2007, p. 276; also“Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatmentof Prisoners of War,” on the website of theO f f i c e o f t h e U n i t e d N a t i o n s H i g hCommissioner for Human Rights (accessed 16June 2009).[42] Explanatory panel in the Australian WarMemorial, viewed 14 June 2009.[43] Bleiker and Hoang, “Remembering andForgetting the Korean War”, op. cit., p. 212.

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/Bulletin_11_Korea.pdfhttp://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/Bulletin_11_Korea.pdfhttp://www.criminal-justice-careers.com/crime/the-geneva-conventions.htmlhttp://www.criminal-justice-careers.com/crime/the-geneva-conventions.html

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