Korean Language Loss Under Japanese Colonialism and Beyond

Korean Language Loss Under Japanese Colonialism and Beyond

This article relates to Flashlight

In Susan Choi's Flashlight, main character Seok, later referred to as Serk, spends his childhood with his Korean family in Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea. He attends a Japanese school, where he speaks and learns to write Japanese. He believes he is Japanese until the occupation ends, leading to a humorous and emotionally brutal exchange with his family that is illustrative of what Korean people, at home and abroad, lost during this period of enforced Japanese language and schooling:

"But what's Korea?" he asked as they turned to walk home.
"Let me die," Auntie Kim said.
"Korea is the homeland of Koreans," his mother told him.
"But what are Koreans?"
"We are," said his mother. "You are. That's why your name isn't really Hiroshi, it's 석."
"What do you mean my name isn't Hiroshi?" he cried.
"I told you," Auntie Kim said to his mother again.
His mother replied, "But what choice did we have?"

During Japan's occupation of Korea (1910-1945), Japan assumed military control of the Korean peninsula and its institutions, including schools, and used education as a means of assimilating Koreans to Japanese language and culture. Widespread displacement and enforced immigration also resulted in many Koreans, like Seok's family on Jeju Island, being relocated to Japan. While the war waged on Korean life and identity was wide-ranging, the attempted erasure of the Korean language, including the suppression of hangul, the Korean writing system, was arguably one of the most significant elements. And although the occupation ended in 1945, Korean people who grew up or lived during Japanese rule continued to experience profound effects of this language loss that in some cases still impact later generations.

As a child, Seok understands Korean from hearing his parents speak it, but he rarely speaks it himself and has never learned the written language. Later, after moving to the United States and marrying an American woman, he spends time with a Korean colleague, Tom. Serk's wife, Anne, portrays her husband's attitude towards the language in a letter to a friend: "Serk even claims, at times, that he CAN'T speak Korean—he and Tom quarreled about this—in Korean, I can only assume!" Later, when Serk's adult daughter Louisa is learning to speak Korean, she thinks of it as "the language her father apparently discarded to the back of his linguistic closet before she was ever his child, a language he possessed in its totality and never bothered to use."

Fluency and degrees of fluency in a language can be nuanced even when one's relationship to it isn't complicated by personal and emotional factors, and Serk's downplaying of his Korean background in general has been bound up with not wanting to endanger his residence in the US by calling attention to his family's ties with North Korea. In this way, the suppression of the Korean language, for Serk, continues long after the Japanese occupation for reasons related to global interests and geopolitical power, even as those around him remain unaware of this.

In Beyond the Shadow of Camptown, an account of Korean military brides in America, Ji-Yeon Yuh addresses the effects language and power had on women who lived through the Japanese colonial period and later moved to the US, many of whom made life choices in precarious situations. Learning first Japanese and then English was essential to their economic prospects during the periods of respective dominance of Japan and America. They had also been discouraged from speaking Korean or never fully learned it, leaving them to struggle with the language later on:

"Foreign domination had literally left these women with no language to call their own. Far from being a liberating, transnational, and multicultural experience that allowed them to cross borders at will and revel in the interplay of multiple tongues, their contacts with multiple languages had been painful, frustrating, and even humiliating."

Both Serk's situation and that of the military brides call attention to the varied, complicated, and sometimes permanent ways that the Japanese occupation (along with subsequent American military presence in South Korea) changed many Korean people's relationship to their language, and how it has presented obstacles to speakers in the Korean diaspora passing the language on to their descendants.

Replica of Hunmin Jeongeum Haerye, the book in which the creation of hangul is explained, at the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, photo by Kbarends

Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities

This "beyond the book article" relates to Flashlight. It originally ran in July 2025 and has been updated for the May 2026 paperback edition. Go to magazine.