We traveled to Seoul and Busan, South Korea to get a holistic collective and individual perspective of the war memories during the Korean war, in which South Korea has been both a victim of Japanese colonialism and forced under sexual slavery system, or comfort women issue, and speaking to scholars and historians on their opinions of how Korea displays its ironic nationalism as both a victim but a victimizer; due to the refusal to apologize and give reparations to the Korean soldiers who massacred innocent Vietnamese civilians during the war.

We traveled to Seoul as it portrays the collective memories of the state, which is that the US and UN forces “liberated” the South from the communist invasion of the North in 1950.

We went to Busan which was the temporary capital of Korea during the Korean war. Due to the ongoing division of the Korean peninsula between North and South and the presence of the US military forces, South Korea serves as a viable and necessary location of research when confronting war memories. In addition, the visit to museums in South Korea allowed the students to experience a “colonized victims’ perspective” with regard to the memories of the Pacific war and understand the implications of the current disputes between South Korea and Japan over the legacies of the war (i.e. the Comfort Women” and “Forced Labor Workers”). For these reasons, South Korea is the ideal location for this LC.