Battleship Island and the transnational dynamics of cultural memory between South Korea and Japan

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines the transnational impact of mediated memory of Korean forced labour through a case study of the South Korean blockbuster Battleship Island (2017)—a historical action film about the mass escape of Korean coalminers from forced labour on Hashima Island. Rather than focusing on the content of the reconstructed past in the film and its historical (in)accuracies, we explore the film’s entanglement with a wider mnemonic landscape and political intent in and beyond South Korea. We argue that the film became an effective cultural memory through a dynamic network of media and social practices that developed around it. By thus treating the film as a material object in the broader media environment and examining its transnational social performance, we highlight Battleship Island’s role in turning Hashima into a new symbolic focal point of South Korea–Japan memory conflict and a transnationally available icon of Korean suffering. Further, we suggest that the film stimulated the production and circulation of alternative memory narratives of Hashima by Japanese rightist memory activists. While recent works on transnational memory in the European context tend to focus on cosmopolitan memory that promotes cross-border identification with victims, this study provides insight on how transnational memory dynamics can develop towards a different direction of reinforcing nationalism.