On the morning of August 15th this year I walked around my apartment complex and counted the flags. Nine or ten.
We didn't hang one either.
For a lot of people this day feels less like "Liberation Day" and more like "just another day of summer vacation."
This isn't meant to criticize that. I just got curious. Why do we actually commemorate this day? And how specifically could we explain that reason?
Descendants We Can't Find, Medals We Can't Deliver
One number stopped me. Four out of every ten independence movement honorees have a commendation that was never delivered, because no descendant could be found. (Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs, 2024)
The reason is simple: so few records survive from that era that even descendants often don't know who their ancestors were, leaving a real break in the historical thread.
The National Institute of Korean History has commissioned the Institute for Research in Collaborationist Activities to collect oral histories from descendants of independence activists, but even projects like this are often limited in scope, tied to a specific anniversary or research grant.
In the end, it always comes back to the same problem: there are far more stories to record than there is the staff or budget to record them.
1945 Keeps Slipping Further Away
Most people who actually lived through liberation on August 15, 1945 are now in their nineties or older.
And the people who can still testify to that day in their own voice, like the surviving comfort women, grow fewer every year.
When a generation fades, the history that generation carried in its own body fades along with it.
What we'll inherit instead is that history filtered through textbooks, documentaries, and a handful of films.
When History Stops Being Memory and Becomes Information
History with no one left who actually lived it stops being "memory" and becomes mere "information."
Information turns up when you search for it.
Memory doesn't work that way. Someone's silence is attached to it, so it resists being summarized.
Maybe Liberation Day quietly turning into just "a day off" is one small symptom of this history sliding from memory into information.
So What Should We Actually Ask?
Every August, Liberation Day ceremonies are held, the names of independence activists are read aloud, and the news brings up the comfort women and forced labor issues once again.
And by August 16th, most of it is forgotten again.
I'm not trying to say this is anyone's fault. But the more this cycle repeats, the more we forget how rare this moment is. The last generation who actually lived that history is still here.
This Liberation Day, I want to ask myself a slightly different question than usual.
Why do I commemorate Liberation Day? I still can't answer that in my own words.
I'd Love to Hear What You Think
Are there stories in your own family from someone who lived through liberation? I'd like to hear them, even briefly.
In the next post, I'll pick up this thread in more detail.
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