The Demands of Self-Narrative in the Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War

This paper charts a landscape of military interrogation during the Korean War that has been shaped by both the legacies of Japanese colonial police rule and the claims of U.S. imperial ambitions in the post-1945 world.  In the U.S. and United Nations-controlled POW camps of the Korean War, there were two overlapping, intertwined systems of interrogation – the official, U.S. military-created interrogation rooms, and the unofficial interrogation rooms created by the Korean POWs themselves.  By examining interrogation transcripts of over 300 investigation case files created regarding POW incidents during the war, I will focus on how Korean POWs attempted to navigate between these two systems.  I argue that the U.S. construction of interrogation was highly influenced by notions in psychological science about the “psyche” and “racial intelligence.”  On the other hand, the tactics used by Korean POWs belied a continuing mobilization and re-invention of Japanese methods of tenko, or conversion.  Between these two different demands for self-narration in the interrogation room, how the Korean POW employ narrative strategies that enabled his or her survival in the POW camp, and in life outside the camp after the war?  I will conclude the paper with reflections on the narrative techniques used by former prisoners of war in their later memoirs of their experience.  The high stakes of self-narration did not lower after the signing of the ceasefire in 1953 – indeed, as displaced persons at the war’s end, narrating oneself became a key element to establishing belonging and legitimacy in a landscape of continuing civil war and violence.