Please note that this lecture will begin at 7pm, and all posted event times are in the U.S. Eastern Time Zone.

Korean photographer Kim Jong Wook has spent the last seventeen years taking photographs of elderly Japanese women who married Korean men during the colonial period (1910-1945), accompanied their husbands’ repatriation to Korea, and remained in Korea after liberation in 1945. These women were housed in Nazareth Nursing Center in Gyeongju, which served as a shelter. As spouses from the former colonizing power, Japanese women in postwar Korea often became targets of both misogynic and ethnic violence and were not afforded social or domestic protection. Nazareth provided a permanent home for these women, where Kim built close relationships with them to gain enough access to take photographs of their portraits and daily lives. These photographs, alongside their oral testimonies, provide material that highlights the overlooked history of Japanese women during and after post-liberation repatriation.

Kim Jongwook is a freelance documentary photographer who was based in Gyeongju since 1987. Kim’s documentary photo project on the Japanese wives of Korean repatriates was featured in BBC (2019) and Hankyoreh Newspaper in Korea (2017). He presented the same project at Hiroshima University (2017) and the Jeonju International Festival in Korea (2014). Kim received his Ph.D from Kyeongju University for his research on this topic. Kim currently operates the Kim Jong Wook Photography Research Institute in Gyeongju.

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