Archival Research
Collecting and analyzing 38,000 declassified U.S. documents at NARA to establish evidence of American involvement in the Jeju 4.3 Incident.
Archival Research for the National Follow-up Investigation
Between 2019 and 2020, I conducted extensive archival research at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as part of the official national follow-up investigation into the Jeju 4.3 Incident. This work produced one of the most comprehensive collections of U.S.-held primary sources on the incident to date: approximately 38,000 documents collected and analyzed.
Why the U.S. Archives
The U.S. Military Government administered southern Korea when the Jeju uprising began in 1948. Its records — military reports, intelligence assessments, and diplomatic cables — hold a critical, external perspective on the violence that followed. These documents reveal what the U.S. authorities knew, when they knew it, and how they responded to the suppression campaign carried out by South Korean forces under their oversight. Without this international dimension, the historical record remains incomplete and the question of U.S. responsibility unanswered.
What I Did
My research at NARA focused on Record Group 554 and related collections. The work involved identifying, translating, analyzing, and contextualizing declassified materials across several critical areas:
State responsibility. I investigated the chain of command within the military and police forces to establish the degree of official accountability for the violence — tracing how orders were issued, communicated, and executed.
Military and police brutality. I systematically documented patterns and specific instances of violence committed by state forces against civilians, building a body of verifiable evidence that moved the investigation beyond anecdotal accounts.
Enforced migration. I researched the mass displacement of Jeju residents who were forced to flee their homes and communities as a direct result of the suppression campaign — a dimension of the tragedy that had been insufficiently examined.
Output
The core findings from this research were compiled, translated, and published as a five-volume archival collection: Supplementary Investigation Materials for the Jeju 4.3 Incident — U.S. Archives, Volumes 1–5 (제주4·3사건 추가진상조사자료집 — 미국자료편 1~5). These volumes make the key U.S.-held documents accessible in Korean for the first time, providing the evidentiary foundation for the national follow-up investigation’s conclusions on U.S. involvement.
The archival materials collected through this research are now accessible at archive.jeju43.info.