How Many Koreans Might There Be Today If Korea Had Not Been Colonized?

 Every year around Liberation Day, we talk about freedom.

We talk about August 15, 1945, about the end of Japanese colonial rule, and about the people who fought for Korea's independence.

But there is another way to think about that history.

What if we looked at it through numbers?

Not the number of years Korea was under colonial rule, or the number of battles fought for independence, but the number of people who might have been here today if history had taken a different path.

It is a question that cannot really be answered.

And perhaps that is what makes it worth asking.

A population of 25 million

In 1944, one year before liberation, the population of Korea was about 25.1 million. There were approximately 12.52 million men and 12.60 million women. The population was almost evenly divided between men and women.

Among the men, about 5.5 million were between the ages of 15 and 49.

That number is striking when we remember what was happening at the time.

These were the years when Japan's war effort was consuming more and more human lives.

Young men were increasingly drawn into military service and forced labor. In 1944, the Japanese authorities formally expanded conscription, with men aged 16 to 40 among those targeted for forced labor. In one regional record from Gyeongsangbuk-do, 93.5 percent of those forcibly recruited were between 16 and 40 years old.

The young people of Korea were not simply living through history.

They were being used to make history happen somewhere else.

Young people who were sent away

From 1939 to 1945, hundreds of thousands of Koreans were mobilized to work in Japan and other parts of the Japanese empire.

Japanese government-related records suggest that at least around 800,000 to 1.2 million Koreans were sent to Japan when different forms of labor mobilization and military personnel are considered. Korean historical scholarship has also suggested that the actual number may have approached 1.5 million. The exact figure remains uncertain because records were destroyed or lost at the end of the war.

Many were sent to coal mines, factories, construction sites, military facilities, and other places where working and living conditions were extremely harsh. Some endured twelve-hour or longer workdays and dangerous conditions.

Women were also drawn into Japan's wartime mobilization.

Teenage girls and young women were mobilized through systems such as the Women's Volunteer Labor Corps, often for work in factories. Korean women were also subjected to the Japanese military's system of sexual slavery, through coercion, deception, threats, violence, trafficking, and abduction. There is no single reliable number that captures all of the women involved in these different forms of mobilization.

So when we look at the population figures of 1944, it is worth remembering that the millions of young men and women represented in those statistics were not simply numbers.

They were someone's sons and daughters.

Someone's brothers and sisters.

They were young people who might otherwise have been working, studying, falling in love, getting married, raising children, and growing old in their own towns and villages.

The people we cannot count

This is where the question becomes difficult.

If those young people had lived ordinary lives, how many children might they have had?

How many grandchildren?

And how many people would be living in Korea today because those families had been allowed to grow normally?

There is no reliable way to calculate it.

History does not give us a second version of the twentieth century to compare with the one we inherited. We cannot know how birth rates would have changed, how many people would have migrated, or how later events such as liberation, division, and the Korean War would have unfolded.

Even a sophisticated demographic model could only give us a hypothetical range.

But perhaps we do not need a final number.

Because there is something unsettling about realizing that population statistics can tell us how many people were alive, but they cannot tell us how many people might have existed.

A person who was never born leaves no census record.

There is no name to search for.

No photograph.

No grave.

Only the possibility of a life that never happened.

Looking at Seoul today

Today, Seoul is a city of millions.

People rush through subway stations, meet friends for dinner, study late at night, raise children, start businesses, fall in love, and make plans for the future.

It is easy to look at this enormous city simply as the result of rapid economic growth and modernization.

But behind every generation is another generation.

Behind every family are people who came before them.

And behind some of those missing generations are historical events that changed who was able to stay, who was forced to leave, who returned, and who never came home.

That is why population can be more than a statistic.

It can be a way of thinking about history.

This Liberation Day, perhaps we can remember August 15 not only as the day Korea became free again, but also as a moment to think about the lives that might have been.

We cannot calculate the number of people who were never born.

But we can remember that they were possible.

And perhaps that is one quiet way of remembering what liberation meant.