In 1945, an empire surrendered—and the people it had sent abroad were left to find their own way home.
Keiko Honda’s grandfather was one of them. A banker from a small Japanese city, he had followed a current his government created and his culture had normalised. When Japan’s surrender stranded his family above the 38th parallel, he was not a soldier or an architect of empire. He was a man trying to keep his family alive, in a world that had stopped making sense overnight.
Decades later, his granddaughter translated his memoir, The Broken Map Home: Escaping Korea, 1945. What she found was not only a family story—it was a mirror.
Keiko Honda is a 2025 Honourable Mention recipient of the Gallery of Human Migration Literary Award. She is also the author of Accidental Blooms and Hidden Flowers, with Words That Lastforthcoming from Caitlin Press in Fall 2026. She moves between the personal and the historical with the same quality her grandfather must have needed on that crossing: the willingness to keep looking, even when what you see is hard.
I sat down with Keiko to discuss mirrors, broken maps, and the moments when ordinary people—across enemy lines and across generations—choose compassion over compliance.
On March 21 — the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination — her work feels not just relevant but urgent. Her book refuses to let that date remain abstract. The patterns she traces in 1945 are not artifacts. They are present. And the question she leaves with every reader is not about the past at all.
Where is your moment of choosing compassion over compliance? And are you paying enough attention to recognise it when it comes?
A Conversation with Keiko Honda
Recipient of the 2025 Gallery of Human Migration Literary Award — Honourable Mention
Keiko, your grandfather's memoir had been waiting. What made the moment you felt compelled to translate it — and to carry it publicly?
I told myself at first that it was about preservation—making sure his experience didn’t disappear. But the further I went into the translation, the more I understood I was also asking something harder: does telling these stories actually change anything? Does bearing witness prevent future harm? Or do we document atrocities, feel moved for a moment, and then watch history repeat itself anyway?
I’m still sitting with those questions. But I think the act of sitting with them together—reader and writer, present and past—is exactly where this book wants to take us.
The story at the heart of The Broken Map Home holds a profound paradox. Your grandfather's family went to Korea as part of Japan's colonial expansion, and then became refugees when that empire collapsed. Can colonizers also be victims? How do we hold both truths at the same time?
That’s the question the memoir refuses to resolve—and I think that’s the point. My grandfather’s family went to Korea as part of an imperial project. When Japan surrendered in 1945, the project ended — and so did their value to the state that had sent them. Pioneers one day, liabilities the next.
What followed was not a rescue but a chaotic repatriation managed almost entirely by Allied occupation forces, with Japan largely absent from the effort to bring its own people home.
The memoir holds that paradox without offering absolution. Their suffering was real—my grandfather adrift above the 38th parallel with his family, not knowing if any of them would survive the crossing. And also real: their presence in Korea was the product of a colonial system that had occupied and exploited Korean people for decades.
I don’t think we do justice to anyone by choosing only one of those truths. My grandfather didn’t design the empire. He was a banker from a small city who followed a current his government had created and his culture had normalized. That doesn’t absolve him. It also doesn’t make him a villain. It makes him human—which is, in some ways, the harder thing to sit with.
The Gallery speaks of Beginning as one of the most disorienting stages of migration — the moment when everything familiar has vanished and you must learn to live in a world that doesn't yet recognize you. Your grandfather's family didn't choose to begin again. That beginning was forced on them. What does that kind of rupture feel like across generations?
The word ‘beginning‘ can sound hopeful—a fresh start, an open door. But my grandfather’s beginning was the disappearance of everything that had made his life legible. He was a banker, not a soldier, drafted just three months before Japan’s surrender. Within weeks, he found himself stranded north of the 38th parallel—a border that hadn’t existed, in any meaningful sense, when he woke up that morning. His family had water they could barely wet their lips with. They had each other, and they had the desperate need to survive.
What passed through generations was not just the memory of what they endured. It was the weight of a beginning that was never chosen.
I didn’t know my grandfather’s story fully until I translated his memoir. But when my own life ruptured—when illness took the body I had relied on and I had to learn, at forty, to inhabit a different one—I recognized something in his experience I couldn’t have named before. Not the same rupture. But the same essential task: to find yourself in a world that no longer fits the shape you thought you were, and to begin again anyway.
Forced beginnings don’t feel like beginnings at the time. They feel like endings. What makes them beginnings—if they become that—is something you can only see looking back.
You write that the patterns in your grandfather's memoir — propaganda that reframes occupation as liberation, victimhood narratives that displace accountability — are not historical artifacts. They're present. On this historical moment, what do you most want people to see?
That the language changes, but the structure is identical.
Wartime propaganda portrayed Japan as liberating Asian nations from Western colonial rule, while masking its own imperial ambitions.
Today, the same framing appears in different conflicts across the world: occupation described as protection and invasion dressed as liberation. And within nations, victimhood narratives still perform the same function—casting long shadows over the harm those nations caused, making reckoning harder to begin.
What I hope people carry into March 21 is this: the pattern isn’t only out there. It’s in us.
We are all, in some form, living inside empires—economic, military, technological, and environmental. The question is not whether we are implicated. It is how much we are willing to see—and what we do in the small space between seeing and looking away.
My grandfather’s family survived because a Korean ship captain chose, in one unwitnessed moment, compassion over compliance. I think about him often—not as a hero, but as an ordinary person who saw clearly what the moment asked of him.
That is what I want people to carry out of this book. Not guilt. Not grief. Just the question: where is my moment? And am I paying enough attention to recognize it when it comes?
One of the most quietly devastating moments in the memoir is a Korean ship captain — a man across the border, across the enemy line — who chose compassion over compliance in a single, unwitnessed moment. He is the reason you exist today. What does that moment tell us about what migration asks of those who receive?
There was no audience. No recognition waiting for him. No history book would record his name. What saved my family was not strategy or strength—it was one person’s decision to see the humanity in people who, by every official measure, were his adversaries.
And it wasn’t only him. There were other ordinary men and women across those lines whose small, unwitnessed choices made survival possible.
What that tells me about receiving—truly receiving—is that it is not a policy or a program. It is a choice made quietly, one person at a time. And it changes everything. Sometimes it changes whether a family lives or is torn apart.
Sometimes it determines whether someone like me exists at all.
That is what migration asks of those who receive. Not grand gestures. Just that—the willingness to see, in the person in front of you, someone whose life is worth the small risk of your compassion.
You describe The Broken Map Home as a mirror, not a memorial. What are you asking your readers to see in themselves?
I’m asking them to recognize the patterns—not in 1945, not in someone else’s country, but in themselves, right now.
My grandfather’s story is not a Japanese story or even a WWII story. It is a human story about what happens when we stop asking hard questions, when survival makes it easier not to look, when the narratives we’ve inherited do the work of disconnecting us from the harm being done in our names.
The mirror I’m holding up is not accusatory. It is an invitation.
Where is your moment of choosing compassion over compliance?
What are you going to do differently, now that you know?
And what will your grandchildren ask you about this time?
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