Ha Young’s Netflix exit exposes South Korea’s unfinished reckoning with its colonial past

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung is resuming a campaign to root out the surviving influence of Koreans who collaborated with imperial Japan. | BLOOMBERG

Sep 24, 2026

Ha Young, a 33-year-old rising South Korean star, was poised to return in Netflix’s hit medical drama “The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call.” Instead, comments about her family history triggered a nationwide controversy that led her to step away from the role.

Appearing on a television show last month, Ha Young spoke proudly of there being four generations of doctors in her family, saying her great-grandfather had studied medicine in Japan before returning to Korea, where he opened one of the country’s earliest Western-style clinics.

But records soon emerged linking her great-grandfather, physician Ahn Sang-ho, to an organization that promoted assimilation during Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula between 1910 and 1945.

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