'No one wants to take responsibility': 80 years on, Korean atomic bomb survivors call for apology, redress

 

Kim Chul-soo, an 87-year-old Korean survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, looks through his family records during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang, on Aug. 12. [MICHAEL LEE]

 
HAPCHEON, South Gyeongsang — Eighty years after a nuclear weapon leveled Hiroshima, the only omen that 86-year-old Bae Kyung-mi recalls of the city’s impending doom is the distant roar of an airplane.
 
Aged six at the time, she dashed into the yard and called to her mother in Japanese, “Oka-san, hikoki, hikoki desu!” — “Mother, an airplane, it’s an airplane!”
 
Then, her world went dark.
 
When she awoke, her forehead was torn and bleeding. Her mother had also survived, but their house lay in ruins, and gray radioactive rain was falling over the rubble. Hours later, her father, a metal scrap worker, returned carrying one of her older brothers, who had been badly burned.
 
“My father went out to search for my siblings but couldn’t tell the charred corpses from the burned survivors,” recalled Bae, a Korean atomic bomb survivor. “He found my brother only because he cried out from within a pile of bodies.”
 
Approximately 70,000 people were killed instantly when the United States dropped “Little Boy,” the first atomic bomb used in war, over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Tens of thousands more, including two of Bae’s brothers, died from injuries and radiation sickness in the weeks and months that followed.
 

Related Article

• Lee offers condolences to Korean atomic bomb victims ahead of 80th anniversary of Hiroshima bombing

• Senior Hiroshima official honors Korean survivors of atomic bomb

• Yoon and Kishida pay tribute to Korean atomic bomb victims in Hiroshima

 
The bombings of Hiroshima — and Nagasaki three days later — are widely credited with forcing Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, celebrated annually as Liberation Day in Korea.
 
But history books rarely mention the estimated 10,000 Koreans who died in the two attacks, or the roughly 40,000 who perished by year’s end. They account for about one-fifth of all deaths from the nuclear attacks, according to the Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Association.
 
In Korea, where the bombs are seen as hastening the end of Japanese colonial rule, survivors have received little recognition over the past eight decades.
 
In a rare official acknowledgment of these victims, President Lee Jae Myung pledged in a statement earlier this month to address “shortcomings” of a 2017 law to support victims.
 
“The government will continue to make an effort to heal the wounds of the atomic bombings,” he wrote on Facebook on Aug. 5 this year.
 
But for survivors — now in the twilight of their lives — who spoke to the Korea JoongAng Daily at a hospice for atomic bomb victims in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang, the president’s words are too little and too late.
 
Subjects of an empire, victims of its demise
 
By the last year of World War II, Koreans had been under Japanese rule for 35 years. Millions were enlisted in service of the empire’s war across Asia and the Pacific. Others migrated to the Japanese home islands voluntarily to escape poverty in the peninsula, which was exploited ruthlessly for food and resources.  
 
Of the 140,000 Koreans in Hiroshima in August 1945, many came from Hapcheon — a mountainous village with little farmland frequently plagued by drought — drawn by relatives and friends who had found work and rations there.
 

Shim Jin-tae, an 83-year-old survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, speaks during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang, on Aug. 12. [MICHAEL LEE]

 
“People in my parents’ generation were either forced to work in Japan or moved there to feed their families,” said Shim Jin-tae, an 83-year-old survivor whose father worked in a munitions factory in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing.
 
While propaganda portrayed Koreans as a “little brother” race to Japanese people, they were usually treated as expendable labor — a reality laid bare when the bomb fell on Hiroshima.
 
“The Japanese fled the city for other places, but we Koreans were made to clean up the rubble and the dead,” said Kim Chul-joo, 87, who was born in Hiroshima to Korean parents and was seven at the time of the bombing.
 
He remembers corpses filling the streets and rivers. “People barely alive were croaking ‘mizu, mizu’— water — but no one could help.”
 
But even the dying were not spared discrimination.
 
“If you opened your mouth and spoke Korean, emergency workers ignored you because they only cared about saving Japanese people,” recalled Bae.
 
The lack of refuge and medical care, on top of poor working conditions and exposure to radiation, meant that Koreans made up one out every seven fatalities in Hiroshima by the end of 1945, according to recent estimates.
 
A similar pattern was repeated in Nagasaki, where 20,000 Koreans died in the blast from the “Fat Man” bomb and post-detonation exposure.
 
Six days after the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan surrendered. Its empire — and its rule over Korea — was no more.
 
Children of the bomb
 
Tears still well up in Kim’s eyes as he recounts the moment he first stepped onto Korean soil off the ship that repatriated his family to Busan in September 1945.
 
“An American soldier was playing the old version of the Aegukka on a trumpet on the pier,” he said, referring to the Korean national anthem. “We had finally come home, and we were free.”
 
But for Korean atomic bomb survivors, the joy of liberation was accompanied by shame.
 

The Hapcheon Welfare Center for Atomic Bomb Victims in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang, on Aug. 12. [MICHAEL LEE]

 
Kim, who has endured constant nosebleeds, partial deafness and impaired mobility since the Hiroshima blast, said people shunned him if he mentioned he was an atomic bomb survivor. “You wouldn’t believe how badly they treated us. People thought radiation illness was contagious.”
 
Though long plagued by thyroid problems that are common among people exposed to excess radiation, Bae never told her husband she was in Hiroshima. “To the day he died, he never knew the truth,” she said. “I worried about not only my own marriage, but also my sons’ prospects for finding wives.”
 
Her fears were not unfounded. Kim said his niece’s husband abandoned her after learning her father — Kim’s third older brother — was a Hiroshima survivor.
 
Although Kim and Bae were able to hide their status as atomic bomb victims because their families resettled in other parts of South Gyeongsang, Shim says this was harder in Hapcheon, where many Korean residents of Hiroshima returned after liberation.
 
“But even here, people have been reluctant to come forward and say they or their parents were in Hiroshima,” he said.
 
Poverty only deepened their isolation. Then came a litany of diseases — depression, heart disease, anemia, kidney failure, asthma and cancer — which affected not only survivors at higher rates than the general population, but also their children.
 

Han Jeong-soon, a 67-year-old woman whose parents were both survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, speaks during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily on Aug. 12. [MICHAEL LEE]

 
Han Jeong-soon, who was born to parents who both survived the Hiroshima blast, has avascular necrosis in her hips. Now 67 years old, she has undergone 12 operations for implants that must be replaced when they wear out. Her first son, now in his twenties, was born with cerebral palsy.
 
“I went to doctor after doctor when he was a toddler. Finally, one doctor told me that I needn’t fret so much because he likely wouldn’t live past his sixth birthday,” she said. “In that moment, I felt the sky fall.”
 
Her former husband and his family offered little sympathy. “They called me a cripple who gave the family another cripple,” she recalled.
 
Evading responsibility
 
Under the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, Japanese atomic bomb survivors — known as hibakusha — lost the right to seek compensation from the United States. Japan later assumed responsibility for their medical treatments, but refused to provide the same support to Korean victims. Further, when Seoul normalized relations with Tokyo in 1965, it accepted a lump-sum payment and waived the right of individuals to pursue their own claims.
 

The Korean Victims and Survivors Memorial Cenotaph in Hiroshima on April 6, 2023. The monument was funded by the Korean Residents Union in Japan, also known as Mindan. [MICHAEL LEE]

 
The struggle for recognition fell upon individual Korean atomic bomb victims, who spent years fighting for equal treatment as hibakusha. In 1978, Japan’s Supreme Court ruled Tokyo’s denial of healthcare benefits to blast victims from abroad was illegal.
 
Survivors in Hapcheon are well aware that no government wished to provide for their care.
 
“No one wants to take responsibility,” Shim said. “Korea may not be directly responsible, but it doesn’t advocate on our behalf. Japan, which started the war, only gave us medical care because we sued for it. America never apologized for dropping the bombs. Obama didn’t even visit the memorial to the Korean victims when he went to Hiroshima in 2016, though he was asked to.”
 
The Hapcheon Welfare Center for Atomic Bomb Victims — where aging survivors in need of care are housed and fed — illustrates the duality of Japan’s duty to care for Korean atomic bomb survivors. Tokyo donated money for the center with Seoul in 1996, but only on the condition that it be run by the Korean Red Cross — not the government.
 
Direct involvement would imply responsibility, which Japan considers settled by the 1965 treaty.
 
Last month, an official delegation from Hiroshima visited the center and laid flowers. But they also offered no apology, according to Shim.
 
Ignored for too long
 
Even after Korean atomic bomb victims were recognized as hibakusha, the Korean government paid little attention to them. Only in 2017 did the National Assembly pass a law to investigate the living conditions of victims and provide them with support.  
 
Yet the law excludes survivors’ descendants, despite earlier studies showing they suffer higher rates of illness and disability.
 
“We live in an age when a probe is launched if one person dies in an accident, but the government won’t properly investigate the suffering of thousands of first and second-generation atomic bomb survivors,” Shim lamented. “What kind of country is this?”
 

Wooden funerary tablets bearing the names of Korean victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki line the inside of a memorial altar in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang, on Aug. 12. [MICHAEL LEE]

 
Survivors like Bae expressed disappointment with President Lee’s recent pledge, saying it should include more monetary support.
 
“We receive about 300,000 won ($220) every three months, but I pay half that to stay at the center,” said Bae. “It’s really not much to live on.”
 
Time is also not on the side of atomic bomb victims. Of about 82 elderly survivors at the center, Bae has lived there the longest. “Most who moved in when I did are now dead,” she said.
 
“Most first-generation victims are gone,” Shim said. “Who is there left for the state to take care of?”
 
Perseverance for peace
 

The entrance to the House of Peace, a center for descendants of Korean atomic bomb survivors in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang. [MICHAEL LEE]

 
Survivors and their families have long fought not only for recognition but for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
 
Shim, who spoke at the third Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in New York this March, said true justice for victims can only come when all countries agree to disarm.
 
“It’s disappointing beyond words that not one of the countries responsible for us — Korea, Japan or the United States — has signed this treaty,” he said.
 
Despite her disability, Han helps lead the House of Peace in Hapcheon, organizing weekly gatherings of second-generation victims and raising awareness about their plight.
 
“The war is over for most everyone else, but our war with the aftereffects of nuclear weapons continues,” she said. “No one must ever suffer again as we do.”
 

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]