The Atomic Bombs’ Forgotten Korean Victims

Tanaka Terumi was thirteen years old when the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, in August, 1945. The blast knocked him unconscious. After he came to, he and his mother walked through the city’s “blackened ruins”—buildings zapped to ash “as far as the port,” some three kilometres in the distance. “I found the charred body of one aunt at the remains of her house,” he recalled late last year, from a dais in Oslo. Now ninety-two, he was in town to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese association of atom-bomb survivors. “The deaths I witnessed at that time could hardly be described as human deaths,” Tanaka said. He spoke softly, and, with his shiny pate and sunken cheeks, looked frail. The story he recited was chilling, but well practiced.

Survivors of the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, called hibakusha, formed Nihon Hidankyo in 1956. In the many decades that followed, they demanded medical care and social recognition from the Japanese government. What they asked of all governments proved more elusive: “the immediate abolition of nuclear weapons.”

Japan is the only country to have suffered mass killings from nuclear war. So it was striking when, later in Tanaka’s speech, he referenced the hardships of “A-bomb survivors living abroad,” especially the “Korean hibakusha who were exposed to the atomic bombings in Japan and returned to their home countries.” This was likely news to viewers around the world. Had there been atom-bomb victims who weren’t Japanese? Who were these “Korean hibakusha”?

Two of them had, in fact, travelled from South Korea to be with Tanaka, in Norway, as part of Nihon Hidankyo’s delegation. Jeong Won-sul, an eighty-one-year-old wearing a sombre black-and-white hanbok suit, had been an infant in 1945, in Hiroshima, born to Koreans forced to work in Japan by the colonial government. His mother had been close enough to the detonation that she lost her hearing; his father lived with chronic pain. Jeong himself had respiratory and digestive diseases. The other Korean in the delegation, Lee Tae-jae, a youthful sixty-five, represented second-generation hibakusha: his father had been caught in the fallout from the bomb in Nagasaki, while conscripted to work at a Mitsubishi munitions factory, and the effects of the radiation seemed to have been passed on to Lee. In his forties, Lee was diagnosed with stomach cancer; he also has anemia and joint trouble. Second-generation hibakusha suffer from certain cancers, depression, anemia, and asthma at vastly higher rates than those of the general population. For Korean hibakusha, Japan was not the only “victim nation,” Lee told a Yonhap News reporter in Oslo. “We must look the truth squarely in the eye.”

Of the hundreds of thousands hit by the blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ten to twenty per cent were Korean. Japan had colonized Korea in 1910, and, by the middle of the century, two million Koreans were living in Japan—some voluntarily, others as forced laborers, ordered to fill a gap in the machinery of war. When Japan surrendered to the Allied forces, in 1945, the Empire was no more, and most Koreans went home, which, by then, had been divided: occupied in the South by the U.S. and in the North by the Soviets. A few thousand Korean A-bomb survivors stayed in Japan, becoming Zainichi hibakusha, or Korean Japanese survivors. (The term “Zainichi” implies temporary residence, but it is applied even to those who have been in Japan for multiple generations.) Though they had much in common with Japanese hibakusha, the Zainichi were denied specialized medical coverage and sidelined by Nihon Hidankyo, which framed the Japanese experience as sui generis.

Zainichi hibakusha raised uncomfortable questions regarding “Japanese colonialism, nationalisms in Japan and Korea, and the Cold War in East Asia,” Yuko Takahashi, a human-rights scholar at Osaka Metropolitan University, writes in her new book, “Korean Nuclear Diaspora: Redress Movements of Korean Atomic-Bomb Victims in Japan.” Takahashi outlines the complex links between Zainichi hibakusha, Japanese hibakusha, and Korean hibakusha in North and South Korea. Over the years, these groups have worked together and at cross-purposes, too, driven by competing visions of history. Their wounds are remarkably fresh, given the dates of the actual bombings. Though most first-generation hibakusha have died, their descendants have inherited their aims and, in some cases, their ailments. The second and third generations continue to press for material reparations and denuclearization. They also represent the degree to which, eighty years on, there has been an “incomplete settlement at the societal level” for the victims of nuclear atrocities.

Before the A-bomb survivors became a movement, before they embraced the hibakusha label, they were casualties in need of care. The U.S. had carpet-bombed Tokyo earlier in the war, killing around a hundred thousand people, but the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no precedent. There was the immediate carnage—as many as two hundred thousand may have died within the first few months—followed by the radiation and its long-term poisons. As Japan was being rebuilt, some survivors had to rely on medical services provided by the occupying U.S. forces. According to a 1947 report commissioned by the American Secretary of War, however, the “investigation of the nature of the casualties was more important” than actually helping people. American officials made clear to the Japanese “that they would assume no responsibility for the treatment of cases.”

The first medical program for Japanese hibakusha was set up in the mid-fifties, in response to a distant accident. In 1954, the U.S. tested nuclear bombs at Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. A Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon Number 5, happened to sail through the fallout. Twenty-three crewmen suffered radiation poisoning, and one died that year; many in the country were reluctant to buy seafood, fearing contamination. The incident “led to a nationwide anti-nuclear bomb movement,” Takahashi writes. A Tokyo women’s group circulated a petition against nuclear testing, and collected the signatures of “about 60 percent of the population over age fifteen.” As the anthropologist Lisa Yoneyama has observed, the Lucky Dragon incident “connected the atomic sites of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini” and produced the idea of a trio of “nuclear attacks that victimized the Japanese nation and people as a whole.”

The following year, Hiroshima hosted the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, where, for the first time, “relief for hibakusha was added to the agenda of the anti-nuclear bomb movement,” Takahashi writes. Survivors could apply for a hibakusha “certificate,” which entitled them to health services and limited monetary benefits. Eligibility was determined by such factors as one’s distance from the “hypocenter” and how many days after the bombing one had entered an affected area. There were direct victims, victims in utero (tainai hibakusha), and victims who passed through Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the following weeks as disaster-response workers or unlucky commuters (nyushi hibakusha).

Both cities were major industrial and military centers, and thus home to tens of thousands of Korean colonial workers and their families. Yet Zainichi Koreans were effectively excluded from the hibakusha benefits system. They were told that they didn’t qualify because of their alien status, or that they needed a Japanese witness to prove their eligibility; sometimes they were turned away for not speaking fluent Japanese. Many were destitute and lived in what was known as an “A-bomb slum.” Zainichi survivors did not fit into the idea of “A-bomb nationalism”—Japan’s unique “sense of victimhood”—emphasized by activist groups like Nihon Hidankyo, Takahashi writes. Conditions were even worse for Korean hibakusha who returned to the Korean peninsula. North and South Korea were transitioning from Japanese rule to Cold War occupation. There was little awareness of, let alone tailored health care for, A-bomb survivors. Korean hibakusha also had to contend with the fact that their countrymen celebrated the bombings as the event that “liberated the Korean nation from Japanese colonial rule.”

By the nineteen-sixties, the hibakusha identity was established enough, and the condition of Korean survivors bad enough, that a transnational movement started to take shape. In 1968, Gang Mun-hui, a Zainichi hibakusha, gave public testimony at a conference in Japan—the first time many Japanese, including victim advocates, learned that there were hibakusha living in Korea. As a child, Gang had moved with his family from Korea to Hiroshima, and was working at a Mitsubishi shipbuilding plant when the atom bomb exploded. His father, brother, and sister died. Gang stayed in Hiroshima after the war, unsure of what he would find back home. “He could not make up his mind as he learned about the political and social confusion in Korea,” Takahashi writes.

In 1970, a South Korean hibakusha named Son Jin-du travelled to Japan, hoping to “receive medical treatments for his radiation-induced illnesses.” His application for a hibakusha certificate was denied, however, “on the grounds that his place of residence was outside Japan.” He took his case through the Japanese courts and prevailed, finally, in 1978, opening a path for overseas victims—though Japan would characterize such aid as charity, not “state compensation.” The Zainichi documentary filmmaker Park Soo-nam interviewed Korean hibakusha who subsequently arrived in Japan to receive specialized care—for puncture wounds, missing eyes—forty years after the fact. (In South Korea, there was “no official policy to help us,” one woman tells her; the hibakusha certificate “was just a piece of paper.”) Meanwhile, Japanese and South Korean advocates and doctors conducted surveys of hibakusha living in cities such as Hapcheon, nicknamed the Hiroshima of Korea for its high population of returning survivors. North Korea undertook its own surveys, with the help of Zainichi and Japanese visitors.

In the next five decades, Japanese and Korean hibakusha became central figures in the global anti-nuclear movement. They successfully pressured Japan to declare a prohibition on the development and possession of nuclear weapons, and to provide assistance to survivors abroad. In a treaty signed in 1965, Japan had paid five hundred million dollars to settle all colonial and wartime claims with South Korea, and maintained that nothing further was owed to Korean hibakusha, forced laborers, or the “comfort women” who’d been used as military sexual slaves. But in 1990, thanks to hibakusha advocacy, Japan announced that it would give South Korea some thirty million dollars to treat overseas hibakusha. A hibakusha nursing home was built in Hapcheon.