Korean Survivors of Atomic Bombs Renew Fight for Recognition, and Apology

Kim Il-jo, 88, in her room in Hapcheon, South Korea. Survivors who returned to South Korea were shunned and denied care, partly to preserve the official view that the nuclear attacks were necessary to liberate Korea.CreditJean Chung for The New York Times

HAPCHEON, South Korea — When President Obama visits Hiroshima this week, a small delegation from South Korea plans to gather around an obscure monument there dedicated to a group of victims who endured more than their share of misery, yet whom few remember.

As many as 220,000 people were killed by the atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Japan, most of them Japanese civilians. But 40,000 to 50,000 of the dead were Koreans who had been taken to Hiroshima or Nagasaki against their will as forced laborers, or had settled in the cities after fleeing deprivation in their occupied homeland.

Those who survived and returned to South Korea after the war were then shunned and denied medical care, partly to avoid upsetting the official view that the nuclear attacks were necessary to liberate Korea. Some were banished to leper colonies.

In the debates prompted by Mr. Obama’s coming visit, few have as many claims to an apology — from Japan, from the United States, even from their own government in South Korea — as these Korean survivors. Their unique experience illustrates the complicated, emotional politics of memory and morality that Mr. Obama must navigate when he becomes the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima on Friday.

Kim Il-jo showing a photograph of herself wearing a bus attendant’s uniform at a studio in Hiroshima in 1944.CreditJean Chung for The New York Times

“If there is anyone he must apologize to, isn’t it the innocent non-Japanese victims like the Koreans?” said Lee Su-yong, 88, whose parents took her to Hiroshima in search of food when she was 7. “We Koreans didn’t start the war. Most of us were there because the Japanese forced us to be there.”

I met Ms. Lee in a special nursing home for survivors in Hapcheon, a hilly southern county that is home to about a quarter of the 2,580 registered Korean survivors still alive today. She said the explosion in Hiroshima — and the ordeal that came before and after it — still haunts her.

“The rivers were floating with bodies, because so many people with burn injuries jumped in there,” she recalled. “They gathered bodies by the cartload and burned them every day.”

Korean survivors are among the most ardent supporters of Mr. Obama’s vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. But in a joint statement this month, they argued that the United States would have moral authority only after it apologized for the “original sin” of dropping the bombs and paid reparations to innocent victims.

Many survivors also echo general unease in South Korea that Mr. Obama’s visit to Hiroshima will reinforce Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s efforts to present Japan as a victim in World War II, obscuring its role as the aggressor that started the Pacific conflict and committed atrocities across Asia, including in South Korea, which it ruled as a colony.

“I doubt that any of Japan’s neighbors welcome Obama’s visit,” said Gong In-bae, a Red Cross official at the nursing home, the only one of its kind in South Korea. “If Japan likes to say that people killed by the atomic bombs were civilians, how about all those civilians it itself had killed in Nanjing, Korea and elsewhere?”

“No wonder South Korea is moving closer to China,” he added. “At least, China and we Koreans share and understand what the pain imposed by Japan was like.”

There is widespread suspicion among South Koreans that the United States is so eager to strengthen its alliance with Japan to offset China’s rise that it is willing to gloss over unresolved grievances across Asia over Japan’s war record.

Lee Gil-ja, far right, 76, with her two daughters, who have mental disabilities. She says she believes the illnesses resulted from her husband’s exposure to radiation in Hiroshima.CreditJean Chung for The New York Times

Many argue that Mr. Obama should have put off a visit to Hiroshima until Mr. Abe visited Pearl Harbor to apologize for the American war dead, Nanjing to offer contrition to the victims of the 1937 massacre in the Chinese city, and South Korea to face the “comfort women” who served as sex slaves for the Japanese military.

Given Japan’s attitude, the mass-circulation daily JoongAng Ilbo said in an editorial, Mr. Obama’s visit to Hiroshima was “imprudent and regrettable.”

Nowhere are the misgivings more evident than in Hapcheon, sometimes called the Hiroshima of South Korea because so many of those killed by the bombing were from here.

During its 35-year colonial rule of Korea, Japan forced Koreans to contribute to its imperial expansion and war effort, drafting them as laborers and confiscating grain and even kitchen utensils and farm tools. Many Koreans did not have enough to eat and fled to Japan, where they believed it would be easier to find jobs and food.

Ms. Lee said she was among the more fortunate because she was allowed to attend school in Hiroshima and later managed to get a job at a bank. Thousands of others from Hapcheon were taken to Hiroshima to toil in munitions factories, or worked on farms and in other menial jobs around the city.

On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, the bomb struck as Ms. Lee was just arriving for work. The roof of the bank building caved in, injuring her leg. The sky turned dark as it filled with ash, she recalled, and people roamed the streets with molten skin dangling from their outstretched arms.

Radiation exposure may have contributed to the tuberculosis, uterine cancer and thyroid illnesses she later suffered, but Ms. Lee survived.

When I visited her nursing home last week, residents sat in a large living room, watching television or gazing out a window at the lush greenery. Some were scarred or in wheelchairs, but most showed no sign of radiation exposure.

Survivors taking part in a therapy session for victims of Hiroshima in Hapcheon, a hilly southern county home to about a quarter of the 2,580 registered Korean survivors still alive today.CreditJean Chung for The New York Times

That’s because those who suffered the most exposure and worst injuries died long ago, with little medical care. Survivors with untreated injuries were often sent to die in leper colonies, said An Jae-eun of the Hapcheon House of Peace, which provides counseling for survivors.

“When I was a kid, it was common to see people with unhealed injuries running with pus,” said Shim Jin-tae, 73, who was born in Hiroshima and now heads an association of atomic victims in Hapcheon. Without medicine, he recalled, survivors often applied crushed raw potatoes or taro to their wounds.

Society treated the survivors as pariahs. Their children could not find spouses for fear they carried genetic defects. Men would divorce their wives if it was discovered they had been in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

“Like many others, I concealed my story, even from my son and daughter-in-law,” one of the nursing home residents, Kim Il-jo, 88, told me.

Compared with the comfort women, whose cause the Korean government championed, survivors of the atomic bombs endured a political handicap: They were victims of an attack by the United States, South Korea’s most important ally, and for decades after the war, criticism of the United States was taboo.

Even the number of Korean victims of the bombings is uncertain because the government has never conducted an official investigation, despite demands for one by survivors. Historians and survivors’ groups relied on early Japanese government data to calculate the death toll and estimate that 23,000 to 43,000 Korean survivors returned home.

Survivors of the explosions did not receive official health benefits in South Korea until the 1990s, when Japan helped establish a humanitarian fund worth 8 billion yen, or $73 million at current exchange rates. In 2003, they also prevailed in a court case in Japan that ordered the Japanese government to help cover medical expenses for registered foreign survivors.

But the families of the Korean survivors are still fighting for recognition and support.

Many are tormented by the belief that radiation exposure caused genetic defects that survivors passed on to their children and grandchildren.

Han Jeong-soon, 57, one of the organizers of the second generation, said she blames genetic defects passed down by her parents for the bone disease she suffers from and her son’s cerebral palsy.

“For others, the atomic bomb marked the end of the war and the liberation,” she said. “To us, it was the beginning of new pain and the start of a never-ending war.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Unique Misery for Korean Survivors of Atomic Bombs. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe