Contested spaces of ethnicity: zainichi Korean accounts of the atomic bombings

Abstract

This article examines the emergence of Korean hibakusha testimonies through the development of historical and testimonial works about Korean hibakusha resident in Japan. Their emergence is related to wider historical discussions and analyses by zainichi Koreans in the mid-1960s, which broadly centre on aspects of colonial and wartime history such as forced labour. The article examines how survivors, community organizations, and activists have positioned themselves vis-à-vis common narratives and understandings of the atomic bombings in Japan, criticized by some as “ethnic histories” that focus on the Japanese majority to the exclusion of others. The marginalization of zainichi Koreans is clearly evident in survivor testimonies, as are the ways that survivors, community members, and activists sought to narrate counter-histories incorporating a Korean perspective. From this we are better able to understand the historical context and experiences of Koreans at Ground Zero, as well as broader social and political movements seen in the zainichi Korean community around the times in question.

Keywords:

• hibakusha
• historiography
• zainichi Koreans
• testimony
• memory

“[For some like author Oda Makoto,] the dead of Hiroshima have no national borders”.

(Kazuo 1983, 469)

“Are there really no national borders for hibakusha [narratives and experiences]?”

(NZJK 1989, 3)

Borders define the world we live in. For some writing about the atomic bombings in Japan, survivor experiences transcend the power or ability of nation-states to craft narrow, nationalistic narratives. Others, particularly minority groups in Japan, have been critical of these seemingly universalistic histories and understandings of the atomic bombings (and, more broadly, wartime history as a whole). While maps during the colonial period (1910–1945) included Korean territory as a part of the Japanese empire, as well as counting its population as Japanese (Kashiwazaki 2009, 129), a rearranging of borders by Occupation forces resulted in the overnight exclusion of Korea from Japan. Such a rapid shift, in light of culturally assimilationist policy proclaiming “Japan and Korea as One” (naisen ittai), is astounding. Koreans who remained in Japan were placed into a precarious position and pushed to the very margins of Japanese society (Weiner 1997, 81). This marginalization of Koreans is reflected in Japanese historical narratives concerning the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the immediate postwar period. Arguably, such marginalization was by necessity on the part of Japan, for to include the voices of minority survivors like Koreans would raise uncomfortable and impossible-to-avoid questions about Japan’s colonial history. These questions include Japanese policies of wartime forced recruitment and forced labour, ongoing and widespread discrimination against members of the Korean community resident in the country, and perhaps even suggest a continuing moral responsibility to survivors whose Japanese nationality was revoked in 1952.

Historian John Dower (1996, 66) wrote,

more than battlefield causalities or the civilian deaths caused by conventional strategic bombing, these two cataclysmic moments of nuclear destruction solidified the Japanese sense of uniquely terrible victimization. The atomic bombs became the symbol for a special sort of suffering – much like the Holocaust for the Jews.

In the immediate months and years that followed, survivors would document, tell, and retell their experiences to a variety of audiences. Literature rapidly became one of the largest corpuses of work, allowing survivors to work through the trauma and make sense of their experiences on “that day” (Thornber 2010, 270–1). Others, such as Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, would express the inhumanity of the bombings in art (see Dower and Junkerman 1985). In most cases, Japanese public discourse rapidly coalesced around Japanese victimhood, which became widely embraced domestically in Japan and abroad. Consequently, this so-called “nationalist mythologization” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reinforced a victim consciousness narrative centred on ethnically Japanese victims and survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Orr 2001, 64–6).

Thus, while many authors have rightly drawn attention to the appalling lack of empathy many Japanese showed to Japanese hibakusha in postwar Japan, the near invisibility of Japan’s largest minority community in Japanese historiography is equally shocking. This article traces efforts by the Korean community resident in Japan (the zainichi Korean community) in constructing a public narrative of Korean hibakusha, examining the roles of survivor testimonies in furtherance of this goal. An examination of this vibrant yet often overlooked discourse can help us better understand the context and experiences of colonial citizens at Ground Zero, and how efforts by the zainichi Korean community to gather and make known hibakusha testimonies fit within the wider social and political movements of the community in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. As I show, many in the zainichi Korean community saw their colonial and wartime history effaced in Japanese historical discourse after the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan in 1952. Survivors are critical of their marginalization in Japanese historical narratives about the war, evidenced in histories and testimonial collections, as well as of how the effects of Japanese colonialism are widely absent in Japanese memory. The attempts by the zainichi community to create a space within Japanese historical discourse for Korean hibakusha is therefore connected with broader attempts by the community to temper the so-called “victim consciousness” narrative (higaisha ishiki) evident in some Japanese quarters, and ultimately to recover and document the wartime history of Japan’s largest minority community. In doing so, we can appreciate how testimonies of Korean hibakusha are part of a much wider discussion making known the experiences of Koreans in colonial, wartime, and postwar Japan, and how they serve to modulate widespread understandings of Japan and the Japanese as the victims of the atomic bombings. After a brief overview of colonial history and Korean migration to Japan, I proceed to outline some of the key arguments and texts concerning the forced labour and forced recruitment of Koreans between 1939 and 1945. In doing so, I show how early efforts by some in the Korean community to grapple with related wartime history led to and influenced a growing number of grassroots community efforts concerning the collection of survivor experiences and writing of Korean narratives about the atomic bombings.

The Korean community in Japan, 1910–1945

Although there is a rich and expansive history of migration, the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 marked the start of a rapid and sustained increase of Korean emigration to Japan.¹ Initially numbering in the thousands during the decade of the 1910s, the number of Korean residents in Japan grew to over 2 million by the time Japan surrendered in August 1945. Policies of assimilation in colonial Korea encouraged the construction of a multiethnic society, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s (Morris-Suzuki 2010, 10). The dramatic increase in the number of migrants was a direct result of Japanese government policies mandating the conscription and enforced labour of Koreans, beginning in 1939. Outside of mainland Japan, many more Koreans migrated or were forcibly relocated to other Japanese territories like Sakhalin, or to the Japanese-controlled puppet state of Manchukuo in northeast China (Manchuria). This period of enforced migration between 1939 and 1945 saw Koreans put to work in Japan’s vital resource and war industries, and as a consequence Koreans would come to form a sizeable fraction of the population in Japan’s important industrial cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where companies such as Mitsubishi worked to produce the planes, ships, and armaments necessary for the war effort. Although precise numbers are impossible to come by, it is estimated that roughly 70,000 Koreans were exposed to the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of the estimated 30,000 Korean hibakusha who did not perish in the immediate weeks and months that followed, about 7000 are believed to have remained in Japan, with the remainder repatriating to Korea in the immediate months and years after Japan’s surrender (Ichiba 2000, 27).

The surrender of Japan in August 1945 began a period of uncertainty for Koreans resident in Japan. Most of the approximately 2 million who were residing in Japan at the time elected to return to Korea, and by 1948 roughly 600,000 remained. Stripped of Japanese nationality, the process of constitutional revision during the Occupation Period (1945–1952) ensured the marginalization of non-Japanese with equal protection under the law for resident aliens being eliminated (Dower 1999, 392–4). The “blatantly racist nature” of revisions (394) would impact long-running efforts by zainichi Koreans and Koreans who repatriated to seek welfare and medical allowances, with court cases continuing today.² Those choosing to remain became foreign nationals in 1952 at the end of the Allied Occupation, and the legal definition of “Japaneseness” was coupled to Japanese ethnicity (Kashiwazaki 2009, 128).³

My use of the phrase “Korean community” in this article oversimplifies the complicated postwar situation on two counts. First is that the division of the Korean peninsula and emergence of two regimes complicated matters for zainichi Koreans, who were split further with loyalty to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) or the Republic of Korea (ROK). The division between Chōsen (referencing “Korea” as a whole, not a particular state) and Kankoku (denoting the ROK) became the centre of expatriate politics by the Korean community in Japan. Given that Japan had no formal diplomatic relations with either North or South Korea before 1965, these nuances made little difference in actual fact: both terms embodied “the same degree of statelessness, disenfranchisement, and unstable residential status” (Ryang 2009, 9). The second reason is that a further division exists inside the community of Korean hibakusha, which as noted earlier was constituted of those choosing to remain in Japan, and those returning to their ancestral homes in Korea. For those repatriating to Korea, returnees were scattered throughout the peninsula as a whole, though most hailed from cities and counties in the southern half of the peninsula.

In Japan, a tangible example of divisions in the zainichi Korean community can be seen with the dispute over the memorial to Korean victims in Hiroshima, erected outside the Hiroshima Peace Park on the opposite bank of the Ota River. Before the memorial was moved inside the Peace Park in 1999, Weiner (1997, 103–4) and Yoneyama (1999, 151–86) rightly observed that the separate memorial for Koreans was an abject, physical reminder of the alienation zainichi Koreans faced in their daily lives. The city gave approval to relocate the memorial in 1990 on the condition that North and South Koreans could agree on the details (Yoneyama 1999, 164). Certainly members of the community recognized and agreed that the separate memorial space was discriminatory, but were broadly split on the linguistic nuances conveyed in the memorial’s inscriptions. The debate became centred on the monument’s changed inscription, written by committee (166–167), which drew protest from zainichi Koreans, Japanese nations, and others. Though eventually settled, we will see that this alienation and separation of Korean hibakusha from Japanese hibakusha in the Hiroshima Peace Park, revealed by the memorial cenotaph, is also seen much earlier in the discursive realm.

Inscribing the erased in Japanese historiography

The alienation of zainichi Korean hibakusha was initially marked by absence. In the years immediately following the Occupation of Japan (1945–1952), Japan saw the emergence of what is commonly referred to as a “victim consciousness” narrative. James Orr (2001, 7) notes that victim consciousness narratives are most clearly seen in narratives about the atomic bombings, and such narratives tended to exclude minority communities due to assertions of the Japanese “people” (minzoku) as victims of the wartime Japanese state and military. The exclusion of minority communities in Japan from these narratives, as well as an utter lack of recognition about the ways these communities were themselves victimized by the Japanese during the wartime period, meant that zainichi Koreans and community groups began to routinely question the inadequacy of standard histories about the bombings, asking, for instance, “how did such a wide gap come to be between the ‘victim consciousness’ of Japanese [and a recognition of wartime forced labour, forced recruitment, and Korean hibakusha]?” (NZJK 1982, 3).

As a result, members of the zainichi Korean community looked to reassert their particular memories and perspectives of Japan’s wartime history, a process that began in the 1960s. Oral histories formed an important part of zainichi Korean hibakusha writings, with a few reasons behind this reliance on testimonies to reveal and recover aspects of their wartime and colonial history. First is that a discursive shift by the Korean community to include testimony in historical writings helped to increase the accessibility of historical works by reading publics, and spoke to readers and communities in a more personally engaging and engrossing fashion. Moreover, it seems that the reliance on oral histories is indicative of certain problems concerning more “traditional” documentary sources about the zainichi Korean community during the colonial period and Allied Occupation of Japan. This is what Kawashima (2009, 19) has termed the “ethnic–epistemological trap”, defined in part as a “positivist, empiricist, and sociologizing trap that stems from [Japanese] government and state documents upon which studies rely for historical data”. In short, it is indicative of the problematic tendency for Japanese sources to confirm what they believed to be the causal factor behind problems in the Korean community: that they were Korean. Further challenges confront researchers when considering the amount of documentation destroyed intentionally or otherwise in the days before Allied troops landed to occupy the country (Dower 1999, 39, 631); documents continuing to be classified by the Japanese government (Yoshimi 2000, 12); or the long-running legal challenges to access corporate archives (Toyonaga 2001, 385–93). Therefore, the importance of oral histories in underpinning zainichi Korean narratives goes beyond efforts to overcome these epistemological challenges and drives to the heart of histories concerning Japanese colonialism. As we will see, many testimonies of Korean hibakusha do not simply describe or discuss their thoughts and experiences about the atomic bombings, the Cold War, or the nuclear age: rather, they speak to a broader set of experiences that the Korean community faced during the colonial period and in postwar Japan, points which are rarely, if ever, considered in the broader Japanese corpus of writing about the atomic bombings.

It would not be until the early 1960s when the zainichi Korean population gradually became more politically active, directly challenging discriminatory government policies by direct action (see Chapman 2008, 31–3; Masaru 2004, chap. 7). Until the passage of the 1965 Normalization Treaty, the Japanese government essentially practised the “politics of exclusion”, as Lie (2008, 36) puts it. Zainichi Korean alienation from the body politic and civil society meant a “separate and unequal” treatment as foreigners resident in Japan, with many suffering through “invisibility and silence” (37, 38). Nevertheless, as the community became active in civil rights struggles, such the employment discrimination case against Hitachi, some community members also began to publish histories of colonial and wartime Korea from a zainichi perspective. These authors, mainly first-generation zainichi Koreans, sought to counter dominant Japanese discourses of wartime history and ethnic relations, written from the perspective of the former colonizer (Ropers 2010, 267–8).

The leading zainichi Korean historian involved in this effort was Pak Kyŏng-sik, author of Records of Korean Forced Recruitment ([1965] 2005). At the time of publication, Pak’s Records was the first major monograph detailing the excesses and extent of Japanese wartime forced recruitment (kyōsei renkō), and conscription policies and their effect on Koreans. It presented a damning account of Japan’s wartime government and military policies, focusing on the problem of enforced labour recruitment and conscription. His groundbreaking study helped launch subsequent research by other zainichi Korean historians and research groups over the following decades, who detailed and chronicled the extent and effect of Japanese wartime policies on the Korean minority in Japan and its colonies.⁴ Reflecting on the state of research in the zainichi Korean community at this time, Pak observed how several factors came together to jump-start this monumental research effort. Many, including Pak himself, were concerned that zainichi Korean historians and researchers were being left behind by their zainichi Chinese counterparts who had been publishing accounts of Japanese wartime history and atrocities inflicted upon their community since the early 1950s.⁵ More acute for the Korean community was that 1963 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Great Kantō Earthquake which levelled the capital of Tokyo and saw the massacre of roughly 6000 Koreans in its aftermath. Two years later, in 1965, was the signing of the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, which formally reestablished diplomatic relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea. Both anniversaries would be significant in driving a reassessment of the history of Koreans in Japan (Pak 1992, 15). Importantly, the Treaty would be cited by successive Japanese governments to argue both inside and outside the courtroom that compensation and reparation claims had been legally settled (Palmer 2008, unpaginated).

Pak’s work was critical for providing the groundwork for subsequent zainichi Korean researchers writing about colonial and wartime Japan during this era. A brief snapshot of Pak’s argument, political views, and writing style is useful to illustrate commonalities between Pak’s writings about forced recruitment and forced labour, and narratives about Korean victims and survivors of the atomic bomb examined in the following section. In his own words, Pak’s sought to “protect democratic rights, eliminate ideological remnants left behind by imperialist aggressors, and to establish goodwill, genuine equality, and international solidarity” (Pak [1965] 2005, 3–4). This politicization is important: while a natural outgrowth of Marxist sympathies, it subsequently affected research by scholars and activists who held Pak’s Records as one of the most influential and referenced works concerning zainichi Korean history during the colonial period by the following generation of scholars (Ropers 2010, 268). Put a different way, Ryang (1998, 5) suggests that these formative writings are not merely about shedding light on an under-researched part of recent Japanese history (the colonial and wartime experiences of the Korean minority), but more importantly are seen to contain a moral imperative by these authors.

Critiquing narratives of Japan’s “ethnic history”

Understanding early histories of enforced recruitment written by Pak and others provides some much-needed context in understanding how subsequent works concerning Korean hibakusha developed, as many survivors were in fact victims of Japanese government policies that had brought them to work in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to begin with. A year after as Pak’s groundbreaking work, journalist and future mayor of Hiroshima Hiraoka (1972, 116) confirmed what many in the Korean community, including Pak, had intuitively understood about Japan’s wartime history, but which many Japanese were unconscious of – that most works about the atomic bombings were largely framed as “ethnic histories” (minzoku no rekishi).⁶ More to the point, Hiraoka argued that while Japanese had never forgotten the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they had forgotten the tens of thousands of Korean victims (1991, 209). Into this gap stepped zainichi Korean researchers and community groups, who repeatedly and explicitly linked the history of forced labour and forced recruitment to research and narratives about the atomic bombings (e.g. Toyoyuki 1970, 79–82, 87–92; HNSK 1975–1976, 98–101; HCHK 1979; NZJK 1989, 49–65). We may be rightly critical that the response of the zainichi Korean community to Japanese ethnic histories was with narratives in the same restrictive framework. However as Morris-Suzuki’s work on border politics and migration makes us aware, “insularity and myths of ethnic homogeneity have helped to shape public and official attitudes” in Japan concerning immigration, and, I would argue, the writing of history as well (2010, 10–1; see also Igarashi 2000, chap. 3).⁷

By the first half of the 1970s, some Japanese writers and commentators had “discovered” the existence of Korean hibakusha (Kawaguchi 2008, 69), unsurprisingly coinciding with the growing number of histories written by zainichi Koreans at the same time. Zainichi authors and research groups would gradually expand their focus from that of Korean forced recruitment and forced labour to that of hibakusha. Increasingly, these works would be authored by collectives rather than individuals, due to the amount of time necessary in amassing documentary evidence and interviewing survivors (Pak Kyŏng-sik 1992, 16). These authors took a lead from the rhetoric and arguments posited Pak Kyŏng-sik in his Records of Korean Forced Recruitment. One, Nishimura Toyoyuki (1970, 85), suggested that the atomic bombings were “impossible for Koreans to have avoided”. Moreover, the commonly heard refrain that there were no differences between Japanese and Korean victims of the atomic bombings was nonsense – an “impossible argument” for Nishimura (85). After all, Nishimura wrote, referencing Pak Kyŏng-sik, “most Koreans were forced to help with Japan’s aggressive war (shinryaku sensō)” (85). While many in Japan appeared content to forget the implications of colonial rule, a growing number of Koreans and Japanese were persistently pointing out uncomfortable wartime realities. Certainly most Korean hibakusha were not content to have their experiences effaced and equated to those of Japanese survivors. For instance, one of the first points zainichi hibakusha Chong Su-nam noted was not about the atomic bomb, but that “I was forcibly conscripted and brought to Japan, [herded] like a pig – and on top of that there’s the atomic bomb, and my now impossible dream of returning to my mother county given the partition [of Korea]” (HCHK 1979, 40, emphasis added).

Certainly some Japanese authors like Hiraoka not only were critical of Japanese colonial rule, but publicly advocated on behalf of Korean hibakusha. Yet this so-called discovery, as Kawaguchi writes, did not necessarily translate into a surge of interest among Japanese researchers or the reading public to re-insert a Korean element that had been purged from the public’s consciousness. In examining early works about Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the 1950s and 1960s, we find that voices of Korean hibakusha are few and far between, with only a handful of testimonies appearing in collections and only a few tangential references to Koreans at Ground Zero in literary and poetic works (Takayuki 2008, 70–2). And, while many oral histories have been frequently published and republished, in whole or in part since the end of the Allied Occupation, Korean survivors do not necessarily figure in them. For instance, in 1967, the nationally circulating Asahi newspaper published a collection entitled Genbaku 500-nin no shōgen [500 Testimonies of the Atomic Bombings], with survivors spread across 30 prefectures contributing to the work. While another oft-forgotten minority group, that of Okinawan survivors, received their own three-page section under the title “There are hibakusha from Okinawa too” (Asahi Shinbunsha 1967, 65–8), which sought to raise a small measure of public awareness, the numerically larger number of affected Koreans were conspicuously absent. While I do not suggest this example completely captures the entirety of Japanese narratives concerning the bombings at this point in time, it does raise broader questions about the visibility of the Korean minority in Japanese narratives of the bombings, specifically in those garnering significant publicity and which were targeted for popular audiences.⁸ With this example in mind, we can return to Hiraoka’s analysis and commentary concerning Korean survivors as he writes at nearly the exact same time in 1966 about the so-called “problems of Korean hibakusha”:

In South Korea, it’s thought that survivor experiences (hibaku taiken) are a problem for Japanese [to deal with]; from the perspective of Koreans [in Korea] it’s often thought to be something that doesn’t concern them. On the other hand, even though Korean survivors live in Hiroshima, the number of people who recognize the problem there are few and far between. […] [Ultimately] I think the meanings of Japanese and Korean hibakusha experiences are different [for each community in question]. The Japanese approach it as Japanese, and for them survivor experiences are a part of their ethnic history; Koreans view it as Koreans, and see it from the perspective of Japanese colonialism. From that the atomic bombing, as a historical experience, tore through the Korean people and carved itself into their minds. (1972, 116)

Whereas Japanese historians and researchers continued to largely view the history of the atomic bombings “as Japanese”, according to Hiraoka, a growing number of researchers and activists were engaged in providing a methodological and historical framework to narrate the history of Koreans in Japan. Coupled with the growing visibility of the Korean community, in terms of discursive outputs, civil disobedience, and public protest (see Chapman 2008, chap. 2), the existence of zainichi Koreans and Korean hibakusha became increasingly difficult to ignore in Japan. Community history groups like Mukuge and Mukuge no kai sprung up in Osaka and Kobe to address a variety of issues, including discrimination, wartime history, and the atomic bombings.⁹ Those that emerged in Hiroshima and Nagasaki often devoted most attention to the history and effects of the atomic bombings on the local zainichi community. Some, like the Association to Protect the Human Rights of Resident Koreans in Nagasaki (discussed later), authored a large number of publications, spanning decades. Others, like the Research Group Investigating the Actual Conditions of Koreans in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Hiroshima Nagasaki Chōsenjin Hibakusha Jittai Chōsadan) were short-lived, though they boasted enough active members (54 in Hiroshima and 25 in Nagasaki) to receive coverage for their work in national newspapers (Asahi Shinbun 1979). Notably, the membership of many groups was not limited to zainichi Koreans; Japanese members also participated in many of these community history groups (see CKRC 1974, 683). Given that most groups utilized oral histories as a key source of evidence in their works, I turn to an analysis of Korean hibakusha testimonies to illustrate some of the markers that, as Hiraoka suggested, left lasting impressions on the zainichi Korean community.

Divergent experiences and the politics of memory in survivor testimony

In analysing survivor testimonies, most texts compiled or authored by zainichi Koreans focus wholly or in part on those who repatriated to South Korea during the Occupation Period. This near-obsession with repatriates is explained in large part by a tendency for first- and many second-generation zainichi Koreans to look towards the Korean homeland. In fact, many zainichi Koreans like Pak [1965] 2005, 10) continued to see themselves as temporary residents of Japan who had been displaced from their homeland in Korea due to Japanese colonialism and the subsequent partition between the ROK and DPRK. In Japan, for example, the North Korean-affiliated organization Chōsen Sōren represented and expressed the concerns of many zainichi Koreans since its formation in 1955, arguing that all zainichi were overseas citizens of North Korea (Chapman 2008, 30). The nominally apolitical Korean Residents Union in Japan (Mindan) made similar claims about representing the interests of zainichi Koreans (Ropers 2010, 273). Thus, while many texts make explicit reference to examining and critiquing the situation for survivors in South Korea (e.g. Pak Su-bok, Kwi-hun, and Yŏ 1975; NSK 1975; Pak Su-nam 1982), the audience of these groups and authors was one almost entirely based in Japan.¹⁰

Testimonials by Korean survivors underscored certain experiences not shared by Japanese hibakusha. Beginning an analysis with the short titles of each testimony or interview can be instructive in how clearly Korean survivor experiences may be demarcated from their Japanese counterparts, and illustrate the ways in which they link to this newly constituted and parallel discourse concerning forced recruitment and forced labour. Consider for instance the following titles of individual testimonies:

“Brought to Nagasaki by labor conscription” (Ri-nop 1987, 122)

“Koreans…, Americans, and Chinese are victims too” (Pak Su-bok, Kwi-hun, and Yŏ 1975, 184)

“A labor brokerage brought me to a coal mine” (Pak Su-nam 1982, 102)

“The diary of a blast-affected conscripted Korean worker” (Sun-gil 1992, 100)

A certain amount of familiarity with a range of hibakusha testimonies is helpful at this point, since in broadly surveying published collections it becomes evident that the experiences encapsulated in these titles more likely than not refer to colonial citizens and not to Japanese survivors. While Japanese citizens were subject to military and labour conscription as well, the burden of military or labour conscription was not something considered unusual, out of the ordinary, or defining in many cases. Conscription or labour service was, after all, seen to be a responsibility that all undertook for the state in what were increasingly dire circumstances for Japan by 1944–1945, and when Japanese experiences of conscription appear, they are rarely referenced in titles themselves.¹¹

This distinction differentiating Japanese and Korean testimonies based on title is important: as Smith and Watson (2010, 33, 144) urge us to consider, titles of books, or in this case individual testimonies, are the strongest suggestion of authorial truth claims; that key “moments of the past” are “impelled” by the titles assigned to entire works or chapters. Titles are, after all, the first thing that audiences typically read, and they provide a snapshot of the work as a whole, making particular representations about the story or experience in whole. These kinds of titles by Korean survivors suggest the impact that Japan’s colonial history had upon them as individuals, and the importance which survivors attach to it even as survivors of the atomic bombings. In doing so, they knowingly and unknowingly make reference to the rapidly growing and concomitant discourse concerning forced labour and forced recruitment by Pak Kyŏng-sik and others, who argued that military or labour conscription was in fact the common point around which all Korean lives had revolved during the colonial period. Reading testimonies of Korean hibakusha, this much seems clear: if not conscripted or forcibly recruited themselves, often survivors’ family members or friends were.

Although titles of individual testimonies can be the most overt indication to readers of the ways in which Korean life experiences diverge from those of Japanese survivors, close examinations of the testimonies themselves are understandably necessary as well. As we have seen, military or labour conscription, along with the migration of families during the colonial period, are frequently recurring components of Korean testimonial narratives whereby zainichi Korean hibakusha discuss how they and/or family members came to arrive and reside in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Indeed, further attention should be given to the typical length and detail these accounts provide, given that, broadly speaking, this is another significant divergence from many Japanese accounts in that the details zainichi Korean survivors sketch of their lives before the bombings are often as vivid, lengthy, and important (in terms of the testimony’s narrative structure) as the day and immediate aftermath of the bombing itself.

Much of the reasoning behind this, I suggest, is in seeking to counter Japanese “ethnic histories” of the bombings, although the politics of memory plays a significant role too. Listen, for example, to the voice of Pak Min-gyu, chairman of the Nagasaki Prefecture Council for Korean Atomic Bomb Survivors (Nagasaki-ken Chōsenjin hibakusha kyōgikai). His prefatory remarks at a local community gathering attended by students indicate an understanding of the implicit political elements that testimonies like his, and those gathered by community organizations, carry:

Not just young children have listened to me speak this year, but also high school students, members of the labor movement, and those in the religious community too. Whether I take an hour, two hours, three hours, or even longer, the one point I wish to share with each of you more than anything else is [my answer to the question of] why so many Koreans came to Japan, and why they must have been killed by the atomic bomb blasts. There are many answers to this question, and of course there are many personal experiences [that speak to this question]. Some answers support political agendas, and in these places I will make adjustments my story. (Pak Min-gyu 1989, 50)¹²

With this example, we see how Pak, as chairman of a community history group, recognizes the political implications that zainichi narratives may have. At the same time, given his student audience, politicizing his experience would be inappropriate. Instead, he sticks closely to points that differentiate Korean experiences from Japanese hibakusha: noting, for instance, the policy of “Japan and Korea as One” (naisen ittai) or that many Koreans in Japan lost their jobs (which they had been conscripted for or forcibly recruited to fill) after surrender (50–51). We can see here how hibakusha testimonies may be deployed to achieve a more factual or holistic narrative in contrast to ethnicized histories that excluded Koreans. And, recalling Pak Kyŏng-sik’s arguments, it is possible to see how in different contexts such stories could be mobilized for outright political ends or advocacy.

Conclusion

In the years following the war’s end, the neglect of the Korean living and dead who had fought and died for the Emperor under 35 years of Japanese colonial rule, including those who were present in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was evident to many in the Korean community. I have sought to trace the development of writing about the atomic bombings by Koreans resident in Japan. By selecting a number of case studies and thematic commonalities present in writings since the mid-1960s, we have seen some of the unique aspects of Korean survivor narratives. In contrast to Japanese writings on the subject, the hallmark of zainichi Korean writings and testimonies concerning the atomic bombings delves deeply as a whole into the history of colonial and wartime Japan. Like Japanese accounts and narratives, zainichi Korean testimonies make clear the horror and inhumanity of the atomic bombings. More than this, however, many challenge the ethnicized version of history presented by most Japanese narratives and testimonies.

One of the most important acts by members of the zainichi Korean community was to challenge pervasive ethnically framed narratives of wartime Japan. In a 1975 article, one Japanese author admitted that before the publication the same year of a book entitled Hibaku Kankokujin [Koreans Affected by the Atomic Bomb], he “didn’t know there had been any Korean victims” (Kumi 1975, 39). This kind of frank admittance is reflective of the overwhelming dominance of ethnicized Japanese histories of the atomic bombings, and speaks to the reasons noted throughout this article about why zainichi Koreans were writing, collecting, and publishing histories and testimonies about Korean hibakusha – indeed, almost anything to do with the wartime period in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Though numbering in the hundreds of thousands, zainichi Koreans were essentially an invisible and ignored part of Japan’s population. Though these works made a growing number of Japanese aware of the existence of Korean hibakusha, equality in accessing government medical and welfare benefits continued to be stymied. Given that discrimination, as Ishikawa Itsuko noted (Itsuko 1991, 490), “lies in the dark shadows of history [concerning Korean hibakusha]”, it would be up to the Japanese courts in many cases to slowly tear down barriers that prevented zainichi Korean and Korean hibakusha from accessing many of the same medical and social welfare benefits afforded to Japanese survivors, despite nationality not being a prerequisite in the laws establishing these programmes (Weiner 1997, 95). While these legal victories were welcome relief for many, they did not dramatically alter popular perceptions or understandings of Korean victims. Rather, public memories and understandings of the atomic bombings continued to be framed in an ethnicized and exclusionary framework despite challenges to the contrary.

In theorizing why this was the case, John Bodnar’s framework concerning historical memory in the United States is useful, where he broadly notes that public memory “emerges from the intersection of official and vernacular cultural expressions” (Bodnar 1992, 13–4). Those in positions of prominence, in government or educational ministries or bureaucracies for example, are invested in the continuity of certain narratives and the suppression of competing interests or discourses, as Ienaga (1993–1994) has elaborated on. On the other hand, vernacular expressions, which works concerning zainichi Korean hibakusha largely fall into, are comparatively diverse and better reflect the “firsthand experience[s] in small-scale communities rather than the ‘imagined’ communities of a large nation” (Bodnar 1992, 14). As we have seen, zainichi Korean testimonies and works directly challenge dominant discourses and understandings of the atomic bombings by foregrounding a longer period of colonial history, and thereby question Japanese victimization narratives about the atomic bombings. Yet, despite the growing number of works published about Korean survivors since the mid-1960s, it has been incredibly difficult to overcome the wide-ranging institutional support in terms of pedagogy, historical research, and commemorative and memorial practices (see Foucault 1981, 55), which by and large promote imagined and communal understandings of the atomic bombings along ethnic lines.

Consequently, efforts to re-insert or create a space for zainichi Korean wartime narratives remains an incomplete project, and, as recent interviews (HST 1999, 554–6) and speeches (OMA 2011) by members of the community suggest, many feel as if this neglect continues even today. As the seventieth anniversary of the war’s end approaches, members of the Korean community in Japan continue to be active in organizing second-generation hibakusha in an effort to preserve and draw attention to the memories and experiences of a fast-fading generation of survivors (Chūgoku shinbun 2015a, 2015b). Ultimately, Korean hibakusha testimonies are not primarily about leaving a record for future generations that illustrated the potential horrors of nuclear warfare, nor squarely focused on broad hopes for “peace in our time”; first and foremost they were about reversing the near-complete amnesia that many in Japan had contracted concerning the worst aspects of the wartime period and the important ways in which colonial citizens (coercively) contributed to the wartime Japanese state.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Although the largest increases came between 1939 and 1945, due to Japanese government policies mandating the conscription and enforced labour of Koreans, other factors included widespread poverty throughout the Korean peninsula, poor agricultural harvests and subsequent famines, and natural disasters such as flooding. Moreover, Koreans have resided in and emigrated (voluntarily or by force) to Japan for centuries (see Mitchell 1967, 2–3). By the nineteenth century, only a few thousand Koreans who had not assimilated were scattered around Japan, including some in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Lie 2008, 4).

2. Japanese residents became eligible for medical assistance in 1957, and social welfare in 1968. Those who repatriated to Korea were excluded from these provisions, which resulted in litigation. The Japanese Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that the Medical Assistance Law should be applied regardless of nationality or residency. Recent litigation has focused on wage compensation for Mitsubishi forced labourers (Palmer 2008), and benefits for hibakusha in Korea (Japan Times 2013a).

3. The history of Japanese nationality law and the peculiarities unique to Korea is complex. Refer to Kashiwazaki (2000, 13–31) and Morris-Suzuki (2010, 42–5).

4. For examples of subsequent studies influenced by Pak in the early 1970s, see Mukuge no Kai (1972) and CKRC (1974).

5. A comprehensive list of sources concerning zainichi Chinese histories of forced recruitment and forced labour can be found in Nozoe Kenji’s excellent multivolume set (2008, 4: 219–307).

6. Hiraoka served as mayor from 1991 to 1999. The Japanese word minzoku is rooted in the concept of “the people” as a particular ethnic group. In the context of broader discussions concerning forms of Japanese “nationalism” and the ways ethnicity factors into the discussion, see Doak (2007, 25–9) and Chizuko (1997, 170).

7. Multiethnic works of Japanese imperialism and wartime history are, even today, few and far between (for one example, see Yang et al. 2012), with recent territorial disputes causing further diplomatic rifts and contributing to the difficulty of writing multiethnic or collaborative histories in East Asia (see Japan Times 2013b).

8. A reissued mass-market paperback version was published in 2008.

9. Mukuge (K: mugunghwa) or Rose of Sharon is the national flower of South Korea. The journal Mukuge tsūshin, affiliated with the organization Mukuge no kai, is one of the longest continuously published journals by a zainichi Korean community group (1971–today).

10. Comparatively fewer survivors would have been repatriated to North Korea, and, given the closed nature of the DPRK, it was impossible for zainichi Korean groups to travel there and interview survivors.

11. To be sure, many Koreans express the same devotion to wartime Japan, although such views are rarely professed publicly (see Ropers 2010, 278–9).

12. A more formalized testimonial variation of Pak’s story can be found in NSK (1978, 645–53).