Hibakusha of ‘Korea’s Hiroshima’ still press for redress

[yuiyoshida]

Baek Du-yi poses for a photograph at a shrine inside the Hapchon Welfare Center for Atomic Bomb Survivors in Hapcheon, South Korea, on July 13. | BLOOMBERG

by Sam Kim

SEOUL – The nuclear bomb detonated as a 16-year-old girl sat in a shanty town cradling her baby, waiting for her mother to return from selling candy.

With Hiroshima in flames behind her on Aug. 6, 1945, the teen raced up a mountain to safety. Her mother, burned from head to toe, died about 10 days later.

Baek Du-yi, now 86, had come to Japan by boat 10 years earlier from the food-scarce, Japanese-controlled Korean Peninsula. After the war she returned to her husband’s town of Hapcheon, a farming community known as “Korea’s Hiroshima,” where about 600 hibakusha reside. The town in the southeast of what is now South Korea accounts for nearly a quarter of the Korean survivors of Japan’s nuclear blasts.

While Baek and her family were in Hiroshima out of economic necessity, many of the estimated 2 million Koreans in Japan in 1945 had been forced by their colonial rulers to work or serve in the Imperial Japanese Army. That period still looms over how Japan and South Korea view each other, and keeps interaction between their leaders in a deep freeze.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/08/06/national/history/hibakusha-koreas-hiroshima-still-press-redress/#.VcNs2rUVjMp