BY HARUMI OZAWA, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE AUGUST 8, 2010
TOKYO, Aug 9, 2010 (AFP) - Kim Jong-ki was an 18-year-old forced labourer digging tunnels for a Japanese arms manufacturer in Nagasaki 65 years ago, on the day a US aircraft dropped an atom bomb on the city.
Like the other estimated 1,000 Koreans toiling below ground, Kim worked from dawn to dusk in the port city where Mitsubishi Heavy Industries was churning out warships, torpedoes and other wartime hardware.
"We were given only poor meals but no payment," Kim, now 83 and living in his home country, told AFP by telephone. "Every day we saw American warplanes flying from right to left for aerial bombardments of the city."
This year marks the 65th anniversary of the US raid which made Japan the only nation that has ever been attacked with atomic bombs — first on August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima, and three days later in Nagasaki.
But for Kim, this year also brings another important anniversary — 100 years since imperial Japan annexed the Korean peninsula.
During Japan’s often brutal colonial rule about one million Koreans are believed to have been brought to the island-nation and its battle-fronts and put to work, mostly in coal mines, factories and on construction sites.
Nearly 70,000 Koreans were in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, the day of the atom bombing, according to a local human rights group. At least 2,900 of them now live in South Korea, and several in the communist North.
Japan had long refused to help the hidden "hibakusha", or atomic bombing survivors, who came from outside the country.
Only after 2008 — following many painstaking lawsuits — did they become eligible for medical and financial aid equal to Japanese victims.
Yasunori Takazane, professor emeritus at Nagasaki University, who also leads the rights group for Koreans, argued that Japan must face up to the harm it caused other Asian people as it calls for a world without nuclear arms.
"What Japan did to its Asian neighbours was way beyond what you’d call discrimination," he told AFP. "It was destroying the people, which eventually led to the calamity of the nuclear attacks."
"I agree that nuclear arms must not be tolerated," he said. "But unless we realise, and repent for, the fact Japan invaded Asian nations, we cannot argue against American people who try to justify the atomic bombings."
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, a South Korean, last week visited Nagasaki and also became the first UN chief to attend an annual ceremony at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, along with envoys from the US and other nuclear powers.
The bombings claimed 140,000 lives in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki, either instantly or later through burns and radiation sickness.
Not only Korean forced labourers, but also Japanese students mobilised for the war effort, worked for the weapons industries in Nagasaki.
One of them, Fujie Makiyama, now 83, remembers that she awoke "buried under the wreckage of the collapsed roof. My roommate who had been sleeping next to me died with her stomach cut open and her innards hanging out."
Makiyama said she suffered injuries to her face and legs and later the after-effects of radiation exposure, including hair loss, an abnormally bloated stomach and black marks on her skin which still appear today.
Most tragically, she said, her son died aged five of cerebral palsy.
"I don’t want to think it was because of the radiation," said Makiyama, now a grandmother-of-three, referring to the risk of genetic damage. She said many of her contemporaries suffered miscarriages or had disabled children.
Another man who was a 17-year-old labourer in the tunnels is now an 82-year-old Catholic monk in Nagasaki named Thomas Ozaki Tagawa.
"The United States needs to apologise for dropping the bombs," he said.
Takazane said the dropping of atomic bombs was an act against not only the Japanese but also "the whole of humankind".
"That’s why we must not forget the Koreans who also suffered the same ordeal."
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I disagree with those who feel the U.S. needs to apologize to Japan. Japan started the war. Japan attacked the United States Japan was facing ultimate defeat and stubbornly refused to surrender. They even refused to surrender after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. A land invasion of Japan would have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. This was Japan's fault. They were warned before the bomb was dropped that it was coming. They refused to acknowledge the warning. The boms were horrible but there was little choice for America. The U.S. military had just finished defeating Hitler's Germany. The U.S. saved the world from both Germany and Japan. The cost was very high but the fault lies with the Japanese emperor and the Japanese military.
John H. Armwood
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