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.”