Source: The New Yorker
The Atomic Bombs’ Forgotten Korean Victims
By E. Tammy Kim | June 16, 2025 

The Atomic Bombs’ Forgotten Korean Victims:

Survivors of the Nuclear Blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Are Still Fighting for Recognition

E. Tammy Kim
Contributing Writer, The New Yorker

Illustration by Grace J. Kim

Tanaka Terumi was thirteen years old when the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, in August, 1945. The blast knocked him unconscious. After he came to, he and his mother walked through the city’s “blackened ruins”—buildings zapped to ash “as far as the port,” some three kilometres in the distance. “I found the charred body of one aunt at the remains of her house,” he recalled late last year, from a dais in Oslo. Now ninety-two, he was in town to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese association of atom-bomb survivors. “The deaths I witnessed at that time could hardly be described as human deaths,” Tanaka said. He spoke softly, and, with his shiny pate and sunken cheeks, looked frail. The story he recited was chilling, but well practiced.

Survivors of the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, called hibakusha, formed Nihon Hidankyo in 1956. In the many decades that followed, they demanded medical care and social recognition from the Japanese government. What they asked of all governments proved more elusive: “the immediate abolition of nuclear weapons.”

Japan is the only country to have suffered mass killings from nuclear war. So it was striking when, later in Tanaka’s speech, he referenced the hardships of “A-bomb survivors living abroad,” especially the “Korean hibakusha who were exposed to the atomic bombings in Japan and returned to their home countries.” This was likely news to viewers around the world. Had there been atom-bomb victims who weren’t Japanese? Who were these “Korean hibakusha”?

Two of them had, in fact, travelled from South Korea to be with Tanaka, in Norway, as part of Nihon Hidankyo’s delegation. Jeong Won-sul, an eighty-one-year-old wearing a sombre black-and-white hanbok suit, had been an infant in 1945, in Hiroshima, born to Koreans forced to work in Japan by the colonial government. His mother had been close enough to the detonation that she lost her hearing; his father lived with chronic pain. Jeong himself had respiratory and digestive diseases. The other Korean in the delegation, Lee Tae-jae, a youthful sixty-five, represented second-generation hibakusha: his father had been caught in the fallout from the bomb in Nagasaki, while conscripted to work at a Mitsubishi munitions factory, and the effects of the radiation seemed to have been passed on to Lee. In his forties, Lee was diagnosed with stomach cancer; he also has anemia and joint trouble. Second-generation hibakusha suffer from certain cancers, depression, anemia, and asthma at vastly higher rates than those of the general population. For Korean hibakusha, Japan was not the only “victim nation,” Lee told a Yonhap News reporter in Oslo. “We must look the truth squarely in the eye.”

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.”

The first medical program for Japanese hibakusha was set up in the mid-fifties, in response to a distant accident. In 1954, the U.S. tested nuclear bombs at Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. A Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon Number 5, happened to sail through the fallout. Twenty-three crewmen suffered radiation poisoning, and one died that year; many in the country were reluctant to buy seafood, fearing contamination. The incident “led to a nationwide anti-nuclear bomb movement,” Takahashi writes. A Tokyo women’s group circulated a petition against nuclear testing, and collected the signatures of “about 60 percent of the population over age fifteen.” As the anthropologist Lisa Yoneyama has observed, the Lucky Dragon incident “connected the atomic sites of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini” and produced the idea of a trio of “nuclear attacks that victimized the Japanese nation and people as a whole.”

The following year, Hiroshima hosted the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, where, for the first time, “relief for hibakusha was added to the agenda of the anti-nuclear bomb movement,” Takahashi writes. Survivors could apply for a hibakusha “certificate,” which entitled them to health services and limited monetary benefits. Eligibility was determined by such factors as one’s distance from the “hypocenter” and how many days after the bombing one had entered an affected area. There were direct victims, victims in utero (tainai hibakusha), and victims who passed through Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the following weeks as disaster-response workers or unlucky commuters (nyushi hibakusha).

Both cities were major industrial and military centers, and thus home to tens of thousands of Korean colonial workers and their families. Yet Zainichi Koreans were effectively excluded from the hibakusha benefits system. They were told that they didn’t qualify because of their alien status, or that they needed a Japanese witness to prove their eligibility; sometimes they were turned away for not speaking fluent Japanese. Many were destitute and lived in what was known as an “A-bomb slum.” Zainichi survivors did not fit into the idea of “A-bomb nationalism”—Japan’s unique “sense of victimhood”—emphasized by activist groups like Nihon Hidankyo, Takahashi writes. Conditions were even worse for Korean hibakusha who returned to the Korean peninsula. North and South Korea were transitioning from Japanese rule to Cold War occupation. There was little awareness of, let alone tailored health care for, A-bomb survivors. Korean hibakusha also had to contend with the fact that their countrymen celebrated the bombings as the event that “liberated the Korean nation from Japanese colonial rule.”

By the nineteen-sixties, the hibakusha identity was established enough, and the condition of Korean survivors bad enough, that a transnational movement started to take shape. In 1968, Gang Mun-hui, a Zainichi hibakusha, gave public testimony at a conference in Japan—the first time many Japanese, including victim advocates, learned that there were hibakusha living in Korea. As a child, Gang had moved with his family from Korea to Hiroshima, and was working at a Mitsubishi shipbuilding plant when the atom bomb exploded. His father, brother, and sister died. Gang stayed in Hiroshima after the war, unsure of what he would find back home. “He could not make up his mind as he learned about the political and social confusion in Korea,” Takahashi writes.

In 1970, a South Korean hibakusha named Son Jin-du travelled to Japan, hoping to “receive medical treatments for his radiation-induced illnesses.” His application for a hibakusha certificate was denied, however, “on the grounds that his place of residence was outside Japan.” He took his case through the Japanese courts and prevailed, finally, in 1978, opening a path for overseas victims—though Japan would characterize such aid as charity, not “state compensation.” The Zainichi documentary filmmaker Park Soo-nam interviewed Korean hibakusha who subsequently arrived in Japan to receive specialized care—for puncture wounds, missing eyes—forty years after the fact. (In South Korea, there was “no official policy to help us,” one woman tells her; the hibakusha certificate “was just a piece of paper.”) Meanwhile, Japanese and South Korean advocates and doctors conducted surveys of hibakusha living in cities such as Hapcheon, nicknamed the Hiroshima of Korea for its high population of returning survivors. North Korea undertook its own surveys, with the help of Zainichi and Japanese visitors.

In the next five decades, Japanese and Korean hibakusha became central figures in the global anti-nuclear movement. They successfully pressured Japan to declare a prohibition on the development and possession of nuclear weapons, and to provide assistance to survivors abroad. In a treaty signed in 1965, Japan had paid five hundred million dollars to settle all colonial and wartime claims with South Korea, and maintained that nothing further was owed to Korean hibakusha, forced laborers, or the “comfort women” who’d been used as military sexual slaves. But in 1990, thanks to hibakusha advocacy, Japan announced that it would give South Korea some thirty million dollars to treat overseas hibakusha. A hibakusha nursing home was built in Hapcheon.

Though the hibakusha cause was often presented in universal terms, the movement was frayed by political allegiances and conflicts. Multiple organizations sought to represent Japanese and Zainichi hibakusha, reflecting their communities’ incongruous postwar dreams. On the Japanese side, there emerged two leftist groups (one Communist, the other Socialist) and a third, more conservative group. Nihon Hidankyo started out as part of the Communist group, but soon distanced itself from all three.

Just as the Korean peninsula had been split in two, Zainichi hibakusha sorted themselves into competing camps: Mindan, which was pro-South Korea, and Choren, which was pro-North Korea (and later renamed Soren). A survivor’s loyalty might depend on where her Korean family was from or ended up living, her attitudes toward the U.S., which still has military bases in Japan and South Korea, and her experience of the Korean War. A Zainichi hibakusha who had relatives killed by the North Korean Army would tend to side with Mindan. Others, whose “family members living in South Korea . . . had been suspected as Communists and then killed by the US military” might support Choren/Soren, Takahashi writes. There were still others who condemned this diasporic friction: “Unless Mindan and Soren get united,” a hibakusha told Park, the filmmaker, there would be “no help” for survivors.

Lee Sil-geun was born in Shimonoseki, Japan, in 1929, the child of colonial Korean immigrants. Those who knew him before the bombings could not have foretold his devotion to North Korea. He was a “militarist boy” who believed that Japan would prevail in the war, “backed by a divine wind (kamikaze).” To make a living, he and his family sold rice on the black market, a business that happened to bring him through Hiroshima shortly after the explosion. What he saw—“metal frame skeletons . . . a pitch-black scorched field filled with a rotten smell”—turned him against the Japanese Empire, which had glorified the idea of war, and toward Communism and his Korean homeland. Though Lee suffered from the “acute after-effects from radiation” (fever, diarrhea, internal bleeding), he was so radicalized by the experience that he felt compelled to settle in Hiroshima to help other victims. He joined the Japanese Communist Party and enrolled in a cadre-training program organized by Choren.

In 1945, the U.S. military controlled both Japan and South Korea, and oversaw purges of even vaguely leftist activity. Officials later ordered Choren to be dissolved, and imprisoned Lee for leafletting against the Korean War. When he got out, the war was over, having ended where it began—in a North-South stalemate. He was both a political activist and a kind of charity worker for fellow-Zainichi, whose concerns many leftists had dismissed as “a domestic, ethnic minority issue.” In 1975, when the Americans made plans “to deploy strategic nuclear weapons to their military bases in South Korea,” Takahashi writes, Lee helped to establish Hiroshima Chohikyo, a Choren/Soren-allied group that advocated for Zainichi hibakusha and protested the continuing U.S. occupation of South Korea. He acquired North Korean citizenship and assisted Zainichi who wished to repatriate there.

Zainichi who were affiliated with Mindan—the pro-South Korea group—had a more conciliatory attitude toward the United States. Gang Mun-hui, the Hiroshima survivor who made the Japanese public aware of Korean hibakusha, worked through Mindan and the Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Association to organize medical trips between Japan and South Korea and support litigation. In 2016, the association won the passage of a benefits law for South Korean hibakusha. A parallel collective in North Korea, the Joseon A-bomb Victims Association, tracked survivors, issued hibakusha certificates, and hosted medical delegations from Japan. But North Korean efforts “stalled in the early 2000s due to political tensions in the region,” Takahashi writes. George W. Bush deemed North Korea part of a global “axis of evil,” Pyongyang admitted to the kidnappings of Japanese citizens, and Kim Jong Il publicized his nuclear-weapons program.

North-South politics have long defined the Zainichi hibakusha movement—and sometimes resulted in antagonism. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, members of Choren reportedly preserved scores of Korean hibakusha remains at a temple in Nagasaki. Members of Mindan later confiscated the remains and moved them to another Japanese temple; they eventually ended up at cemeteries in Korea. Mindan wanted to return the remains “to their homeland as soon as possible,” Takahashi writes, but this desire was also motivated by a rivalry with Soren.

In Nagasaki, three separate monuments to Korean hibakusha have been built over the years: two by Mindan and one by an unaffiliated coalition of Japanese activists. At Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, there is a Mindan-funded memorial cenotaph; negotiations between Mindan and Soren over an additional “unified monument” were entering their third decade as Takahashi’s book went to press.

In 2014, I visited Hiroshima and toured its many monuments to devastation: the skeletal dome, the peace park, the peace museum. An elderly hibakusha was on hand to describe his suffering; I wondered how many times he’d had to relay the same story. The following year, in New York, I interviewed Sumiteru Taniguchi, a hibakusha with Nihon Hidankyo who was at the United Nations to mark the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombings. He showed me a photograph of himself as a child—his back, flayed and bright red—and gave me a four-volume set of oral histories collected by Nihon Hidankyo in the nineteen-eighties. The hibakusha testimonies were labelled by city, gender, and distance from the hypocenter. I noted patterns and recurring memories: flames and thirst; the frenzied search for family; anger toward the U.S. and Japanese government; the smell of burning corpses. The tone often felt apocalyptic, or prophetic: “Hiroshima, 1.5km, Male, Age 32, 22-0290—We are living in a movement between the second World War and a war of the future.” The collection did not include any oral histories of Zainichi survivors, neither Soren nor Mindan, as far as I could tell.

Japanese, Zainichi, and Korean hibakusha have, to varying degrees, raised the question of American responsibility for the atomic bombings. In a 1963 case, Shimoda v. the State, a Japanese court observed that the U.S. had violated international law by engaging in mass “indiscriminate aerial bombardment,” but it ruled that hibakusha had no right to sue. The U.S. has never apologized for what it did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or on Bikini Atoll and other test sites in the Marshall Islands. President Barack Obama, who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his “vision of a world free from nuclear weapons,” arguably came the closest. In 2016, on a visit to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park with then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, he decried the atom bomb’s “capacity for unmatched destruction” and mourned the hundred thousand Japanese and “thousands of Koreans” killed. Yet he failed to condemn America’s role in the killing.

Takahashi’s book emphasizes the good of individuals more than that of nation-states. Gang, the Zainichi hibakusha from Hiroshima, finds that the kindness of Japanese hibakusha—and their allied activists, doctors, and lawyers—helped South Korean hibakusha “leave behind the past resentment towards Japan.” Kawamura Torataro, a Japanese doctor, born and raised in colonial Korea, led a medical delegation to serve South Korean A-bomb victims. And Oka Masaharu, a pastor and a former sailor in the Japanese Navy, campaigned so zealously for Korean hibakusha and, more generally, against the “racial oppression [of] Asians living in Japan,” that a museum about Japanese war crimes, in Nagasaki, was named after him.

Next year, eight decades out from 1945, members of the Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Association will give evidence at a symbolic trial, organized by civil-society groups, in New York. It is meant “to hold the United States legally accountable” and demand “compensation and a legal apology,” organizers say. And unlike in the Shimoda case, neither the standing of the plaintiffs nor the sovereign immunity of the defendant will extinguish the proceedings. There have been other symbolic trials, including for the “comfort women” of the Second World War, in 2000. The coming proceeding feels oddly contemporary, given the escalating risks of nuclear war. At a recent meeting about the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a representative of a Korean N.G.O. helping to plan the A-bomb tribunal warned of “a new Cold War system centered around the U.S.-China rivalry.” There is a real possibility, she said, of those tensions ballooning “into a global nuclear conflict.”

Where else can justice be found? The theorist David Eng offers the story of the Sahtu Dene, a First Nations community in northwestern Canada, whose men mined the uranium used by the U.S. to bomb Japan. In the late nineties, a delegation of Sahtu Dene travelled to Hiroshima to acknowledge their role in that destruction, despite their own ordeals with cancer and poverty. They visited a hospital for Korean hibakusha, and apologized, person to person. The “dispossessed Sahtu Dene,” Eng writes, did what no government—not Canada or the U.S., Japan or South Korea—was willing to do.