[LINK] "Hiroshima Blast Haunts Korean Survivors"
Bloomberg's Sam Kim reports on South Korean survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and their issues.
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, burnt from head to toe, died about 10 days later.
Baek Du Yi, now 86, was Korean. With food scarce at home under Japanese occupation, her family had gone by boat to Japan about 10 years earlier. After the war she returned to her husband’s town of Hapcheon, a farming community known as “Korea’s Hiroshima” where about 600 survivors 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 colonizers to work or serve in the 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.
“We wouldn’t have been in Hiroshima had Japan not colonized us, and we wouldn’t have been bombed had Japan not attacked the U.S.,” Baek said through tears at a shelter for survivors in the town. “Before the bombing, the Japanese treated me like an inferior, and after I returned home Koreans shunned me as if I had a genetic defect.”
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, burnt from head to toe, died about 10 days later.
Baek Du Yi, now 86, was Korean. With food scarce at home under Japanese occupation, her family had gone by boat to Japan about 10 years earlier. After the war she returned to her husband’s town of Hapcheon, a farming community known as “Korea’s Hiroshima” where about 600 survivors 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 colonizers to work or serve in the 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.
“We wouldn’t have been in Hiroshima had Japan not colonized us, and we wouldn’t have been bombed had Japan not attacked the U.S.,” Baek said through tears at a shelter for survivors in the town. “Before the bombing, the Japanese treated me like an inferior, and after I returned home Koreans shunned me as if I had a genetic defect.”