Merely an Event of History
Why is this the case? Certainly, South Korean schoolchildren do not learn about the tragedy of Hiroshima in their history courses. It is understood as an event that hastened the end of World War II and colonial rule. Furthermore, very few works of Japanese culture are available in South Korea. Given the longstanding government effort to resist Japanese cultural imperialism, very few Japanese novels or other Japanese cultural expressions about Hiroshima have been disseminated among educated South Koreans. In other words, it is possible to attribute the prevailing South Korean indifference about Hiroshima to ignorance.
Yet the general indifference is not simply a matter of South Korean callousness or ignorance. To the extent that it contributed to the liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial rule, Hiroshima can be considered a fortuitous event. Hiroshima is contexualized in much the same way that the literary critic Paul Fussell described it in Thank God for the Atomic Bomb. Just as Fussell, a soldier who was about to be sent to fight in Japan in August 1945, found personal relief in the Hiroshima bombing, so too many Koreans experienced social relief from thirty-five years of Japanese colonial rule because of the atomic bombing. Against the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese, then, the death of innocent civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are but an unfortunate price of Japanese aggression. This sentiment is expressed, for example, by the renowned South Korean poet Kim Chi Ha. When Kim appeared in a Japanese television program entitled "Does the World Still Remember Hiroshima?" hosted by the Nobel laureate Ôe Kenzaburô, Kim said:

I think that the title of this program is misleading. We should
be asking; "Does the world still remember 300,000 people who were
massacred in Nanjing?" or "Do we still remember 1 million Asians who
were victims of World War II?" or "Do we still remember Koreans who were
forcibly taken to be used as expendable workers?" or "Do we still
remember Koreans who were victimized by atomic bombs?" Even though
Japan attempts to play a major role in Asia, unless it comes to terms
with all the historical errors made in the past and makes it clear
that it is no longer tainted, Japan won't be qualified to participate,
not only in the future of Asia but in the future of the world as well.
Before pleading to the world, "Do you still remember Hiroshima?" the
Japanese people need to answer the aforementioned questions and organize
the movement to redeem the crimes Japan committed in the past.
It is not that Kim is vengeful. He merely points out that the tragedy of Hiroshima is but one of many tragediesmany of them perpetrated by the Japanesethat occurred during World War II.

A Legacy of Neglect
As Kim intimates, a tragedy largely neglected by both Japanese and Koreans is the large number of Korean residents who died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many Koreans worked as sexual serfs, miners, and factory workers throughout the Japanese archipelago during the war. The Korean hibakusha who died or were injured in Hiroshima have been virtually forgotten; most of them did not receive the Japanese government compensation given to the Japanese hibakusha. Since the building of the memorial tombstone for the Korean victims of the Hiroshima bombing in 1975, the authorities of Hiroshima have resisted its inclusion in the Peace Park commemorating the atomic bomb victims. Consider the following report on the 1985 struggle to move the Korean victims' tombstone inside the Peace Park:

On June 18 [1985], a group of activists and scholars set up a
preparation committee for the relocation of the tombstone. One of
the members, Toyonaga Eizaburô . . . stated: "I think it is more
important for us to build a tombstone to apologize for the crimes
Japan committed against Koreans than a tombstone to commemorate
Korean victims." However, the "memorial tombstone of apology" never
materialized; no statement of Japan's aggression against Korea would
be carved out on the tombstone. . . . The head of the Hiroshima Korean
Residents Association in Japan stated: "The historical fact of Japan's
mass-scale forced abduction of Koreans during World War II will be
erased from memory. . . . Are we going to allow them to trample on
our history?"
The tombstone remained outside the park. It is therefore not surprising that many knowledgeable and concerned South Koreanseven those who are not rabid Japan bashersfind it difficult to join in the Japanese "celebration" of the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I am afraid that I must end on a yet more gloomy note. The neglect of Hiroshimahowever comprehensible for Koreanshas had deleterious consequences for South Korea. This is true, for example, in the largely unquestioned embrace of nuclear power by the South Korean government and the populace. Until the stirring of the environmental movement in the mid-1980s, nary a voice within South Korea questioned the potential dangers of nuclear power. One subterranean source is, I think, the implicit positive association of nuclear power and nuclear weapons with the American military victory and liberation. Because the bomb brought victory and liberation, there has been very little resistance to either nuclear power or nuclear weaponry. Rather than seeking to stop the proliferation of weapons, I would not be at all surprised if many South Koreans will actively promote nuclear weapons to "resist" China to the west and Japan to the east. During the recent brouhaha over the North Korean nuclear controversy, more than a few South Koreans thought it comforting to know that North Korea might have a nuclear weapons production capability. Such is but one dimension of the "lesson" of Hiroshima for South Korea.



John J. Lie is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He recently wrote Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots with Nancy Abelmann.



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