Maintaining Memory: The Inclusion of Korean Hibakusha in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum

Abstract

On the morning of August 6, 1945 Lieutenant Colonel Yi U was on his way to work when the Enola Gay dropped the Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima. He was found later that day and taken to a hospital where he died the following day. Yi was one of the many Koreans residing in Hiroshima in 1945 as the war drew to a close, but unlike the majority of Korean residents Yi was a prince of the Joseon Kingdom's Yi dynasty and nephew of Sunjong, the last Korean emperor before the peninsula was annexed by Japan in 1910. In 1967 a cenotaph was erected at the location where his body was found following the blast in memory of Korean victims of the bombing. This location was outside of the Hiroshima Peace Park, however, and came to be seen to embody the discrimination faced by Korean hibakusha and by Koreans in Japan more broadly, with Korean residents' groups later moving to have a cenotaph within the park. The cenotaph and its relocation along with the inclusion of the stories of Korean victims of the bombing within the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum are the two main controversies surrounding the role of the maintenance of the existence and memory of Korean victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which along with medical support has been the primary struggle of Korean hibakusha and will be the main. focus of this paper. As there has been both more written about the museum in Hiroshima and the controversies surrounding it as well as more Koreans present in Hiroshima at the end of the war, this paper will focus on Hiroshima, though Nagasaki does also have a museum and a park dedicated to the remembrance of the bombing and there is a memorial to Korean victims located there. Though a full explanation would likely fill volumes, this paper will begin by looking at a brief synopsis of the relations between Korea and Japan in the modern era and the status of Koreans in Japan in the twentieth century. This will be followed by a section on the normalization of Japan- South Korea relations and a section on the background of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum. Next will be a discussion on the controversies surrounding the aforementioned Cenotaph for Korean Victims of the Atomic Bombing and its eventual relocation. The third main section will focus on the inclusion of Korean, and more broadly non-Japanese, narratives in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum itself, followed by a section on Korean hibakusha in Korea and a comparison with comfort women. The final section will look at some ongoing questions surrounding the issue of Korean hibakusha before concluding. Though a full discussion of the relationship between Japan and Korea over the centuries. would take much more time and space than this paper allows, it has been, in a complete understatement and oversimplification, complicated. The statue of Yi Sun-sin, the admiral who rebuffed Japanese naval attacks ordered by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in a planned invasion of Korea in the late sixteenth century, is one of two statues standing in Gwanghwamun square in central Seoul today. The other is of King Sejong the Great, who created the Korean alphabet, hangul, in the fifteenth century. During the following Edo Period in which Japan maintained the relatively isolationist foreign policy of sakoku, however, the Japanese and Korean governments maintained relations and continued to conduct trade with one and other. Following the forced opening of Japan by Perry in the mid-nineteenth century and a series of unequal treaties between Japan and Western powers, Korea became the target of Japan's own expansionist policy. Using the same form of gunboat diplomacy that had been used against it not long before, Japan concluded the Treaty of Kanghwa with Korea in 1876. Japan continued to increase its influence in Korean affairs in the following years, including orchestrating the assassination of Queen Min, consort to Gojong, and fighting two wars over influence on the peninsula, the Sino-Japanese War from 1894 to 1895 and the Russo-Japanese War from 1904 to 1905.