hankyoreh

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaks to reporters at his official residence in Tokyo on May 10. (Kyodo/Yonhap News)

Speaking to reporters at his official residence in Tokyo on May 10, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shared news of Barack Obama’s upcoming visit to Hiroshima.

“As the only country in the world to suffer wartime atomic bombing, Japan has called for the abolition of nuclear weapons so that this horrible experience is never repeated,” Abe said.

Watching Abe’s press conference was enough to bring on an odd crawling feeling that perhaps only Koreans can truly comprehend. Lee Sil-geun, 88, has dedicated his life to fighting for a resolution on the issue of both South and North Korean atomic bomb survivors. Born in Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1927, Lee himself suffered terribly as a result of the Hiroshima blast.

“Even today, many people don’t think of the atomic bombings except in terms of the day of Aug. 6, 1945,” he said in a recent interview with the Japanese press. “There’s no discussion of what [Japan] had done before that. The Japanese need to consider once again why those Korean atomic bomb victims exist in the first place.”

Before the bombing, Hiroshima had grown into a thriving military city, fueled by five major conflicts: the First and Second Sino-Japanese Wars, the Russo-Japanese War, the Mukden Incident, and the War in the Pacific. A munitions industry grew to help the country wage war, shored up by cheap labor from Korea. When the atomic bomb was dropped in Aug. 1945, tens of thousands of Koreans were believed to have been killed or injured alongside the Japanese victims. Author Han Su-san wrote a novel about the devastation of the Nagasaki bombing. It was titled “Crow,” after the birds that flocked to peck at the corpses of Korean victims. Injured Koreans were left to die after refused to care for them, because they heard them moaning in their native language.

“The idea of ’Hiroshima peace‘ doesn’t hold water as long as [Japan] does not look back on history and make a break with it,” Lee concluded.

The first reporting on Korean atomic bomb survivors in the Japanese press was done in 1964 by Takashi Hiraoka. Now 88 and a former mayor of Hiroshima, Hiraoka was working for the Chugoku Shimbun newspaper at the time.

“I came under a lot of criticism from victim groups [after the report],” he said. “I wrote about responsibility for colonial rule, and they were talking about how ‘we are the victims.’”

To the US and Europe, Japan stresses how its people were the “only” victims of the atomic bombs. In contrast, the country does not turn its focus to Asia. The only references to “responsibility for colonial rule” that have appeared in the city of Hiroshima’s Peace Declarations - published every year in the name of its mayor on the anniversary of the bombing - came during the years from 1991 when Hiraoka held the post. Japan began something of a dialogue with other Asian countries after the Murayama Statement of 1995 and the Kan Statement of 2010. But with another statement last year by Abe, the focus of historical perspectives appears to have shifted back to the West. It was only in 1995 - a half-century after the bombings - that foreign survivors were first invited to events commemorating their anniversary.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, which Obama is scheduled to visit during his stay, is also home to a memorial to Korean atomic bomb victims, which was relocated there in July 1999. Right-wingers in Japan often come to demand its removal. The cenotaph is located just to the northwest of another where US Secretary of State John Kerry laid flowers last November - less than two minutes’ walking distance.

Can one imagine Abe asking Obama to lay flowers on the memorial for Korean victims as well? While that kind of courage is unlikely from Abe, ordinary South Koreans might better acknowledge the two leaders’ commitment to a “nuclear-free world” if it did come to pass.

By Gil Yun-hyung, Tokyo correspondent

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]