hankyoreh

An ossuary for the ashes of Hansen’s disease patients at Sorok Hospital in South Jeolla Province. (by Lee Moon-young

May 17 will be the 100th anniversary of the opening of Sorokdo National Hospital.
On May 10, a week before the centennial, Japan accepted the final claims for compensation from 590 Koreans with Hansen’s disease, also called leprosy, who had been forcibly quarantined before 1945. In contrast, the South Korean government continues to appeal a series of court orders to provide state compensation for sterilization and forced abortions after 1945, when Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule.
The centennial of Sorokdo National Hospital is not an occasion for celebration, but rather for reflection on the pain of the past. Surely commemorating the occasion should start with South Korea taking responsibility for attempting to remain pure by locking away these people.

His family name is Lim, and he is in a square box that measures 20cm on each side. His personal name is Jeong-haeng. His place is at the top of four layers of boxes, a veritable pile of pain, in which pain is stacked atop pain, with more resentment on top. Boxes of the same size support Lim from below, a pile of ashes, in which boxes are stacked atop each other.

The dead outnumber the living

staff reporter)

The first to die this year was an individual surnamed Jeong. Starting on Jan. 7, the boxes of Paulownia wood rose up in two rows, with 14 boxes by May 4. Each month, the rows grew higher, with seven boxes added in January alone, three in February, two in March, one in April and one in May.

The boxes are located in the crematorium at Gubuk Village, Doyang Township, Goheung County, South Jeolla Province – the first village built on Sorok Island during the Japanese colonial occupation.

On the shore that faces the brunt of the north wind blowing in from the ocean, the corpses of those who ended their lives as inmates at the Sorokdo National Hospital are incinerated. It is at this crematorium that each and every one of the inmates shuffle off their mortal coil, leaving behind bone dust.

Each year since 2006, the boxes of ashes have been piled up, from as few as 37, in 2010 to as many as 73, in 2008. More people have gone into the boxes over the past 10 years (616) than those who will do so in the future (543 were still alive as of Mar. 2016).

The dead are asking the government whether it expects that, if people disappear from Sorok Island, the tears that they shed on the island will disappear as well.

Born in Yesan County in South Chungcheong Province on Sep. 20, 1935, Lim Jeong-haeng died in Room No. 309 at the Sorokdo National Hospital on May 2, 2016.

His body, contorted by paralysis, was burned to ashes and stuffed into a wooden box no bigger than the span of two hands. The remains of the man who was a plaintiff in the first lawsuit asking the government to compensate Hansen’s patients for sterilization and forced abortion in Oct. 2011 (so far, a total of 539 people have participated in six lawsuits) are in the 14th box of ashes produced in 2016.

His family name is Kang, and he was born on Mar. 6, 1925. His personal name is Han-gu. In 1943, a Japanese policeman sent him to Sorok Island to be forcibly quarantined, in line with the Joseon Leprosy Prevention Law that had been enacted in 1935.

In the Japanese-controlled hospital on Sorok Island, there were no boundaries between treatment facilities and detention facilities. The inmates were forced to produce the materials of war, baking red bricks and weaving straw sacks.

Some inmates were branded on the forehead with a red-hot iron; others who were caught trying to run away were beaten to death in the cells.

The stripped trunks of the old pine trees in front of the hospital bear the marks of inmates extracting pine resin intended for the war materials. The resin collected here was also the fuel used to burn the bodies of 84 negotiators representing the patients, who had demanded the right to govern themselves. The 84 were killed in a massacre that took place one week after Korea’s liberation.

During the Japanese colonial period, Kang’s left foot was amputated, along with his right leg at the thigh. For his entire life, he only left Sorok Island one time. This happened when he went to Japan during the middle and late 2000s to file a lawsuit for compensation for his forced quarantine. When South Korean lawyers visited him on Sorok Island and told him they wanted to help him receive compensation from Japan, he did not believe them.

Kang was also incredulous when Japan, which had already compensated domestic victims in 2001, changed its law to also compensate victims from its former colonies. (The bill passed the Japanese Diet in 2006 thanks to the efforts of South Korean and Japanese lawyers and victims.)

On May 10, 2016, Japan acknowledged the harm inflicted on the last nine plaintiffs. This meant that Japan had either compensated or planned to compensate a total of 590 South Koreans, with 8 million yen allotted for each (US$73,640).

When Japan used the word “apology,” Kang expected that the South Korean government would do the same. While Japan had been responsible for forcibly quarantining Hansen’s patients, it was South Korea that had robbed them of their reproductive rights in the sterilization campaign of 1956.

Full name Lim Jeong-haeng. Lim was a victim of forced relocation by the South Korean government in a program that was unrelated to his Hansen’s disease patient status and continued as recently as the 1980s. When he was 20, his eyebrows began falling out. In June 1962, when he was 27, he was taken to Sorok Island. The less than 500 meters’ distance from Nokdong Harbor in Doyang, a township in South Jeolla’s Goheung County, was a stretch he would never again cross. A year after his relocation, he married a woman named Kim Sun-sil. Kim, now 72, had arrived on the island after nodes began appearing on her face.

It was a relationship to which the state would set its scalpel. At the time, the South Korean government was carrying on a policy introduced in 1936 by imperial Japan, which introduced shared housing in place of separate housing for males and females and banned having children. Patients who lived in single housing had to give up on having children if they wished to enter family housing - a hospital policy that was not fully abolished until Apr. 2002. Men had to undergo sterilization; pregnant women were forced to have abortions. Those hoping to marry on the island could not refuse the operations. If they declined to go ahead, they had to leave the island. The island itself was an isolated hellhole; the outside world was open but terrifying.

Even those who underwent sterilization or abortion procedures might not be allowed a place in family housing when there was a shortage. Some patients had to live in single housing for as long as three years after marrying; a few died without ever living together with their spouse. As many as four couples might share the same room in family housing, dividing it up into quarters with a cotton cloth “wall.” Detention cells were sometimes used for family housing as well.

In Jan. 1963, Lim Jeong-haeng underwent sterilization. The country may have gained independence, but the “animal era” continued, and patients like Lim did not enjoy even the same rights as animals - they were not allowed to reproduce.

Kim Cheol-gyu’s box is located to the right of Lim’s. Kim was a plaintiff in the second lawsuit. He received his box a week before Lim - born on Sept. 5, 1935, died Apr. 25, 2016.

Kim was twice relocated. In Apr. 1956, he was transported to Sorok Island, where he had a child with a woman named Jeong Byeong-suk. The son was born after he and Jeong were forced off the island over his refusal to be sterilized. Forced to survive by panhandling, they were apprehended by public health authorities and sent back again. The health center took the son away and sent him to an orphanage. Back on the island, Kim underwent sterilization in Apr. 1974. A statement from his lawsuit described how “young women were summoned to the hospital’s main building and forced to sit in a chair while the medical department head probed their womb with a finger and asked whether they’d had children.” Once the son left the orphanage, Kim had no way of knowing if his son was living or dead. The pain of losing his living son stayed with Kim until the day he died.

The South Korean government refused even the forms of compensation granted by Japan. After Seoul refused blanket compensation, attorneys assembled sterilization and abortion victims and began filing suit in 2011 to demand damages from the state. The six lawsuits involved a total of 539 plaintiffs; in all five that produced first trial rulings, compensation was granted in the form of 30 million won (US$25,500) for sterilization victims and 40 million won (US$34,000) for abortion victims. The government appealed. In the third ruling, the high court dismissed the appeal. The government took the case to a higher court. All of these actions were taken by the Park Geun-hye administration. Its rationale, according to a statement on the grounds for appeal in the third suit, was that “no evidence of forced surgery can be found, and [the hospital’s] actions were consistent with its aims as a treatment facility.”

Family name Kim, box located just underneath Kim Cheol-gyu’s. Her given name is Jeong-rye, age 79. She received her box 51 days before Kim when she passed away on Mar. 5.

Family name Lee, owner of the box meeting Kim Jeong-rye’s at its top right corner. Her given name is Gil-bun. Aged 86 at the time of her passing, she was a plaintiff in the second lawsuit. Her ashes were put in place on Feb. 24, ten days before Kim’s.

Pieces of rusted iron can be found in the drawer of the case supporting the boxes. They include the screws, bolts, and artificial joints that helped support the patients’ frail bodies and survived the cremation process. Specks of bone were still visible on them - perhaps still bearing the painful memories of bodies that could not stand up on their own.

“How have you been?”

Jang In-sim, 78, offered a greeting as she read each name on the Paulownia wood boxes stacked in the crematorium. A plaintiff in the second suit, Jang was also forced to have an abortion.

The fetus was a few months old at the time; to this day, she does not know if it was a boy or a girl. Her husband also underwent forced sterilization - a “totally artless man,” she said, he spent over 30 years paving roads and building the pier as part of the island’s “loyal construction battalion.”

Aborted fetuses at the time were placed in formalin solution for display. The nurses ended up saving one child after a forced abortion during the mother’s eighth month, she recalled hearing from a neighbour.

“They couldn’t put it in a formalin bottle,” she said. Instead, the baby grew to become “a cute child” in Jang’s village, and ultimately went on to finish high school on the mainland.

Han Jeong-yeon, now deceased, experienced two pregnancies and two abortions on Sorok Island. In 2013, she testified to hearing one of the fetuses, a boy, crying after an abortion in the seventh month. “I had no choice but to leave him on the hill, choking back my tears,” she said.

Park Bok-hyeon, now deceased, worked as a researcher at Sorokdo Hospital. Though not technically a medical staffer, Park was in charge of performing autopsies on corpses and carrying out sterilizations and abortions. He was responsible for operations on Lim Jeong-haeng, Han Jeong-yeon, and Jang In-sim. Another patient, Han Guk-man, underwent two sterilization procedures by Park; he had to receive a second after his wife became pregnant following the first. Park also performed an abortion on the wife.

Many of the patients Park performed surgery on suffered from back pain for the rest of their life. Han was left crawling on the ground in his room, unable to function in daily life.

Kang Seon-bong, 77, was a plaintiff in the second lawsuit. Kang previously worked at the island’s medical training center, an educational institution set up there so that patients could be taught medical techniques to perform treatment themselves. After undergoing sterilization by Park, Kang ended up helping him perform vasectomies on other patients.

“When I was lying there on the table, I felt like I was giving up on life,” he recalled. “But when I was performing operations on other people, I was like a trained animal, thinking, ‘I have to live, even if it means doing this.’”

May 17 marks the 100th anniversary of Sorokdo National Hospital founding in 1916. Twenty-nine of those anniversaries came during the Japanese occupation; seventy-one have been under the government of South Korea. During neither of those times was Sorok an island for Hansen’s disease patients. It was a sorry place designed for everyone but them. The hospital’s centennial is the celebration of a “clean century” by the same South Korea that held the patients captive.

There was once a time when the bodies of Hansen’s disease patients would not last a day after their death. For a long time, patients’ corpses were incinerated immediately after autopsy on the day they died. Twenty-four hours was a long time to remain in physical form. The island’s ossuary was filled with Paulownia wood boxes holding their remains. Called the Manryeongdang, it was so small that urns remained stacked in the crematorium for up to a year awaiting enshrinement, which took place on an annual basis.

Lim Jeong-haeng, Kim Cheol-gyu, Kim Jeong-rye, and Lee Gil-bun are all in the crematorium, having died in 2016. Kang Han-gu, Han Jeong-yeon, and Han Guk-man are in the Manryeongdang, having died before this year. Every Oct. 15, a memorial ceremony is held. New urns are moved from the crematorium to the Manryeongdang, while remains that are ten years old are removed and poured together into a grave to the back. During their lifetimes, the patients’ names were stripped from them and replaced with the label of “leper.” After their deaths, they disappear into a mass of ashes.

The patients died still waiting for a state apology and compensation. Kang Han-gu, who was a plaintiff in the second lawsuit in Jan. 2012, shared his life story with an attorney before his death in Feb. 2013.

“I’m 89 years old,” he said. “I don’t know what will become of me or when. I’ve had a hard life, and I’ve never had children. I can’t describe the pain. I hope [the South Korean government] provides compensation quickly.”

Kang did receive an apology and compensation from Japan, but none from Seoul. On Sept. 20, 2013 - seven months after he said he didn’t know what would become of him - his remains were placed in a Paulownia wood box of their own.

Eighty-six of the plaintiffs in the state compensation cases are Sorok Island residents.

“Even Japan, which placed us under colonial rule, gave an apology and compensation,” Kang Seon-bong said. “How can the South Korean government actually appeal this decision? Does it mean they’re waiting for us all to be dead and gone?”

Thirty-three of the 86 plaintiffs, or 38.3%, have since passed away.

By Lee Moon-young, staff reporter

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