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Park Gil-soon (left) with her two daughters

“They say ‘life is more bitter than the spiciest pepper,’ and that’s absolutely true,” said mother Park Gil-soon, 78, through her tears on May 12. “Do I really have to live like this? Life is terrifying.”

Park’s daughters are Kim Ok-hee, 54, and Kim Yeon-hee, 48. Until their mid-twenties, they were normal young woman, working hard and dreaming of happy futures. When the symptoms of intellectual disabilities began to appear, they found themselves unable to work anymore. Ok-hee, the older of the two, suffered from auditory hallucinations and mumbled to herself all day long. Yeon-hee, the younger, stayed in a corner of her room, not moving or uttering a single word.

Their father was a survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Before his death in 2011, he had been a heavy drinker who blamed himself for passing on these terrible health problems to his daughters.

“I feel like I can’t close my eyes for a second out of worry for my children,” Park said. “If they could just be able to live without suffering after I’m gone, I would have no other wish.”

Since early 2016, Hapcheon Peace House, a civic group helping children of atomic bomb survivors, has offered emotional therapy services, sending therapists to homes every week for counseling sessions.

“Ok-hee shows symptoms of lethargy and tics, but with continued rehabilitation, I think she could function at a basic level in social life,” said therapist Jeon Jin-sook.

“Yeon-hee’s condition is more serious than her older sister’s, but she’s now started listening a bit more to what others say,” Jeong added.

Many children of atomic bomb survivors show health problems that appear related to radiation exposure, but neither the South Korean nor Japanese government recognizes them as such, claiming that the inheritance of such health problems from parents has not been medically proven. No medical benefits or other forms of support are provided.

What is certain is that many descendants of A-bomb survivors suffer from congenital conditions without any medically identified cause. A health survey of 244 local children of survivors conducted by South Gyeongsang Province in 2013 showed 34 of them, or 13.9%, to have congenital deformities or hereditary diseases. Examples of deformities included absence of ears and conditions involving the hands, feet, face, lungs, and heart. A total of 9.1% of those examined had disability certification - a rate nearly double the 5% registration rate for the general population.

A 2004 survey by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea also found a prevalence rate among children of A-bomb survivors - the percentage of patients relative to the local population for a given region at a given time - that was dozens of times higher than the national average. For males, far higher rates were found for anemia (88 times the national average), myocardial infarction and angina (81 times), depression (65 times), asthma (26 times), and schizophrenia (23 times). For females, similarly high rates were found for myocardial infarction and angina rate (81 times the national average), depression (71 times), benign breast tumors (64 times), asthma (23 times), and anemia (21 times).

Yet the South Korean government has not investigated even the number of children of A-bomb survivors, let alone their health status.

“My understanding is that because the system is set up to provide support and management only for directly affected survivors, nothing is known about their children’s situation, and nothing has been determined to date,” said an official with the special welfare service office of the Republic of Korea National Red Cross, which manages registered A-bomb survivors.

Even the fact that so many of the survivors’ children suffer from seemingly related health problems only came to light in South Korea after it was shared by Kim Hyeong-ryul - himself a second-generation victim - in 2002.

“We currently have around 1,300 members, and our estimates put the number of children of A-bomb survivors nationwide in the tens of thousands,” said the Association for the Second Generation of Korean Atomic Bomb Survivors, a group founded by Kim.

“But the fact that they are children of survivors does not mean they all suffer from related health problems, and because many of them worry they will be shunned by others without receiving any benefits if they share the fact that they are survivors’ children, most of them conceal it,” the association added.

Ahn Jae-eun, head of the Hapcheon Peace House general affairs team, explained, “All of the first-generation A-bomb survivors are now in their seventies or older, so support for them will be ending within the next few decades.”

“The moment you acknowledge that radiation exposure symptoms are passed on to descendants, the issue of victims becomes a huge problem with no end in sight,” Ahn added.

“That is why both the Japanese and South Korean governments refuse to acknowledge the inheritance of radiation-related health problems.”

By Choi Sang-won, South Gyeongsang correspondent

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