This year marks 80 years since the atomic bombing. Many Korean residents of Japan who had moved to Japan seeking livelihoods or due to forced labor and conscription, living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were also victims of the atomic bomb. While exact numbers are unclear, it's estimated that tens of thousands were affected. The family of Park Young-sook, who moved from Hiroshima to North Korea at age 22 through the repatriation project (1959-84), also lost their home to the atomic bomb, and her pregnant sister-in-law died in the explosion. Her fourth brother, who was attending Hiroshima First Middle School when he was exposed to radiation, suffered from PTSD and aftereffects until his final years in North Korea. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, an unexpected contact came from a classmate in Japan. Park Young-sook, who defected in 1997 and now lives in Seoul, and her eldest daughter Lim Yoon-mi shared their family's atomic bomb damage. (HONG Mari)
◆ Mushroom Cloud Seen at Age 5
Born in Hiroshima in 1940, Young-sook clearly remembers the day the atomic bomb was dropped.
"I definitely remember saying 'What is that?' The cloud was..."
Her father Park Deok-ja (born 1896) and mother Kim Hye-ran (born 1903) moved from Daegu, North Gyeongsang Province to Japan in the 1920s, operating a lumber mill and shoji screen workshop in Hiroshima. Young-sook was born as the eighth of ten children.
Young-sook's family lived in Hirose Kitamachi, Naka Ward, Hiroshima, less than 1 kilometer from the Atomic Bomb Dome. When U.S. air raids targeting the naval port of Kure began, Young-sook's parents evacuated with the young children to Kita-Hiroshima. It was there that Young-sook witnessed the mushroom cloud. Her eldest brother, who worked in the general affairs department of Mitsubishi Shipyard, was safe on a business trip to Yokohama, but his wife from Seoul died in the explosion while fleeing to an underground air raid shelter. She was six months pregnant.
◆ Brother Returns a Month After the Bombing
Though their house burned down, Young-sook's family decided not to return to Korea but to rebuild their lives in Hiroshima. However, they didn't know the whereabouts of her fourth brother Myeong-dal, who attended Hiroshima First Middle School.
A month after the atomic bombing, Myeong-dal finally returned. The family rejoiced, saying "We thought you were dead, but came back alive." When the atomic bomb fell, Myeong-dal said he fled to the mountains with a friend. He stayed in the mountains eating sweet potatoes for a while, but eventually came down due to hunger and was mobilized for victim rescue operations.
It's easy to imagine the horrific scenes—giving water to those who requested it, loading bodies onto trucks—too gruesome to fully describe in words. Upon returning, Myeong-dal was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward for a month. "Burning corpses, screaming people... he was tormented by hallucinations as those scenes kept coming back to him," says his niece Yoon-mi.
