Compensatory Justice and the Politics of Care: Korean Survivors Remember the Atomic Bomb

This paper recuperates the repressed voices of Korean atomic bomb victims, whose post-World War II struggles for redress challenge the dominant liberation narrative of the bomb and its Cold War legacies. Over 100,000 Koreans, many of them conscripted laborers and their families from southern Korean provinces during the Japanese colonial period, were trapped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the atomic bombs were dropped in August 1945. Upon their repatriation to Korea after Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, the Korean a-bomb survivors have struggled to gain historical recognition and reparations as victims of colonial violence and wartime atrocities. Under the auspices of the U.S.-led Cold War alliance in Asia-Pacific based on nuclear proliferation, the successive authoritarian regimes of South Korea silenced the voices of Korean a-bomb victims, whose struggles for survival complicate the representation of the American a-bomb as the savior that liberated Korea from the Japanese colonial rule. Moreover, the dominant public narratives and popular memories of war in Korea, Japan, and the United States have depicted the casualties of the bomb singularly as Japanese and rendered these non-Japanese a-bomb victims invisible.

However, Korean a-bomb survivors have not simply disappeared from history, as they have emerged in recent years as a critical contingent of the international reparations movement for victims of atrocities and state violence in the Pacific world. Analyzing survivors’ testimonies, the paper examines oral histories as lieux de memoire (“sites of memory”) that expose the interconnections between historical memory, the role of nation-state, and empires in shaping the dominant narratives of war across borders. The voices of Korean survivors reveal complex ways in which they have negotiated the legacies of colonialism, shifting geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War U.S. nuclear umbrella, and the politics of citizenship to reshape the debates about compensatory justice.