Bringing dead home

Remains of 115 victims of Japan's forced labor will be returned after 70 years By Jung Min-ho The remains of 115 Koreans who died in Japan after being forced into hard labor during World War II (1910-45) will be returned home next week. A joint committee of Korean and Japanese activists is working together on the project. A Korean official said the remains of the 115 who died in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, will arrive in Seoul on Sept. 18. The project is one of the largest such undertakings at the non-government level. From Saturday, the remains will be carried to Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima and Shimonoseki for memorial ceremonies. The committee will recover the remains of 34 Koreans who died while working on the construction of an airfield in Asajino, Sarufutsu, the northernmost village on the island. Korean representatives will then move to Horokanaicho, in the mountainous northern area of the island, to retrieve the remains of four people who died there. They were conscripted in 1938-43 to construct the Uryu Dam. Then, the committee will retrieve the remains of six Koreans which were placed in a temple in Bibai City. The victims died in an explosion at a coal mine operated by Mitsubishi Materials in 1941. The representatives will eventually move to Honganji Temple in Sapporo City to receive the remains of 71 people. On Sept. 19, a joint funeral service will be held at Seoul Plaza. Then, the remains will be buried at the city-run cemetery in Paju, Gyeonggi Province. About 1,500 people, including students, historians and activists, both from Korea and Japan, have reportedly worked on exhuming the remains of forced labor victims for the past 17 years. Many were found at coal mines and construction sites. In an interview with a local Japanese media outlet, Tonohira Yoshihiko, a founding member of the Hokkaido Forum for the Recognition of Forced Labor and its Victims, said that the civic group members hope to reconcile with people in East Asia. More than seven decades after Korea was liberated from Japan's colonial rule, the matter of Tokyo's compensation for Koreans conscripted into forced labor and military service remains unresolved. Historians say many Korean forced laborers in Hokkaido worked in mines run by Mitsubishi Materials. The company apologized in July to James Murphy, a 94-year-old American, for forcing him to work there, but it has not expressed regret to Korean victims who have long been fighting for a corporate apology. During the war, more than 670,000 Koreans were conscripted into labor by Japan, with some of them dying from accidents or illness.  mj6c2@ktimes.com,