Finding Lost Horizons: Rescuing Souls Who Died Doing Forced Labor in Wartime Japan

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Proposal Application

Abstract

"Finding Lost Horizons: Rescuing Souls Who Died Doing Forced Labor in Wartime Japan"

Japanese and Korean governments long have rejected responsibility for repatriating the remains of civilians who died doing forced labor in the homeland. The Japanese public has forgotten the thousands of remains - Korean, Chinese, and others -- still in the ground or in crypts across the archipelago. For twenty years a volunteer project has been retrieving remains from sites in Hokkaido. In September 2015 on the 70th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War the project memorialized 115 sets of remains with commemoration services in major Japanese cities, and returned them for the funeral ceremony in Seoul and re-encryptment in the Municipal Cemetery. The work has been done by hundreds of Korean, Japanese, and Zainichi student volunteers. They also participate in multi-cultural workshops tasked with creating a new dialogue of hope in Asia in an era of nationalist rancor.

1. David W. Plath shows “The Coldest Place in Japan” (a short documentary video)
This short video reports on the Shumarinai excavations and the struggle by citizen volunteers in Japan and South Korea to do the right thing.

2. Yoshihiko Tonohira talks about his chance awareness of the Korean remains, his struggles to educate Japanese about the issues and to persuade corporations and government agencies to do something about them.

3. Byung-Ho Chung introduces the processes of setting up the student workshops that look to the future as much as to the past, planning to do the September pilgrimage last year, and some of the struggles with the bureaucracies of two countries.

4. Ki Chan Song discusses on the characteristics of the workshops and their success in taking on a new life of their own with a multi-national thrust no longer tied to matters of rescuing remains.

5. Sung Hyun Sohn presents "Homecoming in 70 years" (a photographic exhibition)
This exhibition will provide visual images of the repatriation of Korean victims and how Korean and Japanese citizens have opened their minds and communicated throughout the cooperative project, overcoming any conflicts that exist between the two countries.

Area of Study

• Northeast Asia

Session Organizer

• Byung-Ho Chung, Hanyang University

Chair

• Byung-Ho Chung, Hanyang University

Discussants

• David W. Plath, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Yoshihiko Tonohira, Ichijyoji

• Byung-Ho Chung, Hanyang University

• Kichan Song, Ritsumeikan University

• Sung Hyun Sohn, Korea Art Conservatory