Radioactive Discourse in Hiroshima: the Korean Hibakusha Redress Movement

• In Event: Border Crossing Activism in the Asian Anthropocene

Abstract

On September 8, 2015, the Japanese Supreme Court ruled that South Korean atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) of Hiroshima were eligible to receive full medical payment regardless of residency. According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, there are about 4,280 authorized hibakusha outside Japan, with 3,000 in Korea. It is also estimated that 50,000 Koreans were exposed to the atomic bomb detonated in Hiroshima, and 20,000 in Nagasaki. This paper explores the Korean hibakusha redress movement, which began in the 1960s when the Association for the Relief of Korean Atomic Bomb Victims was established in South Korea. During the late 1960s, The Chugoku Shimbun, the Hiroshima local newspaper, published articles featuring the voices of South Korean hibakusha. At the center of this movement was Takashi Hiraoka, a journalist, writer, and eventual mayor of Hiroshima (1991-1999). I examine the representation of South Korean hibakusha in Hiraoka’s newspaper articles and his other writings. Focusing on what his writing includes or excludes, I examine Hiraoka’s activism as well as the role his writings played in the subsequent Korean hibakusha redress movement. Finally, I am interested in how these stories of radiation exposure and histories of struggle for redress have not only created the possibility for ecological justice, but unwittingly connected the advent of the nuclear age to our current Anthropocene epoch. How do we understand the connection between these two periods? And what do they signal for ecological struggles in other parts of Asia and the world?

Author

• Kyoko Matsunaga, Kobe City University of Foreign Studies