A life of stigma in a single flash

Shin Jin-tae says he lives in the unluckiest town on Earth.

During World War II, when the Japanese occupied Korea, thousands of residents of this small farming community were shipped to Japan to work in munitions factories.

Their destination: Hiroshima.

Shin and his family were there on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, when the U.S. military dropped the atomic bomb, leveling the city center and vaporizing many of those within a mile of the blast.

Along with Japanese civilians, thousands of people from Hapcheon died instantly. Others lived, only to face poverty, prejudice and loneliness, some of them marrying other survivors because no one else wanted them.

“Sometimes I ask God, ‘Why Hapcheon?’ ” said Shin, now 65 and a rice farmer. “And why did we have to go there? There were so many other Japanese cities. Why did it have to be Hiroshima?”

Monday, Shin and about 300 other Hapcheon residents will join atomic bomb survivors in South Korea and other countries in filing suit against the Japanese government for wartime reparations.

The survivors, represented by a team of Japanese lawyers, were spurred on by a Japanese Supreme Court ruling that recognized their right to receive reparations for mental anguish.

Although lawsuits seeking medical benefits have been filed over the years, suits seeking compensation for emotional suffering are a new element in the legal battles between bomb survivors and the Japanese government.

“We’re poor farmers and we are dying off,” said Shin, director of a local chapter of the Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Assn. “For Japan to really repay us, the amount is uncountable.”

An estimated 40,000 Koreans died and 30,000 were injured in the atomic blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For years, survivors lobbied for medical care.

Progress has been slow. Although Japan has paid for medical treatment for its own victims -- known as hibakusha, or “explosion-affected people” -- foreign survivors were ignored until November 2007, when the Supreme Court voided a 1974 government declaration that atomic bomb survivors living outside Japan could not receive benefits.

The ruling prompted the government to offer $10,000 in compensation to each overseas survivor recognized as an atomic bomb victim in lawsuits already lodged against the state.

Japanese officials say they have been responsive to the survivors.

“Let me emphasize that we take various health and medical measures for survivors living in and out of Japan,” said Masato Kumaki, an official with the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. “And we will continue to pursue measures to support atomic bomb survivors under the law.”

For Hapcheon residents, the trauma dates to before August 1945, to the forced exodus they say devastated a community. Their dislocation was one small chapter in Imperial Japan’s colonialism of the era, which included annexing Korea in 1910 and invading China in 1937, uprooting hundreds of thousands of people.

“Japanese groups have donated money, reporters from Japan have come to tell our stories, but the Japanese government is useless,” Shin said. “They have never admitted that they ruined the lives of thousands of people who lived here.”

Across South Korea, 2,665 atomic bomb survivors could eventually file suit as a result of the Japanese court ruling.

But Shin said Japan wasn’t the only country with much to answer for.

“I understand that the U.S. wanted to win the war and avenge Pearl Harbor,” he said. “But their scientists knew they would cause terrible carnage. Why did they drop bombs on civilians?”

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Ryu Young-soo remembers the flash, like lightning during a storm. He was a 12-year-old schoolboy, standing at a trolley platform in Hiroshima, a mile from the spot now known as Zero Point.

“It was a magnesium white light,” said Ryu, now 77, who lives in a welfare center for atomic bomb victims in Hapcheon. “It surprised me so much I immediately dove under the train.”

The next time he looked, Hiroshima was gone.

At 8:15 a.m. that day, a silver U.S. B-29 -- called the Enola Gay after the pilot’s mother -- dropped a uranium bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” on the Japanese military hub.

More than 130,000 soldiers and civilians are believed to have died instantly or in fires that swept through the city. Thousands more would die later of radiation sickness.

Ryu remembers how the dust took forever to settle. His eyes stung and he could hear voices calling for help.

He wasn’t injured in the blast: The train shielded him. His older brother wasn’t so lucky. He worked at the Hiroshima railroad yards, near Zero Point. He was badly burned and died a few years later.

Ryu’s mother and father were outside the city with his three younger brothers. They rushed back to Hiroshima and spent two days searching for their two oldest boys.

Ryu’s mother contracted a mysterious illness, he said, and died two months later. The family returned to Hapcheon in December 1945, with an urn containing her ashes.

The images of the devastation have never left Ryu.

“In my dreams, sometimes I am back there again,” he said. “There is a big city. And then suddenly it’s not there anymore.”

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Shin Jin-tae finds the numbers difficult to fathom.

Under Japanese occupation, the army mobilized hundreds of thousands of Koreans to work in coal mines and military facilities in Japan.

Hapcheon, a farming community of 100,000, lost 70% of its population. Many were sent to Japan for forced labor. Others moved there to escape poverty.

Shin was 2 when the bomb fell on Hiroshima; his family lived outside the city and escaped injury. Their real trauma began when they returned to Hapcheon after the war.

Without land of their own, the family suffered years of poverty. Shin had to learn Korean and was ridiculed by other children. They were shunned by neighbors, who whispered about “the bomb people.”

“Nobody wanted to marry the bomb victims,” Shin said. “They were afraid of genetic problems.”

Shin was afraid to tell his wife about his past until they were married. Today, 653 registered survivors live in Hapcheon, population 53,000. There are no doubt more, but many are ashamed to reveal their past.

“They want nothing to do with our group,” Shin said. “They are afraid to tell their own children. They don’t want them to have the stigma of being from a family of bomb victims.”

For years, survivors have worried that each prolonged family illness is the result of radiation exposure, though research has found few radiation-related problems among the offspring of survivors.

An ongoing study at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, a U.S.-Japanese venture started by President Truman after World War II, has tracked the health of 40,000 children of Japanese victims.

“Scientists have looked very hard,” said John D. Zimbrick, a former director of the board of radiation effects research at the National Academy of Sciences. “There just isn’t anything that the children of these victims seem to be at risk for.”

But little research has been done into the long-term psychological effects.

“For many atomic victims, it’s like post-traumatic stress -- if they get sick, they attribute everything to the bomb,” said Roy Shore, chief of research at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation.

A 2005 study by South Korea’s human rights commission found that bomb survivors suffered higher rates of depression and some cancers.

Many complain that their government has done little to help them.

“We have been left to take care of ourselves,” said Kim Do-sik, a survivor. “We’re uneducated. My father suffered his burns for years. He ate fatty pork and cucumbers as medicine. What did he know?”

Lawmakers in Seoul are sponsoring legislation for a nationwide study of South Korean survivors. It would establish nationwide clinics and a memorial for the dead.

But that isn’t enough for residents of Hapcheon. At a downtown community center, they prepare paperwork for their Japanese lawyers and finish plans for a museum to illustrate the horrors of nuclear weapons.

Above them loom photos of bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One shows a small girl standing over a charred body. It includes a handwritten inscription.

“Those who are alive, those who are dead,” it says. “Nagasaki never ends.”

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Shin pats the hand of his 91-year-old mother, whose heartbreak didn’t end in Hiroshima. Her husband was killed in the Korean War, and she raised her children alone.

Over the years, she rarely talked of the bomb, instead relating stories of the hardships of working in a Japanese bullet factory.

Along with 200 other survivors, she lives in the welfare center for victims on the outskirts of town. An 80-bed addition is under construction. There is a waiting list to be admitted.

The walls of the center are covered with pictures the residents have drawn. There are no images of mushroom clouds, just lots of flowers and smiling children and bright colors.

Like Shin’s mother, many have forgotten the bomb. “It’s good they can forget,” Shin said, gazing at his mother’s face. “It’s a blessing that those memories have finally left them.”

The facility’s second floor is reserved for the sickest residents. Though their memories have faded, many remember the language they were forced to learn. As a visitor left, one old woman called out her goodbye.

“Sayonara,” she said.

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john.glionna@latimes.com

Ju-min Park of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.