Korea’s Lost WWII Victims

The scabbed stump of Chang Gi Chan’s mangled arm is about all he has to show for a life cursed with colossal bad luck.

Born under Japan’s brutal colonial rule of his native Korea, Chang was wrenched from his wife and baby daughter in 1944 and shipped to the frigid wasteland of Sakhalin island off the coast of Siberia as a slave laborer for the Japanese Imperial Army.

After the war, he and 43,000 other Korean workers and their wives were abandoned in Sakhalin and sealed into what became Soviet territory as the iron curtain came crashing down. The Soviet Union’s collapse let Chang return home in 1994--crippled from an industrial accident and virtually penniless--only to find that his wife had died and his daughter was untraceable.

For almost half a century, Chang and his comrades were the forgotten victims of not one but three wars--their fates unhappily entwined with the great power conflicts of World War II, the Korean War and the Cold War’s monumental ideological clash.

Now, at last, they are coming home. In complex negotiations still colored by emotion over war guilt and responsibility, the governments of South Korea, Japan and Russia are working together to help salvage a peaceful end to the harrowing lives of these Sakhalin sojourners. They are bringing them back to die in their long-lost but never forgotten homeland.

Japan is providing $22.7 million to build apartments to resettle 500 returnees and $4.1 million for a 100-person retirement home in a venture with South Korea, which is donating the land. Japan and South Korea also have donated money to the International Committee of the Red Cross to bring more than 5,000 people back for home visits.

So far, 297 people have returned to resettle permanently, according to the South Korean government. But that number is expected to increase--an estimated 7,000 original workers remain--as the three-way negotiations progress over sticky issues ranging from citizenship to financial aid.

Not all returnees have fared well: Culture shock or loneliness have prompted a few to move back to Sakhalin. Chang, however, is not one of them.

“I am happy. I will not be sorry if I die tomorrow,” the 82-year-old said, his wizened face breaking into smiles during an interview at a retirement home built for Sakhalin returnees in a wooded area outside the southeastern city of Taegu.

But in moments of reflection, a sadness still hangs heavily over his ill-fated life. “Why was I forcibly taken somewhere I didn’t want to go? Why did I have to lose my arm?” he asked as two roommates listened gravely.

His greatest sorrow stems from his entrenched Confucian values, which stress the importance of ancestors and the filial duty to perpetuate the family line. “I am a sinner against my ancestors because I have cut off the family line,” Chang cried. “If I had not been taken away, I would be married here, a respected father and grandfather. Now all of this is gone. No wife. No children. No rituals for me when I die. Why? Because of the Japanese.”

His roommate Yoo Soon Nam burst out angrily: “If I could, I would go around and kill several Japanese before I die.”

Shattered Lives

These men view themselves as slaves of the Japanese war machine, as tragic in their own way as the “comfort women” who were forced into prostitution at the front lines. Like the women, the men of Sakhalin were dehumanized and beaten. Their bodies were exploited as beasts of burden to build airfields, staff factories and work in coal mines in Japan’s desperate final years before its 1945 defeat.

The experience shattered many of their lives, as it did the women’s, and they are demanding compensation. But in contrast to the story of the sex slaves, whose plight has commanded international attention, few know the story of the Sakhalin workers--and fewer still, they say, seem to care.

Yet the story is more complex than a simple tale of Japan’s war misdeeds.

Japan acknowledges its responsibility for bringing the laborers to Sakhalin, but the question of who bears the blame for leaving them there for so long is a diplomatic hot potato.

Most Koreans blame the Japanese. They argue that Japan abandoned the men in Sakhalin, in a cruel act of betrayal, even as it brought its own laborers home; the Japanese called the men their subjects to justify their use of them as forced laborers but eschewed all ties when the time came to bring them back.

Japan, however, says it was a defeated nation under Allied occupation with no power to ask the Soviets for anything. Tokyo University professor Yasuaki Onuma says the occupation government under Gen. Douglas MacArthur petitioned the Soviets in 1946 to allow the workers to return to South Korea but that it apparently received no response.

The Russians say the laborers were always free to leave Sakhalin for North Korea but that many initially preferred to stay because of family ties, homes, jobs and other attachments.

But Onuma writes that the Soviets, desperate to rebuild their war-torn nation amid a labor shortage caused by heavy military casualties, were reluctant to allow foreign workers to leave.

And after 1948, when Kim Il Sung formally established a Communist regime in the North allied with the Soviets, any hopes of the Sakhalin laborers’ being repatriated to the U.S.-backed South--where most of them came from--evaporated. The door had slammed shut and would stay so for the next four decades.

“It was a problem of the Cold War, of disagreements between the Soviet Union and United States, that resulted in the division of the Korean peninsula,” a Russian diplomat in Seoul said.

A Japanese official said Tokyo began raising the Sakhalin issue with Moscow in the early 1970s after a citizens movement to rescue the abandoned workers began in Japan. But Moscow rejected the attempts, saying the problem was one for the Soviets and North Koreans--not the Japanese--to resolve, the official said.

Still, Russia and South Korea believe Japan should pay reparations to the laborers--even though Tokyo legally settled all war compensation claims with Moscow in the San Francisco peace treaty ending World War II and with Seoul in its 1965 treaty reestablishing diplomatic relations. The two nations also want Tokyo to aid not only the original laborers but their offspring as well; Russia additionally is lobbying to include in a planned survey of the Sakhalin community questions on how Japan can help even those who stay behind.

Coming to Terms

Japan views its donations as humanitarian aid, not war reparations. But just as Seoul argues that compensation claims for the comfort women were never settled by the 1965 treaty because the issue was not public at the time, officials say the Cold War prevented proper assistance to the Sakhalin laborers.

“Diplomacy is about reality, and I’m telling the Japanese bureaucrats they need to come to terms with their history,” a South Korean official said. “Japan should do everything to bring those Koreans back. And they have a moral obligation to do something for the second and third generation as well.”

For Japan, the issue underscores its inability to put the war behind it even half a century later, as officials are plied with continuing demands for aid from abroad and with right-wing opposition to their compromises at home.

Seoul is protesting payments made by a semiprivate Japanese organization to former comfort women, insisting they should officially be made by Japan’s government so it assumes proper responsibility. And at home, the Japanese Education Ministry’s decision last year to include the comfort women problem in junior high textbooks for the first time has caused a furious reaction--including threats against publishers by a group calling itself the Red Revenge Army.

Despite Japanese efforts to make amends, Yoo and others here are unforgiving. For them, the pain has been too great, the damage to their lives too deep.

When Yoo, 76, was ordered to obey his conscription orders, he escaped into the mountains but eventually turned himself in to prevent his family from being punished. Arriving at Sakhalin, a chilly, desolate island covered with muddy fields and a thick blanket of spruce and pine trees, he thought, “My God, we are going to have a hard time.”

Working at airfields and coal mines, he and others say, they were given only a meager fare of rice mixed with barley, soup and sometimes a bit of fish. They were beaten when they worked too slowly, and when they became ill they were locked in a hut to prevent their escape. At night, Yoo’s feet froze because he was too tall to tuck them into his bed.

“We were slaves who couldn’t complain,” said Kim Dong Sung, 75, who worked in the mines six days a week, more than 12 hours a day. “There were military police with big swords, and if we protested, they wouldn’t even say you are wrong--they simply wielded their swords and down you would go and die.”

The men say they never were paid. While some workers were to receive a nominal wage, Yoo and others say the Japanese told them they would “bank” their earnings and pay them at the end of their contracts--but never did.

One man showed visitors a copy of his wartime savings passbook, a Japanese document stamped with entries for two years of work in 1944 and 1945. The sum still owed: 942 yen, or about $7.50 in today’s currency.

Room for Hope

After the Japanese left, the men say, life under the grim rule of the Stalinist regime was not easy--one day of missed work carried a six-month jail term. “But at least we were paid, and taken to the hospital when we were sick,” Yoo said.

It was only after Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev began glasnost and perestroika that the Japanese and South Korean branches of the Red Cross began sponsoring visits for Sakhalin workers to South Korea. And real negotiations over their return began after 1990, when Moscow and Seoul reestablished diplomatic ties.

Currently, 26 men and 16 women--more than half of them 75 or older--live at the Dae Chang retirement home, a two-story brick building overlooking rice fields, rivers and hills. The fields are frozen now, but residents grow their own vegetables the rest of the year and earn money by doing assembly work for Taegu factories in the home’s basement.

The home was built with donations from a Korean woman in Japan, but Seoul supplies its operating budget and individual subsidies for food, transportation, clothing and other essentials.

“They look healthy, but many of them are in a very depressed state,” said Shin Wol Shik, Dae Chang’s secretary-general. “They left Sakhalin with only one hope: to find their relatives and have their bones buried here. But once they got here, they found their parents have died and their direct relatives are gone.”

The residents live communally, three or four to a room. They have heated floors, color televisions and small cabinets to store their few belongings. They play chess, talk with friends. Sometimes they sing songs or play games with volunteers who come to make lunch--on a recent day, grilled meat, soup with tofu, kimchi (pickled cabbage), rice and salad--from Taegu.

When they turn their minds away from their unhappy pasts, life is tolerable, even pleasant, they say.

Chang said he was “dizzy” at his first sight of South Korea in 50 years, his pride swelling at the high-rise buildings, shiny cars and material abundance that contrast with the impoverished farming region he left behind.

Yoo was stunned by the selection and low price of food. In Sakhalin, beef cost $38 a pound, a luxury he could afford only three times a year. In South Korea, where beef runs $5 a pound, he eats it three times a week.

Yoo said he has little left to do in his life but wait to die--but at least he can do so in paradise.

“Korea,” he said, “is a thousand times better than Sakhalin.”

Chi Jung Nam of the Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.