At 08:15 on August 6, 1945, as a nuclear bomb was falling like a stone through the skies over Hiroshima, Lee Jung-soon was on her way to elementary school.
The now-88-year-old waves her hands as if trying to push the memory away.
“My father was about to leave for work, but he suddenly came running back and told us to evacuate immediately,” she recalls. “They say the streets were filled with the dead – but I was so shocked all I remember is crying. I just cried and cried.”
Victims’ bodies “melted away so only their eyes were visible”, Ms Lee says, as a blast equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT enveloped a city of 420,000 people. What remained in the aftermath were corpses too mangled to be identified.
“The atomic bomb… it’s such a terrifying weapon.”
It’s been 80 years since the United States detonated ‘Little Boy’, humanity’s first-ever atomic bomb, over the centre of Hiroshima, instantly killing some 70,000 people. Tens of thousands more would die in the coming months from radiation sickness, burns and dehydration.
The devastation wrought by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – which brought a decisive end to both World War Two and Japanese imperial rule across large swaths of Asia – has been well-documented over the past eight decades.
Less well-known is the fact that about 20% of the immediate victims were Koreans.
Korea had been a Japanese colony for 35 years when the bomb was dropped. An estimated 140,000 Koreans were living in Hiroshima at the time – many having moved there due to forced labour mobilisation, or to survive under colonial exploitation.
Those who survived the atom bomb, along with their descendants, continue to live in the long shadow of that day – wrestling with disfigurement, pain, and a decades-long fight for justice that remains unresolved.
AloJapan.com