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Updated August 12th, 2020 at 10:51 IST

Aging SKoreans seek remains of lost WW2 labourers

About 400 aging South Koreans are desperately seeking traces of husbands and fathers still lost to Japan's brutal rule of the Korean Peninsula.

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About 400 aging South Koreans are desperately seeking traces of husbands and fathers still lost to Japan's brutal rule of the Korean Peninsula.

Shin Yun-sun describes her life as a maze of dead ends.

The 75-year-old South Korean has spent decades pestering government officials, chasing records and combing through burial grounds in Russia's desolate Sakhalin island, desperately tracking the traces of her father.

Bringing back the remains of the presumably dead man she married as a teen is an ardent wish of Shin's ailing 92-year-old mother, Baek Bong-rye.

She still treasures a silver ring she made from the money he once sent from Sakhalin, months after he was conscripted for forced labor from their farming village by Japan's colonial government in September 1943, when she was pregnant with their daughter.

Shin vows to never stop searching but fears that time is running out.

Family members of Sakhalin labourers, she says, "are dying every day, and I can't even put into words how impatient I feel".

Lee Gwang-nam bears a striking resemblance to his missing father, who was conscripted the same day as Shin's father.

"My mother is also alive. I am eager to find my father's remains and bury him next to my mother when she passes", he says.

Chung Su-jin's father was also a Sakhalin labourer.

"I have lived in poverty all my life and I have no memory of my father", he says.

"I would be happy to see his remains return but I have lived the past 80 years without any memory of my father. I don't even know whether I will cry if I ever see his remains."

The thousands of husbands and fathers who never returned from Sakhalin after eight decades is a largely forgotten legacy of Japan's brutal rule of the Korean Peninsula before the end of World War II.

The family separations became permanent during a devastating three-year war that broke out between North and South Korea in 1950, which resulted in huge losses of contact, and subsequent periods of Cold War animosities.

After Japan's surrender in August 1945, which liberated Korea and cemented the Soviet Union's full control over Sakhalin, families thought the workers would be coming home soon.

But while repatriating thousands of Japanese nationals from Sakhalin, Soviet authorities refused to send back the Koreans, who had become stateless after the war, apparently out of concerns of labour shortages in the island's coal mines and elsewhere.

"The least Russia can do is to find his remains and return them to South Korea for the humanitarian purpose", Shin said.

There are about 400 aging relatives like Shin who hope to bring back the remains of the missing workers, seeking closure after years of emotional distress and economic hardship.

 

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Published August 12th, 2020 at 10:51 IST

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