Not far off the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, just a three-hour ferry ride across the sea, is Japan. Typically to travel by ferry, the boat departs from the city of Busan, Korea and arrives in Fukuoka, Japan. Korean tourism is so common in Fukuoka that upon arrival all signs are in both Korean and Japanese. From there, it is only about a one-hour bullet train ride from Fukuoka to Hiroshima.

In the middle of the city of Hiroshima is a Peace Park memorializing the first nuclear attack on August 6, 1945 towards the end of World War II. Totaling both direct and indirect victims, a total of approximately 400,000 people died. Many were killed by the bombing itself, but later up to 140,000 people died from lethal post-explosion radiation (which was approximately 40% of the city’s population at that time). Among them, 20,000-45,000 of the victims were Korean. However, the exact number of Korean victims is uncertain due to their status as minorities in Japan.

The entire area around the epicenter of the bomb was flattened except for one building: the A-Bomb Dome. Only skeletal ruins remained from this former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. As the last standing building, the Japanese government refrained from renovating it to maintain it as a memory for both the nation’s and humanity’s collectively shared heritage of the catastrophe.

The A-Bomb Dome can be seen directly through the eye of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Arch. In Hiroshima Peace Park, memories of nuclear horrors are perpetuated to advocate for peace around the world. Not only was the city’s busiest downtown commercial and residential district destroyed but also hundreds of thousands of innocent people fell victim to these horrors.

As a result, it is here in Hiroshima that the world’s conflicts collide. This includes not only the conflict of nuclear warfare but also the tensions from the Korean War. Hiroshima hosts a large Korean population. Some of these Koreans have lived in Japan for up to three, four, or even five generations.

During the Japanese Occupation, Koreans were brought to Japan for labor. But once Korea was liberated from Japan on August 15, 1945, many of those Koreans remained in Japan. As North and South Korea were established as separate countries in 1948, the Koreans living in Japan was asked to choose citizenship. More Koreans chose North Korean citizenship than South Korean citizenship at that time. However, many Koreans also refused to choose sides. They claimed that they were citizens of one Korea as a united nation. 

Even today about 33,000 Koreans remain in Japan with no citizenship. They belong to no country, and as a result, they cannot obtain passports and leave Japan. These citizenship-less Koreans live with permanent Japanese residential status only.

Therefore, within the city of Hiroshima is the complexity of the Korean Peninsula. There are North Koreans, South Koreans, and citizenship-less Koreans all residing in the same place. Trauma and pain from the nuclear bomb live on. Having descended from the war generation, current residents live with the memories from World War II. Within the Korean population in Japan also exists the tension between the North and the South. One by-product of this is the citizenship-less Koreans who have willingly given up many rights and the freedom to travel. They only recognize themselves as descendants of a united Korea.

In this way, living within Hiroshima is the complexity of the Korean Peninsula. Even abroad in a country like Japan, trauma and division amongst Koreans themselves remain. While physical structures like the city itself can be restored, it will take much more to heal and restore the hearts and minds of the Korean and Japanese peoples.

It is easy for those of us who do not have to live with trauma to leave the past in the past. But for those whose everyday lives are impacted by the pain, the past can still be very real and relevant. Hiroshima remembers. Its residents live with the ruins.