Thousands of Korean labourers still lost without a trace 75 years after the end of WWII and the Cold War.
Shin Yun-sun describes her life as a maze of dead ends.
The South Korean has spent many of her 75 years pestering government officials, digging into records and searching burial grounds on a desolate Russian island, desperately searching for traces of a father she never met.
Shin wants to bring back the remains of her presumed-dead father for her ailing 92-year-old mother, Baek Bong-rye.
Japan’s colonial government conscripted Shin’s father for forced labour from their farming village in September 1943, when Baek was pregnant with Shin.
As the 75th anniversary of the end of the war nears, the thousands of conscripted Korean men who vanished on Sakhalin Island are a largely forgotten legacy of Japan’s brutal rule of the Korean peninsula, which ended with Tokyo’s Aug 15, 1945, surrender.
Shin vows to never stop searching for her father but fears time is running out.
“Family members (of Sakhalin labourers) are dying every day, and I can’t even put into words how impatient I feel,” Shin said at her Seoul home.
It’s unclear what happened to many of the forced Korean conscripts on Sakhalin. They disappeared during extreme tumult.
About 400 aging relatives like Shin hope to bring back the remains of the missing workers, seeking closure after years of emotional misery and economic hardship.
Historians say Japan forcibly mobilised around 30,000 Koreans as workers during the late 1930s and 1940s on what was then called Karafuto, or the Japanese-occupied southern half of Sakhalin, near the Japanese island of Hokkaido.
They endured gruelling labour in coal mines and logging and construction sites as part of Imperial Japan’s wartime economy, which became heavily dependent on conscripted Korean labour when Japanese men were sent to war fronts.
Families thought their loved ones would return when Japan’s surrender in WWII cemented the Soviet Union’s full control over Sakhalin.
Soviet authorities repatriated thousands of Japanese nationals from Sakhalin.
But they refused to send back the Koreans, who had become stateless after the war, apparently to meet labour shortages in the island’s coal mines and elsewhere.
Another searching family member, Lee Gwang-nam, 76, bears a striking resemblance to his missing father, who was conscripted on the same day as Shin’s father from their hometown of Imsil.
Lee is eager to end a “lifelong wait” by his 93-year-old mother, who wants to be buried with her husband when she dies.
Lee received a letter from an ethnic Korean in Sakhalin in 1990 who claimed of hearing that his father had died, sometime in the late 1960s. He still has no idea where his father was buried.
While Seoul has said it hopes to reach a new agreement with Moscow that would expand efforts to find and return the remains, Lee Sang-won, an official from Seoul’s Interior and Safety Ministry, admits nothing has been fleshed out yet. Shin bristles at the slow progress. “Who knows how long it will be before my mother is gone, too?” she said. — AP