On May 24, South Korea’s Hankyoreh news agency posted an editorial about the “joint tribute” paid by Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to Korean victims of the 1945 atomic bombing in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park at the end the recent  G7 Summit. It was the first time leaders of the two countries had honored Korean victims together, though the editorial noted that the late former Japanese prime minister, Keizo Obuchi, had done so by himself in 1999 after the memorial was relocated to a spot within the park. The memorial was originally erected in 1970 but at a location outside the park because of Japanese objections. At the time they were exposed to the bomb, the Koreans were nominally Japanese citizens, since Korea was a colony of Japan until the end of the war, and yet the keepers of the Peace Park did not allow the memorial to be erected on its grounds because it was for Koreans.

The number of Korean victims was considerable: 50,000 were exposed of whom 30,000 died immediately or shortly thereafter. An association of Korean victims was founded in 1967 to demand “treatment and compensation” from the Japanese government, which was not forthcoming. In 1945, 2.4 million Koreans lived in Japan, either because they had gone there for work or were conscripted. Of these, 140,000 were living in Hiroshima, which was the base of the Second General Army command. That’s why it was a target of the U.S. atomic bombing.

Hankyoreh recognizes that the joint visit by Yoon and Kishida is significant if overdue, and apparently it was suggested by Kishida during his visit to South Korea on May 7. No South Korean president had ever officially visited the memorial before, and Japanese politicians in general tend to avoid any sort of involvement in annual memorial ceremonies in Hiroshima on August 6 for various political reasons. Though Kishida could be credited with drawing the world’s attention to the atomic bombing by selecting Hiroshima, his home town, as the site of this year’s summit, the topic of non-proliferation and any expression of remorse on America’s part during the event was strictly off the table. After all, Japan is now a full partner in the U.S. defense strategy for the Asia-Pacific region, which means Japan is effectively under the American nuclear umbrella. 

But Hankyoreh’s complaint about what wasn’t said at the summit was more parochial: Though Kishida may have recognized Korean victims of the bombing he did not address why they were victims in the first place. He said nothing about Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945, nor the practice of forced labor of Koreans during the war. Hankyoreh characterized this elision as much more than just a missed opportunity. Japan has never apologized for its colonial rule, since it doesn’t even acknowledge it.

This sentiment was echoed in a column that appeared in the Asahi Shimbun May 26 by Toshiharu Sasagawa, a member of the non-profit peace group Kyosei Forum Hiroshima. He says that when the city was announced as the site of the 2023 summit he thought it would provide a valuable opportunity to promote Hiroshima as an international city devoted to peace, and he looked forward to working with local businesses and media toward that goal. As part of this work, he hoped to increase understanding toward the abolition of nuclear weapons, which is a prime activity of his organization, but it didn’t happen. 

That’s because the Japanese government has only addressed Hiroshima’s status as the first city to ever be the target of an atomic bomb in terms of its “destruction” without ever discussing why it was a target. As with the Korean victims of the attack, whose status as victims has never been linked to their identity as unwilling subjects of the Japanese emperor, Hiroshima’s role in history as the target of a nuclear bomb has never—at least in Japan—been tied to its central role as a military center during World War II. 

But this neglect went further. At last year’s Hiroshima peace memorial ceremony on August 6, a video was prepared that contained testimonies of hibakusha (atomic bomb victims), including one written by a Korean who had died and said that, following the war, the Japanese government excluded Korean victims from the special benefits it gave to hibakusha. The Hiroshima government, however, removed this particular testimony from the video, effectively erasing the Korean presence among the victims. Sasagawa protested the removal directly to the Hiroshima government, which dismissed the complaint. Moreover, the local government has since the war systematically erased “the memory of Hiroshima’s history” as a military center that actively carried out the government’s colonial aims in Korea. All these acts of historical elimination are interconnected, says Sasagawa, presumably to align with the official narrative of Japan being more of a victim of the war than a perpetrator. The obvious hole in the narrative is, Who was the perpetrator?

Like Hankyoreh, Sasagawa mentions that Kishida participated in the tribute to Korean hibakusha without addressing the colonization matter. Confronting history means internalizing it as a “guiding principle for the future,” he writes, but when history is selectively edited to serve a particular agenda, it is only useful as far as that agenda goes. Under the authorities’ gaze, Hiroshima, sadly, has nothing to teach the world. 

A similar sentiment was presented anonymously in Asahi’s Vox Populi column on May 22, which describes a book written 40 years ago by reporter Takashi Hiraoka, who later became mayor of Hiroshima. In the book, Hiraoka talks about a trip he took to South Korea to interview Korean hibakusha. As did Sasagawa, Hiraoka said that to the Japanese people Hiroshima symbolizes “destruction” disconnected from any Japanese responsibility for that destruction. Hiraoka’s mission in his trip to South Korea was to find out why these victims were in Hiroshima in the first place, because such intelligence had never been reported in Japan. Thus, the book posited this question for the first time, at least in Japanese: How can you talk about the lives lost in the Hiroshima bombing without talking about Japanese colonial rule of the Korean peninsula, since they were so interconnected? A nation’s history, said Hiraoka, is not just “its glories,” but also its “shameful” events. Japan will never be a mature country until it faces up to that reality.