In February 2022, we posted a piece about the 1942 Chosei coal mine disaster in Ube, Yamaguchi Prefecture, which killed 183 workers, 136 of them Koreans who had been brought to Japan. A local group was formed in 1991 and have been holding annual memorial services for the dead ever since. A parallel group in South Korea was established the following year and the two groups have worked together and separately to lobby the Korean and Japanese governments to undertake an excavation of the disaster site in order to recover the remains of the victims. Since the mine collapsed during the war, the Japanese government did not have the available resources to recover the bodies, and after the war subsequent governments have claimed that the logistics of the proposed recovery operation would be too difficult, because the mine was located under the seabed off the coast of Ube. However, certain independent media have said that another reason the Japanese government has ignored the groups’ entreaties is that the Koreans who died in the accident were laborers brought to Japan against their will, an assertion the government has always refuted, and thus opening the Chosei mine would in turn open a can of worms. One aspect of the dispute that the government sidesteps is that during the colonial period, land, including farmland, on the peninsula was appropriated by the Imperial authorities without compensating the owners, thus forcing the owners and others who made their living off the land to secure work elsewhere, and in many cases the only work they could find was in Japan laboring for the war effort.

Apparently, the two memorial groups have decided they are no longer going to try to get any government involved in the project and will just carry out the excavation themselves. According the Choshu Shimbun, during the February 2024 memorial service, the groups declared that they would “open the hatch” by the end of the year, “the hatch” being the ingress point into the tunnel that connects to the collapsed mine. On July 15, the groups organized a meeting attended by 107 Japanese people and 30 Koreans that officially launched the recovery effort. Since the groups cannot count on the Japanese government for help, they are also launching a crowdfunding page to raise money on their own to finance the excavation. A Korean lawyer who has been instrumental in the negotiations with both governments since 2005 told the group during the meeting that without recovering the remains of the victims of the Chosei mine disaster, “we cannot solve any serious human rights issues [between our two countries], and therefore cannot even talk about Japan-Korea friendship.” If there is a will to recover the remains of the victims, then the groups should just go ahead and do it on their own, he added. 

Apparently, the groups were spurred to action in April, when one lawmaker in the Japanese Diet asked welfare minister Keizo Takemi why the government has “never tried to open the hatch.” Takemi answered that the site of the disaster is underwater, “so we don’t know where the remains are or how deep [the site] is.” The memorial groups responsed by saying that of course Takemi would say such a thing because the government has never even tried to carry out a field survey of the disaster site to determine the feasability of a recovery effort, so they realized that if the work was going to be done, they would have to do it themselves. Through crowdfunding, the groups plan to raise ¥8 million with the intention of starting the excavation work this fall. 

They know what they are up against. Even the location of the hatch is not known, so the first action on the agenda is to find it, and in recent weeks, volunteers have been cleaning the suspected area of vegetation. They don’t even know who owns the land they are searching, but are nevertheless undeterred. They have not sought permission for the ecavation work from either the central government of the relevant local government, but will simply go ahead and face such an issue only after someone in authority complains. But that doesn’t mean they will stop. 

For crowdfunding site (in Japanese) click here.