Hiroshima Traces by Yoneyama Lisa

Author:Yoneyama, Lisa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 1999-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

CONTENTIOUS MEMORIAL

The memorial for the Korean atomic bomb victims stands northwest of the Peace Memorial Park, across the river that demarcates the park’s western boundary. Because of its siting, those who visit the park tend to miss it altogether, unless they deliberately seek it out. It is set at the foot of a bridge, at a narrow fourway intersection. A statue of a mythic turtle supporting a fifty-foot-high granite column stands there.

The turtle rests on a terracelike platform and is fenced with small columns connected by metal bars. To the side of the memorial are some rose of Sharon trees, symbols of the Republic of Korea. Offerings of colorful cranes and children’s original artworks forming the Chinese characters for “peace” are placed neatly at the fence. Every piece of artwork or cluster of cranes is labeled with the young artist’s individual and school name. A white pebbled area surrounds the platform and separates the memorial from dark granite tiling the ritual floor. Among the pebbles are stones on which schoolchildren have scribbled their names, ages, and classes. Some even have slogans or handwritten phrases, such as “antidiscrimination” (hansabetsu), “peace and human rights,” or “toward a society without war” (senso no nai shakai o). Visits by student pilgrims make many of the memorials in the Peace Park—such as the Atom Bomb Dome, the Statue for the Atom-Bombed Children (which commemorates Sasaki Sadako, who died as a teenager from radiation late-effect leukemia), or the memorial for mobilized students—more than mere stone monuments. The plenitude of offerings at the memorial site indicates that the Korean memorial is among the most frequently visited memorials, despite its physical isolation.

On the front of the memorial is an engraving made up of Chinese characters that reads Kankokujin genbaku giseisha irei hi, or “memorial for Kankokujin (South Korean and/or Korean) atom bomb victims.” Next to it is a second line, also with Chinese characters but in a different style of calligraphy: “In memory of Prince Yi U and the other 20,000 or more souls.” Below them is a horizontal line engraved in English, “THE MONUMENT IN MEMORY OF THE KOREAN VICTIMS OF ABOMB” [sic]. The names of the fifty-seven Koreans and three Japanese who were involved in its construction are listed on the memorial’s right side.

The memorial has provoked a number of interpretive contestations over the past two decades. One issue has been whether this monument memorializes all souls of the Korean atom bomb dead, or only those survivors affiliated with the Republic of Korea. The term Kankokujin, at least in contemporary Japanese usage, generally refers to nationals of the Republic of Korea; another term for Koreans, Chōsenjin, is used either to specifically denote nationals of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or to indicate the larger ethnic group. The schism in the homeland, brought about by the history of Japanese colonialism, U.S. cold war hegemony, and the Korean War, led to a corresponding chasm in memorializing the atom bomb dead. Members of Zainippon Chōsenjin Sōrengō (the General

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