Hundreds of aging Koreans desperately seek traces of husbands and fathers still lost to Japan's brutal colonial rule, 75 years after World War II ended.
South Korean Shin Yun-sun shows photos of her 92-year-old mother, Baek Bong-rye, during an interview at her house in Seoul, South Korea Wednesday, July 29, 2020. Shin, 75, has spent decades pestering government officials, digging into records and searching burial grounds on Russia’s desolate Sakhalin island, desperately searching for traces of a father she never met. Shin wants to bring back the remains of her presumably dead father for her ailing mother.
WWII ended with the Korean Peninsula divided into a Soviet-backed north and U.S.-backed south, and the devastating 1950-53 Korean War followed. In the ensuing decades, Cold War animosities saw the rival Koreas regularly threatening each other with war. Families thought their loved ones would return when Japan’s surrender in WWII cemented the Soviet Union’s full control over Sakhalin.
While Soviet authorities offered the Korean workers Soviet or North Korean citizenship beginning in the 1950s, many chose to remain stateless in hopes of eventually returning to South Korea. 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.
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