San Francisco Chronicle

Foreign A-bomb victims are all but forgotten
Kathleen E. McLaughlin, Chronicle Foreign Service

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Nagasaki , Japan -- Tucked in the far corner of Nagasaki Peace Park sits a small monument next to a memorial featuring a streetcar platform ruined by the atomic bomb.

The simple marker is easy to miss, a lonely tribute to the non-Japanese survivors of atomic destruction. Their numbers are unknown, and their struggle for recognition and financial assistance continues six decades later.

A 1,000-man camp in Nagasaki is believed to have been destroyed when the bomb fell 60 years ago Tuesday. A group of U.S. prisoners of war, among tens of thousands of POWs in Japan in 1945, lost a U.S. court battle for reparations two years ago. Lester Tenney, a former soldier who now lives in La Jolla ( San Diego County ), saw the mushroom cloud rise over Nagasaki from the prison where he was being held 32 miles away.

"We have never, never received anything from the Japanese in any way," says Tenney, who suffered a broken back, shoulder, nose, foot, hand and a skull fracture while in captivity. He was freed when Japan surrendered Aug. 15, 1945.

Others -- Dutch, Australians, Chinese and as many as 10,000 Koreans among them -- were not that fortunate. Some were workers the Japanese army conscripted during the war for some of its most difficult projects, such as dangerous mining and shipbuilding. Nagasaki city historical accounts say thousands of non-Japanese merchants and free laborers also were in town when the bomb fell.

"Almost all of these people would have experienced the atomic bombing, and it is estimated that thousands of them were killed," the Nagasaki Testimonial Society writes in its regularly updated account, A Journey to Nagasaki , a Peace Reader. "The facts about this area of the atomic bombing have not been properly brought to light."

Neither the Japanese government nor diplomats have clear figures about how many foreigners were in Japan in August 1945 or died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki .

The Japan Times reports 2.5 million Koreans were in Japan then. Some were conscripted laborers, but more were here because of Japan 's earlier colonization of Korea .

In January, Korean survivors scored a victory when a Hiroshima court sided with 40 South Korean hibakusha in ordering the Japanese government to pay damages of nearly $11,000 per person. A Tokyo columnist on international affairs said the Japanese government maintains it has already done its part.

"The Japanese government's position is that when Japan and Korea signed the peace treaty in 1965, the Japanese government paid compensation for the damage caused during the war, and both governments agreed that this compensation included individual damages as well," said Megumi Nishikawa with the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun.

The Dutch, long-standing trade partners with Japan , also suffered a heavy toll. Some 90,000 Dutch people have filed claims over the decades for reparations from Japan . Jan van Wagtendonk, head of the Amsterdam-based Foundation of Japanese Honorary Debts, said Dutch nationals who had been interned and otherwise injured in Japan were seeking the same amount from Japan that the U.S. government granted in 1990 to each person of Japanese descent who was interned in the United States during World War II -- $20,000.

"We still try very hard to convince Japan and its people that they have a moral obligation to all individual Dutch internees and POWs who were badly treated by the Japanese military in Dutch Indies ( Indonesia ), Japan , Burma , Thailand and China ," said van Wagtendonk.

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