��������

HAPCHEON: Bae Kyung-mi was five years old when the Americans dropped “Little Boy,” the atomic bomb that flattened Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
Like thousands of other ethnic Koreans working in the city at the time, her family kept the horror a secret.
Many feared the stigma from doing menial work for colonial ruler Japan, and false rumors that radiation sickness was contagious.
Bae recalls hearing planes overhead while she was playing at her home in Hiroshima on that day.
Within minutes, she was buried in rubble.
“I told my mom in Japanese, ‘Mom! There are airplanes!’” Bae, now 85, told AFP.
She passed out shortly after.
Her home collapsed on top of her, but the debris shielded her from the burns that killed tens of thousands of people — including her aunt and uncle.
After the family moved back to Korea, they did not speak of their experience.
“I never told my husband that I was in Hiroshima and a victim of the bombing,” Bae said.
“Back then, people often said you had married the wrong person if he or she was an atomic bombing survivor.”
Her two sons only learned she had been in Hiroshima when she registered at a special center set up in 1996 in Hapcheon in South Korea for victims of the bombings, she said.
Bae said she feared her children would suffer from radiation-related illnesses that afflicted her, forcing her to have her ovaries and a breast removed because of the high cancer risk.


She knew why she was getting sick, but did not tell her own family.
“We all hushed it up,” she said.
Some 740,000 people were killed or injured in the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
More than 10 percent of the victims were Korean, data suggests, the result of huge flows of people to Japan while it colonized the Korean peninsula.
Survivors who stayed in Japan found they had to endure discrimination both as “hibakusha,” or atomic bomb survivors, and as Koreans.
Many Koreans also had to choose between pro-Pyongyang and pro-Seoul groups in Japan, after the peninsula was left divided by the 1950-53 Korean War.
Kwon Joon-oh’s mother and father both survived the attack on Hiroshima.
The 76-year-old’s parents, like others of their generation, could only work by taking on “filthy and dangerous jobs” that the Japanese considered beneath them, he said.
Korean victims were also denied an official memorial for decades, with a cenotaph for them put up in the Hiroshima Peace Park only in the late 1990s.
Kim Hwa-ja was four on August 6, 1945 and remembers being put on a makeshift horse-drawn trap as her family tried to flee Hiroshima after the bomb.
Smoke filled the air and the city was burning, she said, recalling how she peeped out from under a blanket covering her, and her mother screaming at her not to look.
Korean groups estimate that up to 50,000 Koreans may have been in the city that day, including tens of thousands working as forced laborers at military sites.


But records are sketchy.
“The city office was devastated so completely that it wasn’t possible to track down clear records,” a Hiroshima official told AFP.
Japan’s colonial policy banned the use of Korean names, further complicating record-keeping.
After the attacks, tens of thousands of Korean survivors moved back to their newly-independent country.
But many have struggled with health issues and stigma ever since.
“In those days, there were unfounded rumors that radiation exposure could be contagious,” said Jeong Soo-won, director of the country’s Hapcheon Atomic Bomb Victim Center.
Nationwide, there are believed to be some 1,600 South Korean survivors still alive, Jeong said — with 82 of them in residence at the center.
Seoul enacted a special law in 2016 to help the survivors — including a monthly stipend of around $72 — but it provides no assistance to their offspring or extended families.
“There are many second- and third-generation descendants affected by the bombings and suffering from congenital illnesses,” said Jeong.
A provision to support them “must be included” in future, he said.
A Japanese hibakusha group won the Nobel Peace Prize last year in recognition of their efforts to show the world the horrors of nuclear war.
But 80 years after the attacks, many survivors in both Japan and Korea say the world has not learned.


US President Donald Trump recently compared his strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“Would he understand the tragedy of what the Hiroshima bombing has caused? Would he understand that of Nagasaki?” survivor Kim Gin-ho said.
In Korea, the Hapcheon center will hold a commemoration on August 6 — with survivors hoping that this year the event will attract more attention.
From politicians, “there has been only talk... but no interest,” she said.

PERKINSTON: In the embrace of a cheerfully chittering spider monkey named Louie, an Army veteran who grappled for decades with post-traumatic stress disorder says he finally feels at peace.
“Being out here has brought a lot of faith back to me,” said John Richard. “There’s no feeling like it.”
The bond began last fall when Richard was helping two married veterans set up the Gulf Coast Primate Sanctuary, volunteering his time to build the enclosure that’s now Louie’s home in rural southeast Mississippi.
During a recent visit, Louie quickly scampered up Richard’s body, wrapping his arms and tail around him in a sort of hug. Richard, in turn, placed his hand on the primate’s back and whispered sweetly until Louie disentangled himself and swung away.
“He’s making his little sounds in my ear, and you know, he’s always telling you, ‘Oh, I love you,’” Richard said. “‘I know you’re OK. I know you’re not going to hurt me.’”
Richard said his connection with Louie helped more than any other PTSD treatment he received since being diagnosed more than 20 years ago.
It’s a similar story for the sanctuary’s founder, April Stewart, an Air Force veteran who said she developed PTSD as a result of military sexual trauma.
“It was destroying my life. It was like a cancer,” she said. “It was a trauma that was never properly healed.”
Stewart’s love of animals was a way to cope. She didn’t necessarily set out to create a place of healing for veterans with PTSD, but that’s what the sanctuary has become for some volunteers.
“By helping the primates learning to trust, we’re also reteaching ourselves how to trust, and we’re giving ourselves grace with people,” she said.
Her 15-acre property, nestled amid woods and farmland, is filled with rescue dogs, two rather noisy geese and a black cat. It’s also now home to three spider monkeys, two squirrel monkeys and two kinkajous, a tropical mammal that is closely related to raccoons.
The sanctuary in the town of Perkinston, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) due north of the Gulf coast, includes three large enclosures for the different species. Each has a smaller, air-conditioned area and a large fenced-in outdoor zone, where the primates swing from platforms and lounge in the sun. Checking on the animals — changing their blankets, bringing food and water — is one of the first and last things Stewart does each day.
However, she can’t do it alone. She relies on a group of volunteers for help, including several other veterans, and hopes to open the sanctuary to the public next summer for guided educational tours.
Stewart and her husband, also a veteran, decided to open the sanctuary in October after first rescuing and rehoming monkeys. With the help of two exotic-animal veterinarians, they formed a foundation that governs the sanctuary — which she said is the only primate sanctuary in Mississippi licensed by the US Department of Agriculture — and ensures the animals will be cared for even when the Stewarts are no longer able to run it themselves.
All the animals were once somebody’s pet, but their owners eventually couldn’t take care of them. Stewart stressed that primates do not make good or easy pets. They need lots of space and socialization, which is often difficult for families to provide.
The sanctuary’s goal is to provide as natural a habitat as possible for the animals, Stewart said, and bring them together with their own species.
“This is their family,” she said.