South Korea will distribute a report on Korean victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings in Japan when the former colonist marks the 70th anniversary of the nuclear attack, the prime minister's office said Tuesday.
A state-funded foundation supporting victims of Japan's forced labor said it is making a Japanese report on the Korean victims of the atomic bombings to better inform Japan about its past wrongdoings. The report was originally published in Korean in 2010.
The foundation plans to print a thousand copies and circulate them in Japan on Aug. 6, exactly 70 years after the United States dropped the nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
The foundation estimated about 70,000 out of 690,000 victims of the atomic bombings were Koreans.
The report also contains information about a shipyard in Nagasaki, where Korean laborers were forced to work during the war. Japan has been trying to register it as a UNESCO World Heritage site, a move that has enraged Koreans.
The forced laborers were later sent to the bomb-ravaged cities rebuild infrastructure, which left them further exposed to residual radiation, it said.
It is the third publication about the little-known atrocities committed by Japan that South Korea is translating into Japanese.
Japan's conscription of Koreans as slave workers is another symbol of its wartime atrocities, along with the enslavement of women for sex in frontline brothels. (Yonhap)