Voices of the Unredressed: Korean and Nisei A-Bomb Survivors, Structural Legacies of Violence, and Compensatory Justice in the Cold War Pacific Michael R. Jin Program in Global Asian Studies and Department of History, University of Illinois Chicago, IL, USA ABSTRACT This essay explores the historical erasures of Korean and U.S.-born Japanese American (Nisei) survivors of the 1945 atomic bombing. Since 1945, the Korean survivors of Hiroshima have struggled for redress as South Korea has remained a crucial part of the U.S. Cold War nuclear umbrella. As American civilians, the Nisei atomic bomb survivors have also found themselves unrecognized by their country as victims of the U.S. nuclear violence. The struggles of Korean and Nisei A-bomb survivors for historical recognition reveal the colonial, racial, and state violence that remain unredressed in the U.S. “empire for liberty” well into the twenty-first century. KEYWORDS Atomic bomb survivors; compensatory justice; Hiroshima; nuclear violence; redress I arrived in Hapcheon, a picturesque rural town 152 miles southeast of Seoul, in a late September morning in 2017. Less than two months before my visit, Hapcheon had become the site of South Korea’s first and only atomic bomb resource center when it opened its doors with little fanfare on August 6, the 72-year anniversary of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Figure 1). 1 I found myself the only visitor at the resource center and its small museum that morning (Figure 2). Most tourists who visited Hapcheon, Koreans or foreign- ers, had never heard of the new A-bomb resource center in a town famous for the Haeinsa Temple, a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site of Tripitaka Koreana, the renowned thirteenth-century wooden printing blocks. 2 In a country where the memories of the brutal Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945) have intimately shaped its national consciousness since the end of World War II, most of its citizens remain oblivious of the fact that tens of thousands of conscripted Korean workers and their families from southern rural commu- nities like Hapcheon during the colonial period had perished in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Today, Hapcheon is home to more than 500 of the 2200 remaining Korean A-bomb survivors who had returned from Japan after the Pacific War. 3 After a short tour of the museum, I introduced myself to the Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Association’s regional director, Shim Jintae, who invited me to have lunch with some of the residents at the A-bomb survivors’ welfare center within a short walking distance from the new resource center. Among the residents I met that day was Lee Sun Ho, an 88-year-old Hapcheon native whose family had left their poverty-stricken village in CONTACT Michael R. Jin mrjin@uic.edu Global Asian Studies Program, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA AMERASIA JOURNAL 2021, VOL. 47, NO. 2, 314–329 https://doi.org/10.1080/00447471.2022.2037989 © 2022 The Regents of the University of California