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Member of Hiroshima survivors’ council visits North Korea, requests survey on conditions of local A-bomb survivors

by Michiko Tanaka, Staff Writer

In mid-November, Kim Jin Ho, the executive director of the Council of Atom-bombed Koreans in Hiroshima, paid a visit to North Korea to explore support measures for A-bomb survivors residing in that nation. On November 26, Mr. Kim said that he has asked a local A-bomb survivors’ organization to carry out a detailed survey on the actual conditions of survivors living there and that the organization has agreed to Mr. Kim’s request.

After his visit to North Korea, Mr. Kim sat down with the Chugoku Shimbun. He said that he exchanged views with executive members of the North Korean A-bomb Survivors’ Association (headquartered in Pyongyang) and suggested that they seek a way for survivors living in North Korea, which has no diplomatic relations with Japan, to obtain the A-bomb Survivor’s Certificate.

According to Mr. Kim, the Pyongyang association told him that they interviewed 29 survivors and sent out questionnaires to 50 survivors living in the country between June 2011 and May 2012. In some cases people had long been unaware that they were A-bomb survivors because their parents had not told them the truth, out of fears of discrimination.

In addition to the executive members of the association, Mr. Kim met two women, now 75 and 67, who returned to North Korea after being exposed to the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. “As a prerequisite for receiving benefits from the government’s relief measures for A-bomb survivors, we have to prove that they were actually exposed to the atomic bombing,” Mr. Kim said. “We must carry out a survey as soon as possible.”

(Originally published on November 27, 2012)

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