The first book-length study in English dedicated to the Korean survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings, Korean Nuclear Diaspora reveals how Koreans colonized by the Japanese and victimized by the U.S. weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaski have grappled with the shifting exigency of the long Cold War. Drawing on the little-known experiences of Korean survivors in both North and South Koreas as well as in Japan, Yuko Takahashi presents a compelling picture of grassroots organizations and key individuals who led an extraordinary international activism toward a better recognition of and unity over the survivors’ multifaceted suffering.

Naoko Wake, Michigan State University; author of American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

One of the neglected stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the presence of tens of thousands of Koreans on August 6th and 9th. Korean Nuclear Diaspora traces the journeys that brought these hibakusha to Japan, and their later struggles for redress in Japan as well as South and North Korea. Takahashi details how mechanisms of individual and communal identity construction, subjected to and resisting pressures from colonialism and Cold War politics, channeled the movements of Korean hibakusha for recognition, compensation, and dignity. Histories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can no longer exclude this hidden chapter.

Robert Jacobs, Hiroshima City University

Though this is the story of Koreans in Japan struggling with colonialism, ethnic competition, and the atomic bombings, Takahashi offers insight into how people think, how they feel, and how, as a result, societies work. The specific social issues related to colonialism, the war, the bombings, ethnic conflicts, and ideological conflicts are important. Anyone, especially any historian, interested in the effects of the atomic bombings on society should read this book. Anyone interested in imperialism and ethnic competition should read this book. But at a more universal level, anyone interested in intense social conflict and the potential for resolution should study this book carefully. Through extremely careful, thorough, and microscopically detailed research and writing, Takahashi has performed an enormous service to humanity.

Steve Leeper, Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation

Lee Sil-guen was a second generation Zainichi Korean (a Korean living in Japan), surviving by trading rice on the black market in August of 1945. To return to his home he had to pass through Hiroshima, a city leveled and irradiated by nuclear attack, and in doing so he developed radiation sickness—and he assumed a new identity, that of hibakusha, a person affected by the atomic bomb. But this is only the start of the story. Lee became an advocate for people like himself, especially those who retained loyalty to North Korea or who lived there in the years following the Korean War. This remarkable, complicated story of the identities made and remade by nuclear war is just one of many lives that animate Yuko Takahashi’s essential new book about the Korean hibakusha, living in Japan and on both sides of the 38th parallel. Based on original sources in Korean, English, and Japanese, Takahashi’s scholarship shows the depth of understanding necessary to follow the tangled lives and politics of disaster survivors—survivors whose political goals and personal dreams for recovery reflect every nuance of east Asian cold war complexity.

Scott Gabriel Knowles, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology