ABSTRACT
The wartime Korean population of Hiroshima consisted partly of pre-war immigrants and partly of wartime conscript laborers. The latter were fairly numerous, as Hiroshima was a military command and industrial center of some importance, though not of high enough strategic priority to be attacked earlier. Among the total of more than 300,000 covered in the complete records of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, Koreans are difficult to identify because of the enforced use of Japanese names. The Peace Memorial Park at the epicenter, at a fork between two rivers, gradually took shape in the years after the peace treaty and a cenotaph was dedicated to all the victims, but nothing marked the disproportionate number of Koreans involved because names were all in Japanese form. The memorial consists of an inscribed granite column supported by the statue of a symbolic mythical tortoise. As with all other matters affecting the Korean community, the memorial has been a focus of constant controversy.
