TOKYO, Feb. 8 (Yonhap) -- A Japanese activist on Thursday urged South Korea to propose that Japan locate and repatriate the remains of Koreans who were killed after being forcefully taken to battlefields in Japan and across the Asia-Pacific region as soldiers and laborers during World War II.
"It is hard for me to understand why the South Korean government remains silent (about the issue of retrieving the remains) even after our efforts made the Japanese government say it would cooperate," Keishi Ueda, a member of a Japanese civic group seeking to repatriate remains of war dead to their families, said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency.
Ueda, a civil servant in the city of Sakai, Japan's Osaka Prefecture, has spearheaded a project to bring the remains of Koreans killed in the conflict back to their bereaved families.
At least 22,000 sets of remains of Koreans are believed to still be buried in the southern Japanese island of Okinawa and the war's other battlefields. The Koreans were taken there to work as soldiers or forced laborers building ports and other facilities for Japanese troops.
Korea was under Japanese colonial rule from 1910-45.
In March 2016, Japan enacted a law to bring its war dead back from overseas over the next nine years. Those who hailed from the Korean Peninsula, however, were omitted from the law's scope.
The 60-year-old activist frequently visited Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry officials, and politicians, who handle the retrieval of remains of Japanese war dead abroad, and politicians to appeal to them for the repatriation of the Koreans' remains to their families.
This undated photo shows Keishi Ueda, a member of a Japanese civic group seeking to repatriate remains of war dead to their families. Ueda conducted an interview with Yonhap News Agency in Tokyo on Feb. 8, 2018. (Yonhap)
Efforts by Ueda's group and Japanese as well as South Korean activists groups paid off in October 2016, when the Japanese government expressed its intention to consider the implementation of the remains' retrieval in case the South Korean government comes up with a concrete proposal on the issue.
Ueda called the South Korean government's silence "lamentable." The previous government, under President Park Geun-hye, made no official reaction to the issue and the current government, led by President Moon Jae-in, has yet to take action, while many bereaved families are dying of old age.
"The South Korean government should make a proposal for the present," Ueda said. "Not to do so is to help the Japanese government make an excuse that it has done its own job."
Noting that South Korea helps the United States excavate remains believed to be of U.S. soldiers killed in the 1950-53 Korean War, he said, "It is a great irony that South Korea remains inactive in solving the issue while it helps exhume remains of another country's people."
On Thursday, Ueda came to Tokyo from Sakai, after taking a three-day leave, and joined officials from South Korean civic groups to hold a rally to voice their demand to the Japanese ministry that remains of Koreans be returned to their families.
Ueda's attention to the repatriation of Koreans' remains came after he heard from their bereaved families that "they cannot die in peace unless the remains of their parents or siblings are returned to them."
namsh@yna.co.kr
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