Remains of Korean at Tokyo temple are those of separate person

SEOUL, Jan. 16 Kyodo

One of more than 1,100 Koreans whose remains were believed to have been laid to rest at a Tokyo temple has been confirmed to be alive in South Korea, Japanese and South Korean government sources said Tuesday.

Kim Sang Bong, 84, currently living in Busan, is on the list of 1,135 Korean servicemen and civilian employees of the defunct Japanese military whose remains are placed at the Yutenji temple in Tokyo's Meguro Ward.

At least another six Koreans on the list are known to have returned to South Korea after World War II, the sources said. The South Korean government's search for relatives of the listed people led to the discovery of the repatriated group of people.

Japan's Ministry of Health and Welfare, now the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, entrusted the remains and the list to the temple in 1971.

In December 2004, then Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi agreed, in talks with South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun, to return the remains of the Koreans at the Yutenji temple as early as possible, and Tokyo is now in talks with Seoul to return at an early date 137 remains, which have been identified.

Kim, who was a civilian employee of the Imperial Japanese Army, has told Kyodo News that he was repatriated to his hometown in North Gyeongsang Province in December 1945 after he was captured eight months earlier by U.S. forces and served time at a detention center in Hawaii as a prisoner of war.

Kim said he wants the governments of Japan and South Korea to make efforts to identify the remains at the Yutenji temple and return them to their real relatives.

Japan, which ruled the Korean Peninsula between 1910 and 1945, recruited a large number of Korean men as soldiers and civilian employees of the military and took many others as forced laborers before and during World War II.

Yutenji, a Buddhist temple established in 1718, houses remains not only of the Korean servicemen and civilian employees but of 285 unidentified Koreans who are among more than 500 victims in a 1945 explosion of a Japanese naval transport ship.

The 4,730-ton Ukishima Maru sank off Maizuru port near Kyoto on Aug. 24, 1945, nine days after Japan's defeat in the war, leaving 524 Koreans and 25 Japanese dead.

In July 2006, the war-linked Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo removed the name of a former Korean military personnel in the Japanese military after he was confirmed alive in Seoul.

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