A lot of things have been happening here on the little deer island. I had a couple visiters who all chose to come at the busiest possible time, making meeting with them quite hectic. My old beloved roommate Siyu came through Korea for a week's stay after his stay in China, but because he was staying mostly in Seoul it was difficult to meet up with him due to my tight schedule and we ended up not meeting.
Another Fulbrighter contacted me and said she was working with professor Jeong Geun-Sik of Seoul National University while on Sabbatical from her position at Century College teaching disabilities studies. We managed to meet up yesterday morning and I regretfully sent her off unaccompanied to do some sightseeing at Aeyangwon while I bathed the residents at the hospital.
A third and quite unexpected visitor was my big brother in the capoeira world, Angelo, who came all the way to Yeosu to support his little cousin in the world inline roller skating championships. We met up on Thursday night in Yeosu and saw some Colombians and Koreans burn up the Americans on the 500 and 1000 meter sprints. Then we had some Samgyeopsal with his little cousin and another racer and got a motel before heading out the next morning to watch some more races in the blistering Korean Summer.
From Yeosu I headed to Daegu where I met up with a Kang JeSuk sonsaengnim and a representative of a certain NGO working on issues affecting Hibakusha in Korea. Hibakusha (korean: Pipokcha 피폭자) is of course the Japanese word for “bomb victim” which refers to the atomic bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I had not realized that over 10% of Hibakusha about 20% of the overall fatalities from the Hiroshima bomb were Koreans, mostly brought to Japan to work in factories or coal mines. Theirs is a sad history, in which they were forced by economic conditions or military orders to deploy to Japan to work for the Japanese war machine and then bombed by the Americans. They returned to Korea only to be ostracized due to their physical scars and receive little sympathy in a society which did not have much room to sympathize with those who had suffered from the American bombing of Japan. They were often mistaken for Hansen's disease patients due to the scars left by the radiation wave which had caused their skin to shed from their bodies like thin bark from a tree.
The NGO rep is herself a second generation hibakusha who has had a series of hip surgeries due to avascular necrosis of the hip joint. They suspect that it is related to the fact that her mother was in Hiroshima and had radiation sickness due to the atomic fallout, but they cannot get recognition from the Japanese government in order to receive support that is given to hibakusha. Avascular necrosis is usually caused by alcoholism or steroid use, but its other causes are unknown. I suspect that maybe her condition is caused by a hormone imbalance resulting from the radiation that her mother was exposed to. We had Daegu Makchang, a specialty of Daegu and the only worthy feature of Daegu cuisine.
After our meal I went with Kang sonsaengnim to Hapcheon where we stopped into a inn run by a nice auntie. An ethnomusicologist from the University of Toronto, Joshua Pilzer, was living there while studying the folk songs of Korean hibakusha. He has also studied the folk songs of Korean comfort women. It turns out he went to Evergreen State College in Olympia so he's well familiar with my home town. He had some Polish vodka so we went up to the roof and polished that off with the Kang sonsaengnim while discussing various philosophical topics.
The next day we went to the “Peace House,” the headquarters of the NGO advocating for Korean Hibakusha. We met up with two first generation Hibakusha in their 60's. Bae DongNok is a Korean Japanese man who was only several months old when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, giving him lifelong health problems. He has healthy children and does work singing Korean traditional songs for Japanese schools to expose schoolchildren to the history of Koreans during imperial Japan. Another man seemed fairly healthy himself but he had lost several children at childbirth to birth defects. We drove to a village where many of the original hibakusha had settled. There we visited the house of an old woman and her two daughters. The father had passed away several days before. The daughters were both mentally disabled. One could not speak at all and the other could speak but could not hold a topical conversation. She was somewhat unaware that her father had passed away several days before. They lived there gardening small plots of land, in a state of poverty which one rarely sees in modern Korea. The mother seemed worried about what would happen to her daughters when she passed away. Kang sonsaengnim was trying to talk the second and less disabled daughter into joining a group picnic the next day in Kangwondo at Inje, but she was somewhat reluctant to leave the house.
Update Sept. 9th
Now it is Friday and I am in Seoul. I stayed up all night talking with the other volunteers. A Buddhist monk came to volunteer and we spent most of the night talking about Buddhist practice, yoga, Christianity, religion, film, politics, etc. I went to work at 5:00 am and then had breakfast and took the bus to Seoul. Getting ready for Chuseok and my departure from Korea in a couple days.
I had been planning to visit Japan one last time before I left Korea, but I decided against it so that I could spend some more time in Sorokdo and then a few days in Seoul before leaving. I called Suzuki-san, my host in Tokyo, to tell him I was not coming and I heard that he has signed up for the cleanup crews at Fukushima. Suzuki is a contract electrical engineer for power plants and he has worked in some 30 countries around the world in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, etc. He also traveled to many places when he was a Buddhist monk including pilgrimages around the United States. He lived briefly in the Seattle area as well.
He's in his mid 50's and unmarried so he decided that it's better that he risk his life than younger people. I could tell that there was something eating at him last time I talked to him but I wasn't sure what it was. He said that there is a 10-year contract for working on the cleanup crew at Fukushima. I hope he is not hurt by working there, it's probably one of the most dangerous places in the world to work. But I believe he is the right person for the job.
I talked to my dad and heard that he is going to visit Japan for the one-year anniversary of his brothers passing. The last thing I did before I came to Korea was attend his wake on October 13th. So I guess everything has come full circle. Time to get back to putting my life together and learning how to be a grown-up in America.
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