OSAKA -- A memorial will be held here March 13 to mark 80 years since the first major air raid on this city in the last stages of World War II, as a civilian-led survey shedding light on the Korean victims of the attacks makes headway.

The event will be hosted by a committee of lawyers, journalists and field researchers in front of the Osaka International Peace Center, also known as Peace Osaka, in the city's Chuo Ward.

Osaka Prefecture was the target of over 50 bombings by U.S. air forces from December 1944 through August 1945, resulting in some 15,000 casualties. As of March 2024, information such as the names of 9,157 of those who were killed have been recorded in a registry kept at Peace Osaka. However, according to 83-year-old committee member Atsuo Yokoyama, the names of victims who were born on the Korean Peninsula are mostly unknown.

Yokoyama is also a member of a civilian research group called the Osaka air raid survivors' movement documentation study group. While researching the air raids and the forced immigration of Koreans to Japan, he noticed that he could not find many firsthand accounts of the raids by those born in Korea.

Yokoyama offered his view that the reasons for this included a lower level of interest in non-Japanese victims, as well as the fact that anti-Korean discrimination and the turbulence caused by the division of the Korean Peninsula left no room for them to provide their testimonies.

In January 2019, Yokoyama investigated the Korean victims, who were not known, and proposed in the group's meeting to hold opportunities to mourn them. An executive committee to that end was established.

Based on the population ratio at the time, the committee estimated that roughly 1,200 Koreans were killed in the Osaka air raids. By researching items such as name registries kept by public bodies and temples and cenotaphs, it has thus far determined that 167 people were from the Korean Peninsula. The committee has also conducted interviews with bereaved relatives and those who experienced the raids, and published a booklet in 2022.

In some cases, the committee's interviews led family members to report the names of relatives who died in the raids to add onto the list of deceased or to apply to change their listed names from the Japanese aliases they were then using to their real names.

The group's memorial event has taken place every March since 2021. The committee has also expanded its research into further topics such as the Chinese people who were in Osaka at the time, including those forcibly brought there, and casualties among Allied prisoners of war. At last year's service, the names of eight Chinese victims of the Osaka air raids and three American prisoners of war were read aloud.

Starting from 2 p.m., a flower-laying ceremony is planned to take place after the reading of a eulogy and announcements of the group's activities at the memorial facility in Peace Osaka. Welcoming participants, Yokoyama said, "On the occasion of the 80th anniversary, I'd like people to think once again about the meaning of remembering and mourning all the victims of the Osaka air raids."

Sijong Oh, 84, a resident of the city of Sakai, Osaka Prefecture, tackling issues surrounding the human rights of Koreans in Japan, was interviewed by Yokoyama in 2020. The second-generation Korean in Japan experienced the first major Osaka air raid in the city's Nishinari Ward and remembers the sounds of bombers and the sky turning red with flames. "There were a lot of Koreans in Osaka at that time who had no choice but to come to Japan due to Japan's colonial policies. Many must have been air raids victims, and it is important to dig up and pass on their records and memories," he said.

(Japanese original by Kana Takagi, Osaka City News Department)