Flowers and a water vessel are placed at a memorial stone in the commemorative plaza of the Chosei coal mine in Ube, Yamaguchi prefecture, Japan, April 2. Korea Times file
Korea and Japan will begin DNA testing on human remains recovered from a submerged wartime coal mine in southwestern Japan, a critical step toward identifying Korean laborers forced into dangerous underwater shafts during World War II.
The Korean government said Monday that forensic experts will analyze remains excavated in August 2025 and February 2026 from the Chosei coal mine in Ube, Yamaguchi prefecture. The testing framework follows an agreement struck by the two nations during a bilateral summit on Jan. 13, which was subsequently formalized through working-level diplomatic negotiations.
The Chosei mine is the site of a notorious 1942 disaster, when an underwater tunnel collapsed beneath the seabed, drowning more than 180 people. Historical records indicate that more than 130 of the victims were Korean forced laborers brought to the site during Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula. For decades, the site remained largely untouched, submerged beneath the ocean, serving as a painful emblem of unresolved wartime grievances.
Officials from Seoul’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior and Safety said they will continue to coordinate closely with Tokyo to expedite the genetic profiling and match the samples with surviving relatives in Korea.
While the initiative signals a rare moment of bureaucratic alignment on historical issues, the identification process faces significant hurdles due to the degraded state of the remains and the passage of more than eight decades since the disaster.
This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.
Source: Korea Times News
