'I don't have much hope': Koreans search for loved ones who died fighting for Japan
As Tokyo marks the end of war in Pacific, conscripts’ families search for information on where their forebears fell
Kim Jung-im was three years old when her father, Kim Dong-won, was conscripted into the Japanese imperial army in 1940.
He died, aged 23, in the jungles of New Guinea in 1943, two years before Japan’s wartime defeat and the Korean peninsula’s liberation from more than three decades of colonial rule by Tokyo.
“We didn’t know whether he was alive or dead, even after Korea was liberated,” Kim told the Guardian during her recent visit to Tokyo along with other elderly relatives of South Korean conscripts desperate to learn the fates – and in some cases the final resting places – of
