Ukishima Maru

The vessel was originally used as a passenger transport between Osaka and Okinawa. The Imperial Japanese Navy requisitioned it in September 1941 and primarily employed it on a routing between Aomori and Hakodate, connecting the main islands of Honshu and Hokkaido. == Final voyage and sinking ==

Japan surrendered to the United States on 15 August 1945. Seven days later, on 22 August, Ukishima Maru departed Ominato in Aomori Prefecture, bound for Pusan. The number of people aboard the ship is disputed. Although the Japanese government officially recorded 3,735 passengers and 225 Japanese crew, there have been estimates of as many as 10,000 Koreans on board. According to eyewitness accounts from seven Korean survivors, Japanese marines threw documents and other items off the ship, and some marines left the ship in a smaller boat before the explosion. Survivor Jeong Gi-young also stated that he overheard the Japanese marines, who were looking at the woman feeding her baby on board and said it was such a pity that the baby was going to die soon at young age without ever fully blooming. Survivor Jang Yeong-do recalled that the rumor, which said that the ship was going to explode if it was to change its course from Busan, was already circulating around the vessel. In 2016, a team from the Research Institute of Korean and Japanese Cultural Studies led by Kim Moon-gil obtained the document of the Japanese government instructing ships including Ukishima Maru to discard loaded explosives less than three hours prior to the departure. With neither witness accounts nor records of the explosives ever being discarded from the ship, Kim and others suggest that Ukishima Maru likely left with the explosives on board. Kim also argued that only 25 out of 300 Japanese crews on board died compared to the thousands of the Korean passengers who were never officially reported, suggesting that many Japanese crews were aware of the planned explosion and escaped by boats as the Korean survivors witnessed. Meanwhile, the Korean passengers were unaware and thus killed in much large number by the sudden explosion. Part of the reason for the discrepancy, according to historian Mark Caprio, is that the official numbers did not count bodies that sunk with the ship. Around 900 survivors returned to Korea after the incident by traveling to Yamaguchi Prefecture and boarding other repatriation ships there. == Legacy ==

Official response The sinking was first reported in the Korean press on 18 September, and in the Japanese press on 8 October. In 1965, Japan and South Korea signed a Treaty of Basic Relations that established a $364 million compensation fund for victims of colonial occupation. After this treaty was signed, Japan stopped accepting compensation claims from victims, but the South Korean government offered compensation payments of 30,000 won from the fund in the mid-1970s. Eighty South Koreans, including the survivors and relatives of the incident's victims, filed a lawsuit against the Japanese government in 1992 seeking monetary compensation, an official apology, and return of nineteen victims' remains from Japan to South Korea. In 2001, the Kyoto District Court ordered the Japanese government to pay to 15 South Koreans, including the survivors and relatives of the victims from the incident, ruling that the Japanese government had failed in its duty to transport passengers safely, but rejected the demands for official apologies and return of the victims' remains. The entire decision was rejected on appeal in 2003 by the High Court of Osaka, and the rejection was upheld by the Supreme Court of Japan in 2004, resulting in no legal redress for the plaintiffs. Salvage Incomplete salvage attempts were carried out in 1950 and 1954, which recovered some remains from the shipwreck. Memorials An annual memorial service was held in Maizuru starting in 1954, and a monument to the tragedy was sculpted by a local Japanese schoolteacher between 1977 and 1978. The monument now stands in the Ukishima-maru Victims Memorial Park. Annual memorial services at the ship's departure site in Ominato have been held since 1994, and a permanent information board was erected at the site in 2012. Media • Asian Blue: the Ukishima-maru Incident (1995) – Japanese film depicting the incident • Souls Protest (2000) – North Korean film depicting the incident == References ==