Mining atomic bomb material: The remorse of a Congolese asylum seeker in Japan

TOKYO — In 2023, the number of people forced to flee within their countries across the world or abroad due to conflicts and persecution reached a new high, and an increasing number are seeking refuge in Japan. Compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic, Japan has seen a sevenfold increase in asylum applications from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a central African country rich in mineral resources but long plagued by war. While the two countries are far apart, when the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approach, there are people from the Congolese country who feel a sense of guilt toward Japan. Why is this?

‘Shocking’

“Many people in Congo know the words Nagasaki and Hiroshima,” said a man in his 30s who fled to Japan from Bukavu in the eastern DRC last June, and who is now applying for refugee status in Japan. In fact, uranium extracted from the Shinkolobwe mine in the southern DRC when it was a Belgian colony was used as material for the atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

The man says he learned this during a high school history class. Around the same time, Japan and South Korea were hosting the 2002 soccer World Cup. In African countries including the DRC, Japanese cars are popular, and the man says he had a positive image of Japan.

The man says he found it “shocking” to learn that many innocent people had died from the atomic bombs made with his country’s resources. In history textbooks there was a photo, well known in Japan, of a boy waiting by a crematory in the aftermath of the Nagasaki bombing, with his dead baby bother strapped to his back. “I could only imagine that he didn’t want to leave the body of his brother,” the man said.

Mari Kobayashi of Refugee Empowerment Network (REN), a nonprofit organization in Japan supporting many refugee applicants like this man, said with a dark expression, “When I first heard this, I was very surprised. They’re in a position of having been exploited, but then they feel a strong sense of guilt toward Japan over the dropping of the atomic bombs.”

The uranium used in the bombs is said to have been secretly transported to the United States by a Belgian mining company at the time. Locals were mobilized to mine the uranium ore, and it is said that they suffered radiation damage because they dug it out with their bare hands.

Reaction to a hibakusha’s story

At REN’s Japanese language classes, around 30 refugee applicants participate each time. Their nationalities vary, but there has been a surge of people from Congo since last year, and at one point those from the DRC accounted for 90% of participants. According to the Ministry of Justice, last year a total of 178 people from the DRC applied for refugee status in Japan — around seven times more than in 2019, before the government imposed entry restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The man’s story resonated with Kobayashi, so recently she invited a university professor from Hiroshima to talk about their experience in the atomic bombing. Over 20 people participated, and nearly half of them were from the DRC.

Mitsue Allen-Tamai, a professor at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo who came to the talk, noted that Japan had been an aggressor during World War II. After this she shared the story of her uncle, who was a university student at the time the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima and died, and how one of her own classmates who was a second-generation A-bomb survivor passed away at the age of 10. The participants listened intently, and looked fixedly at photos of the Atomic Bomb Dome and the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima.

After the session, a Congolese woman in her 20s asked Allen-Tamai how the people of Hiroshima managed to rebuild their lives, expressing a desire to learn more, while a male participant said he was glad to have learned in detail about the history because he had known that the uranium from his home country had been used to make the bombs.

Conflict sparked by mineral resources

At the same time, the man who mentioned his guilt toward Japan also wants Japanese people to learn more about the conflict in his country over mineral resources. “Fight, fight, fight … there’s still fighting going on. Innocent people are killed every day,” he said, adding that the situation marred by prolonged battles was “getting worse and worse.”

Armed groups that earn their cash not only from uranium but also other mineral resources such as cobalt, which is used in smartphone batteries, have been cropping up in eastern Congo, and fighting for control has continued since 1996. Armed groups control the mines, and the Congolese military is also involved in illegal mining and trading.

The man says the area where he lived was also frequently attacked by militias. His friends and neighbors were killed, and the man’s fruit and vegetable store was attacked, with looters taking everything. His father was also attacked and lost his property — a shock so great it contributed to his death, the man says.

Several years ago, he saw a TV program and learned that there had been no war in Japan for over 70 years. From that point on, he had dreamed of “living in peaceful Japan.”

The man now works as a cleaner at a hotel in Tokyo. He says the Japanese government should know why the Congolese people are fleeing to Japan, and pointed out that just like in Ukraine and Gaza, war is continuing in Congo.

(Japanese original by Ai Kunimoto, Foreign News Department)