Mental illness hit Korean conscripts of Japanese army during WWII: clinical records

TOGANE, Japan -- Korean conscripts of the Japanese Imperial Army who were stricken with mental illness during World War II suffered from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to copies of Japanese hospital-kept clinical records obtained Monday by Yonhap News Agency.

Asai Hospital in the city of Togane, Japan's Chiba Prefecture, has kept clinical records on about 8,000 former soldiers who developed mental illness on Japan's battlefields in the Pacific War, including about 100 former conscripts who hailed from the Korean Peninsula. Before and during the war, Japan placed the peninsula under its colonial rule from 1910-45 and forced many Korean people to fight for the country.

Located about a 2 1/2 hour drive from Tokyo, the hospital specialized in the treatment of mental illness has kept stacks of the records in a warehouse on its grounds. 

Toshio Asai, the deceased former chief of the hospital, had them in his custody after working as a psychiatrist at the Japanese Army's Konodai Hospital in the city of Ichikawa, Chiba, that was designated as a military medical facility for soldiers hit by mental illness.

Asai had hidden the records, a collection of 1,000 books classified by the years when the patients were evacuated to be treated for illness, defying an Army order to have them burned following Japan's defeat in the war.

According to the copies, the agony of a Korean conscript surnamed Kim suffering mental illness included a description of the extent of the war's terrible situation and his unwanted participation in the conflict inflicted on him.

Born in 1924, the native of Gyeonggi Province near Seoul was conscripted in April 1945 before being diagnosed with a case of mental illness in October the same year.

"He got up all of a sudden at night and began to cry, saying 'Aigo,' and sometimes he beat his head with both of his hands," the records said.

Kim also went on the rampage and broke panes of glass in a bathroom before the hospital took measures to restrain him.

Even though the war ended in 1945, his illness continued to plague him until he died at the hospital in 2000 at the age of 76.

Hiroshi Shimizu, an 81-year-old honorary professor at Japan's Saitama University who carried out research on the clinical records along with Asai, has delivered the records of Kim's case to his younger brother living in South Korea.

Learning about Kim's death four years later, the younger brother contacted Shimizu for the medical records on Kim.

"His mother passed away without knowing about his son's fate,"

Shimizu said, adding that he sent Kim's bereaved family a report based on his sickbed records.

Shimizu lamented, "I can't imagine how miserable the family members were when they read the report." (Yonhap)