SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Shin Yun-sun describes her life as a maze of dead ends.
The South Korean has spent many of her 75 years pestering government officials, digging into records and searching burial grounds on a desolate Russian island, desperately searching for traces of a father she never met.
Shin wants to bring back the remains of her presumed-dead father for her ailing 92-year-old mother, Baek Bong-rye. Japan’s colonial government conscripted Shin’s father for forced labor from their farming village in September 1943, when Baek was pregnant with Shin.
As the 75th anniversary of the end of the war nears, the thousands of conscripted Korean men who vanished on Sakhalin Island are a largely forgotten legacy of Japan’s brutal rule of the Korean Peninsula, which ended with Tokyo’s Aug. 15, 1945, surrender.
Shin vows to never stop searching for her father but fears time is running out.
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