What Happened at Josei Coal Mine? The Truth Revealed After 82 Years on 'Tails of Tales'

What happened at the Josei Coal Mine that day?

On the September 10 broadcast of SBS's "Tails of Tales", the story of the Josei Coal Mine was spotlighted under the subtitle "Black Bones - An Obituary Delivered 49 Years Later."

In 1991, people across the country received letters sent from Japan. The recipients shared one common thing: someone in their family had died on February 3, 1942, in Ube, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan.

The bereaved families knew virtually nothing about what happened. However, there were people who vividly remembered that day.

Seol Do-sul was 21 years old when he was suddenly dragged off to Japan in 1939. There were hundreds of other young men in the same situation. Filled with anxiety, the place they arrived at was the Josei Coal Mine in Ube, Yamaguchi Prefecture.

Under strict surveillance, they began working at the Josei Coal Mine, an undersea coal mine stretching out beneath the ocean. In harsh conditions where the engine sounds of ships passing overhead could be clearly heard, countless young men had to work without even being able to properly straighten their backs.

Consequently, the young men always sought ways to escape, but that was practically impossible. They faced brutal treatment from the Japanese every day, and eventually gave up trying to escape to avoid being beaten to death. In total, nearly a thousand young Korean men were forcibly brought there.

On the fateful day in 1942, Seol Do-sul was sleeping after finishing his shift. Awakened by the urgent shouts of a supervisor, he rushed outside and directly witnessed the coal mine being submerged.

Countless people filled the area in front of the tunnel shaft. Numerous people wailed in front of the tunnel entrance, which had been blocked off by seawater, searching for their family members who had gone inside to work.

Even as time passed, no one informed them of the situation inside the tunnel or what would happen next. Shortly after, Japanese military police appeared and blocked off the tunnel entrance right in front of the families who were desperately looking for those who had gone inside.

No one knew how many people died or how the accident happened. The bereaved families could not even find the bodies of their loved ones, and the remaining family members had to go work at the very coal mine that swallowed their families just to make a living.

Ever since that day, Do-sul lived in seclusion, tormented by the guilt of having survived alone. Time passed, bringing liberation, and even more time elapsed until the year became 1991.

Yamaguchi Takenobu was a high school teacher in Ube. Having belatedly learned about the Josei Coal Mine, he grew interested in the incident and began gathering information piece by piece.

As more time passed, he formed a civic group dedicated to engraving the Josei Coal Mine submersion accident into history, gathering like-minded individuals to collect information about the event. One day, Yamaguchi heard a rumor that a roster of the deceased existed at a temple.

Upon checking the roster, he could not hide his shock. It contained the names of 183 deceased individuals—those who died due to Japan's wartime national coal industry policy. Among them, 136 were Koreans.

However, all the names listed were Japanese-style names given through forced name changes (Soshi-kaimei). The first goal of the civic group was to erect a memorial stone inscribed with the real names of the victims. Knowing the pain of those called by Japanese names, the members wanted to find their true names and carve them onto the memorial stone to honor them.

Discovering the hometown addresses written beneath the names, the group sent letters to South Korea and North Korea in 1991. In their quest to find the victims' real names, they sent 118 letters and received 17 replies.

Most of the replies revealed that families who had previously known nothing about the life, death, or whereabouts of their missing relatives learned through the group's letters that they were victims of the Josei Coal Mine. The letters delivered after 50 years were essentially obituary notices for their families.

Those who received the letters visited the Josei Coal Mine to mourn their family members. Calling out the names of their loved ones believed to be somewhere in the sea, they yearned for those who had passed away.

In 2006, Seol Do-sul, a survivor of the Josei Coal Mine, returned to the sea where he had left his friends behind 65 years earlier. Gazing only at the remaining traces of the old coal mine site, he expressed sorrow for his departed friends and shed tears.

With no other way to pay respects other than visiting a temple housing the ancestral tablets of the deceased and bowing before his friend's unfamiliar name, Mr. Seol Do-sul could only do so much.

It was later revealed that personnel inside the tunnel at the time were already aware of abnormal water leakage phenomena. Although the miners working inside trusted the supervisors and continued working while watching the situation, the supervisors failed to fulfill their proper duties.

Japan, needing a steady supply of coal for the war, had pushed for coal extraction exceeding normal amounts over several days. During this process, even coal pillars known as "tanzu" were removed, ultimately causing a collapse that delivered a tremendous shock.

Thanks to the efforts of the civic group, a memorial stone honoring the victims of the Josei Coal Mine was erected in 2013. The reason they went to such lengths was out of conscience.

The civic group's next project was the excavation of the victims' remains, also undertaken to uphold human conscience. Following their relentless efforts, they successfully located the tunnel entrance and opened the sealed shaft.

"Look here, the tunnel entrance is open," shouted the members of the civic group. Those who caught a glimpse of hope after 82 years then began work to excavate the remains.

Discovered inside the dark tunnel, the remains of the victims had turned black by the time they finally came out into the world in 2025.

Mr. Seol Do-sul passed away without ever knowing that the tunnel had been opened or that the remains had been discovered.

Offering an apology on behalf of everyone, Yoko, a member of the civic group, bowed her head and drew attention by saying, "While I cannot become a bereaved family member myself, I believe humans are capable of sincerely understanding those feelings and striving to draw close to them. In that sense, I hope you can take the pain of the bereaved families a little bit as your own and think of this as just the beginning."

In January of this year, the governments of both South Korea and North Korea agreed to cooperate on DNA analysis of the remains at the South Korea-Japan summit. Is not the journey home for those sleeping beneath the sea truly beginning now?

(SBS Entertainment News | Editor Kim Hyo-jung)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.