Two weeks later when a traumatized nation heard Emperor Hirohito's voice announce surrender, Park, then a 12-year-old schoolgirl, found her father quietly rejoicing that his homeland was about to emerge from 35 years of Japanese Imperial occupation.

"As my father listened to the radio announcement on the end of the war, he started speaking to himself, saying 'Hooray, hooray,' in Korean," Park says.

"Then I heard him whispering: 'The liberation has come.'"

Out of the 140,000 people who died 60 years ago from the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, some 27,000 of them were Korean, many brought to Japan as slave laborers, others, like Park's family, to look for employment.

For Park and other Koreans, the legacy of the bombing has been more complex than for many Japanese survivors. While the Koreans suffered in huge numbers, they also went on to endure intense discrimination, much as they had done during the period of Japanese occupation.

Before the nuclear attack, she watched her father, a hard-working laborer, be humiliated by the military police in Hiroshima.

"My father was speaking to his friend in Korean on the street and an officer yelled at them, 'Don't you speak in Korean in public, you bastards!'"

Park was forced to use a Japanese name, Namiko Arai, but her Korean origin was no secret. To escape the vicious taunts from her classmates, Park would avoid wearing Korean clothes and begged her mother to cook her Japanese food.

"I wouldn't eat her kimchee because the other kids would tell me that I reeked of Korean food," says Park -- who, now a 72-year-old grandmother, wears her exquisite blue and white Korean chima-chogori with pride in Hiroshima.

-- "It was eerie. There were no buildings in Hiroshima" --

On the fateful morning of August 6, 1945, Park had just boarded a train with her younger brother and sister to take them to a rural village as part of a wartime evacuation for toddlers.

Just as the train was about to cross a metal bridge at 8:15 am, Park saw a flash and seconds later a fire raged through the carriages with a piercing and roaring sound.

"My sister and I immediately jumped off the train. A Japanese soldier grabbed my little brother and jumped off the train. I didn't know what happened."

"I saw dark clouds over the sky and wondered why it was so dark even though we had such a beautiful morning," she says.

"I was bleeding because fragments of glass were stuck in my head. But I didn't feel any pain. I was too frightened to feel pain."

Park and her young siblings were just two kilometers (one mile) from the center of the nuclear blast. They managed to return home on foot and found their mother standing outside their demolished house.

"She was holding our baby brother. She had cuts all over her body and was completely dazed," she says.

Her mother, who barely spoke Japanese, told Park later that she saw a fireball inside the house and did not remember how she got out of the house with her six-month-old baby.

Around 8:25 am, Park walked up a hill behind her house and saw the town of her birth in flames.

Soon Park started seeing men, women, children coming from all over the city, staggering and asking for water before collapsing to the ground.

"Their faces were so red and burned with skin hanging from their arms and legs. One by one, they collapsed and never got up," she says.

By 9:00 am, Park was reunited with her father who was in downtown Hiroshima at the time of the atomic explosion but miraculously survived with minor cuts to his forehead.

Despite the utter destruction in the city, the Japanese military resumed food supply, mostly from their rations, on August 7. But Park was always starving.

"Just to survive, I was constantly looking for food. I stole tomatoes, cucumbers and eggplants from somebody's gardens. I didn't feel any guilt. Whenever I heard there was food supply, I ran to the place barefoot."

Three days after the bombing she waited her turn for a share of soy sauce when she noticed that two human bodies were floating inside the tank.

"I wasn't scared at all. Everyone was taking soy sauce from the tank," she says.

"For the two dead, I'm guessing that they must have suffered severe burns and jumped into the tank due to unbearable heat."

Unshaken as she headed home, she then spotted a charred freezer that had belonged to the Japanese army, opened it up and took some meat.

"I dipped that soy sauce on the meat and baked it. It tasted so good. It was so delicious."

-- "We started our lives from scratch" --

Park's parents came to Hiroshima from southern Korea shortly after imperial Japan invaded the neighboring peninsula in 1910. They came by choice to make a living, with her father taking jobs building homes and constructing dams.

"He worked so hard that our standard of living was up to that of Japanese," Park says.

About a month after the war ended, Koreans started fleeing Japan on hearing rumors that crazed Japanese officers would kill them to vent their anger for Japan's surrender.

The mutterings proved to be unfounded, but Koreans had reason to be afraid: several thousand were killed by Japanese neighborhood vigilantes in Tokyo in the aftermath of the 1923 earthquake because of rumours that Koreans were starting fires and poisoning wells.

Like tens of thousands of Koreans who left Japan after the war, Park's husband and her future father also planned to return to Korea.

But in 1950 the Korean War broke out, aborting her family's plan to resettle in their native country for good.

"My husband's nephews and sister, as well as the wife of his older brother, were killed by US bombings. My husband tried to go home but received letters from his brother saying 'Don't come home now.'"

"My husband's elder brother went mad after losing his family members in the Korean War."

After the war, Park was able to dispense for good with her Japanese name. But discrimination was still everywhere.

At 17, Park married a Catholic Korean, Cho Min-Jae, and converted to Catholicism. Soon she gave birth to twin girls, who only lived for two weeks due to malnutrition.

Park would have four more children and by 1955, she was a young mother desperate for work to support the family.

"I applied for jobs at banks and shops but they all rejected my applications because of my Korean origin. The only jobs available for Koreans were the ones loathed by Japanese such as picking up junk metal, manufacturing illegally distilled spirits and raising hogs."

"I did all of them just to survive and support my family."

-- 'An eye-opening experience' --

Aged 72, Park struggles to speak Korean, the language of her childhood home. But her identity was awoken by her husband, a native Korean whom she met when he was in Hiroshima as an exchange student.

She went to South Korea for the first time in 1970 to meet her mother-in-law.

"It was an eye-opening experience," she says. "Because of my husband, I was able for the first time to understand Korea."

When she returned she began to learn Korean cooking and dancing and eventually came to head an association of Korean women aimed at passing on traditions to a new generation of Koreans born in Japan.

Besides preserving culture, she also focused her attention on how Koreans were treated after the atomic bombing.

Six decades after the bombing, Park is still in Hiroshima and leading a comfortable life, with a pork business bringing her enough for a retirement and her children successful in their professions.

She has used part of her money to set up a program in Hiroshima to help Korean victims of the nuclear bombings be treated for radiation sickness.

Japan gives generous medical benefits to survivors of the bombings, which remain so etched in the national memory, but it was not until 2001 that it extended the benefits to the roughly 4,500 people who live overseas, most of whom are Korean.

The mixed Japanese response is also seen in how it commemorates Korean victims. Japan's Korean community, which today numbers about 700,000, in 1970 floated plans to set up a memorial at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial park.

But the city repeatedly turned down the requests, saying the peace park was already too cluttered and instead allowed it to be built on a river bank opposite the park.

It was not until 1999 that the Korean memorial was finally transferred to the peace park thanks to a decision by then Hiroshima mayor Takashi Hiraoka.

On Friday, a day before dignitaries mark the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Park will attend a separate ceremony of remembrance at the Korean memorial.

"I will never forgive the people who dropped the atomic bomb," Park says.

"But I do think the war ended earlier because of it, and because of it we were able to get our homeland back. When it comes to the war, my feelings are always complicated."

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