Kim Jae Koo was eating dinner at home when the Japanese soldiers came for him. He tried to resist, demanding to know where they were taking him. The soldiers didn't respond. Before he was dragged away, he remembers twisting around to tell his stunned family: "I don't know where I'm going, but I'll be back." That was in 1943. He was shipped from his home in southeast Korea to Sakhalin, an isolated island off Siberia, to work as a slave laborer in a coal mine. When Japan surrendered at the end of World War II, Sakhalin returned to Soviet control, and Kim and some 43,000 other Koreans found themselves trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Half a century later, the survivors are starting to come home to South Korea. But for many, the ordeal isn't over.

Sakhalin was a living hell, says Kim, now 82. During the war, the Koreans lived in squalid camps managed by brutal guards who sometimes beat them with shovels. Life under Soviet rule was almost as grim. Koreans faced poverty and racial prejudice. But what makes Kim shake with anger even today is this: the Koreans never received the token wages they were promised. The Japanese deducted room and board and put the rest into postal savings accounts that most of the workers never saw. A survivors' support group estimates that their collective savings are now worth almost $200 million, figuring in more than 50 years of interest.

It's a sum that would make life more bearable for these men, now in their 70s and 80s and worn out by long, hard years in forced exile. But they can't get their hands on it. Japan's Foreign Ministry says postwar treaties between Japan, South Korea and the Allies absolve Tokyo of legal responsibility to return the money. Postal officials say the original documents are missing anyway, so it's almost impossible to figure out who is owed what. Kenichi Takagi, a Japanese lawyer representing the survivors, argues that the Koreans' situation parallels the plight of Holocaust survivors who were turned away by Swiss banks after the war when they tried to reclaim their savings. "The postal ministry has been managing this huge sum of money for the benefit of the Japanese economy," he says. "It should be returned to the Koreans taken to Sakhalin."

The dispute is only one of many bitter legacies of Japan's brutal 35-year rule on the Korean peninsula. As war created a labor shortage, Japan press-ganged Koreans into grueling jobs in factories, mines and construction sites around Asia. An estimated 4 million of them were forced to join this army of slave laborers. Japan also made as many as 200,000 women, mostly Koreans, provide sex for Japanese troops, say scholars. Today, relations between the two countries remain tense, despite a 1965 treaty that restored diplomatic ties. Japan's seeming inability to apologize without mumbling angers many Koreans, who would like to see a clear expression of contrition. That's what Korean President Kim Dae Jung will be hoping to hear when he arrives in Japan this week for a four-day visit.

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