Anchor: The remains of 115 Korean victims of Japanese forced labor in Hokkaido will return home on Friday. The remains will arrive in South Korea aboard the Pukwan Ferry, the same ship that likely dragged them off during Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula.  
Our Bae Joo-yon has more.

Report: A ceremony was held last Saturday in memory of Koreans who died after being dragged away by the Japanese military and forced into hard labor in Hokkaido during Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.
 
The victims were forced to toil away at construction sites of the Japanese Army’s airfields and dams on Japan’s northernmost island.
 
Through a series of four excavations that began in 2005, a South Korea-Japan civic group uncovered the remains of 115 Koreans whose bodies had been long left neglected by the Japanese government.
 
Though more than two-thousand Koreans died while laboring in Hokkaido during Japan’s colonial occupation, efforts to locate their remains have proved challenging as most were buried in unmarked graves or cremated by the Japanese government.
 
Yoshihiko Tonohara, who headed Japan’s team of excavators, said they want to return the remains with a deep sense of regret and remorse. He also expressed hope that the bereaved family members will open their hearts after belatedly reuniting with their long-lost loved ones.
 
The remains will arrive in South Korea on Friday aboard the Pukwan Ferry, the same boat that Koreans who were dragged to Japan boarded from Busan to Shimonoseki on the western tip of the main island of Honshu.
 
It will mark the first time such a large number of remains have been returned.
 
The return of the remains is set to come as the government is seeking the UNESCO listing of documents detailing Japan’s wartime forced labor of Koreans.
 
By the end of August, around 336-thousand documents were submitted as evidence of forced labor by Japan during World War II.
Bae Joo-yon, KBS World Radio News.