“Those damn Koreans (朝鮮人の奴ら) are openly taunting us, saying “The war's going to be over soon” and “Japan's going to lose, you know.” Excerpt from Hiroshima Timeline tweet on June 16, 2020. Screenshot of Tweet has been cropped, with full tweet embedded below. Image widely shared on social media. An innovative NHK project about the August 6, 1945 bombing of Hiroshima has come under scrutiny for using racist epithets to describe Koreans, political interference, and for potentially fabricating historical source material. NHK's Hiroshima Timeline project, dubbed, “What If They Had Social Media In 1945” (もし、75年前にSNSがあったら) features tweets based on the diary entries of three people who lived through the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945. Regular people in Hiroshima, including high school students, have helped write the daily tweets and hundreds of thousands of people have followed along and engaged with the project on Twitter. Daily tweets about life in Hiroshima in 1945 are planned until the end of 2020. In August, however, observers in Japan and around the world noticed the NHK-sponsored project was using a racial slur to describe ethnic Koreans who would have lived in Hiroshima in 1945. So the NHK, Japan's largest TV station, set up an official account commemorating the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima bombing, and their idea of commemoration is using a racial slur against Koreans who are supposedly terrible people for rooting for Imperial Japan to lose WWII. — T.K. of AAK! (@AskAKorean) August 21, 2020 The slur, chosenjin (朝鮮人), is used by the persona of Shun (hereafter referred to as @nhk_1945shun), a 12-year-old boy and one of three characters whose diary entries are shared in NHK's Hiroshima Timeline project. 【1945年6月16日】 朝鮮人の奴らは「この戦争はすぐに終わるヨ」「日本は負けるヨ」と平気で言い放つ。 思わずかっとなり、怒りに任せて言い返そうとしたが、多勢に無勢。 しかも相手が朝鮮人では返す言葉が見つからない。奥歯を噛みしめた。#ひろしまタイムライン#もし75年前にSNSがあったら — シュン@ひろしまタイムライン (@nhk_1945shun) June 16, 2020 June 16, 1945 Those damn Koreans (朝鮮人の奴ら) are openly taunting us, saying “The war's going to be over soon” and “Japan's going to lose, you know.” Although I felt myself giving in to my anger and was going to taunt them back, I finally just felt overwhelmed. Anyway, I couldn't even find a suitable retort for the Koreans, so I just bit my tongue. About 2 million Koreans resided in Japan in 1945. Some had settled in or had been brought to the country after Japan colonized Korea in 1910, while between 1939 and 1945 up to 800,000 Koreans were conscripted during the war to work in Japan's wartime industries. In 1945, an estimated 80,000 ethnic Koreans lived in Hiroshima, at least 30,000 of whom would die immediately in the atomic attack. About one million ethnic Koreans still reside in Japan, and still experience discrimination. According to Twitter user “Tomoka Phenomenon” (ともかﾌｪﾉﾒﾉﾝ, referred to hereafter as Tomoka) NHK's Hiroshima Timeline project appears to have published at least four different tweets that included the term chosenjin (朝鮮人), including the following: 【1945年8月20日】 朝鮮人だ！！ 大阪駅で戦勝国となった朝鮮人の群衆が、列車に乗り込んでくる！#ひろしまタイムライン#もし75年前にSNSがあったら — シュン@ひろしまタイムライン (@nhk_1945shun) August 19, 2020 August 20, 1945 The Koreans are coming! A horde of Koreans, acting as if they have just won the war, are on their way (to Hiroshima) by train from Osaka! Since the tweets sent by the three Hiroshima Timeline Twitter accounts are supposed to be based on actual diary entries by three real people in Hiroshima in 1945, Tomoka searched through Shun's original diaries to find some context for the tweets about Koreans. #ひろしまタイムライン のシュンが「朝鮮人」という語句をどれだけ使っているのかと思って検索すると6月16日に「朝鮮人」を含むツイートが3件見つかった。 この日何があったんだろう？と日記の原文を辿ると、そこには「朝鮮人」なる語句も、蛇を食べたという話も、まったく書かれていなかった。 pic.twitter.com/5ujEhUUx47 — ともかﾌｪﾉﾒﾉﾝ (@tomoka_hidden) August 20, 2020 I started to wonder just how much Shun from #Hiroshima Timeline had actually used chosenjin in his diary. First, I searched the @nhk_1945 on June 16 (1945) for tweets that included chosenjin. I found three. Following up, I took a look at that day in 1945 to find out what happened Shun (to make him disparage Koreans). However, there was no mention of Koreans in his diary […] The Mainichi Shimbun also reported that Shunichiro Arai, the real person upon whom the @nhk_1945shun's tweets are based, never made disparaging or racist remarks about Koreans in his diaries: Diary entries by Shunichiro Arai, whose writing forms the basis for Shun's tweets, are being published on the Hiroshima Timeline official website, but there is no mention of “Korean people” in the original text.