A South Korean man's 20-year mission to trace the steps of his long-lost father recently brought him to the site of an old coal mine in Fukuoka Prefecture.
Choi Rak-hun, 73, from Uijeongbu, north of Seoul, came to Japan in the hope of finally discovering what happened to his father, Choi Chon-ho, after losing contact with him as a child immediately after World War II.
Choi believed his father might have worked at the Kaijima coal mine during the war, because a photograph suggested that possibility — the only clue to his father's whereabouts his mother left before she died in 2007.