TOKYO (AFP)-Japan’s first official mission to consider assistance for wartime atomic bomb victims in North Korea has found a total of 928 survivors there, reports said March 18.

Tokyo’s six-member team, which ended its five-day visit to North Korea March 17, quoted Pyongyang officials as reporting 928 survivors of the Allied atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, papers said.

The group, led by Shigekazu Sato, deputy director-general of the Japanese foreign ministry’s Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, was also told a total of 1,353 victims had returned to North Korea following the war.

More than two million Koreans were in Japan at the end of the World War II after they were brought in as forced laborers - a legacy of Japan’s colonial occupation of the peninsula between 1910 and 1945.

But the Japanese government previously had no official data on the number of atomic bomb survivors in North Korea.

The average age of the North Korean survivors was 69, the papers quoted the mission officials as saying.

The victims had also pressed the Japanese team, on a fact-finding visit to assess their numbers and needs, for compensation, Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported March 15.

The experts, including two doctors and four government officials, met five representatives of North Korean atomic bomb survivors and visited medical facilities where victims were treated, the reports said.

The Kyodo News agency quoted mission members as saying the medical facilities were poorly equipped, even lacking heaters.