This presentation describes contemporary practices aimed at honoring and appeasing the victims of forced labor imposed by colonial Japan to Korea between 1930 and 1945. It is based on ethnographic surveys of a Korean-Japanese that exhumes and repatriates the remains of forced laborers (particularly Koreans) scattered across the former colonial empire. The activities of these self-described "grassroots" activists, committed to peace in East Asia, draw on the materiality of the dead – notably the striking dimension of the bones – but sometimes also dispense with it by reaching these dead through other mediums, notably their names, their ancestral tablets or Buddhist rituals. While looking at the activities of this association, this presentation describes the relationships these activists establish with dead who are in part unknown to them, as well as the political and ethical projects they build on these relationships.