Rethinking So Far from the Bamboo Grove

EKC448, the Koreans were not the subject of institutionalized oppression like the Nuremberg laws. If you cannot see the difference between Korea under Japanese administration and the way Jews were treated in Germany, and how improper the comparison is, there is no point talking to you. By the way, Jews were in their own country too.

WangKon936, the bamboo doesn’t really matter unless she was being attacked by sentient sticks of bamboo. In Keoko’s case, she is saying she was being forced to change her first name, which is just silly because people had to actually pay money and go through extra procedures to do it. Not to mention that the change of family name was not forced, either. Plenty of people did not change their names.

But if you want to split hairs, who said there is no bamboo in North Korea? There is indeed bamboo, and Chungjin, where Yoko was, is near the sea and is appropriate growing area for bamboo.

There is a “bamboo grove” near Kaesim temple in North Korea. We are told that “the bamboos grow well even in cold areas.”

http://www.vnctravel.nl/korea/chil-ss.htm

According to this bamboo distribution map, there is bamboo in North Korea.

http://web.archive.org/web/200.....rcemap.htm

As for the Korean communists, there were Korean communists in Korea at that time. As soon as Japan surrendered there were Koreans claiming they were communists.

This book describes how Koreans in 1945 suddenly started calling themselves communists. (Thanks, Gerry).

The following is an excerpt from the autobiography of 김병걸, “실패한 인생 실패한 문학,” where he talks about the idealogical confusion following Korea’s liberation in 1945:

모 두 하루아침에 달변가가 되었으며 아울러 잔잔하기만 하던 마을에 사상적인 균열이 일기 시작했다. 좌(左)가 좋으냐 우(右)가 좋으냐 하는 시비와 논쟁이 날이 갈수록 심화되어 가는 것이었다. ….바로 얼마 전까지만 해도 일본을 절대적으로 믿고 충성스럽게 뛰어다니던 사람이 하루아침에 열렬한 사회주의자가 되어 떠벌리고 다니는가 하면, 심지어 만주에서 아편 장사를 한 것으로 알려진사람도 사상가인 것처럼 행세를 했다. (pp. 108~109)

One morning everyone had suddenly become an eloquent speaker. In a village that was once quiet, ideological cracks start to appear. As the days go by the debate on whether the left is better or the right is better intensifies. …. People who had just previously run around showing absolute trust in and allegience to Japan had suddenly become passionate socialists running around wagging their tongues. Even a man who was known to have been an opium dealer in Manchuria started acting as if he were some profound thinker.
——-

Kim Il Sung also arrived in Korea in September 1945, with Korean partisans that were uniformed members of the Soviet Army (uniformed communists). That puts paid to the idea there were no uniformed Koreans until 1948.

In addition, many men of the time wore clothes that were similar to military style. All they needed was a red armband and you have a communist soldier.

There is plenty of testimony and similar accounts to that of Yoko, like this one.

http://www.amazon.co.jp/私が.....mp;s=books

The book is called “what I did on the Korean peninsula”. It describes at the end his escape from Korea, and how he escaped forced detention and banditry by Koreans.

So no, they are not major plot holes, nothing like “when my name was Keoko”.

Eujin, I think that is questionable. In this modern world people are able to maintain ethnic identity and allegiances no matter where they live. The internet offers them a constant connection, something that assimilating minorities in the past never had. Furthermore, some governments actively encourage race consciousness to their emigrant citizens and former citizens, by sponsoring awareness programs and trips to the homeland.

I think that the best that can be hoped for is a tribalization of politics, with one group canceling out the baneful influence of another.

Sonagi, the US is the best example of it, and the US had an immigration pause of about 50 years, starting 1915, plenty of time to assimilate immigrants. As matters stand these days, there is no guarantee that even a pause could help matters, especially since assimilation is viewed as either cultural domination or even racism in some circles.

Jewook,

Yes, it is still very much improper. Unit 731 (in China) had a handful of Korean victims (total number of victims estimated 10 000, mostly Chinese) but it had nothing to do with the lives of Koreans living on the Korean peninsula, who would not even have known about Unit 731. Jews in Germany and occupied Europe were rounded up and put in concentration camps.

There was no program targeting Koreans at all. Korea was a backward country made into a colony by a more powerful country. Nothing more, nothing less. And nothing different to any other colony on the planet.

shakuhachi,

It surprises me that someone who seems as intelligent as you is appearing to make greater logical allowances for books that have serious factual errors simply because it agrees better with your personal viewpoint.

Both Bamboo and Keoko are works of “historical fiction” and both have serious errors in them that, if you were to consider them as near court testimony worthy stories, would put their credibility in doubt. Of course in your world errors in Bamboo are just incidental and even the most unlikeliest scenarios (uniformed Korean communist troops in August 1945, large bamboo groves in the northern tip of Korea, “American” bombers flying overhead and “bombing” her train) you are willing to stretch around your head simply because Yoko’s book fits your world view better. However, because Keoko doesn’t fit your world view, the same errors makes you discount the testimony entirely. Consistency on your side is purely driven by your prejudices, which tells me more about you- shak- and much less about what you may believe in.

I don’t entirely dismiss Keoko, but it may be that she does not have the entire story. Many Koreans would have thought it beneficial to have complete Japanese names so as to gain advantage or avoid potential discrimination. In any event, Bamboo fictionalizes something that happened -attacks on Japanese people by Koreans after the Japanese surrendered. It is not totally biased against Koreans because the characters are also helped by kindly Koreans who were aware of the danger they were in.

In that sense, problems of perception by the author are not particularly problematic, even when they seem to defy the facts. For example, when her hometown of Chungjin was attacked by bombers she thought they were American. The Japanese in the area were still unaware that the Soviets had invaded, and reported the attack as American. Thus her insistence that it was American bombers. Uniformed Koreans were in Korea, as part of foreign communist armies, even if the ROC and DPRK did not yet exist. Also, as I pointed out, a red armband could make a communist soldier as mens clothes at the time often resembled a uniform. In any event, the attacks against Japanese are well known, and this book is a fictionalized version of it.

Keoko’s story and the problem with it is more fundamental. The author takes mistaken historical interpretation, like the “forced” name changing, and builds a story around it. First, the author mistakenly believes that both the first and last name needed to be changed. In fact, only the last name needed to be changed. Some 80% of Korean people changed their names. 20% did not register a new name, and had their Korean clan names registered automatically. Korean wives of Korean men that did not register were given their husbands Korean clan name (the only time that names were forcibly changed!). The people that did not take a Japanese name continued to live their lives without negative consequences. The people of Taiwan had the option of taking a Japanese name as well. Very few (less than 5% I think) ever bothered. Why? It is something that bears thinking about.

There were other things, stuff which that struck as false. One of the important parts of the book shows the Koreans being angered by a newspapers saying that “Kitei Son” had won an Olympic event. They were angry, it said, because his name was “Japanese”. This is nonsense for a few reasons.

1. Kitei Son is the way Kee-Chung Sohn is pronounced in Japanese kanji.

2. Newspapers in Korea at the time were a mixture of Chinese characters and Hangul. The name would have been written in Chinese characters, with Hangul representing the Korean pronunciation. If there was Hangul accompanying the name, it would be the Korean pronunciation, not the Japanese.

3. Kitei Son doesn’t even sound Japanese. First off, Son (or Sohn, whatever way you want to write EXACTLY the same pronunciation) is not a Japanese family name. Second, Kitei is about as unusual name as you can get. I doubt that you would find even a 100 individuals with that name in Japan. Even then, they probably have an unusual background. Kitei Son isn’t a victim of “forced name changing”. Kitei Son is his name in the pronunciation of the national language of the country he was representing at the Olympics. Koreans at the time would have known this.

The example of Kitei Sohn is supposed to support the idea that her family had been forced to take on Japanese names, both family names and given names, noting that “the Japanese had renamed people before”.

These are not small issues, but ones that are at the core of the story. I am willing to look at testimony but it has to be measured against the facts, and Keoko is found wanting, in my opinion. But as I said before, I would not mind if it were read in some schools, “balanced” by another book or not.