Alan Heyman’s 80th Birthday

It is nice to see the little girl hovering around her grandfather, great grandfather, or whatever their relationship. He probably enjoys having her around.

By the way, with all due respect, he looks closer to ninety than eighty, which makes me wonder if he is ill or something. If he is not ill, then I wonder why he seems to have aged so much. Maybe a Korean lifestyle–with its apartment living, frequent drinking parties, and such–ages people more than they may realize.

Sanshinseon wrote (# 31):

Good for you, Gerry…

I am not sure what you meant by the above comment, but my # 30 comment was not meant as ridicule. I was simply relating an experience I had with someone who strongly believed in such things.

Even my ex-wife, who was a much more rational Korean, believed fairly strongly in certain Korean superstititions, such as, not whistling at night for fear of snakes, not nervously shaking the luck out of your foot, not writing people’s names in deadly red ink, and not putting the head of our bed against the north wall as if laying out a corpse.

Do you believe in shamaism, Sanshinseon (David)? Or do you just have an interest in studying it? For example, do you carry a talisman around with you?

Jeffery Hodges (#35),

Gerry (#30), maybe your shaman mother-in-law disapproved of your views on Dokdo and advised you in ways that would bring you bad luck.

My mother-in-law was NOT a shaman. She was a wonderful woman out of Gyeongsang Province who had only good things to say about the Japanese in Korea and in Japan, where she went to study for a while. While she was working or studying in Busan, after Korean “liberation,” her father and brother were murdered by Communists in front of the people of her village, where her father was a village leader. She told me she never saw any of the abuses the Japanese were accused of doing during the colonial period.

During that tumultuous time between Korean liberation and the Korean War, my mother-in-law also told me that politics was so violent that men were being killed in Busan for putting up political posters on the walls in the city. Because the men were being attacked and killed, women, including my mother-in-law, started posting the posters instead of the men, even though women were also being beaten. She was very proud of the work she did during that time.

Another interesting thing my mother-in-law told me was that when she was very young, her family had a jong (a slave or servant), with whom she remembered playing when she was a child.

The woman whose mother was a shaman was a woman I met later, after my wife and I divorced. That woman, by the way, borrowed 17 million won from me that she never paid back.

Thanks, Dogbertt. Yes, I am very happy to be back in the US with my son. I would have come back sooner if I had not had so much trouble getting my son out of the Philippines. His deceased mother’s family did not want him leaving the Philippines, and I had little or no rights there as his father since I was not married to his mother when she died.

Speaking of levitation (# 38), I had a strange experience one beautiful spring afternoon after returning to my one-room apartment on the second home of a house in Itaewon.

I came in, lay down on my bed, and started noticing the wonders of spring. A steady, light, breeze was levitating the light curtains on my screenless window into the room. The curtains seemed to float on the breeze above the window like two long, white feathers. I saw nothing but clear, blue sky through the window. I could smell honeysuckle and other flowers on the breeze. I could hear children laughing and playing in the distance.

My body was completely relaxed and still. In fact, it seemed as if I no longer had control of my body, as if all the electricity to my nerves had been turned off. My mind was completely empty. I had no thoughts of anything except a feeling of blissfulness. I felt as light as a feather, and then I noticed that I was floating above my bed.

After I realized I was floating, I wanted to continue floating, but the thought of wanting to continue floating only made my body heavier, so I tried to return to my thoughtless state, but even the thought of wanting to return to my thoughtless state was a thought, which weighed down my body. Slowly my body lowered back down to the bed and begin to press down into the mattress. I did not move a muscle for a long time, hoping that my body would start floating again, but it never did.

There was no sense of falling asleep or waking up. The was just a sense of having experienced the most peaceful event of my life.

Q wrote (#80):

How old is she now? She must be too young to witness cruelty of Japs.

If she is still living, she is probably in her nineties. I remember her being at least ten years older than my dad, who is now 81.

By the way, I met an old Korean man in a park in Incheon while jogging a few years back. He called me over and asked me to take a seat beside him on a bench because he said he was worried that I was overdoing it or something. He spoke some English and told me he used to work at a US army base in Daegu before the war and then, I think, also afterwards.

We talked for a while, and then I asked him what it was like during the colonial period. He just looked down at the ground, shook his head, and said, “It was bad.” Then, I mentioned that my Korean mother-in-law had told me that she liked the Japanese and never saw any of the cruelty that they were accused of during the colonial period.

Suddenly, the old man looks up at me, smiles, and says, “Actually, I liked the Japanese, too.” Then, he pulls out one of those Japanese monthly literary magazines from inside his jacket and tells me that he gets the magazine every month and comes to the park to read it. He said he learned Japanese during the colonial period and did not want to forget it.

He reminded me of the Korean mentioned in the 2004 BBC News article, “Sumo returns to Seoul”:

Thousands of Koreans turned out on the first day – some drawn by curiosity, others by nostalgia.

The first bouts have attracted big crowds “I last saw sumo here in 1942,” said Lee Byoeng-chon, who like many Koreans of his generation was educated in Japanese.

“I’ve overcome my hard feelings towards Japan. It’s often the younger people who are more hostile. They’ve been fed only the worst stories about the colonial period but they don’t know the reality the way we do.”

Were you also “fed only the worst stories about the colonial period,” Q?

The sad part is that once these older Koreans die, we will be left with only the “younger people,” who grew up being “fed only the worst stories of the colonial period” under the anti-Japanese policies of the 1950s and 60′s.

Q, maybe your dad remembers studying in a classroom with the following education motto hanging on the wall:

반일, 반공
“Anti-Japanese, Anti-Communists.”

If the Japanese were so hated during the colonial period, why did Korea need to exert so much effort to teach Koreans to hate the Japanese during the 50′s and 60′s?

Q wrote (#52):

You must be happy if you were forced to change your last name to aggressors and banned to speak your mother language? The education for Japanization of Koreans was not for the benefit of Koreans. It was for exploitation of Koreans.

Japonymous asked for your family history, Q. What Japanese surname was your family “forced” to take?