By Yoko Kawashima Watkins
I thought this book was very interesting and moving, and to be honest I was surprised that I had not read it before. It really brought my attention to a historical event that I have never really thought about before.
I've read a lot of criticism online about this book - and yes, Yoko has a very one-sided viewpoint of the entire situation. I've even read some comments such as "how dare she wrote such a pity war story." I'm not going to argue with the fact that a story which was written from an 11-year-old Japanese girl's point of view is probably going to be biased. Isn't that the point? Yoko isn't trying to offer the entire history of Korea - she's telling her story. The history of Korea is a long and complicated one, and this book simply offers a look at how this history affected one person at one particular point in time.
It is up to us as educators to make sure that our students have the critical thinking skills to realize that this story cannot be used to generalize entire nations. But it is also up to us as human beings to approach this story with compassion and empathy for an author who was willing to put herself out on the line by telling us her personal story. I can only imagine that it was not easy for Kawashima to put such a big part of herself out into the world for everyone to see and judge.
It is easy to jump to conclusions in this book about how our students need to be shown more than one viewpoint when it comes to history. Pairing this book with The Year of Impossible Goodbyes seems logical to us because we are distanced enough from this situation to see the biases of either side. But what about the other lessons we teach students in our classrooms? I would even go so far to say that we need to think about this issue with everything we teach in regards to history. For so long, "history" has just been what is written in the books, given to us from one particular viewpoint. With stories that we can distance ourselves from, such as this one, it is easy to balance out the viewpoints.
But what about the issues that hit close to home for us? Are there educators out there who are willing to concede that even historical books such as The Diary of Anne Frank are biased? Perhaps reading a story from the viewpoint of a Nazi child would show us more about what life was like during World War II. If that seems too extreme, perhaps sharing a tale from a British boy's viewpoint during the American Revolution would seem more acceptable. I've come to see that we need to look at both sides to every story.
*Even typing this I am fearful that people will jump to conclusions about me trying to justify the Holocaust or something ridiculous. I'm not, and and maybe that is my point. The Holocaust was an atrocity in history that will hopefully never be repeated. But demonizing a child for having their own point of view and for loving the family they were born into doesn't make any sense to me. That is why I am so discomforted by critics who say that Yoko's character is biased, even though Yoko never says it is anything more than an 11-year-old girl telling us about her own life.
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This book is not worth reading because it was made for international political purposes, not for education. Most of the facts are distorted in this book:
ReplyDeleteThere were no North-Korean soldiers in 1945 (they existed after 3 years), and the location of where the author claims to have been when she was young did not have the right condition for bamboo trees to grow back then (Nanam). She also claims to have seen and heard bombs explode due to US air-force planes, but B-29s did not have fuel tanks large enough to fly all the way to Korea (nor were there ANY records of bombing in Korea at that time). Also, the United States ORDERED the Japanese soldiers occupying in Korea to be left ARMED until every Japanese civilians were escorted back to their homeland. Thus if Japanese civilians were REALLY raped, chances are, they were raped by their own people.
So what do we have left from this novel? Just a fictional book that distorts history in a very ironic way (Considering the fact that the Japanese soldiers RAPED and MURDERED Korean women at wartime for pleasure. They actually had the nerves to call these women 'Comfort Girls'). The book title should be renamed as "So Far from History and the Truth"
It's like Hitler claiming that he was tortured by the Jews in the Holocaust. Sounds like a nice book for young kids and adults eh?