Through reflections on So Far from the Bamboo Grove, this essay brings into view both the reality of the Korean Peninsula that Japan’s major media have failed to report and the broader structure of anti-Japan propaganda.
The author is deeply struck by the fact that this work, which conveys the harrowing experiences of Japanese repatriates through the testimony of its author Yoko Kawashima Watkins, remained largely unknown in Japan, while in South Korea and China it became the target of bans, denunciations, and exclusion campaigns.
What the book depicts is a hellish postwar landscape on the Korean Peninsula in which Japanese civilians were massacred, robbed, and women assaulted, and the essay argues that precisely because such history is inconvenient for present-day South Korea, efforts have long been made to suppress it.
The author further links this concealment and the obsessive anti-Japan educational posture surrounding it to Umesao Tadao’s insight into the essence of China and the Korean Peninsula as lands of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies.”
He then adds that he himself, in real life, came face to face with that same evil and nearly lost his life because of it, and insists on the importance of Japanese people learning these truths.

2019-03-18
I never imagined, of course, that I would one day encounter that evil so directly in real life and nearly lose my life because of it. *

What follows is from the blog of someone who is now reading my own blog.
Here too, it is no exaggeration at all to say that true journalism now exists on the internet, while newspapers such as The Asahi Shimbun and NHK do not convey a single genuine fact and instead devote themselves to malicious information manipulation unworthy of any real news organization.
As for So Far from the Bamboo Grove, I had read the title before in an essay by Masayuki Takayama, but it is no exaggeration to say that I knew almost nothing of its contents.
If even I was in that position, then almost all Japanese people must have known nothing about it.
Just how terrible the Japanese media truly are.
It is a disgrace beyond measure, and a clear proof that until August five years ago, they had been manipulated at will by China and the Korean Peninsula.
I am truly proud, as a fellow person of Tohoku, that the author of So Far from the Bamboo Grove, a book that every Japanese citizen ought to read, is from Aomori Prefecture, and I express the greatest respect for her strength of spirit.
I am also astonished that it resonates with the essay I myself wrote today addressed to the people of Tohoku.
*The asterisked portions are my own words.
The Deadly 38th Parallel.
“The Futsukaichi Recuperation Center” (Chikushino City, Fukuoka Prefecture).
What Japanese people must never forget…………
There are no abandoned war orphans left on the Korean Peninsula, but do you know why……………
2016/3/15
Do you know why there are no abandoned war orphans left on the Korean Peninsula?
So Far from the Bamboo Grove.
A shocking book, banned in South Korea as an evil pseudo-history that depicts the supposedly gentle Korean people as murderers like beasts and beautifies the demonic Japanese Empire, then also banned in China, later adopted as an ethics teaching material in the United States, yet still subjected even now to fierce campaigns of protest and de facto book burning by Korean organizations in America crying, “Do not show this devil’s book to American children,” has finally been released in Japanese.
[Author / Supervising Translator]
Yoko Kawashima Watkins.
Born in Aomori in 1933.
At six months of age, she was taken by her father, who worked for the South Manchuria Railway, and moved with her family to Ranam in northern Korea, now Chongjin in North Hamgyong Province, North Korea.
In 1945, in the midst of Japan’s defeat, she escaped from Ranam with her mother and sister, crossed the Korean Peninsula in a desperate struggle for survival, and was repatriated to Japan.
After returning, she entered a girls’ school in Kyoto.
While working and devoting herself to study, she graduated and later studied English literature at Kyoto University.
After graduation, she worked as an interpreter at a U.S. military base, then married and moved to the United States.
There she engaged in activities to introduce Japanese culture to American children.

Late at night on August 9, 1945, Corporal Matsuura informed the family that Soviet forces were invading and urged them to flee the town immediately.
Her father and Hideyo were absent, but Soviet troops were already closing in, and there was no longer time to contact the two of them.
Leaving a note behind, the mother, Yoko, and Ko fled Ranam with only minimal luggage and valuables, boarding a hospital train as Corporal Matsuura had advised.
Later the train came under bombardment at a point 45 miles from Seoul, and since the locomotive was destroyed, the three got off and headed for Seoul on foot.
But the peninsula had already become a hellish scene in which, by Korean communist forces acting in concert with the Soviet army, Japanese people were being massacred one after another, gold teeth were pulled from Japanese corpses, every shred of clothing was stripped away, all Japanese land, homes, and property were seized, and Japanese women, from little girls to young women, were raped indiscriminately.
In America, it was highly praised as an excellent book conveying the tragedy of war, and it even became school teaching material.
Yet among Koreans living in America, campaigns of exclusion were launched, and it began to be removed from school curricula.
However, there were later moves to adopt it again, and although the Korean campaign to exclude it does not seem to have succeeded for now, it appears to still be continuing.
Why did such a movement arise?
It seems to be because the depiction in this book of Koreans and people of the Korean Peninsula is inconvenient for Koreans who wish to portray Japan as absolute evil and to continue seeing themselves as perpetual victims.
They themselves exaggerate and fabricate the comfort women issue and loudly proclaim it, while moving to suppress anything inconvenient to them.
That is what Koreans are.
*Because there exists a truly excellent book called So Far from the Bamboo Grove, one that describes undeniable facts, it is all the more likely that the South Korean government, as part of anti-Japan education for children and as propaganda for tourists, created inside the country those bizarre facilities with obsessive zeal, facilities that shift their own acts of brutality onto the Japanese military.
In other words…
I was born in Miyagi Prefecture, while Umesao Tadao was born in Kyoto.
He, the greatest anthropologist and ethnologist in the world, lived for several years in nearly every province of China, and from fieldwork extending through the Korean Peninsula, Pakistan, India, and beyond, arrived at one conclusion…
What is the essential nature of China and the Korean Peninsula?
They are lands of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies.”
His conclusion was entirely correct, and the instant I encountered it, I, who conceived The Turntable of Civilization, reacted with a shock-like certainty to both his greatness and the fact that his conclusion was 100 percent correct…
I never imagined, of course, that I would one day encounter that evil so directly in real life and nearly lose my life because of it. *