“So Far from the Bamboo Grove” and the 38th Parallel of Death — What Japanese Media Have Hidden About Korean War Brutalities
This 2019 blog entry introduces another blogger’s powerful essay on Yoko Kawashima Watkins’s So Far from the Bamboo Grove and the postwar experiences of Japanese civilians fleeing northern Korea.
The author condemns Japanese mainstream media—especially Asahi and NHK—for ignoring the book and, until recently, operating under the influence of China and the Korean Peninsula.
The post summarizes Yoko’s biography, her family’s desperate escape from Ranam, and the scenes of massacre, looting, and rape committed against Japanese during their retreat.
It also traces how the book was praised in the United States as an educational text, then targeted by Korean-American groups for removal, and finally re-adopted, highlighting why the portrayal of Koreans in the book clashes with a self-image of eternal victimhood.
The entry argues that all Japanese must confront these suppressed historical facts and recognize So Far from the Bamboo Grove as essential reading.
2019/3/18
The following is taken from the blog of someone who is, right now, reading my own blog.
Here again we can see that true journalism today exists on the internet, and that it is no exaggeration at all to say that outlets such as the Asahi Shimbun and NHK convey none of the real facts and instead devote themselves to malicious information manipulation unworthy of any news organization.
As for “Takenori Haruka” (So Far from the Bamboo Grove), I had seen the name in an essay by Masayuki Takayama, but it is no exaggeration to say that I knew nothing of the contents.
If even I was in that state, then virtually all Japanese must have known absolutely nothing about it.
What kind of appalling thing, then, are Japan’s mass media?
Their behavior could not be worse than it is, and this is clear proof that, at least up until August five years ago, they had been operated in complete obedience to the will of China and the Korean Peninsula.
As a fellow Tohoku native, I am truly proud that the author of “Takenori Haruka” is from Aomori Prefecture, and I pay my highest respect to her indomitable spirit.
I am also astonished at how it resonates with the essay on the people of Tohoku that I wrote today.
The 38th Parallel of Death, “Futsukaichi Rest Home” (Chikushino City, Fukuoka Prefecture) — things the Japanese must never forget……
There are no left-behind orphans on the Korean Peninsula, but do you know why……?
March 15, 2016
There are no left-behind orphans on the Korean Peninsula, but do you know why?
“So Far from the Bamboo Grove”
This is a shocking book that was banned in South Korea, and then also banned in China, as “an abnormal depiction in which the good and virtuous Korean people are portrayed as fiendish slaughterers, and an evil false history book that glorifies the demon-like Japanese Empire,” and which, though adopted in America as an ethics text, is still being subjected to an ongoing campaign of thorough denunciation and demands for its burning by Korean-American organizations insisting that “such a book of the devil must not be shown to American children.”
At last, a Japanese-language edition has been released.
She was born in Aomori in 1933 (Showa 8).
At six months of age, she moved with her family to Ranam in northern Korea (present-day Chongjin City, North Hamgyong Province, North Korea), accompanying her father, who worked for the South Manchurian Railway (Mantetsu).
In the midst of Japan’s defeat in 1945 (Showa 20), she escaped from Ranam with her mother and elder sister, and, after a desperate journey traversing the Korean Peninsula, she repatriated to Japan.
After returning, she enrolled in a girls’ school in Kyoto.
She worked while studying diligently, and after graduating she 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.
She engaged in activities to introduce Japanese culture to American children.
“On the night of August 9, 1945, Corporal Matsuura informed the family that the Soviet army was about to invade and urged them to leave the town at once.
Yoko’s father and Hideyo were not at home, but the Soviet army was already close at hand and there was no longer time to contact them.
Leaving a note behind, Yoko’s mother, Yoko, and Ko took only the bare minimum of luggage and valuables and, following Corporal Matsuura’s advice, boarded a hospital train and fled Nanam.
Later, the train was bombed forty-five miles from Seoul and its locomotive destroyed, so the three got off the train and set out on foot toward Seoul.
However, the peninsula had already become a hellscape: Japanese were being massacred one after another by the Korean communist forces acting in concert with the Soviet army; the corpses of Japanese had their gold teeth pulled, their bodies stripped naked, all Japanese land, houses, and property were seized, and Japanese women from little girls to young women were raped indiscriminately.
In the United States, the book has been highly regarded as a good work that conveys the horrors of war and has been used as a school textbook.
However, among Korean-Americans a movement arose to expel the book, and it began to be removed from school reading lists.
Subsequently, however, moves have emerged to adopt it again, and it seems that the expulsion campaign led by Koreans has not gone entirely well so far, but it still appears to be ongoing.
Why has such a movement occurred?
It seems that it is because the portrayal of Koreans and Korean people in this book is inconvenient for Koreans who wish to cast Japan as the absolute villain and remain forever in the role of victim.
On the one hand they fabricate and wildly exaggerate the so-called “comfort women” issue and loudly propagate it, and on the other they move to suppress anything that is inconvenient for them.
This is what Koreans are like.