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Authors: Yoko Kawashima Watkins

So Far from the Bamboo Grove

BOOK: So Far from the Bamboo Grove
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MAP

DEDICATION

T
O
M
Y
H
ONORABLE
S
ISTER
K
O

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TO CATHERINE WOOLLEY,

who journeyed with me through the harsh time

I could not have relived alone,

my heartfelt gratitude.

The publisher would like to thank Colonel William R. Corson (Ret.), coauthor of
The New KGB: Engine of Soviet Power
, who served in Korea during the Korean War, for his careful reading of the manuscript. We are also deeply appreciative of the help given by Dr. Clarence N. Weems, editor of
Hulbert's History of Korea.
We extend special thanks to Jacqueline van Zanten, first reader.

DEAR READER

Since September 2006, there has been concern expressed by some people in the Korean American community regarding this book, so I want to start by saying that what I have written is a remembrance of my own life experience. My intention is not to hurt any individual or nationality, but rather to tell my story of survival in the midst of war, and offer my hope for peace.

The Japanese occupation in Korea caused deep suffering, sacrifice, and anger. Then and during World War II, countless Korean people were victims. My book was never intended to be a defense of the Japanese. Readers will hear my mother voice her unhappiness with the Tojo government clearly and can draw their own conclusions about my school days in Korea and Japan. War in any country is always chaotic and
terrible, brought on by events beyond the control of most people. Individuals, families, and communities on all sides suffer terribly and yet they still reach out and help one another, showing again and again the humanity of all people. In the book, I tell of the Korean family to whom we are forever grateful. At considerable risk to themselves, this family protected my brother, offering him food, shelter, and friendship. They saved his life.

I am very sorry that the Japanese government has not apologized adequately for what happened during the occupation and the war and has never fully recognized the suffering of the Korean people. As a Japanese American woman, I would like to express my deep regret for the suffering and loss so many experienced.

If we are to have peace and reconciliation in this world, I strongly believe there must be opportunities for understanding and dialogue. My own experience as a young girl escaping from one country to another casts light on the horror of war for all children in all places. Linda Sue Park's
When My Name Was Keoko
and Sook Nyul Choi's
Year of Impossible Goodbyes
give different perspectives that also help us understand the consequences of oppression and war.

I work to pass on to the young people of the world an understanding of the cruelty, the horror, and the human cost of war. My prayer is for all people to live in peace together.

—Yoko Kawashima Watkins

CONTENTS

Map

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Dear Reader

Foreword

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Notes from the Publisher

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

N
INETEEN FORTY-FIVE WAS A BAD TIME
for a Japanese girl to be living in northern Korea. More than ever, the Koreans resented the Japanese, who had taken over their country and ruled it as their own. Now it was threatened by World War II. The Russians, who had outposts close to the Korean border, might at any time join their allies, the United States and England, in the war against Japan. And the Americans were already bombing industrial sites in northern Korea.

Yet before the danger started, Yoko Kawashima had been happy in her home in a bamboo grove. One of her early memories is of her father bring
ing her a pair of canaries. Sitting before their cage, she carried on a long conversation with them, which she later turned into a story for school. When her classmates laughed and told her that people couldn't talk with birds, Yoko insisted that she could and had. Even then she knew she wanted to be a writer, and of course she was pleased when her story was published in the local paper.

She couldn't know, however, that within a few short years she would be caught in the middle of a real-life story—so grim, so tragic that she would spend years of her adult life trying to get it down on paper.

Yoko Kawashima Watkins, who now lives on Cape Cod, is married to an American and is the mother of four grown children. Her struggle to master English and to record the nightmare of her private war story is a demonstration of the persistence and will she showed as a little girl, escaping from Korea and learning to survive when—as she says—she was “in the most bottom of the bottom.”

When this book was accepted for publication, a writer friend told Yoko that now she would be competing with other writers. Yoko said, No, she would not compete with anyone for anything. “I competed with life and death when young,” she said. “And I won.”

Here is the story of her victory.

—J
EAN
F
RITZ

ONE

I
T WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT ON JULY
29, 1945, when my mother, my elder sister Ko, and I, carrying as many of our belongings as we could on our backs, fled our home in its bamboo grove, our friends, and
our town, Nanam
, in northern Korea, forever.

In darkness Mother checked windows and doors. I was eleven, Ko sixteen. I was very tired and my head was so dizzy I did not know which way I was heading. The cool night air swept my face; still my head was not clear. I saw Mother close the main entrance and lock it.

“Now give me your wrist, Little One,” she commanded in a low voice.

I was called “Little One” by my parents and Ko, but my older brother, Hideyo, always teasing, called me “Noisy One” because I often screamed when I was teased and when we frolicked in the house.

My wrist? I hadn't had a night's sleep in two weeks because of the air raids. My head was very hazy.

“Hurry!” Mother found my wrist in the darkness. She was tying a rope to it. “So I won't lose you.”

Tying Ko's wrist, she asked, her voice full of worry, “You did leave a note for your father?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“I left a note for Hideyo,” said Mother. “Oh, I hope he finds it and joins us. He can get in through his window. Now remember, no one knows we are leaving. No matter what, until we reach the train station, be silent. Understand?”

“Yes,” Ko said again. I wanted to cry.

Though we lived in northeastern Korea, we were Japanese. My country, Japan, which I had never seen, had been fighting America and Britain for four years. Because Father was a Japanese government official, working in Manchuria, I had grown up in this ancient town. We were fifty miles from the Manchurian border, and we were so close to the Russian ports, Vladivostok and Nakhodka, across the sea from our harbor. Father came home by train as often as he could.

The shadow of war had been creeping across our peaceful village for months. The most horrible shock
had come some weeks before. Mother and I were alone and I was practicing my brush-writing before going to my teacher's house for a calligraphy lesson. Calligraphy is dipping a fat or thin brush in India ink and writing in script or in the square style of Chinese characters.

I had finished my final copy when four
Japanese army police
burst in through the main door of our house, which only invited guests used, without taking off their shoes.

A mean-looking policeman told Mother, “We are here to collect metal. Iron, bronze, silver, and gold.”

Mother stood, bewildered, and he yelled at her.

She gave him Father's treasured silver ashtray set. He threw it in a box and demanded, “More!”

Mother brought her bronze flower vase that stood in the
Tokonoma
(alcove), where flowers were always elegantly arranged. She began to pull the lovely arrangement of irises out one by one, and the policeman pushed her, yanked out the irises and leaves, and dumped the vase and heavy metal frog inside into the box. Mother's eyes were fixed on that box, but she was silent.

The head one noticed Mother's wedding ring and he demanded that. Then her spectacles, gold-rimmed, though she told him she could see nothing without them. They went into the box.

Finally the head police picked up the Mount Fuji paperweight holding my calligraphy copy. That paperweight had been sent to me by Father's mother.
She said it had been passed on to my father from way back and she could still see my father, when young, using it to practice brush-writing. Through this Mount Fuji paperweight I dreamed of seeing the majestic mountain and imagined the beauty of my homeland.

He glanced at my writing, “
Bu Un Cho Kyu
” (Good Luck in War), then left the sheet and tossed the paperweight into the box.

I had stood there helpless, fists clenched, seething, and the iron weight smashing Mother's important lenses released my fury. I jumped at the head policeman's hand and bit it as hard as I could.

He yelled, but I bit harder. He shook me off, pushed Mother away and made her fall. Then he threw me on the floor and kicked my side and back with heavy army boots that had hard soles with metal cleats. My head went dark. Somewhere in the dark space I heard Mother's anguished cry. “Leave . . . leave!”

When I awoke, Hideyo, Ko, Mother, and Doctor Yamada were around me. The doctor was a friend of Father's who always treated his patients with a smile, but not this time. He gave me a shot.

Mother was putting a cold towel on my back. Every time I took a deep breath my chest and side pained, and the doctor said I might have cracked ribs. He looked at me through his half-glasses. “No more frolicking, no more crossing the stream. You stay home until I say all right.”

He turned to Mother. “I will call my optometrist friend and he will prescribe lenses for you. This is absolutely inexcusable of the military,” he said angrily. “The government must be desperate for supplies to make ammunition. Telephone me if a thing like this happens again.”

His bald head was shining against the late afternoon sun, and in spite of my misery I remembered what he had said to Father once when he came to the New Year's party—that he must invent a solution to grow black wavy hair.

I was glad I did not have to go to school the next day. For a long time, school had been changing. We studied for only three periods, and the male teachers were wearing army uniforms. Women and girls had to wear the national clothes, by order of Japanese Prime Minister Tojo—khaki pants gathered at the ankles, simply designed long-sleeved blouses.

BOOK: So Far from the Bamboo Grove
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