So Far from the Bamboo Grove by Yoko Kawashima Watkins
I liked this book a lot better of the two paired books but I can definitely see how it would be very uncomfortable to teach for some. I feel like i have mixed views on this topic because I fell that in certain situations, that this book would be inappropriate because of your class make up or the are you may be in teaching. When the school is right and there is a go ahead from everybody I would approach these books by sending home a note and explaining to the children about the mature content they will be en counting, and this way I would be able to cover all of my bases. This would be a great book to use during a WWII unit about a Japanese family forced to flee their home in Korea.
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?