So Far From the Bamboo Grove by Yoko Kawashima Watkins
This amazing children's novel tells the heartbreaking story of an eleven-year-old Japanese girl living in Korea. Yoko finds out that she has been taking her peaceful and secure life for granted when all of a sudden it changes during the frightful times at the end of World War II. All Yoko has left is her older sister Ko and her mother as they flee away from their home in the bamboo grove and away from the vengeance-seeking Korean Communists. Yoko's true story of her fight for her life is filled with unimaginable violence and death. Yoko writes this novel with strong descriptions that it can easily draw many readers into tears. While these stories are heartbreaking and horrible they are the truth about what happened during the war and should be told to show the truths of war. Yoko tells the story about loosing so much honor by having her and her sister's heads shaved so the two could pretend to live the life of a man to escape from some of the fears of getting raped. She also tells the unbelievable account of the death of a newborn baby while riding in a train's cargo car. The death and disease on the train made the doctor toss the deceased newborn off of the moving train into the railroad ditch as if the newborn was a mere football. The story continues on past the violence and death to ultimately tell a story family, love, and life. While these topics are extremely hard to read, the classroom can be a very supporting place to open a discussion about the thoughts and feelings of reading this amazing novel. I defiantly plan on bringing this wonderful children's novel into my classroom, but I will be cautious about the grade and maturity level of the readers.
Intended Age 9-12
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?