Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes by Yoneyama Lisa

Author:Yoneyama, Lisa [Yoneyama, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2016-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Perils and Possibilities

Asian/American investments in knowledge production and representations of the Asia-Pacific War and Japanese imperial violence are not limited to juridical channels but have increasingly proliferated in other U.S. civic spheres. The decisions by state legislators in Maryland and Virginia to ensure that students will be taught in schools that the body of water between the Korean peninsula and Japan is named the East Sea in Korea and the Sea of Japan in Japan can likewise be seen as another attempt by Korean/Americans to rectify Japanese colonial injustice from their position as American citizen-subjects. The dispute over So Far from the Bamboo Grove, also known as Yoko’s Story, a children’s novel by an expatriate Japanese author, Yoko Kawashima Watkins, similarly involved public venues in Massachusetts and other states. Employing a plot reminiscent of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, this supposedly semiautobiographical story depicts a nine-year-old girl’s turbulent and brave journey from Korea, where she grew up in a well-to-do Japanese colonists’ family, to war-torn Japan, where she became orphaned and impoverished but learned to survive with honor.51 The book sparked a nationwide and transpacific controversy when a local school board in Massachusetts found its depiction of “North Koreans” problematic and banned it from the district’s school curriculum. The Korean American attempt to remove Yoko’s Story from the school and libraries was viewed by some in Korea as a case of distant nationalism. In a different but related way, the city of Glendale, California, erected the “Comfort Woman” statute to commemorate and condemn the forced recruitment of Korean women into the wartime military comfort system (see figure 4.1).

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