I had bought the flight ticket to Osaka and went to the airport. But I didn't take the flight and just came back home. There were many reasons. Anyway, thanks to it, I got plenty of time to do what I didn't use to do. Late afternoon when I just arrived home, my mom called me to check on my safety over the cancelled trip. Getting to know I was not in Osaka, she asked me to drive her and her mother(my grandma) to a seafood market in the West Sea near their town. My grandmother had been quite sick, and barely recovered. Her appetite for sea food came back. We went to the market. After shopping, we got into a seafood restaurant and ate a lot of sashimi. Interestingly, the things my grandmother talked about while enjoying the sashimi was the stories when she was quite young, Japanese Colonization and Korean War. Now she is 91 years old and it was amazing that she had such vivid and abundant memory over her childhood. Her memory of Japanese Colonization period was especially surprising. Her stance towards Japan and its people during that time was both positive and negative. Here are some stories she mentioned.
Story 1: She was not allowed to speak Korean at school. Almost all teachers were Japanese and they were wearing long swords all the time. She said it was quite scary to face them. Students were punished when they were caught speaking Korean. Mild punishments were like cleaning the toilets and so on and tough ones were corporal punishments.
Story 2: She was talented in singing and dancing. Some rich Japanese neighbors were quite supportive for her. She said Japanese don't care much about family lineage like Koreans and love to support talented people. She said she got lots of direct and indirect support from them.
Story 3: She confessed that she still feels scared retrieving the brutal scenes she saw right after Japan surrendered in August in 1945. After the war, Japanese armies had to go back to the Islands. Going back, they killed thousands of people on the way. She went to the downtown and felt frightened with nasty smell of corpses slaughtered by Japanese soldiers and police officers. She mentioned an episode she heard that a man was walking for a few seconds with his head cut off by a military officer riding a horse.
Story 4: It was probably 1991 or 1992, when she got a chance to visit Japan for tour with her friends. She happened to visit a Japanese family and she was amazed with the diligence of the kids of the family. They had to share a quite big portion of housework and took it for granted, which was a bit unusual in urban Korean families.
Typical Koreans stances toward Japan have been both positive and negative like my grandmother. They admire Japan for its advanced position as the first non-Western nation succeeding in becoming a modern one. On the other hand, they feel suspicious of its intention behind its actions. From the Western point of view, it could look overly reactive for Koreans to criticize Japanese government and politicians trying to change its constitutions that Japan is able to build normal military forces and engage in foreign affairs more actively. Koreans have quite mixed feelings toward China, too. They feel happy with the truth that Korea has the most attractive market right next to it(About a quarter of exports from South Korea is for China), but cautious that China may overwhelm Korea soon and exert dominant influences over it.
After Korean War, there has not been a big conflicts in Far East Asia and its has been more than a half century. That is a good thing. But when it comes to the level of the level of cultural exchange, it didn't seem to be that dynamic. It is quite recent that K-pops and K-dramas got Chinese audiences' attention. Until I was in middle and high school( until 1990s ), it was not illegal for private companies or institutions to import Japanese pop culture products or services.
My concern is that how the four nations ( including North Korea) can maintain the peace and build up reconciliation and prosperity breaking historically toughly rooted distrust among them. Unfortunately, the situation seems to be getting worse. More mass destruction weapons have been piled up around and the tension among them has been raised. Misconception and distrust among them have worsened the situation. It appears that we've known each other long time, but haven't known each other well. It's time to put a portion of energy we have put to study and know the Western Civilization to our own things we have ignored quite a while.
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