6th-grade book stirs rethinking
By Lisa Kocian, Globe Staff | November 12, 2006
A review committee that included the middle school librarian and two English teachers unanimously voted to recommend removing "So Far from the Bamboo Grove" from the curriculum after 13 parents complained. Superintendent of Schools Perry Davis backed the recommendation.
The School Committee has the final say. Members took no action after a hearing on the proposed book ban last week , instead referring the matter to a subcommittee for review.
The book, by Massachusetts author Yoko Kawashima Watkins, is the story of an 11-year-old Japanese girl whose family has to flee Korea in the aftermath of World War II. The journey is fraught with danger and persecution because of the Koreans' animosity toward the Japanese, who had occupied their country for more than three decades. The book is based on the real-life experiences of Watkins, whose father was a Japanese government official.
Dover-Sherborn middle school students have read the book as part of a unit on stories of survival and have me t with the author. The book is used by numerous other school districts in the state.
During a School Committee meeting last week, several parents and teachers defended the book as well as the two-day annual visit made by the author, who is an anti war activist, to talk about it.
Karen Masterson told the committee that her children read the book in school years ago and that they recall it as one of their best educational experiences." She said it "ignited a love of reading " in her daughter.
Her voice shaking with emotion, she added, "A single book is not supposed to be all things."
Scott Walker, who has been teaching sixth-grade English for five years, told the School Committee that both the book -- which he said has been taught "effectively and tastefully" for 13 years -- and the author are prized by students.
"She is a gift our youngsters hold onto far beyond their time in our classroom," he said, adding that older students come back to the middle school to see her during her visits.Frederick Randall, the middle school headmaster who was also on the book review committee, said the panel had struggled with its recommendation.
"I won't represent it as being an easy process on any of us," he said. "As a committee, we did the best we could with it, to remain objective."
But he said there simply wasn't enough time in school to explore the issues raised by the book.
Thousands of Koreans were killed or wounded and others were drafted to fight for Japan or perform forced labor during the occupation, which lasted from 1910 to 1945.
Henry Jaung, the father of a sixth-grader, told the committee that he didn't think rape and other war atrocities were appropriate subject matter for such young children.
"In my humble opinion, sixth-graders aren't equipped," he said.
He also said he didn't understand why the school district sought parental permission before teaching a class on personal hygiene to fifth-graders but had offered no similar input for issues of rape and the complexities of war .
In one scene in the book noted by Jaung, the sister of the main character says: "We must get out of Seoul. I saw several Korean men dragging girls to the thicket and I saw one man raping a young girl. . . . The girls were screaming for help in Japanese."
Reached by phone after the meeting, Jaung said the book gives a distorted view of what happened, all the more troubling because it will be the students' first exposure to Asian history.
"You'll notice throughout the book these acts are committed by Korean men -- it is a pretty disturbing connotation of a group of people," he said. "The first impression you imprint in a child's mind is typically very hard to erase."
Agnes Ahn, the other parent who spoke at the meeting, said her Korean-American son was made fun of at school because of the book and got the cold shoulder from a teacher because of the controversy over it.
"What if your favorite teacher no longer says hi to you?" she asked the committee.Sam Yoon, a member of the Boston City Council and a leader in the state's Korean-American community, was contacted by the parents who are concerned about the book.
He said the book is one-sided, representing Koreans as the wrongdoers when it was the Japanese who occupied Korea.
"For me, the issue is about a child's self-image with respect to their ethnicity," Yoon said. "This book doesn't put that story in that context. It's confusing. . . . one ethnic minority is portrayed as . . . the bad guys."
Watkins, the author, was traveling last week and couldn't be reached for comment.
Kathy Glick-Weil, president of the Massachusetts Library Association and director of the Newton Free Library, said she's heard of other challenges against the book. But she argued that a controversial book should be used to spark discussion, and a school could bring in someone to express the opposite side.
"It certainly sounds like an important issue for young people to discuss and understand: Is this an opinion we agree with or we don't agree with? Is it even handed or not? I don't think you'd want to remove a book that encourages that kind of discussion and intellectual pursuit."
The American Library Association, based in Chicago, tracks book challenges around the country.
"So Far from the Bamboo Grove" has been the subject of four challenges since 2000, according to Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the association's Office for Intellectual Freedom.
There is no record of it being successfully banned in any of those instances, she said, but the association doesn't always track the end result. The book has won multiple awards, including selection as an ALA Notable Book, and has been used extensively in middle schools, she said.
"Our hope is that books are retained rather than removed," Caldwell-Stone said."Ultimately, every challenge is an attempt to remove ideas from the discourse. We really encourage books [be allowed] to stay in the curriculum and to work with the difficult material. Every community, of course, comes to its own conclusion."
Both the School Committee members and the parents said they had no objection to the book remaining in the school library.
Lisa Kocian can be reached at 508-820-4231 or by e-mail at lkocian@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/11/12/6th_grade_book_stirs_rethinking/?page=1
School Reinstates Controversial Book After Protests From Free Speech Groups
Jan 04, 2007
http://news.bookweb.org/m-bin/printer_friendly?article_id=4952
Japanese-American author agrees to revise some controversial parts of memoir
February 09, 2007
"Yoko is considering adding references to inaccurate parts of the book and other measures," said an acquaintance who had joined Watkins in the Stonewalk Japan 2005, a global pilgrimage that honors civilian war casualties.
Kawashima Watkins lived with her Japanese family in Korea during the 1910-1945 occupation. The book recounts her memories of their harrowing exodus after Japan's surrender in World War II.
In one of the most controversial passages, she wrote that her family narrowly escaped Korean "communists" in 1945 who had been raping Japanese women and killing others as they fled southward from Nanam, a city now in North Korea. In reality North Korean communist troops were first formed in 1948.
"Yoko feels that because the book is based on her childhood experience it may not reflect some of the true historical facts at the time," her acquaintance added. "I believe the revision will add a sentence like, "It may not have been communist troops but other groups."
Yoko's friend, however added that the author expressed no intention of altering her account of a U.S. B29 air raid on the Korean Peninsula or her description of her father's work. Because her father's position was never explained clearly in the text, some have expressed the possibility that he could have been assigned to Japan's notorious Unit 731 in charge of human experimentation.
Instead, Kawashima Watkins plans to hold a press conference in the United States and give further explanations this coming Thursday (Feb. 15). She is expected to say her father had no relation to any troops involved with Unit 731 or the issue of Comfort Women (young Korean women and girls forced to work as sex slaves for imperial Japanese troops). She is also expected to explain that the rape of fleeing Japanese women was described indirectly for the sake of young readers.
Meanwhile anti-war groups in the United States are planning to publish more copies of the book.
"We have been tapping a few publishing companies," said one official with the anti-war group. "They will make a final decision after reading the original script written in English, but so far they seem positive about it."
"Although there are certain parts in the book that could evoke some misunderstandings in Korea, the book holds the essence of anti-war literature by portraying the pain of war. If we allow such books to be widely criticized, it would only benefit rightist group that beautify past war atrocities."
"It wasn't just Koreans but also Japanese women that were exposed to the confusion, violence and insanity exposed by the war at the time, and the responsibility goes to Japanese government," the official stressed. "We should not let her experience go to waste."
The misrepresentations in the book began to worry the Korean community after it was assigned in English classes at a number of middle schools in New York, Boston and Los Angeles. Korean-American students and their parents have confronted schools with evidence that several passages are inaccurate, citing numerous inconsistencies in her account and details of her family's background as well as historical records.
"So Far from the Bamboo Grove" was first published in the U.S. in 1986 and was later translated into German and Korean. In the Korean edition however, some contents were altered or omitted to avoid rousing the ire of Koreans. There is no Japanese edition.
In an editorial about the controversy sent to the Boston Globe, Harvard historian Carter Eckert wrote,"Yoko's story is compelling as a narrative of survival, it achieves its powerful effect in part by eliding the historical context in which Yoko and her family had been living Korea. That context, simply put, was a 40-year record of harsh colonial rule in Korea, which reached its apogee during the war years of 1937-45, when Yoko was growing up.
"(T)o teach 'So Far from the Bamboo Grove' without providing historicization might be compared to teaching a sympathetic novel about the escape of a German official's family from the Netherlands in 1945 without alluding to the nature of the Nazi occupation or the specter of Anne Frank."
http://www.korea.net/news/news/NewsView.asp?serial_no=20070208044&part=102&SearchDay=
Controversy
Response in Boston
The issue came to head after 2006, when 13 parents of Korean-American students in a Greater Boston community urged the book be removed from the English curriculum of Dover-Sherborn Middle School, resulting in the convening of a review committee that included the middle school librarian and two English teachers, which recommended removing the book from school curriculum in November 2006. A hearing in the Dover-Sherborn Regional School Committee was later held which took no action and instead referred the matter to a subcommittee for review. The book was later kept in the curriculum to be used in tandem with other books on Korean history for a more balanced experience.
The parents' have complained that the book is "racist and sexually explicit" containing historical inaccuracies that whitewashed Japanese atrocities against Koreans during the Japanese Occupation. During the hearing of the School Committee on the proposed book ban one parent said he didn't think rape and other war atrocities were appropriate subject matter for young children. When talking of a scene in the book where a Japanese girl is being raped by a Korean man, the parent brought up worries that this would lead children to have a certain impression of Korean men, saying, "The first impression you imprint in a child's mind is typically very hard to erase."
A Boston councilman also weighed in, stating that the Korean minority were being portrayed as the "bad guys", even though Japan was the one who had occupied Korea.
Both the School Committee members and the parents said they had no objection to the book remaining in the school library.
Although some staunch supporters of the book were teachers and parents who saw the issue as a matter of literary censorship rather than historical revisionism and distortion, the middle school headmaster who was on the book review committee said the panel struggled with its recommendation adding that there wasn't enough time in school to properly explore the issues raised by the book. Other supporters who coalesced around anti-censorship issue were Kathy Glick-Weil, president of the Massachusetts Library Association and director of the Newton Free Library, and Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of The American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom.
Response in California
In 2009, Korean-American school parents submitted a complaint to the California Department of Education regarding inclusion of "So Far From the Bamboo Grove" in the school curriculum on grounds that the novel contained historical inaccuracies, including accounts of Japanese female victims of rape perpetrated by Koreans. The state of California gave school parents an opportunity to offer opinions and ultimately decided to remove the novel as a school curriculum option in the state. Around 50 K-12 Korean-American students who attended The Young Korean American Academy wrote letters to the state education offices and publishers asking for greater exposure of Korean history and culture, with McGraw-Hill sending back a response letter promising to implement students' requests.
Response in Korea
When this book was published in Korea as Yoko iyagi (요코 이야기, "Yoko's tale") in 2005, the sales were brisk partly due to a sales copy that said "why was this book banned in China and Japan?", but there was not much discernible social uproar about it.
There had even been positive reviews written about it, accepting the book as delivering an anti-war and anti-colonial message.
The situation completely changed in 2007, when it became a target of intense debate in Korea and in the United States. This development was triggered by the protests lodged by Korean-American students in the Greater Boston area in September, 2006.
Other schools
Even prior to the Dover-Sherborn Middle School's decision to suspend the book, there have been other challenges tracked by The American Library Association, some of which have been successful in removing the book from the curriculum and reading lists. Rye Country Day School in New York had acted swiftly by banning the book in September, 2006.
One Catholic school and one private school, both in Massachusetts removed the book from their curricula in 2007. A teacher at the latter wrote an opinion on the book which appeared in The English Journal.
The school board of Montgomery County, Maryland struck the book off its recommended list in March, 2007.
Watkins' response
Watkins said that she had no intention of disregarding the history of Korea and apologized for any hard feelings felt by Korean readers. She stated her intention was to portray her childhood experiences in a softer way for young readers, and denied the accusations made by the Korean newspapers.
Historical inaccuracies
The Korean media has characterized her book as "autobiographical fiction". It has believed there are several points of historical inaccuracies in her account. Certain "Korean historians" (unspecified) charge that some of her narrated incidents are imagined. However, the author insists she wrote her experience as she remembered it.
U. S. bombers
Watkins gives in her book an account of sighting U. S. B-29 bombers (identified as that type by Mr. Enomoto). This has been characterized as suspect, since according to historians, there were no bombing in the area in July or August 1945. Watkins retorted that she did not go so far as to say these airplanes bombarded her hometown of Nanam (Rannam), but that she had simply witnessed them fly over.
In fact, U.S. bombers were flying missions to the general area of Korea by this time, according to Yoshio Morita's book on evacuation from Korea: "From July 12 [1945] onward, American B-29's came almost every other day and regularly around 11:AM assaulting Rajin and Ungi in Northeast Korea, dropping many mines into the harbor".
An airplane attack on the train Yoko was aboard occurred, although she has not claimed she was able to identify the aircraft as American. On this point, Korean media cast suspicion on this passage as anachronistic, since "American military did not bomb any part of North Korea during the time frame of the story".The train was stalled by the attack 45 miles before reaching Seoul.
Korean communist presence
Also, when pressed, she admitted she could not identify the armed uniformed militia that her family encountered as definitively "Korean Communists", although that was the label she has given to her posing threat throughout the book. She explained that this had been the assumption she had made after hearing that the areas left behind in her trail had been overrun by communists. The book, in a different context, describes the mother telling Yoko that Koreans had formed what is known as an "Anti-Japanese Communist Army".
Harvard historian Carter Eckert had considered these points, and stated the only organized Korean "Communist Army" around this time would have been the guerrillas led by Soviet-trained Kim Il Sung, who "did not arrive in Korea until early September 1945", but there might have been "local Korean communist groups" present.
However, there was already a report that on August 8, a Korean contingent of 80 strong men was spotted with the Soviet Army, crossing the border into To-ri (土里; Japanese: Dori). It was only a short distance by speedboat across the Tumen River for them to arrive from Russia to this town.
"Korean Communist soldiers" were bereft of their uniforms for Yoko, her sister, and mother to use as disguise in the book. Some media coverage gave a forced reading saying this term can only have applicable meaning as soldiers of the "Korean People's Army", not established until 1948, so that Yoko was describing uniforms nonexistent at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Far_from_the_Bamboo_Grove
'Life > e—cultivate—culture' 카테고리의 다른 글
| Korean Mexicans Learn More Of Their Asian Roots On Visit To So Cal. (0) | 2008.08.18 |
|---|---|
| XXIX Beijing Olympic Opening Ceremony 2008 (0) | 2008.08.09 |
| THE AEROSPACE (0) | 2008.01.14 |
| Phineas and Ferb (0) | 2007.12.03 |
| Animator vs. Animation - Alan Becker (0) | 2007.12.03 |
