hankyoreh

Korean-American students and parents throughout the United States are joining forces to remove a high school book they say distorts history based on the author's personal experience they believe is fabricated.

Written by Japanese-American Yoko Kawashima Watkins, "So Far from the Bamboo Grove" recounts the final years of the 1910-1945 Japanese colonial occupation of the Korean Peninsula from her perspective as a little girl.

The book is part of the language arts curriculum in junior high schools in Boston, New York and Los Angeles. It is also read at international schools in South Korea.

Watkins says her father was a Japanese government official who worked in Manchuria at the time but was always against the war.

She and the rest of her family lived in Nanam, a city now in North Korea. Her book is about her escape from Nanam with her mother and sister and what she says she saw until they arrived in Japan.

She tells of the rape and slaughter of Japanese by Koreans during their escape southward, of having to walk endlessly after their train is destroyed by American bombings, scrounging for food and traveling at night to avoid getting caught by Koreans.

But students and parents refute her account point by point, citing historical records.

The book begins on July 29, 1945, when Watkins and her family leave Nanam after what she calls weeks of bombings by American planes.

But records indicate such U.S. bombings were impossible because Nanam was out of reach of the the B-29s, critics say.

Moreover, records say Japanese forces held an iron grip on the entire Korean Peninsula until their surrender on Aug. 15 that year to the United States, disputing Watkins' account of how Koreans had organized "anti-Japanese communist" groups as she called them, critics say.

Carter Eckert, a Harvard University professor, called references to such groups "problematic" because such an organization would have been near impossible given Japan's tight clutch on Korea at the time.

Critics question Watkins' account of her family as well. She says her father, Yoshio Kawashima, worked for the Manchurian Railroad, although in her book she describes how her family was prevented from boarding a train to Seoul. She says her father attended Oxford University, but parents who tried to confirm it found no record of a Yoshio Kawashima there.

A note from the publisher attached to the book says the father later returned from six years in a Siberian prison camp.

Alex Hugh, an 11-year-old Korean-American student in New York, succeeded in removing the book from the curriculum after days of protest by not attending school.

"I cried when I read the part about how Koreans were accused of harming Japanese women," she said.

"I couldn't let (my) American friends learn something that was so wrong."

The controversy heightened when the book became an issue at a recent conference of South Korean consuls general in the U.S. The participants agreed they need to launch an active campaign to remove the book from schools.

Ji Young-sun, consul general in Boston, said the book is creating a wrong perception.

"There have even been instances in which Korean students have been put in a spot because of the book," she said.

"We will launch active government-level actions."

Boston, New York, Jan. 16 (Yonhap News)