hankyoreh

A Japanese-American author caught up in a controversy over her autobiographical book appeared to take a step back, negating parts of what she wrote.

In an interview published over the weekend in the South Korean daily Joong-Ang Ilbo, Yoko Kawashima Watkins maintained that her book, "So Far from the Bamboo Grove," is about what she saw and experienced.

She said she was planning a news conference "before long" to clear up the allegations that she had lied in some sections of the book, which until recently was used in the English language curriculum of many middle schools across the United States.

A campaign by Korean-American students and their parents, questioning the truthfulness of the book as well as the identity of the author's family, has led many of the schools to either drop the book from the reading list or to reconsider using it.

The book stirred up ire among Koreans with claims that Watkins' family suffered atrocities while trying to flee to Japan from a city now located in North Korea during the last months of World War II in 1945, when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. Many parts of the book allege Korean "communists" hurt the Japanese.

But in the interview, the details that Watkins gave as clarifications seemed to contradict what she wrote in the book.

She said that unlike the title of the book, the bamboo surrounding her home were not a grove but "thin and narrow but tall bamboo grasses." The book, however, says that the author ran "straight into the bamboo grove, and ran all the way home" and that she went "beyond the bamboo grove" to see her brother off.

She also tells of how the bamboo made "cracking noises" as they were hit by American bombing, suggesting that they would have to have been thicker than grasses.

Students and parents have argued that the weather conditions in Nanam, the city where Watkins and her family lived, would not have allowed bamboo to grow.

Watkins wrote, "Americans were already bombing industrial sites in northern Korea" in July 1945, which is disputed by historical records that U.S. bombers had not reached that part of the country at the time.

In the interview, however, she said she never wrote the U.S. military bombed the Nanam area, but that air raid sirens sounded and she would clearly see American planes flying overhead in formations of three.

"Maybe they were Russian planes. I know nothing of airplanes," she said.

Students and parents also questioned her claims that she and other Japanese people were hurt and harassed by the Korean communist army, which was not established until February 1948.

Watkins explained she was focusing on her and her family's survival rather than history when writing her book.

"Whoever mother, my sister and I encountered, were (they) North Korean military? I do not know," she said in the interview.

The identity of Watkins' father has also been questioned throughout the controversy, with some suggesting he was a leading member of the infamous Unit 731 that tested biochemical and germ weapons on humans, mostly Koreans and Chinese.

The author describes him as a high-level government official who worked in Manchuria, whereas in her second book "My Brother, My Sister, and I," she said he was a diplomat.

In the interview, she said he worked at the administrative section in southern Manchuria and that his "nickname" was diplomat.

In the book, the father is portrayed as a man of high status.

The author's sister tells Watkins that if the Russians had killed him, they would have told the Japanese government "because of his position."

Watkins' family was warned, according to the book, that they might be hunted down and killed because of the father's "work for Japanese interest in Manchuria."

Washington, Feb. 4 (Yonhap News)