More American Schools Stop Textbook Falsifying Korea
By Park Chung-a
Staff Reporter
An increasing number of schools in the United States are rejecting an autobiographical novel written by a Japanese-American as Korean-Americans challenge the authenticity of her story.
Catholic Memorial High School in Massachusetts decided last week to exclude ``So Far from the Bamboo Grove'' from its curriculum since next year, concluding that it is inappropriate to use it as a textbook due to historical distortions.
Friendship Academy, another private school located in Massachusetts, already decided to remove the book from its curriculum at the end of last year after Stephen Walack, an English teacher, pointed out its errors.
Moses Brown School in Rhode Island also removed the book from its curriculum at the end of last year, as did Rye Country Day School in New York in September. Alex Hugh, a seventh-grader at Rye, had boycotted school for a week in protest against the book.
Hamlin Middle School in Texas was one of the first schools to question the use of the book, citing sexual and violent content in a review in 2005. School authorities decided then to allow students to study an alternate book with parental permission.
Dover Sherborn Middle School in Massachusetts tentatively decided not to use the book in November, but ruled earlier this month to maintain it in their curriculum with another book on Korean history.
The book's author is 74-year-old Yoko Kawashima Watkins. It is being taught in English language arts courses in middle schools in New York, Boston and Los Angeles.
Korean-American students and their parents have protested against the schools' use of the novel as textbook claiming that much of Watkins' accounts are fabricated.
For example, in the book, she says that toward the end of the World War II she and her family witnessed anti-Japanese Korean ``communists'' raping Japanese women and killing others as they fled southward from Nanam, a city that now belongs to North Korea.
However, there was no organized ``Anti-Japanese communist army'' of Korean soldiers, except that of Kim Il-sung, later the leader of North Korea, and his guerrilla partisans in Manchuria, but they did not arrive in Korea until early September 1945, long after the events described in the book. Korea was colonized by Japan from 1910 until its liberation at the end of World War II in 1945.
Carter Eckert, a professor of Korean history at Harvard University pointed out in his recent column titled ``A Matter of Context'' published in the Boston Globe that while there is no reason why Watkins's book cannot be used in the schools, to teach it without providing a proper historical context 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.
The author has declined to have interviews with reporters for personal reasons.
michelle@koreatime.co.kr
01-23-2007 18:22
http://search.hankooki.com/times/times_view.php?term=yoko++&path=hankooki3/times/lpage/nation/200701/kt2007012318222511990.htm&media=kt
By Park Chung-a
Staff Reporter
An increasing number of schools in the United States are rejecting an autobiographical novel written by a Japanese-American as Korean-Americans challenge the authenticity of her story.
Catholic Memorial High School in Massachusetts decided last week to exclude ``So Far from the Bamboo Grove'' from its curriculum since next year, concluding that it is inappropriate to use it as a textbook due to historical distortions.
Friendship Academy, another private school located in Massachusetts, already decided to remove the book from its curriculum at the end of last year after Stephen Walack, an English teacher, pointed out its errors.
Moses Brown School in Rhode Island also removed the book from its curriculum at the end of last year, as did Rye Country Day School in New York in September. Alex Hugh, a seventh-grader at Rye, had boycotted school for a week in protest against the book.
Hamlin Middle School in Texas was one of the first schools to question the use of the book, citing sexual and violent content in a review in 2005. School authorities decided then to allow students to study an alternate book with parental permission.
Dover Sherborn Middle School in Massachusetts tentatively decided not to use the book in November, but ruled earlier this month to maintain it in their curriculum with another book on Korean history.
The book's author is 74-year-old Yoko Kawashima Watkins. It is being taught in English language arts courses in middle schools in New York, Boston and Los Angeles.
Korean-American students and their parents have protested against the schools' use of the novel as textbook claiming that much of Watkins' accounts are fabricated.
For example, in the book, she says that toward the end of the World War II she and her family witnessed anti-Japanese Korean ``communists'' raping Japanese women and killing others as they fled southward from Nanam, a city that now belongs to North Korea.
However, there was no organized ``Anti-Japanese communist army'' of Korean soldiers, except that of Kim Il-sung, later the leader of North Korea, and his guerrilla partisans in Manchuria, but they did not arrive in Korea until early September 1945, long after the events described in the book. Korea was colonized by Japan from 1910 until its liberation at the end of World War II in 1945.
Carter Eckert, a professor of Korean history at Harvard University pointed out in his recent column titled ``A Matter of Context'' published in the Boston Globe that while there is no reason why Watkins's book cannot be used in the schools, to teach it without providing a proper historical context 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.
The author has declined to have interviews with reporters for personal reasons.
michelle@koreatime.co.kr
01-23-2007 18:22
http://search.hankooki.com/times/times_view.php?term=yoko++&path=hankooki3/times/lpage/nation/200701/kt2007012318222511990.htm&media=kt