Sunday morning thoughts

I believe I've wrote before about Korea's disdain for Japan. This feeling was never stronger than when Japan beat Korea last week to eliminate them from the World Baseball Classic. I think they were more upset about 'who' beat them than the fact that they'd been beaten. I'm reading a book called "Native Speaker" about a Korean-American spy. There is a passage in the book I really liked because it mirrored my own thoughts on Korea's Japanese resentment. Often, when teaching young children who simply say, "I hate Japan," I've thought of African-Americans. It's so sad when the young children feel so adamantly about something they don't even understand. I stop and explain to them that, although history has been unkind to them, the Japanese people of today are not the people who committed those horrible crimes to Korea. I tell them that there is a child their same age in Japan who loves them and that they cannot hate that child. In simplistic language like that, they understand, but I doubt it will soften their hearts. Anyways, in the novel a Korean politician is speaking to a hostile crowd of Koreans and Blacks. He's trying to stop the violence between the two communities. Check this out:

"If they (blacks) do not have the same strong community you enjoy, the one you brought with you from Korea, which can pool money and efforts for its members--it is because this community has been broken and dissolved through history.
We Koreans know something of this tragedy. Recall the days over fifty years ago, when Koreans were made servants and slaves in their own country by the Imperial Japanese Army. How our mothers and sisters were made the concubines of the very soldiers who enslaved us.
I am speaking of histories that all of us should know. Remember, or now know, how Koreans were cast as the dogs of Asia, remember the way our children could not speak their own language in school, remember how they called each other by the Japanese names forced upon them, remember the public executions of patriots and the shadowy murders of collaborators, remember our feelings of disgrace and penury and shame, remember most of all the struggle to survive with one's own identity still strong and alive.
I ask that you remember these things, or know them now. Know that what we have in common, the sadness and pain and injustice, will always be stronger than our differences."

I included this not to condemn the Japanese or white slave owners but to highlight the similarities between African-Americans and Koreans. And it's something not many Koreans realize because they still are favorable to whites over blacks. But how can they come to love something they can't see? Until Korea becomes less homogeneous, I don't see them breaking down their long-rooted racism. That's another blog entry though. One thing working for them is Hines Ward. The Korean Times did an article on him before the Super Bowl because he's half African-American, half Korean. After he won Superbowl MVP, Korea took pride in him as one of their own even though he'd never been to Korea. And there was his picture on the front page of the newspaper, looking very black, like the people they normally fear. It's trivial, but it goes a long way in Korea's acceptance of things they don't see here.