![]() ![]() But many of the Korean Japanese she interviewed dismissed her concerns. And they would do everything they possibly could within legal channels to be considered a respectable human being.”Īs a naturalized American who feels she belongs in this country, Lee says it is hard for her to understand that generations of Koreans have never been fully accepted in Japan. “He is an emblem of so many people that I met who wanted very desperately to just belong. But her firstborn, Noa, never comes to terms with the circumstances of his life. Even so, one of Sunja’s sons thrives in the business. Despite its popularity, the Japanese look down on pachinko parlors as gambling dens with connections to criminals. Though they may have found employment, and in many cases, financial success, that didn’t necessarily translate into respect. So, in pachinko they were able to find a kind of employment haven.” “Even now they have great difficulty finding jobs in certain sectors. “The Korean Japanese could not find legal employment for … seven or eight decades,” Lee explains. Both of Sunja’s sons find work in the noisy pin ball dens which are often run by Korean Japanese. ![]() Twenty years later she still yearns for what she has lost.Īfter the war the pachinko parlors start popping up all over in Japan. With the war and partition of Korea, it becomes almost impossible for Sunja to return to her homeland. She and her children survive World War II but then the Korean War breaks out. But when he is arrested for preaching Christianity, her life becomes even more difficult. Sunja has two sons and her husband takes care of them both. ![]() The impoverished Koreans who left their occupied homeland didn’t find life much easier in Japan. They didn’t know that the history would turn out this way.” And to be frank, most Koreans really didn’t know that this was going to happen. “When she goes to Japan she simply has no idea what’s going to wait for her. Sunja is saved from disgrace by a Christian minister staying at her family’s boarding house who offers to marry her and take her to Japan. When she becomes pregnant he tells her he is already married. She falls in love with a good looking, older man from the mainland. A young girl named Sunja is growing up in a small fishing village on a tiny Korean Island. The story begins in the early 20th century when Korea is already under Japanese rule. “I wanted … to give these people flesh and blood in the same way that people that I know have contradictions and betrayals and deaths and marriages and the kind of texture of life.” “I was very interested in history but I also thought, you know, history is not that interesting sometimes and it can feel a bit medicinal,” she says. She decided to tell their history through a multi-generational family story. ![]() She lived there for a while and interviewed many Korean Japanese to get a sense of what life was like for them. Lee, a Korean American, was determined to tell the history of Koreans in Japan. … That story just really could not be more fixed in my brain.” The parents were born in Japan, the boy was born in Japan. “They had written the words: die, die, die. “And in this yearbook several of his classmates had written things like: Go back to your country,” Lee says. After his death the boy’s parents found his school yearbook. He told a story about a 13-year-old boy who committed suicide. It was 1989 and she went to a lecture by an American missionary who had been working with the Korean Japanese in Japan. Lee got the idea for her book when she was still a college student. ![]()
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