her teachers could quash those plaintive whys, cut them off before they were even all the way out of her mouth.
Despite these mysterious dead ends, the little girl did enjoy studying. Her first year was her favourite because they got to learn how to read and write Hangul — the Korean language that her family spoke in the privacy of their home. It enraptured Meiko to watch her tiny hand convert words and phrases into script, a multitude of tiny circles and tents and perpendicular dashes. Doing it correctly, getting full marks on her workbook, filled Meiko with greedy pride. And yet, in Grade Two, things inexplicably changed. All of a sudden, the girls were not allowed to write or even speak Korean. If one of them was caught doing so, the teacher would make her stand in the corner under the picture of Hirohito and hold a metal pail heavy with pebbles over her head. “You’re not babies anymore,” the teacher would tell the rest of the class while the offending girl, head down, struggled in the corner to keep the pail upright. “It’s time to leave your childish habits behind.”
So every class became in some way about Japan. The girls learned to read and write its language. In geography class, they memorized Japan’s islands and major cities. They learned about the bodies of water surrounding the nation, including the one that led to its colony of Korea, the very colony they lived on, but the geography for which they were taught nothing. By Grade Four, the girls began learning Japanese history. They were told of how Japan had generously taken over the “administration” of the Korean peninsula in 1910 with the idea of leading its illiterate peasants toward an overdue modernization. This, they were taught, was part of an even grander initiative that Japan, in its infinite graciousness, had taken upon itself throughout the wider region, a program called “the Co-prosperity Sphere in Asia.” This involved Japan overseeing the administration of less-evolved nations all around the Pacific Rim (the teacher pointed to these countries on her map), to insulate and expand the Oriental way of life in the face of growing influences from the West. The teacher spoke as if this were her nation’s greatest accomplishment, its gift to the world. Meiko raised a hand. If the Co-prosperity Sphere was so great, then why had all-out war erupted between Japan and China the previous year? (Meiko had, after all, overheard her parents arguing about it: the conflict had increased her father’s hours at the munitions plant and also threw into doubt the future of Meiko’s two older brothers.) The young teacher, usually a tight drum of calm, grew instantly enraged by these questions. She stomped over and began screaming into Meiko’s face in a flurry of Japanese that came too fast to follow. She then struck Meiko around the head with her pointing stick, dragged her by the collar of her dress to the corner, filled the pail with a double helping of pebbles and made her hold it over her shoulders for the remainder of the class.
Despite these cruelties, Meiko could not deny how much she enjoyed being smart. She loved to pore over a text, to memorize fascinating facts and fill out answers in her workbook, even if they were all in Japanese. The knowledge she gained gave her an advantage over the children in her neighbourhood who did not get to go to school: she could read the growing number of Japanese street signs and understand the stories that appeared in the free newspapers on every corner. If she and her friends were playing outside and were approached by the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, Meiko could speak to the officers in stilted but serviceable Japanese. The police often accused them of being spies, which struck Meiko as silly. “No,” she would tell them, “we’re just little kids playing innocent games. No spies here.”
But the more Meiko studied, the more it infuriated her father. Sometimes he came home at night to find her on the floor, her papers spread in a halo around her textbook. He’d march over to grab a fistful of them at random and head toward the kitchen stove. Meiko would chase after him in tears, upset that he had disrupted the careful system of memorization that she had set up for herself. He would fend her off with one hand while stuffing her papers into the stove with the other. When finished, he’d turn to her and yell, “Girls who study become foxes! Why don’t you get a job, you slut?”
Getting jobs was exactly what had happened with her two older brothers that year, 1938, when they were fifteen and thirteen respectively. As planned, the boys dropped out of school after acquiring a bare minimum of education. They took jobs as delivery boys for a local Japanese restaurant. Their total combined income was less than half of what their father made at the plant, but the family was desperate for money and the boys were forced to work every day. It was also that year that the plant announced a pay cut for all Korean workers despite the growing war in China. This left Meiko’s father in a constant state of fury. He would explode at the children over the simplest of trifles, like if they raised their rice bowls a fraction of an inch off the table while eating. Whenever these outbursts happened, Meiko and the boys would mutter at each other in Japanese about their father’s bizarre behaviour. This would send him into another long rant about how the Japanese had infiltrated every aspect of their household, to the point where children could mock a father in a language he did not understand.
Meanwhile at school, Meiko’s teachers had begun grooming the girls to join a new organization that Japan had introduced, called the Jungshindae — Voluntarily Committing Body Corp for Labor. The teachers said that this was the highest calling for every girl in the Empire, to give her body and spirit over to Emperor Hirohito and his many worthy causes. In a few years, they would be called up into good-paying jobs as teachers and nurses and entertainers, contributing whatever they could to Japan’s military success in the region. Meiko rushed home to explain the Jungshindae to her mother, expecting her to share in Meiko’s excitement. Instead, her mother exploded into anger and broke a rice bowl on the lip of her washing tub. “Don’t listen to them!” she shouted. “They will not have you. Do you hear me? I will pull you out of that school and lock you in the cellar before I let them own you!”
But every day Meiko would come home praising some new aspect of the Jungshindae. When her baby sister, who was now six years old, heard these things she began wanting to go to school herself, but her mother would not allow it. “Why does she get study and I don’t?” the youngest daughter asked. “I wish to learn things, too.”
“Girls who read books become sluts!” their father belched by rote from his wicker chair.
Her mother squatted down to be eye level with the girl. “You will stay home with me, little one. We can’t afford to have two girls in school. I will teach you things here.”
Meiko watched this with a shake of her head. “Umma, you should let her study. Our teachers have promised us good-paying jobs with the Jungshindae. In a few years, we’ll be able to support both you and father.”
Her mother’s eyes filled with an emotion Meiko could not understand. “Don’t listen to them,” she wept. “My wise little crane, do not listen to them. And you are to come straight home after school — every day. Do not linger on the streets with your friends. Do you hear me?”
The girls could not know what their mother knew, nor could their father. It took being a housewife, going to markets every day, talking to other women, to learn what she had come to know: that young girls in their teens had begun disappearing from the neighbourhood. It became a common sight to see a mother, not much older than Meiko’s, splayed out on the curb outside her house in anguish, her fists pounding her face as she screamed incoherently at the sky. The only words that Meiko’s mother could make out were, “My daughter! My daughter! Mydaughtermydaughtermydaughter! Theyhavetakenmydaughterawayfromme!”
In early 1941, the boys both received draft notices from the Teishintai — the Japanese Volunteer Corps for Men. The government was mobilizing the entire country for war and this included conscripting Korean boys as young as fifteen into the Imperial army. When the draft notices arrived, Meiko’s mother burst into wails and collapsed onto the floor in front of her washtub. Within a couple of weeks, the boys were sent to the city of Daegu for six weeks of basic training before getting shipped off to the battlefields of Southeast Asia. Meiko’s mother was inconsolable. Her husband lamely brought up the boys’ lost income in his first attempt to comfort her, as if this
