He won’t watch it. Probably not.
All in an instant one’s hopes to create and rejoin can be ruined. Some wounds are too deep for people to give over.
The film “Letters from Iwo Jima” is too hard to accept for Koreans. It humanizes the Japanese of an era who dehumanized so completely those around them, that they simply cannot accept it. If it is seen at all in Korea, it would be very surprising.
Koreans don’t forget. They don’t; the Jews, the Koreans, the Native Americans, the minorities in almost every land, including the many blacks in so many parts of the world, the Chinese at Nanking, the Serbs, the Palestinians, and back around to the Jews…. How do we forgive something so terrible that it can ruin even the attempt to bridge over something long past?
Sometimes there doesn’t seem hope for my husband. He will always be an indoctrinated and propagandized child of a severely wounded people. An unstemmed bitterness keeps them apart from all the rest of the world — while the Japanese government holds out without a word of apology all these years.
I don’t think most of Japanese youth even know about the atrocities committed to the grandparents and great=grandparents and great=great grandparents of those Koreans in the TV dramas they watch today. They were equally indoctrinated. They dance and swoon over Gackt Camui (at least half Korean) and now Bi (”Rain” — who is really Jung Ji Hoon, entirely Korean) and have no idea. They watch Korean soaps even as their government sends ships into Korean waters, purporting to own a Korean island.
The wound is 70 years ago, but still so fresh, for the Koreans.
I am a patcher and fixer of people, so I’ve been told, sometimes to the point of being told to STOP fixing.
And I with friends on both sides of that sea, have no real way to help.
So I looked at it from a microcosmic view: Could there be some guidelines? What would you do on an individual scale, when two children won’t stop fighting, just won’t stop ?
They say, “reward both sides when they cooperate.” (Aid/Sanctions? Does that work?)
They say, “separate them and train them separately on cooperation.” (This has not been tried, has it? We just punished with an atom bomb…)
They say, “when intervening, remain calm and do not lay blame on either side.” (I doubt this would be possible. It was after all unprovoked. But we’d have to remain silent on that.)
They say, “children who are feeling loved are least likely to fight.” (Respect, yes! That’s what makes them both tick, it’s true.)
They say most importantly: “Limit your own fighting and arguing. Children will learn how to be peaceful from you. Don’t expect them to do it well if you don’t show them how.”
(Here our cowboy efforts in Vietnam and Iraq leave us flat.)
So I, the Ms.-Fix-It I, recommend these actions not to the two wounded sides, but to my own government:
Dear U.S. Military and Government: Who the hell is really going to listen to, say, Switzerland on the peacekeeping front? Let’s face it — it has to be us, and we’ve made a mess of things.
Are the countries of Korea and Japan, not to mention the rest of the world, really going to believe in us? In peace? Even in economic coexistence and cooperation?
Not if we keep botching these ridiculous ground wars and political coups in the name of cleaning up the world. It’s possible that our hands were never completely clean, but — there has to be an extreme change even for us, right here. Sooner than now.
At least Clint’s crying in the wilderness. Perhaps he should have been more than just Mayor of Carmel.
Dear U.S.: I know it’s on a long list of fix it items and you’d rather go watch Clint’s WWII movies, but hey. Please. Somehow. There’s some real repercussions going on, some of which are right here in my living room.
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