An afternoon walk
There was a dirt alley not too far from our house. One afternoon, aunt Sung took brother Vinh and me for a walk in that alley. We had to walk by the Japanese soldiers who occupied the only villa and some of the houses in the neighborhood. The soldiers looked serious with stern faces, long rifles and swords. They talked but like they were yelling to each other. Two Japanese women in their colorful kimonos walked by them hastily into the villa.
I didn’t know to whom that villa and those houses belonged before the Japanese soldiers moved in. Later in life, I learned that many residents in the area had left the neighborhood to seek refuge in the countryside when Americans bombers started to drop their load over Japanese targets in Saigon. The armies of Japan occupied Vietnam in 1940 but allowed the French to continue to govern the country. Japan surrendered to the Allied in August 1945.
The dirt alley branched out several narrow passages. Vinh and I followed aunt Sung into one of those. We walked along the smelly sewer line covered with cracked cement blocks. We didn’t have to walk far. There were rows and rows of banana trees in the open field next to the vacant homes. Aunt Sung cut down a couple of bare plants. She trimmed the leaves off and took the trunks home. Once we got home, she used a knife and trimmed the trunk in a way to have 5 or 6 flaps on its topside. She was careful not to cut the flaps completely off. The inner end of each flap was still attached to the plant. The flap looked like the upper part of a duckbill. Using my left hand, I would lift the plant to shoulder level and parallel to the ground. Then with my right hand, I raised the cut end of each flap to form an angle jus...
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...hose words stayed with me. I can only remember what I saw.
The Big Prison was destroyed in the late 1950s, and its site was home of the National Public Library. The tribunal that tried Father remained as a tribunal but those French magistrates were long gone. The Catinat Police Headquarters was also flattened in the late 1950s. On its site was built the Main Office of the Ministry of Interior.
In the 1940s, Father fought for the Viet Minh who later declared independence from France as the Democratic Socialist Republic of Viet Nam. He was severely wounded, captured, and beaten by the French. In the 1960s and 1970s, his children who grew up in the South, served in the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam and fought against the Democratic Socialist Republic of Viet Nam. Two of his children were imprisoned in the victorious
Re-education Camp for several years.
The novel, Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, tells her family’s true story of how they struggled to not only survive, but thrive in forced detention during World War II. She was seven years old when the war started with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1942. Her life dramatically changed when her and her family were taken from their home and sent to live at the Manzanar internment camp. Along with ten thousand other Japanese Americans, they had to adjust to their new life living behind barbed wire. Obviously, as a young child, Jeanne did not fully understand why they had to move, and she was not fully aware of the events happening outside the camp. However, in the beginning, every Japanese American had questions. They wondered why they had to leave. Now, as an adult, she recounts the three years she spent at Manzanar and shares how her family attempted to survive. The conflict of ethnicities affected Jeanne and her family’s life to a great extent.
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York: BasicBooks, 1997. Print.
Soon after Papa’s arrest, Mama relocated the family to the Japanese immigrant ghetto on Terminal Island. For Mama this was a comfort in the company of other Japanese but for Jeanne it was a frightening experience. It was the first time she had lived around other people of Japanese heritage and this fear was also reinforced by the threat that her father would sell her to the “Chinaman” if she behaved badly. In this ghetto Jeanne and he ten year old brother were teased and harassed by the other children in their classes because they could not speak Japanese and were already in the second grade. Jeanne and Kiyo had to avoid the other children’s jeers. After living there for two mo...
Soon after Pearl Harbor was bombed, the government made the decision to place Japanese-Americans in internment camps. When Jeanne and her family were shipped to Manzanar, they all remained together, except her father who was taken for questioning. After a year he was reunited with them at the camp. On the first night that they had arrived at there, the cam...
The Vietnam War: A Concise International History is a strong book that portrays a vivid picture of both sides of the war. By getting access to new information and using valid sources, Lawrence’s study deserves credibility. After reading this book, a new light and understanding of the Vietnam war exists.
Okihiro, Gary Y. Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996.
Beginning in March of 1942, in the midst of World War II, over 100,000 Japanese-Americans were forcefully removed from their homes and ordered to relocate to several of what the United States has euphemistically labeled “internment camps.” In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston describes in frightening detail her family’s experience of confinement for three and a half years during the war. In efforts to cope with the mortification and dehumanization and the boredom they were facing, the Wakatsukis and other Japanese-Americans participated in a wide range of activities. The children, before a structured school system was organized, generally played sports or made trouble; some adults worked for extremely meager wages, while others refused and had hobbies, and others involved themselves in more self-destructive activities.
Japanese- Americans were being evacuated along the west coast into internment camps by their zone districts. Uchida, a current college student, lives under the constant fear of “voluntary evacuation” areas by the military, but the spiteful comments around her campus has been increasing. Many of her classmates had gone home to stay with their families or take over the family duties because the head of their families have been taken. Most of these Japanese- Americans were first and second generation Americans, who grew up here and knew America to be their “home” country. As Uchida says, “We tried to go on living as normally as possible, behaving as other American citizens. Most...had never been to Japan. The United States of America was our only country and we were totally loyal to it.” Eventually, her zone gets called for evacuation so she returns home - a place where her family has lived for fifteen years. Her sister, the head of the family in lieu of her father, brings home tags that had the reference to the family number and a few suitcases that they can carry their supplies in. The family proceed to their well- guarded designated place. The author recounts, “I could see a high barbed wire fence surrounding the entire area, pierced at regular intervals by tall guard towers...I saw armed guards close and bar the barbed wire gates behind
During World War II, countless Japanese Canadians, and Americans, were relocated to internment camps out of fear of where their loyalties would lie. Because of this, those people were stricken from their homes and had their lives altered forever. Joy Kogawa’s Obasan highlights this traumatic event. In this excerpt, Kogawa uses shifts in point of view and style to depict her complex attitude and perception of the past.
The article provides background information which helps to explain how the Japanese soldiers were able to commit such atrocious attacks on Chinese citizens with seemingly little or no remorse. From a young age, Japanese children had a hatred for the Chinese engrained into them through propaganda by their teachers, textbooks, and even through the toys ...
To conclude, the Rape of Nanking was a terrifying event, which has, throughout the impact of the Japanese government and the fear of the people who survived, happened to be designed to disappear with time. History textbooks go over the subject along with the individuals whose reality that was; have already been made into a terrified silence. This story nevertheless, must be shared. Three hundred thousand Japanese men and women were brutally raped and killed over a long amount of time, a period where there was clearly no escape. Iris Chang goes back and reveals the incidents and the reasons behind the concealing, in such a way that simply cannot be forgotten about.
Herring begins his account with a summary of the First Indochina War. He reports that the Vietnamese resisted French imperialism as persistently as they had Chinese. French colonial policies had transformed the Vietnamese economic and social systems, giving rise to an urban middle class, however; the exploitation of the country and its people stimulated more radical revolutionary activity. Herring states that the revolution of 1945 was almost entirely the personal creation of the charismatic leader Ho Chi Minh. Minh is described as a frail and gentle man who radiated warmth and serenity, however; beneath this mild exterior existed a determined revolutionary who was willing to employ the most cold- blooded methods in the cause to which he dedicated his life. With the guidance of Minh, the Vietminh launched as a response to the favorable circumstances of World War II. By the spring of 1945, Minh mobilized a base of great support. When Japan surrendered in 1945, the Vietminh filled the vacuum. France and the Vietminh attempted to negotiate an agreement, but their goals were irreconcilable.
“Wake up, wake up, son. We must leave now.” He opened his eyes and looked outside; it was still very dark and rainy. “Where are we going, Mom?” he asked while crawling out of bed sleepily. When they left the house for the train station, it was only four o’ clock in the morning, and the boy thought that his family was going to visit their grandparents whom he had not seen for ten years. The next morning, they arrived in Nha Trang, a coastal city in Central Vietnam, where his father told him that they would stay for a while before going to the next destination. They went to live in the house of an acquaintance near the fish market. Every day they would stay inside the house and would go out only when it was absolutely necessary, especially the kids who now had to learn how to be quiet. They learned how to walk tip-toe and to talk by finger pointing; few sounds were made. Every sound was kept to the minimum so the neighbors and the secret police would not be aware that there were new people in town.
Stories about war and implements of such can be observed throughout the course of Japanese history. This shows the prevalence of martial training and the profession of arms as a tradition that has not faded since ancient times (Friday and Humitake 13).
In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie noticed while living in the Everglades that some of the Indians started leaving the town and heading east. She also noticed that the animals started to scatter as well. Janie asked one of the Indians why they were leaving and he said that there was a hurricane approaching. The park ranger that guided us on the slough slog informed the class that this is a fact. The animals as well as the sawgrass know when hurricanes are approaching. The Indians these days know when a hurricane is approaching as well. Yet, these days they most likely find out from the weather channel reports on their big-screen TV's in their casinos instead of analyzing whether or not the sawgrass is blooming! It would have been interesting to have had class this Friday to see for ourselves if the blooming of sawgrass is indeed a fact now that Hurricane Michelle is approaching.