by | 7 November 2005 · 10:45 am

Diary of an Japanese Schoolgirl, 1945

June 17, 1945

Today we went over what we’ll do at the presentation assembly, and this time we had Hachikuwa-sensei decide. Today was a spiritual training day for the whole school, and we did something different–we did hand-to-hand combat. Iwamaru-sensei told us many different stories. Then we piggybacked the person across from us and ran and did other things. The next station was Akuzawa-sensei’s hand grenade-throwing class. We used small balls for hand grenades and imagined that the large ball we used for the intergrade meet was the enemy’s head and threw the small balls at it. We threw the hand grenades with all our might, but they didn’t hit their target. Then we moved to Hachikuwa-sensei’s station, where we practiced striking and killing with a wooden sword. We faked to the left and faked to the right. Then after some time we went to Ishida-sensei’s station. We took our clothes off and practiced spearing someone. We used our foreheads to butt the chest of the person in front of us, thrust our hands into their armpits, and pushed with our feet firmly planted on the ground. In the end, only one person was still thrusting. Then when that was done, we went to Yoshikado-sensei’s station, where we practiced spearing. Yoshikado-sensei said, “They’re still there. Spear them! Spear them!” and it was really fun. I was tired, but I realized that even one person can kill a lot of the enemy.

August 16, 1945

Today at breakfast we heard very sad news from Miyaji-sensei. At long last, Japan was forced to surrender unconditionally to the Soviet-American-British alliance. It was because of the atomic bomb. On August 15, His Majesty said, “We have endured hardships and sadness, but we have been defeated by that atomic bomb, and all Japanese could be injured and killed. It is too pitiful for even one of my dear subjects to be killed. I do not care what happens to me.” We heard that he then took off the white gloves he was wearing and began to cry out loud. We cried out loud too. Watch out, you terrible Americans and British! I will be sure to seek revenge. I thought to myself, I must be more responsible than I have been.

SOURCE: Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese, by Samuel Hideo Yamashita (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 289, 307

Leave a comment

Filed under Japan, war

by | 6 November 2005 · 10:33 pm

Diary of a Kyushu Schoolgirl, 12 April 1945

Today will be a clear-weather attack. They loaded us into a car with the divine eagles who will attack and not return, and we drove straight to the waiting aircraft along Guidance Road. On the way we sang “Sinking from the Sky” over and over. Together with our teachers we pulled the camouflage netting off the squadron leader’s plane. The revolutions of the propeller on his plane, the one with a bomb on its belly, were fine. Motoshima’s plane made a buzzing sound. That was probably the exceedingly kind squadron leader. We climbed onto the starting car (in those days, when aircraft started their engines, their propellers would not always turn automatically, so many had to be started with a starting car) and went to the control tower to send off the pilots. When I turned around, the squadron leader and Motoshima, both wearing pretty Chinese milk vetch necklaces, boarded their aircraft and looked back at us. A plane covered with cherry blossoms taxied by right in front of us. We thought that we, too, should shower the planes with cherry blossoms and ran back to the barracks. On the way we met Kawasaki, who was riding a bicycle.

We picked as many cherry blossoms as we could and ran back as fast as our legs would carry us, but the planes had gone to the starting line and were about to begin taxiing down the runway. They were far away, and we were sorry we couldn’t run out to them. Motoshima’s plane was late and went to the starting line right in front of us. Then the squadron leader’s plane took off. It was followed by planes piloted by Okayasu, Yagyu, and Mochiki. The Type 97 fighters wagged their wings from left to right, and we could see smiling faces in all the planes. The plane piloted by Anazawa from the Twentieth Jinbu Squadron passed in front of us. When we waved branches of cherry blossoms as hard as we could, the smiling Anazawa, his head wrapped in a headband, saluted us several times.

Click! … when we turned and looked behind us, it was the cameraman taking our pictures. When everyone of the special-attack [“kamikaze”] planes had taken off, we just stood there for a long time, gazing at the southern sky, which seemed to go on forever. Tears welled up in our eyes.

We didn’t feel like talking, and when we were about to return together, we discovered Motoshima and Watai. Motoshima was crying unashamedly … when I asked, “What’s wrong?” he said, “My bomb dropped off, and I couldn’t take off. When I ran over to our squadron leader, he said, ‘Motoshima, come later. I’ll go ahead and will be waiting for you in that other world.’ I didn’t expect this, and I’m so upset! After squadron leader’s plane took off, I just sat alone and cried to my heart’s content.” Teary-eyed Watai added, “It is really a shame! I’m sorry.” All at once, the tears we had been stifling welled up, and we all cried together. They said that tonight was a wake for the squadron leader, so sake couldn’t be drunk. Horii, who came today, told jokes, and the men listened, but their minds were somewhere else. Since they cried whenever they thought about their squadron leader, who had such deep affection for his subordinates, and about the way he’d say “Motoshima, Motoshima,” they asked us not to say anything at all.

It was unfortunate that Motoshima and Watai weren’t able to body-crash together with their splendid squadron leader or to participate in the second general attack.

SOURCE: Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese, by Samuel Hideo Yamashita (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005),
pp. 230-231

Motoshima got his wish 4 days later. The diarist was among the high school girls “assigned to the quarters of the special-attack [“kamikaze”] pilots and told to look after them, which meant cleaning their quarters, doing their laundry, and mending their clothes” (p. 221).

Leave a comment

Filed under Japan, war

by | 4 November 2005 · 10:16 am

A North Korean Renegade in Seoul

Seoul’s Christian community offered me enormous material and emotional support. Religion is very attractive to North Korean renegades. The atmosphere of quasi-religious adoration in which we were raised in North Korea only partially explains this phenomenon; more important, I believe, is the thirst for affection–for love, even–every renegade feels. I don’t know whether I am profoundly religious, but I wanted to be baptized.

I was also lucky enough to receive support from a bank, which gave me a scholarship for the duration of my studies. Add to that the money I made from giving interviews and writing the occasional article, and I had few material worries.

Since my integration into South Korean life ultimately would have to take place through steady work, I joined Hanyang University. Its founder, Kim Yon-jun, was a strong advocate for human rights in the North. Many renegades had enrolled in his university, and I was encouraged to do the same. I chose international business as my major. All the students were much younger than I was, but they accepted me as they might an older brother. They liked me a lot and tried to help me however they could, especially with English, which I spoke poorly. Despite our amicable relations, many things they did put me off. They were always going out to cafes and restaurants, as though getting a soda from the dispenser and lying on the grass weren’t good enough. They were throwing money out the window! Life in the North had made me a bit of a Spartan. When students sat down cross-legged in front of me and started smoking, I had a hard time holding my tongue; you don’t do that in front of someone your senior. The North is hypertraditionalist. Friendships between members of the opposite sex is not the norm. When a man speaks to a woman his own age, he employs the familiar form of address, she the formal. Relations follow a strict hierarchy. Here, we were equal! Some of the female students were so self-confident, they hardly paid me any attention when I spoke to them.

I eventually got used to all this. I have fond memories of my days at the university, even though the leftist students often riled me. They always tried to make me see the shortfalls of the South Korean system of government. At least the North wasn’t corrupted by a fierce, never-ending battle for profit! Though I lacked the theoretical arguments to counter their claims, I wasn’t impressed. “Go to the North,” I told my contradictors, “and you’ll stop trying to excuse all Kim Il-sung’s failures. Go find out for yourselves.”

SOURCE: The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, by Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, translated by Yair Reiner (Basic Books, 2001), pp. 227-228

Leave a comment

Filed under Korea

by | 4 November 2005 · 8:00 am

Thomas Barnett on Fundamentalists vs. Evangelicals

Last weekend, I watched a thought-provoking interview on C-SPAN2’s Book TV with Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century and its follow-up Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating. He has some surprising recommendations about U.S. policies toward both Iran and China. Surprising for a Neocon. Not so surprising for a Realist.

The initial shocker to me was that the interviewer was a U.S. Congressman (Rep. Tom Feeney, R-FL) who could ask intelligent questions–and then wait for an extended answer. It doesn’t matter if he was Republican or Democrat, Representative or Senator. I was just impressed that Feeney could yield camera time for extended periods to a lowly, unelected book author. I haven’t been able to find a transcript yet, but the whole interview is available on (RealPlayer) video.

One insight I’ve been mulling over is the distinction Barnett makes between fundamentalists and evangelicals. Barnett sees the world as divided into a globalized Functioning Core (basically, the G20) and a Non-Integrating (often self-isolating) Gap. He sees fundamentalists–whether Muslim or Christian (and I would add, back-to-nature secularist)–as those who reject globalization, whereas evangelicals, in Barnett’s view, are some of the most ardent globalizers. Here’s my transcription of a bit of the tail end of the interview.

FEENEY: We only have a very brief time left. One of the many subpremises of your book, which is again a fascinating book, A Blueprint for Action, is that evangelical Christians may be the best opportunity to turn these Third World countries into a connected, friendly, peace-loving community. You point out that there are more people attending Christian services in China than in western Europe put together. Is this the peaceful version of the Crusades that’s going to bring world peace?

BARNETT: Well, you know, I really stress *not* making Islam the enemy. There are parts of every religion who are fundamentalist. They believe to be a true believer is to separate oneself from the rest of society. In the United States, we have the Amish, for example. They do this peacefully. What we see in the global Salafi/Jihadist movement are fundamentalists who seek separation through violent means. I think we have to distinguish between fundamentalists and evangelicals, of all religions, who basically seek connectivity through the spread of their faith. My argument is, it’s become a huge connective force, a very positive thing, and we need to seek to promote it as much as possible. Not surprisingly, evangelicals in this country are some of the biggest internationalists right now: most concerned about the environment, most concerned about human rights, most concerned about economic justice.

That rings true to me. I see the outgoing wave of U.S. missionary evangelists of my parents’ generation after World War II as the religious equivalents of the wave of secular Peace Corps evangelists of my generation. (I was never in the Peace Corps, but my wife was.) Even the Southern Baptist missionaries of my parents’ generation were much more internationalist than those fundamentalists who later took over the Southern Baptist Convention during the 1980s.

UPDATE: More on Thomas Barnett vs. Robert Kaplan on China and the U.S. here and here (via Simon World).

Leave a comment

Filed under China, Iran

by | 3 November 2005 · 6:12 pm

Defective Defector Redefects

A 31-year-old Japanese lady who defected to North Korea two years ago has given up and redefected to Japan. She had earlier spent time in the Aum Shinrikyo. The BBC has a few more claims and rumors about her saga. Somehow, I find the Jenkins-Soga saga more scintillating.

You know, it’s hard to find good utopias these days. The demand so far exceeds the supply that the price often takes a wasted lifetime to pay.

via Japundit

Leave a comment

Filed under Korea

by | 3 November 2005 · 5:46 pm

Famous Non-Hawaiian Prompts AP Style Change

Heavy news coverage of Hawai‘i’s most famous current sports personality has finally prompted the AP to conform its stylebook to reflect the meaning of the term “Hawaiian” as it is used in Hawai‘i rather than the meaning assigned to it in Webster’s. Nelson Daranciang of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reports:

Outside the state, few people know that all Hawaii residents are not Hawaiians. [My personal stylebook recommends rephrasing that as “not all X residents are Xians”–J.] For years, “The Associated Press Stylebook” and libel manual, a guide commonly used by newspapers around the country, said there was no difference.

That has changed.

The AP has informed its member organizations of an update to the stylebook on the use of the term “Hawaiian.” From now on, Hawaiians will be used only to describe members of the ethnic group indigenous to the Hawaiian Islands. “Hawaii resident” or “islander” describes anyone who lives in the state.

Previously, “Hawaiians” could be used to describe residents of Hawaii….

AP Honolulu Bureau Chief Dave Briscoe said, “We’ve actually been trying to get a change for years.”

He said the use of “Hawaiian” becomes an issue whenever a prominent person from Hawaii makes national or international news. He said the bureau has had to change Hawaiian to Hawaii resident in stories originating on the mainland describing teenage golfer Michelle Wie.

Wie is an American of Korean ancestry. She is also a Hawaii resident.

Briscoe said he had difficulty persuading AP to make the change, because the organization bases much of its stylebook on dictionary definitions. According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, Hawaiian is a native or inhabitant of Hawaii.

I remember having a go-round on this point in the comment thread of a Language Hat post a while back.

Leave a comment

Filed under Hawai'i

by | 3 November 2005 · 10:51 am

First Impressions of China after North Korea

The river crossing didn’t take long, two minutes, perhaps, of running across the ice with as little noise as possible. I still remember clearly the mix of emotions I felt just then. There was certainly fear–of getting caught and of what awaited me on the other side–but I also felt sadness. I was abandoning something indefinable that was reproaching me for leaving. … Those two or three minutes on the ice were like an eternity.

Though the area was supposed to be under surveillance, we didn’t see a single guard. Running across the border today is even easier: many more people are at the starting line, and the guards are more lax than ever. Just give them some money or a good pack of cigarettes and they’ll let you pass. Back in 1992, if they saw a fugitive, they would cry “Halt,” then start firing.

We arrived at our guide’s house tired and out of breath. We found him dressed in South Korean-made jacket and pants, which must have cost the equivalent of a North Korean worker’s monthly wages. He was a man bubbling over with plans, the first of which was to move to South Korea as soon as he had enough money saved up. “Going from the North directly to the South is impossible,” he said with effect, trying to bait us. But we weren’t going for it. We had taken the precaution of not telling him we were wanted by the authorities. While he was happy to help people make little “business” trips into China, he had no interest in running seriously afoul of the law. To help ensure he kept quiet about our crossing, I gave him a handsome wad of cash [sent by relatives in Japan], for which he was also supposed to find us a truck to Yonji–or Yongil, as we say in Korea–the capital of China’s autonomous Korean region. As we sat chatting that first night, we heard some astonishing things from our guide. We learned, for example, that he was actually a member of the Chinese Communist Party. It was totally baffling. Korean Communists were hard, austere ideologues–or at least tried to act that way–and here was this Chinese Communist proudly flaunting his wealth!

The next evening’s meal was as ample as the first. The guide’s wife claimed it was just the usual fare, but what was ordinary to them was gargantuan to me: there were many different dishes, and several had meat! I couldn’t believe my eyes. I felt as if I’d been invited to a feast for Party cadres. In the North, alcohol is very expensive; an average bottle sells for 10 won, one-tenth of a worker’s monthly wages. The most popular spirit, pai jou (white alcohol), comes from China. It costs 60 won a bottle and is usually reserved for special occasions. Here it was being poured into our glasses as an ordinary accompaniment to an improvised meal! … China was like paradise, and I began to sense the huge gulf separating the universe as I knew it and the world as it might actually be.

There were more surprises to come. After dinner, our host suggested we walk to a nightclub in the neighboring village. We accepted the invitation–though I couldn’t help thinking, Don’t these people go to work? It was nearing midnight, and we were only now stepping out! Finally, I worked up the courage to ask, “Don’t you have to wake up early tomorrow?” His answer left me stunned: it was “up in the air!” His next observation, though, is the one that really did me in. “In any case,” he said, “the important thing isn’t work; it’s to enjoy life.” I was speechless.

SOURCE: The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, by Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, translated by Yair Reiner (Basic Books, 2001), pp. 197-198

2 Comments

Filed under China, Korea

by | 2 November 2005 · 9:26 am

Diary of a Tokyo Civilian After Surrender, August 1945

August 16, 1945

The expressions on people’s faces haven’t changed much at all. When one meets people, instead of uttering the usual greetings, they blurt out, “What’s happened is terrible.”

This morning there was an air-raid warning and alert. At the company, we were told that female employees would be on vacation until there was a better sense of what would happen next. Whether I’m in the mountains or wherever, I just want to stay in touch. Apparently, government offices will tell us what procedures to follow. What in the world are they thinking of doing? I expect there is a mountain of serious problems, but what are the officials managing the country getting so excited about?

Haven’t they lost their power and been defeated? The military is calling for complete resistance and appealing to all citizens. This is a very difficult problem. The true nature of a people is apparent when they lose a war, rather than when they win, and the day has arrived when we should reveal Japan’s greatness.

Now that we’ve been defeated in war, I’m eager that our national identity as a people not be completely ruined.

August 17, 1945

Clear. Beginning today and for some time, it was OK to stay home from the company, but because I was the only one who knew how to handle mail transfers, I went to work. There were reports that the young military men haven’t accepted the peace and were still active, and wild rumors circulated. We were fearful of what couldn’t be foreseen, perhaps because we were hearing that everything was in chaos and that people were uneasy about the evacuation of women and girls and because as a people we had never experienced defeat. [There were widespread fears of rape by the victorious American troops.]

Today leaflets were dropped from friendly aircraft.

At Kanda Station I saw a flier plastered on a wall that read, “Both the army and navy are fine and believe that the people will endure,” and people had signed their names. As far as the feelings of military people were concerned, I thought this was not unexpected, but we already had had a statement from the emperor. If we are to build the future, don’t we have to begin clearing a path today? Dying is cheap. In the long history of the state, this defeat probably will not amount to very much, whereas the reconstruction that was about to begin could end up as a great achievement.

What was there to say? We did our best and were defeated. Only those who did not work as hard as they might have would feel any regret.

Take C, for example. While he was in the city, he was angry about everything and said he wanted to go off, even to the mountains, and I was surprised by the narrowness of his perspective. That may be a purist position to take vis-à-vis the country, but it was only his personal philosophy, one that was too beautiful, and it really hadn’t taken root or spread. C’s philosophy made me feel the need to broaden my vision.

SOURCE: Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese, by Samuel Hideo Yamashita (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 218-219

Leave a comment

Filed under Japan, war

by | 1 November 2005 · 9:35 pm

Korean Scholars Now Exploring Collaboration Issues

South Korean scholars are finally beginning to re-evaluate the sharp dichotomy between “collaborators” and “nationalists” in their narratives of the Japanese colonial period, according to an article entitled “War and the Colonial Legacy in Recent South Korean Scholarship” by Kyu Hyun Kim in IIAS Newsletter no. 38.

In the mainstream Korean narrative of the wartime period (1941-1945, or more accurately 1937-1945, dated from the outbreak of the continental war against China), Koreans are relegated to the position of victims. It was during this period that Japanese exploitation of Korean socio-economic resources, both material and human, reached its height. It was also during this period, according to most Korean scholars, that the Japanese colonizers tried to eradicate Korean culture by forcing Koreans to worship at Shinto shrines, by banning the Korean language from official use and designating Japanese as the ‘national language’ (kokugo), and by adapting Korean family lineages into the Japanese household system, compelling the latter to choose Japanese-style names. Koreans have come to refer to this set of policies, promoted under the ideological campaign of naisen ittai 内鮮一体 (Japan and Korea as One) as ‘ethnocidal policies’ (minjok malsal chôngch’aek 民族抹殺政策) through which the Japanese colonizers sought to eradicate Korean identity altogether, absorbing it into the ontological category of the Japanese imperial subject (kôkoku shinmin).

The wartime period was characterized as a pitch-black vacuum (amhûggi 暗黒期, the ‘era of darkness’) in which only certain elite members, the ‘pro-Japanese’ traitors (ch’inilp’a 親日派), were allowed to profit and flourish at the expense of the majority of Koreans. However, this characterization of the wartime period has also suppressed frank, open-minded investigation of the actual circumstances involving Japanese colonialism’s infiltration into Korean culture and society. Studying the colonial-period ‘collaboration’ between Japanese and Koreans was anathema for many years, especially under the dictatorial regimes of Syngman Rhee (1946-1960) and Park Chung-hee (1961-1979). Indeed, President Park, who seized presidential power through a military coup d’etat, was a direct progeny of Japanese wartime militarism, a graduate of the Manchurian Military Academy.

Democratization and rehabilitation of the South Korean public sphere in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following monumental protest and resistance against Park’s junta successors, finally opened the space to examine the collaborationist activities of the Korean colonial elite. ‘Progressive’ scholars and critics, riding the surf of democratization and liberalization and embracing hitherto-forbidden Marxist and radical-populist perspectives, challenged the whitewashing and exposed the lacunae found in historiography, literary collections and the biographical data of ‘collaborators’. Scholars excavated shrill pronouncements written by prominent writers, intellectuals, educators and government leaders of post-liberation South Korea, inculcating Korean youth to throw away their lives for the glory of the Japanese empire, or fictional works enveloped in a sheen of patriotic fervor and serene acceptance of the Holy War, looking to a future when Japan would emerge triumphant in the titanic struggle against the venal white races.

By the mid-1990s, this newfound freedom in exposing the past sins of the fathers and the scholarship it engendered moved into a new phase. While the democratically elected regimes of Kim Dae-jung (1997-2002) and Roh Moo-hyun (2003-present) have continued to struggle with ‘the dark legacy’ of the colonial period, South Korean scholars, now relatively unencumbered by the desire to subordinate such reflections to the political objective of overthrowing military dictatorship, have begun a long and arduous process of parsing through the legacy of the colonial period, engaging in long-overdue reflection on the possibility of post-colonial identity for Koreans.

via Hunjangûi karûch’im

Leave a comment

Filed under China, Korea

by | 1 November 2005 · 3:49 am

Aliens Invade NK Prison Camp

In the summer of 1982, my situation improved further. I finally made a friend. The camp had received two new prisoners, space aliens practically, whose extraordinary clothes and looks reminded us of our lost world. They were an elegant woman with dark glasses and her handsomely attired son, whose delicate white skin contrasted invidiously with our own, which the sun, wind, and snow had tanned into leather. Our jaws dropped when we saw them.

Within a few months their finely cut clothes would lose all their charm. The woman stopped wearing her glasses; she and her son looked just like everybody else in the camp. Less than a year after their incarceration, the boy, whose name was Yi Sae-bong, fell seriously ill and couldn’t move his legs. Fortunately his paralysis didn’t last. At first we had a hard time communicating, because having grown up in Japan, he only knew a few words of Korean; but he learned the language quickly and was soon able to tell me how he arrived in Yodok. He was a little older than I was and his family had lived in Kyoto, the city with the most powerful Chosen Soren cell outside the homeland. When the Party leadership in Pyongyang chose Han Duk-su to head the Japanese wing, the Kyoto cell protested. Han Duk-su, they said, was being parachuted in; he had never done anything for the struggle in Japan. The opponents backed down when they learned Kim Il-sung himself was backing the controversial nomination, but by this time the Great Leader’s embittered candidate was determined to exact revenge. Many members of the Kyoto cell wound up in the camps. They had opposed the will of Han Duk-su and, by extension, that of Kim Il-sung, and this was a crime that could not be easily forgiven.

Like so many who hadn’t understood the danger, Yi Sae-bong’s father decided to move his family back to North Korea. He planned to come first, then send for his wife, three sons, and daughter. Shortly after arriving, however, he was arrested for espionage and sent to a hard-labor camp. When weeks passed without a word, Yi Sae-bong and his mother came to North Korea to try to find out what had become of him. Instead of receiving information, they were arrested and sent to Yodok.

I loved to hear Yi Sae-bong’s stories about Japan. I was amazed by all its brands of beer-imported from all over the world–and by the huge black American soldiers that walked the streets. My imagination soared at the mention of France, England, Germany, and Czechoslovakia–the latter inspiring particular wonder. What most sparked my interest were the thick, juicy steaks people ate with a knife and fork. I wanted to know how they were cooked, what they were garnished with, the side dishes that accompanied them. I was sad I couldn’t imagine the taste of catsup and offended by the rampant wastefulness, which included the lighthearted dumping of half-eaten meals. More shocking was my friend’s contention that grocers sold fruits the whole year round. I was almost ready to suspect him of lying. It was either that or believe that Japan really was a paradise–a possibility that, despite my father and uncle’s warm recollections, I still found difficult to admit.

Yi Sae-bong was the person who really introduced me to Japan. I hassled him constantly for details about his school, the traffic, the movies, the department stores. I was amazed at his description of the automobile assembly lines, where robots put entire cars together in a matter of minutes. The most astounding things, though, were the toilets: they had chairs where you could sit and read a paper, or have a cup of coffee. It seemed so incredible to me. The first time Yi Sae-bong went to the bathroom at Yodok, he threw up.

SOURCE: The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, by Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, translated by Yair Reiner (Basic Books, 2001), pp. 119-121

Leave a comment

Filed under Korea