Sad Peninsula

by Mark Sampson

  “She is going to study,” her mother said one day in their dark kitchen, chopping vegetables for a stew.

  “The hell she is,” her father retaliated from the washtub, where he stood scrubbing the day’s grease off his hands from his new job in a munitions factory. The girl watched them argue while spooning mashed rice into her baby’s sister’s mouth. “No daughter of mine will be caught in a school,” she heard her father say.

  “There’s a small academy for girls near the police station. I found it on my way to market. I’ve already paid the tuition. I’ve already arranged it. She is going to study. Next year.”

  “ Aigo! To what end?” her father snarled. “How will this help us? To have our daughter at a desk all day, learning to read and speak Japanese? How will this help you? You can barely keep up with your housework as it is. Aigo!”

  “You don’t know what the future will hold, my friend,” the girl’s mother said, dropping radishes into a dented pot of boiling water. “You can’t say how it might help us to have at least one of our children properly educated.”

  “Must everything change?” her father sighed as he dried his hands and then collapsed into his flimsy wicker chair near the door. To the little girl’s eyes, his now-clean hands looked weak and shrivelled as they fell limp in his lap, like two dead birds. He spoke almost to himself. “They have taken my fields, forced us to live in this city with less land than a dog. And now girls — girls — going to school. Must everything change?”

  “Yes, it must,” her mother replied, putting the lid on the pot and wiping radish juice off the knife with a rag. “I cannot watch her twenty-four hours a day. And I will not bear the thought of her wandering these streets unsupervised. I will not bear it.” The girl watched as worry fell over her mother’s face then, a shifting in the han that flowed through her. “She is going to school. She’ll be safer there.”

  And the little girl felt that tickle in her mind, the ache for wisdom. “Safer from what?” she asked from the table. But to her surprise, her mother would not answer.

  So here was the little girl in school, grappling with that ache, these questions, this sense of entitlement instilled deep within her. She perhaps learned more slowly than the other girls that some questions were okay to ask, questions like when? and where? and how much? — but others, like why?, were not. “Why” seemed off limits; “why” was a waste of time and reached for answers that existed beyond the outskirts of the teachers’ patience. Questions like: Why can’t I eat rice while sitting at my desk? Why must I ask before I can go to the bathroom? But also: Why do we stand each day at the beginning of class to sing the Kimigayo, the Japanese national anthem? Why is there a picture of Emperor Hirohito on the wall above the blackboard? Why must we bow to it several times when we finish singing? And why have you given me a Japanese name — Meiko? I hate this name. It sounds so babyish. This is not the name my mother calls me. It alarmed the girl how forcefully 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 langua
ge 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 were partly the source of her grief. “Are you insane!” she wept as she shoved his arms away. “Don’t you realize that your sons are as good as dead? As good as dead! Their lives mean nothing to the Japanese. They will put them right up … up on … on the front lines …” Meiko and her baby sister watched as their mother choked on this knowledge as if it were poison. Over days and weeks, Meiko’s father would try different ways to comfort his wife, and grew frustrated at his inability to do so. This precipitated even more arguments between them. Their fights raged for hours in the evenings, growing so intense that Meiko and her sister had to hide away from them in the small bedroom they shared.

  It was on a morning during the height of these battles that Meiko, now thirteen years old, discovered the sticky marks of blood that had arrived overnight in her underpants. She found them while dressing for school. She did have an inkling about these blood marks, suspecting that they were not uncommon for a woman. She sometimes found faint droplets of crimson left behind in the squat toilet if she used the bathroom immediately after her mother. But still, Meiko convinced herself that this blood was a dire omen of illness, and to share this news would only add to her mother’s stress. She found a rag to place between her legs before dressing and hoped the bleeding would go away. Yet the discharge got worse the next day and worse still the day after, until Meiko had to discreetly drag her mother into the bathroom, close the door and show her what was happening.

  At first, a blush of pride swept over her umma. “Oh my wise little crane, this just means you are becoming a woman,” she said, taking the girl’s face into her hands. “I should have mentioned something to you long before this.” She went on to explain how the girl should expect a number of days’ bleeding each month, and when it came she was to place a special kind of cloth in her underpants to catch the flow. But no sooner had her mother finished this instruction than a shadow darkened her face, as if a delayed reaction, an ominous and barely spoken secret, began sinking through her like a stone through water. “My sweet child,” she said, and began weeping. “We must figure out … what we’re going to do about this …”

  Do about what? Meiko thought. About the blood? Or about me becoming a woman?

  Meiko soon became the focal point of her parents’ arguments. Her father was adamant that she now leave school to get a job. The plant had yet again cut his wages, and even with the boys off at war he still struggled to feed his wife and two remaining children. “She could become a cleaner or errand girl,” he said. “Or she could use her Japanese to work in an office somewhere. That would bring in some money.”

  “Absolutely not,” her mother said. “We must find a matchmaker and get her a husband. Now that she is a woman.” Meiko’s mother knew that other families were rushing their teenaged daughters into a chungmae — an arranged marriage. Girls not much older than Meiko were getting paired up with neighbourhood widowers who were often twice or three times their age. Meiko’s father scoffed. “Marriage? So soon? She’s only thirteen. Besides, who in this neighbourhood could afford an acceptable dowry for a girl with seven years of schooling and good Japanese?”

  On a day during the peak of this bickering, Meiko spoke up for herself. “I don’t want a chungmae, and I don’t want a job right now,” she blurted from her ring of homework on the floor, interrupting her parents in mid fight. She climbed to her feet to face them. “I want to stay in school until I’m eighteen and then join the Jungshindae. To support you and father. And then, when the war is over, I want to find a yonae.” They both stopped to stare at her, nearly burst into laughter at Meiko’s use of that word: yonae, a love match.

  “You naive fool,” her father spat at her.

  “My little crane, this is not practical,” her mother said. “You don’t understand what is happening to our country. We must find you a husband right away. You shouldn’t —”

  “Mother, it’s you who placed me in school. It’s you who always said it’s important to learn everything you can. Why has the blood between my legs suddenly changed that?”

  Her father took two large steps across their wooden floor and struck Meiko hard on the face. She fell in a heap amidst her homework. He stood over her, trembling in rage. “What did my ancestors ever do to burden me with this life?” he quaked. “To live in a house full of vulgar whores? Am I not the head of this family?” He looked at his wife, at Meiko, at Meiko’s sister who was watching the fight from her bedroom door, her eyes filling with silent tears. “We’re all going to starve,” he said, then walked over to grab a jacket off the hook by the door. “Don’t blame me. We’re all going to starve.” And then he was gone outside, into a street vandalized with Japanese signs he could not read.

  Meiko remained in school mostly by default because her parents refused to agree on what to do with her. School seemed to be the safest place to be, even if every class simply groomed the girls to se
rve the Japanese empire. By Grade Nine, Meiko and her classmates had flowered into silent and hardworking servants of the Emperor, skilled at music and storytelling, experts at keeping their faces pleasantly devoid of emotion. They came to class with their hair tied into the long, twisted braids that were the Korean symbol of chastity, and their developing bodies were covered in the unflattering tent of hanbok, the traditional Korean dress.

  One day, their teacher announced they were having a special guest to class. She welcomed him in and told the girls he was a well-respected Japanese businessman. He took his place in front of the blackboard, his masculinity so foreign in the room. To Meiko’s eyes, he didn’t look like a businessman; he looked like an army sergeant. The teacher made some more introductions and then turned the class over to him.

  “How many of you have older brothers?” the man began. Several girls, including Meiko, raised their hands. “And how many of those brothers have been shipped off to fight for the Emperor?” None of the hands went down. “And how many of you have fathers who work in factories or on construction sites, barely making enough to feed whatever remains of your families?” Most hands stayed in the air, including Meiko’s. The man nodded as if he knew all along what the answers would be. “Well, I am here today to offer you all an opportunity. An opportunity to provide for your families in a way that your men cannot.” He told them that Japan was prepared to offer each girl a year-long job in a new textile factory in the Japanese city of Shimonoseki. The government would cover everything: their transportation to and from Japan, their accommodations while there, their meals and clothes and entertainment. And the jobs themselves would be some of the highest-paying in the Empire. “You’ll most likely make more money than your fathers, and you’ll be able to send those earnings home each month to help out your families. There will also be extra pay for those willing to work extra hours.”