Yoko Kawashima Watkins was born in 1934 in the Japanese-occupied Chinese province of Manchuria. She then spent the first eleven years of her childhood in the northern Korean city of Nanam, where her father worked as a Japanese government official. In 1945, as it became clear that Japan was losing the war against the Allies, angry Koreans sought vengeance against Japanese residents living in their country for decades of Japanese oppression. Yoko fled with her mother and sixteen-year-old sister to Japan. After several months, Yoko's brother arrived there safely too. In 1976 Yoko first questioned her brother about his trek from Nanam all the way to Seoul. He died within weeks of recounting his tale, and it wasn't until 1986 that his sister finished So Far from the Bamboo Grove, the story of their escape from Korea.
Korea under Japanese rule: 1910-1945. Korea is a peninsula stretching from mainland China and Manchuria toward the islands of Japan. For centuries Japanese emperors regarded Korea as a foothold for expansion into Asia. In 1904, when fighting broke out between Russia and Japan for control of Korea and Manchuria, Japanese troops overran Korea.
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