Yoko Kawashima Watkins is of Japanese ancestry but was born in Harbin, Manchuria in 1933, then moved to North Korea where she lived with her family while her father worked as a Japanese government official during World War II. She lived in a bamboo grove in Nanam until 1945, when the Russian and Korean Communist forces, angered at years of Japanese oppression, escalated their warfare and drove hordes of Japanese people out of the country. Yoko lived a comfortable life in the bamboo grove until the age of eleven, when she, her mother, and her sister Ko were forced to flee to Japan and leave her father and brother Hideyo behind. After her harrowing ordeal as a refugee she learned how to survive and persevere. Watkins worked hard, became educated in Kyoto, and learned English well.....
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