Japan/China:
A little
while ago I wrote about Pearl Harbor. I thought I would follow up with this by
talking about Japan. Japan was involved with the war before they bombed Pearl
Harbor. The signing of the Tripartite Pact with Germany made it one of the Axis
powers. The Japanese were not just fighting us, they were invading China.
Movies:
Many of
the movies I found where from the Chinese perspective of the war. My favorite
movie about the Japanese invasion of China has to be “Empire of the Sun”
staring Christian Bale. This movie was made in 1987. It is so well done, that
you can almost forget that the movie was made so long ago. Bale plays an
aristocratic British boy living in China. After the Japanese occupation of
China, the young boy, James, finds himself alone in his now abandon home. He is
forced to leave when he runs out of food, and finds himself in even more
difficult situations. He eventually ends up at a POW camp where he befriends
many different people and creates a good trading network.
This was
not the last movie Bale was in on the subject of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Later, Christian
Bale did a second movie on a similar subject, but as an adult. The movie is
called “The Flowers of War”. Here Bale plays a selfish, undertaker who finds
himself at a convent filled with young female students. It is one of the only
places in Nanking, China where there seems to be refuge from the Japanese
invasion outside. A group of prostitutes work their way into the convent
despite the protest of the young lad in charge of keeping the girls safe. The
prostitutes and the female students fail to get along. The war outside the
walls of the church which was already bad is threatening to break through the
convents walls. In the end the undertaker’s heart softens and he helps sneak
the girls to a safer location, meanwhile the prostitutes sacrifice their lives
to helping the girls ensure the girls successful escape. This movie shows us
the harsh realities of war, but also shows that people can be at their best
when times are most brutal.
People:
When I was in middle school,
my father worked with two people. One was from Japan and the other was from
China. The two didn’t like each other, and most of the time, they wouldn’t even
talk to each other, preferring instead to send messages back and forth to each
other through my dad. This is how I first came to find out that the Japanese
and Chinese didn’t like each other.
In
college, I was in the Asian American Association. There was no one from Japan
in the club. Perhaps there were no Japanese students at my school, but I wasn’t
sure of that. There were people from other countries, China, Vietnam, Thailand,
etc. I noticed very quickly that none of them ever spoke highly of the
Japanese.
I also
had a Japanese foreign exchange student living with me when I first went to
college. She was attending the high school that I had gone to. The guy that I
was dating at the time was from Guatemala. He being from the country directly
south of Mexico, was not found of those from Mexico. Anyway, he asked the
foreign exchange student if she would ever marry a man from China. Which she
promptly replied “no” to. He kept questioning her on this. “Why not?”
“I don’t
like the Chinese.” “We don’t like the Chinese”. “It would never work.” “Our families
would never work.”
Finally,
I turned around and asked him: “Would you ever marry a Mexican?”
His
Answer: “No.”
“Why
not?”
“I don’t
like Mexicans.”
“Well
that’s the same with her.”
It is
easy as an American to fault others for not getting along with other people,
but we have very little history of long term war that other nations. The people
we have fought within our recent past we have made up with to a large extent.
Like Japan and China, Guatemala had to fight Mexico to maintain their independence
from them, but China and Japan have had hundreds if not thousands of years of
mistrust between each other.
Food
I’m really fond of Japanese
food, so when one of the dishes that came out of my “Hello Fresh” box of food
turned out to be udon noodles with vegetables and tofu I was really excited.
The dish was a lot easier to make then the last dish I made from them, but I
still managed to mess it up a little. I made the noodles too sticky and I
couldn’t get the tofu to sauté quite right. Still, the dish was tasty despite
the fact that I couldn’t get it to look quite like what was presented in the
picture of the dish. 
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan
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