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 language 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