Toranaga wrote:I wonder how "marriage" can turn into "China vs Japan"
i guess if you have a chinese that married to a JPese, or if you are like newbie lam-san who is half JPN and CHNese, then i guess that this can be topical. Reading this thread and just getting the feed back from the peeps here, to say the least, makes very interest reading. here is my take i guess:
I grew up in a VERY pro-chinese family, prolly much like elt, bmw, and maybe a bunch of youse out there as well. Everytime the topic JPN was brought up, it was preceeded with the adjective, "Those g0d-dam...", or "say-yun law-baat tau" (cantonese for daikon head, because that was the CHN perception of the JPN at the time). Never bought any JPN cars (until about a couple of yrs back). Not that these actions weren't warranted, my grandmother still has her pinky missing from a JPN soldier after an interrogation. she didn't want to give up the location of my mom (who was prolly about 6 or 8 at the time) who was hiding in a closet downstairs. My dad saw all that stuff happening to HK at that time (which fell to the JPN forces) so i can see where they are coming from. So here i am, already with a dislike for JPNese all the way until i met my wife when i was stationed in Okinawa as a U.S. Marine.
I learned that life in Okinawa at that time was no picnic either. My wife's Grand-dad was drafted in the JPN imperial navy....at gun point, leaving behind a pregnant young wife (who is going to be my wife's father) after about a yr of marriage. After sometimes at see, his ship was sunk somewhere and never returned. After the war, the US carved out some territories in JPN for military occupancy in some treaty that would allow XXX amount of land. Lawmakers in Japan, at that time only recently had taken over Okinawa (wich, as late as the 1800's, was it's own country and did NOT belong to JPN, but more about that later), had given 95% of that alloted space to be built in okinawa, whom the elder people in okinawa these days, still hold more of a grude to tokyo people than to the US people. It doesn't help that okinawa had (and still do) consistently one of the highest unemployment rate in all of JPN, and usually the poorest, as in income per capita. Stories of her had, growing up, eating just a small onigiri and miso soup for 3 meals, rivals some of my parents' days after the war.
So, as you can see, there are some people who can relate to both sides of the same coin. sorry for ranting...
- niko out.