Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood

Average Rating:
4.625
32 Reviews
Categories: , , , , , , , .
TitleLost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood
Publication TypeBook
Year of Publication1998
AuthorsKim, Richard E.
Number of Pages196
PublisherUniversity of California Press
Abstract

"From 1932 to 1945, the Japanese occupied Korea. Organized in seven vivid scenes, Kim's fictionalized memoir tells the story of one family's experience, as told by the boy. The narrative starts in 1933 with a dramatic iced-river crossing into Manchuria, when the boy was just a year old, a story the boy knows from the many times his mother has told him the tale. Next scene and we're in 1938. The boy and his family have moved back to Korea, where the boy is the new boy in school and is learning new routines like bowing his head toward where the Japanese emperor is supposed to be in Tokyo." (text taken from Amazon)
URLhttp://www.amazon.com/dp/0520214242

Supplemental Contributions

Members of the community have contributed the following materials as supplements to Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood.

Title Attached Files Contributed By Contributed On Link

Japanese Expansionism leading up to WWII

Lost Names, by Richard Kim, is an excellent narrative of the Japanese occupation of Korea prior to and during the Second World War. To get a...

1 Shawn E Zetzer 2/26/15

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Lost Names - Names & 5 Themes of Geography

Scenes from a Korean Boyhood is a wonderful book about the Japanese invasion and occupation of Korea from the early to mid-20th century. The...

1 Aruna Arjunan20 2/10/14

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Japanese Occupation Lesson

An analysis and learning opportunity focused on Japan's military occupations of China and Korea authored by Timothy Riley.

 2 NCTA Work Projects 11/27/12

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Lost Names unit in two parts

Lost Names unit for high school

 2 Ashley Quinn 11/9/11

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Average Rating:
4.625
32 Reviews

Reviews for Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood

3

Posted By: William Dawson

Posted On: January 15, 2020

I was asked to review this novel specifically for its potential usefulness in a classroom setting. I think it has some potential in the classroom, but I have a few concerns as well. The book is well written and is particularly notable for its descriptive language. It also does a very good job of presenting the perspective of a Korean child living during the Japanese occupation of the peninsula. Unfortunately, I also think that a true understanding of the plot and character development requires a knowledge of historical context that will be beyond most of the students that I work with.

In fact, I would be hesitant to recommend it to teachers in my middle school because I believe it is too advanced for the vast majority of the children at our school. Only a small number would have both the patience and ability to read it at all, and I don’t think any of them have the requisite historical background knowledge to truly comprehend it.

I think there is a great deal more potential to be found teaching this novel at the high school level. Certainly one would expect older students to have a greater understanding and appreciation for the use of descriptive language, as well as the question of identity faced by the protagonist. Even for high schoolers, however, I think that any truly effective teaching of the novel would require some time spent upon the historical scaffolding needed to understand the novel at the highest level.

I also have some doubt as to whether students would enjoy and be enthusiastic about reading this book. For all its strengths -- a readable narrative, a young protagonist, and real tension -- there are also weaknesses (in my opinion). Primarily, I think, there’s the problem of basic interest. I’m not sure how easily most students in my district would find it to identify with the main character and develop a compelling interest in his story (this due primarily to his precociousness, not his culture). I think student enjoyment might also be hampered because the tension and conflict within the story is mostly resolved by talk and the passage of time, rather than gripping, climactic scenes.

Weirdly enough, I also felt the book also has a notable western bias, despite being a story told by a native Korean who actually lived through the times he describes. Partly this is due to the Christian faith of the main characters. Again, knowledge of historical context is vital in order to understand this “non-exotic” fact of a story with a setting that might be considered exotic by most western readers. I can’t rewrite Mr. Kim’s biography, but I still feel that the story would have more appeal and educational relevance if it were told by a character with a more traditionally Korean spiritual outlook. Additionally, I also feel that, while the author took great pains to present all of the characters in the novel as realistic characters with strong cultural inclinations alongside more basic human emotions and internal conflicts, the overarching story is told from a classically western “good guy vs. bad guy” perspective. It results in a somewhat confusing resolution, where the reader must be fairly astute in order to recognize the ongoing conflict for the protagonist.

All in all, I think this book might do OK with high school ELA students, particularly as an example of excellent descriptive writing and the internal conflict of the main character. As a social studies teacher, I am concerned that the book leaves too many holes in the larger historical context to be anything more than a supplement to one’s lesson plans or extra-credit reading for advanced students.

5

Posted By: Pamela Longo

Posted On: January 5, 2020

For the boy-narrator of Richard E. Kim’s Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood, replacing the family name with a Japanese name is one of the many indignities of Japan’s occupation of Korea. The boy comes of age while enduring occasional beatings from his Japanese teachers, suppression of his native language, and eventually hard labor at an airfield he and his classmates are conscripted to build in the waning months of World War II. All the while, life manages to go on. While there is much he does not understand about the world and his father’s past in the Korean resistance movement, the boy grows in maturity and cleverness, discovering his sense of self amid the privations of colonial oppression and war.

The themes of self-discovery and intergenerational endurance will contribute to the book’s appeal to a high-school or young-adult audience. Readers will find the work more rewarding if, like the narrator, they acquire comfort with paradox and ambiguity—not the least of which is Kim’s insistence that the book fictionalizes events he experienced in his youth. For all the particulars of characterization and plot, Lost Names captures a sense of the Korean spirit and human resilience while maintaining a depth of character among both the Korean and Japanese figures it portrays. The result is a nuanced depiction of life under occupation, the meaning of survival, and the ability of each generation to shape its history. Recommended pairing with twentieth-century East Asian history, world religions, and ethics.

5

Posted By: Donald Yuhouse

Posted On: December 30, 2017

Don Yuhouse
Dr. Brenda G. Jordan
Book Review “Lost Names” by Richard E. Kim
28 November 2017
After allowing a few weeks after the reading of this novel to process the information, this is a recommendation must read to anyone interested in a Korean perspective of WWII. “Lost Names”, through the eyes of a boy and his family, the reader is painted a fascinating picture of occupied Korea. The trials and tribulations of the family trying to hold onto their values, culture, beliefs, and their name.
The story unfolds and, as the reader, the characters names are never given. It is quite perplexing and the plot unfolds without that attachment to a character with a name. A wonderful way to give the reader a sense of misplaced, or better yet, no identity. Who are you? Who am I? Where do I stand in the world? Do I make a difference? As a people, the Korean people were treated as a colony and forced to learn Japanese language and customs. Eventually leading to the forced taking of a Japanese name and surrendering your surname. It is a personal ethnic cleansing without the actual act of killing. The author, in this reader’s opinion, appears to be the narrator and the boy in the story. Albeit, in the closing, the author refutes this belief and states this book is a fictional work. The book is well written and leaves the reader wondering if it is fiction or not.

5

Posted By: Jeremy Jukus

Posted On: January 19, 2017

I found this book to be a fairly enlightening experience in regards to how the Japanese treated the Koreans while occupying them. While reading I began to draw parallels to the movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the US Government to “educate” Native American children. The idea of the time was to “Kill the Indian, save the child” by eliminating the learning of their traditional culture and history and converting them to Christianity. They also forced them to learn and speak English in an effort to eliminate their native languages; all in a vile campaign to “Americanize” them and destroy traditional roots. From what Author Richard E. Kim describes in this fantastic novel, it appears the Japanese had studied their lessons on American history.
What makes this book so profound is how simple is. In very plain and easy to understand text, the narrator explains the situation of his family and people, and bluntly describes the propaganda, disrespect, and brutality of the Imperial occupiers. Throughout the novel we see the physical abuses they serve to those who are deemed as potential problems or those who resist against their rule, as seen with his father and Korean teacher. But then we see the disrespect, and the attempts to eliminate Korean culture through their initiatives. For instance, we see early on that they force the children to conform to the worship of the Japanese Emperor and Shinto practices, but as time goes on it gets more and more severe, as they are forced to abandon their language for Japanese, and eventually surrender their old names for new Japanese ones!
Clearly this novel provides excellent insight into the practices of Imperial Japan, who echoing the Americanization of Native Americans, sought to Japanify conquered peoples and erase their traditional identities.

5

Posted By: Jeremy D. Hess

Posted On: January 17, 2016

Starting 23 years into Japan’s occupation of Korea, Richard E. Kim’s fictional novel is based on real people and real events. It begins with a mother recounting to her son a story about their family when the son was one year old. The young family of three was trying to start life by leaving Korea after the father’s parole time was up. He had spent several years in prison after speaking out against the Japanese occupation. The book, told in the first person of the son, is a series of vignettes in chronological order but often skipping years in between. In the second chapter, the family has returned to Korea, what is today North Korea. The son tells of his experience growing up with a influential, yet compassionate father and living in a Korean society that is ruled by entitled Japanese. Throughout the book, the reader sees, through the eyes of the young boy, the Japanese effort to change and manipulate Koreans into believing the Japanese way, including making them change their names, propaganda films and radio, and termination of speaking Korean in schools, among other things. In the Koreans, the responses are subversion, longing to be free, anger, and even forgiveness and mercy in the fall of the Japanese empire. The book showed strong feelings of pride in Korean culture in the face of foreign occupation and a palpable difference in Japanese and Korean culture.

I did enjoy the book, so much so that I read it in two days, which is abnormal for me to read a book that quickly. In a classroom setting, it would be good for many themes and concepts related to a literature class. For Social Studies, the book is very specific to time and place, so it would have to be use in an East Asian or World War II era history class. Although, it could be used to illustrate what happens in occupied countries between the perpetrators and the victims and the ways occupiers try to keep control with propaganda and forced assimilation of culture. I do believe it is a little too old to use in a World Geography or World Cultures class as the setting was over 70 years ago.