When author Richard Kim originally published his short story Lost Names in 1970, it was written as a fictional work infused with real characters and past events, which aimed to illustrate the historical Japanese assimilation of the Korean peninsula. In the novel, Japan’s gradual assimilation practices and wartime mobilization are viewed through the eyes of a young Korean boy. As the boy grows older, Japan’s assimilation tactics and wartime mobilization methods also grow in severity and pace. Furthermore, through him, we see the different affects the Japanese practices had on the Korean people.
Throughout the book, the boy witnesses many Japanese tactics. Of these various tribulations, perhaps the most bitter felt is the forced name change. All the Koreans are required to relinquish their ancestral name and adopt a Japanese surname. Children whose families have yet to undergo the change are dismissed from school until their parents have registered their new identities. In fact, the school is used to implement many of the assimilation policies. Korean cannot be spoken in the classroom; anyone who is caught speaking their native language is fined. The money …show more content…
They were a small island country in the midst of a war with the world's most powerful countries. To compare it to Korea's earlier calamity, they were a shrimp in a fight between whales. Though the policies were cruel, they did what they thought they needed to do to survive. If they lost control of their colonies, they would lose the war, and their colonies' resources were taken because they were needed for the war, like many earlier colonizers.
Though the young boy in Lost Names, Richard Kim portrays the assimilation policies and wartime mobilization of colonial Japan in Korea. The affect on the Koreans is palpable and present. Yet however brutal these policies were, looking at them through Japan's perspective makes them seem