macbook_amateur

She has a favourable opinion of Japan. In fact, she's visited Japan! lol. Like I said in my previous reply, she talked with a few Japanese soldiers and realized that a lot of them were just drafted and hated what they were doing. She believes that many of their Japanese soldiers were good people. She only has ill feelings towards the commanders and officers of the army because she believes they did the worst things.

No. She does think that the commanders and officers were evil though.

She tells me that one of the Japanese troops would come stay overnight in their town because they had nowhere to sleep, and some of them would just stay at their school. One time at school a bunch of her classmates decided to have a conversation with them, and the soldiers told them that they were just students, and they hated being soldiers. They said that one day they got home from school and just got drafted into the army and they didn't want to go to war. My grandma felt really sorry for them and felt that a lot of them were good people.

She hates the commanders and officers though because they were the ones who were responsible for capturing people and committing violence.

Yea she definitely knew about this. All the girls knew that if you were a young girl and you were caught you were either 1. raped 2. taken as a comfort women 3. killed or all three.

She always tells me this story about how when she and her sister were running and hiding, her sister, who was a bit older than her would smear her face with charcoal from their wood stove to appear "uglier" in hopes of not attracting any attention.

No. They were a small town of farmers and they had guns, but there is no way they could've taken on soldiers. All they could do was hide or run.

1. Like the replies said, Japan has officially apologized for what they did. However, a lot of countries in the area still don't fully buy it because of some of the things Japan has done (Like neotiger said, putting WW2 criminals in their national shrine). I know in Hong Kong there are frequent protests against the Japanese government every year because of this issue.

2. About half my family on my mom's side is here in Canada, and the other half is still in Hong Kong so she kind of switches back and forth between places lol. Right now she's in Canada

3. I should totally do that! One of the reasons I really enjoy hearing her stories is because all the knowledge and experiences that our generation knows about WWII is through books, movies, and etc. To us, it's something in the distant past that we will never experience first hand. For her though, this was a real experience. She actually saw Japanese soldiers and felt the fear of being caught by them and has a very different perspective of it.