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.

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. 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.

She actually didn't hear anything about it. I think that being a simple farmer kind of sheltered her from some of the worst atrocities because she didn't have good access to the news.

Luckily her house wasn't vandalized. When she ran to Hong Kong to hide, her parents stayed behind at the house. The Japanese came in waves through their small town throughout the years, and whenever there was a big group of them there'd be a warning and her parents would go hide in the mountains. When they were hiding a lot of the soldiers would take their livestock, and that was about the worst that happened to their home.

For her, restarting her life wasn't really hard I guess, because she was really young when she was running and hiding from the Japanese. Also, a year after the war she got married to my grandpa so in a way it was a fresh start and that's when her life really started. For the farmers in her town though, she knows it was hard because they had the tough task of rebuilding their farm, and many of them didn't have money.