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| Yoko Kawashima Watkins | |
Yoko Kawashima Watkins, author of several fictionalized memoirs set in Korea and Japan, died on December 8 at her home in Brewster, Mass.
Born in 1933 to a Japanese diplomat who was stationed in China and then northern Korea, Watkins and her family lived at the end of World War II in Nanam in northern Korea. In 1945, 11-year-old Yoko, her sister Ko, her brother Hideyo, and their mother fled their home in a bamboo grove to avoid the advancing Red Army and Korean communist forces. They took trains, hiked 45 miles to Seoul, and went to Japan where their family homes had been reduced to rubble by U.S. bombers. Watkins's mother died soon thereafter, and her father was in a prison camp in Siberia for several years before returning to Japan. Despite extreme poverty, Watkins finished her secondary schooling and attended Kyoto University where she was in an English-language program. She graduated and worked at a U.S. Air Force base as a translator. In 1952, Watkins married a U.S. pilot and soon moved to the U.S.
The family's survival as refugees was the subject of her books, So Far from the Bamboo Grove (1986), Tales from the Bamboo Grove (1992) and My Brother, My Sister, and I (1994). She won several awards, including the Parents' Choice Award in 1986 and Judy Lopez Memorial Medal in 1995.
Watkins made hundreds of school visits, speaking to thousands of children about being a mischievous child, about the value of being true to one's best self, and the importance of peace. She wrote personal answers to many hundreds of children, expressing her belief in each as a strong, good person.