Timothy

media type="youtube" key="_M2Io10hF6Y&hl=en&fs=1" height="344" width="425"

My video....

Choose a western fairy tale, which involves children’s relationship to their parents, and compare the attitude in that tale with the attitudes expressed here. What strikes you as familiar? Where do you see differences?
 * Filial Piety**

Usually, Asian fairy tales emphasize the importance of son or daughters’ obedience to one’s parents. Tales usually involve son and daughters devoting themselves to their parents. Most of the time, the children suffer while the parents do not. For example, there is a story of Kuo Chi, who lived during the Han dynasty. He was very poor and lived with his wife, a bady son, and his mother. Since the family was very poor, there was not enough food and Kuo Chi’s mother usually gave her food to her grandson. Kuo Chi thought that there is only one mother while he can get more sons if he wants to. Therefore, he ends up killing the baby. Another tale would be Min Tzu’s story. Min lost his mother at a young age, and got a stepmother. The stepmother mistreated Min, but Min never complained or hated her for mistreating him. In fact, parents in western fairy tales also have parents who do not suffer at all and sometimes scold their children, but the difference is that the children do not often voluntarily show affection to the evil parents For example, in the tale of Cinderella, the stepmother and sister maltreats Cinderella. However, Cinderella does not show any voluntarily devotion to her stepmother. She obeys her stepmother, but only because the mother forces Cinderella. From comparing the western and eastern fairy tales, I found a huge difference. I realized that eastern tales focuses more on the voluntarily devotion to parents, while western tales do not. I think the main reason for this lies on the impact of Confucianism. Many of the eastern countries had Confucianism as their religion while Confucianism in western countries was very rare. Since Confucius emphasized the willingly devotion to parents, I think many of the eastern fairy tales mostly from China focuses on the theme of voluntarily commitment to parents.


 * Rape of Nanking**

I just read the introduction of the book called Rape of Nanking, but I was able to learn many facts about the rape of Nanking. The introduction is only fifteen pages long, but this passage not only contained the author’s opinion on the Rape of Nanking, but also some shocking and horrible statistics that were very hard to believe. I have never known that the death toll during the Rape of Nanking exceeded the number of victims during the Nazi Holocaust or the number of death when two atomic bombs devastated Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I knew many women were raped during the Rape of Nanking, but I never expected the number to be as many as 20000 to 80000. The methods of raping used by the Japanese were as shocking as the statics.

Much more surprising fact was that this historical event was properly informed to the world just few years ago. According to the author, not many American textbooks on the World War 2 did not describe anything or mentioned only few sentences about this devastating massacre. Indeed, The American Heritage Picture History of World War 2 written in 1966 was one of the most popular textbooks in America, but did not contain even a single word describing the Rape of Nanking. Personally, this fact frustrated me very much because the case is very similar to the case of Korea comfort women. Japanese too invaded Korea during the World War 2, and forced many Korean women to become sex slaves, but, this issue is also not very well known to the world. So, I could feel myself become sympathetic toward the author of this book and become very interested in this book.