As for history, I guess all that historical study that kids do in school is about of the same kind I had to do in middle school and high school… I knew something about World War II once I graduated, but I didn’t know much about Rome, about the British Empire that most of the English-speaking world was once part of, about Asia, or even about my own (local, as in Saskatchewan) cultural history. I knew about the Riel rebellion, but only because teaching about Natives and Metis in Canada was fashionable then. Nobody told us of Riel’s mental breakdowns or religious fanaticism, either.

Still, I am surprised that Korea doesn’t look toward China unfavorably. There seems to be a kind of strong respect, more than anything, and a kind of optimism that China will someday be very powerful and lead the world. I don’t know if this optimism is tied to the hope of the end of American domination of the world, a kind of fellow-Asian pride, or the wish for a more amicable alliance with the world’s hegemon (and maybe a little reunification feeling has something to do with it…).

But I’m sure, over all of it’s history, China has done Korea almost as much bad as Japan did.

By the way: I think it’s likely that most of us know the popular American myth of Thanksgiving, but of course Europeans were celebrating the harvest all the time, all the way back to the time when agriculture first showed up. The American story shows a wonderful picture of unity between the Puritans and the Indians, but I’m not sure how much that reflects actual history. The Puritans seem to me to have been likely to be scared of the Indians and thinking of them as “dirty savages”; so it’s not hard for me to imagine the Puritans only using alliances to aid them in surviving the new and harsh environment of North America. Similarly, I doubt the Indians were so convinced that peace and brotherhood with these new strange people would be so easy. And, of course, all the Indian Wars after never get mentioned in the Thanksgiving story. They don’t really need to, because after all, they lost. And anyway, the bounty and freedom that America celebrates at Thanksgiving was only available because they lost. So the holiday is, implicitly, a celebration of their loss of the war.

But that never gets mentioned. Wonder why…?