Our School

Firstly, I thought it was interesting that there is not much information out there about the director, Kim Myung Joon. I could not find information of where he was born or his birthday. Just about what kind of films he produced and the university he graduated from. During the beginning of the film, when he is narrating, I thought he was North Korean because he used the word ‘Dong Moo’ to call the peers or the students. As far as I know, these kinds of words are only used in North Korea. However, he did not seem to have the North Korean accent (obviously). This made me realize how biased this film could be. We are looking at the Cho Seon people through the eyes of the director Kim Myung Joon and we do not know what scenes he used or didn’t use in the film. This documentary definitely had some negative views towards South Korea and was strongly against how Japanese people treated them. Because of this reason, I had mixed feelings towards this documentary. I saw the sufferings the Cho Seon people were going through and empathized for them. However, I knew the documentary was biased so I was not sure to what point of the film was completely true. I may be totally wrong here but I thought there were two divisions of the ‘Jae Il Dong Po’ (Koreans who reside in Japan). It is divided into ‘Jae Il Bon Dae Han Min Gook Min Dan’ (Korean residents union in Japan, 재일본대한민국민단) and ‘Jae Il Bon Cho Seon In Chong Yun Hap Hwae’ (Cho Seon residents union in Japan, 재일본조선인총현합회). North Koreans do not call themselves ‘Koreans’ they call themselves ‘Cho Seon In’. Even in North Korea, they do not call themselves North Korea, but North Cho Seon, and South Cho Seon for South Korea. As far as we know, Director Kim could have only shown Cho Seon students in the film to emphasize his views towards reunification of the nation. This is one of the reasons why I personally do not enjoy watching documentaries. You can never be too sure of what is being shown is real because of the director’s biased view towards that certain idea.

Is it because I am from South Korea that I feel this way? Or am I the only one? Honestly, I was a little offended when the documentary was giving off negative views towards South Korea. I mean, it is necessary to show different sides of the story, but this documentary completely made North Korea the ‘saviour’ for the students in Hokkiado School while South Korea completely neglected them. Perhaps it is because they are already closely associated with North Korea.

Despite all of this though, I did find the documentary moving because the film showed that the Cho Seon students are not different from us. It made me happy to see especially how naïve the students were despite the hardships brought onto them by the Japanese society. No matter who they are, they still play, share friendship, girls love famous Korean celebrity, and boys play in hardcore soccer team, just like any other students, including South Koreans and Japanese.