Alex Fairhall on In Sup Shin Interview

Richard Kim: So we are starting interview with Alex Fairhall, who did a project regarding the Shin san. Can you briefly summarize what you did in your project?

Alex Fairhall: Uh, okay, so, using the interview that Sugimori sensei had done with In Sup Shin san, a Korean professor, I reviewed and translated the interview from Japanese to English. Experiences from the interview were about Mr. Shin’s time growing up during the war. He was just, I suppose, graduating elementary school, he was in elementary school years during the war, and he talked a lot about his experiences speaking Japanese and Korean, or how he wasn’t allowed to speak Korean at school or in public. There were special police who would come and round you up if you were caught speaking Korean or 00:01:00sharing ideals that opposed the, uh, the Japanese imposed government as they occupied Korea during that time. He also talked about just his general experiences with education and being forced to join the, I guess, manual labor force during the war. He briefly had to leave education and work, building bunkers and doing physical labor to help support the war effort in the area. That was mostly what I did.

Richard: How did you feel listening to those war memories that do not happen in “normal” times?

Alex: Frankly, they were frightening. It’s not something that I could personally imagine going through; being taken from my home to do, uh, being 00:02:00forced to do physical labor, being forced to speak a language that is not my own in education, being forced to do all of these different things. It’s just not something we have to deal with now, in these times of relative peace. So it’s scary, to me now, to try and think of how it must have been to live at that time. But I also think, and I was thinking this as I did the interviewing, I mean did the translating, that these types of memories are available to people, so they can understand, you know, that things are not the same as they were and we’re in a better place now.

Richard: Did you have any challenges regarding this project?

Alex: Umm, yeah, there were some challenges that came up. Mostly with translating the nuance in language, between Japanese and English. There was a 00:03:00little bit of, kind of, Korean and Japanese mixing, especially when he referred to names of places, or names of schools, sometimes he would use them interchangeably. And during the translation, I was unsure if I should write the names, how phonetically, like the Korean spelling, or the Japanese spelling, or what should I do, because he means the same place but perhaps there’s some difference in the context using Korean versus Japanese. There were also a couple of times in the speech when someone misspoke, or used words that I had no idea what they meant, old words. So, there were these kinds of problems.

Richard: Do you have any last words?

Alex: Once again, I’d like to say that I think this is a very, kind of, important project. Being able to share these memories of times of war and 00:04:00change. But, other than that, no.