CBR15Bingo: Guide (purports to be a guide to the relationship between China, Japan, and South Korea, and how to fix it)
This is a DNF for me but I did read most of it out loud to my mom in a rage, so I feel qualified to write a review. I hated this book and think it’s completely biased and under-researched, and the fact that he is selling this book as a qualified insider type look into the relationship between these three countries is borderline dangerous considering how unbelievably intellectually incurious and inaccurate it is. When I got this, I had the passing thought that maybe it would be lacking since it is written by a white British guy and I am trying to pick books written the people from the culture the book is about, but I went ahead and got it based off skimming the first chapter, which was a mistake. This falls into all the traps of reading a book about Asian cultures from an expat perspective. This is my least favorite book that I’ve engaged with this year.
Three Tigers, One Mountain purports to be a history of the conflicts between China, Japan, and South Korea, and how Booth thinks the relationships should be fixed. His thesis is basically that despite their historic bad blood, they should now all work together and overcome their pasts through forgiveness and reconciliation, thus ushering in a new era of pan-Asian prosperity. He also states that the Japanese have apologized a lot and the South Koreans and Chinese should accept their apologies and move forwards. I am coming at this from a background where I was partially raised by a Korean-American woman, so I am admittedly emotionally biased to the viewpoint of the Koreans.
However, Booth is just as favorably biased towards the Japanese, as seems to view it as an ideal place to live, versus South Korea, which he has a litany of complaints about. He says it’s dirty, polluted, the people are rude, the metal chopsticks are too heavy and they make his wrist hurt (“The chopsticks also make my right hand ache. I will grow to hate them during my time in South Korea…”), the architecture is ugly, the Korean taxi drivers are bad (“Japanese taxi drivers are courteous, efficient, law-abiding, and careful…My first Korean taxi driver…shoots off from the ferry as if he has just heard that the North is invading.”), the Koreans have a sense of “blithe entitlement,” the waitresses are rude, the Koreans talk “loudly and constantly” into their phones while the Japanese do not, the Koreans are on their phones too much in general, they spit “with abandon,” Seoul is “unhindered by regulations, planning or poor taste,” he doesn’t like K-Pop and claims to not even understand what it is, etc, etc, etc. He legitimately seems to be disgusted by the country and the people as a whole, down to their chopsticks! Having used both metal and wooden chopsticks, metal ones do not make your wrists hurt, they are not made of lead.
This nonstop complaining made his thesis of reconciliation and the Koreans getting over what the Japanese did to them ring very hollow. Why would they want to reconcile based off this book when he insults their temperament, culture, architecture, and driving? It was honestly shocking for me to read because I was excited to learn more history and I just got a book full of travel complaints based off anecdotal experience. He also lacks intellectual curiosity and disguises it behind “funny” insults, as with his paragraph on K-Pop. If there is a genre of music that is so popular that it is a chunk of the Korean economy and is exported around the world, wouldn’t you as a journalist want to learn about it and why it is so popular? But no, he prefers to sling some throw away jokes about the music having “the vocal nuance of a car alarm,” which is just so ignorant and dismissive of how hard these singers work for years and what great singers and performers they actually are. Listen to Onew or Jonghyun and then get back to me. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-Egdk8z8ms or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lSSIQ4lE78 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30VMl9ZkmgE)
I didn’t get very far into the Chinese section and I don’t know as much about China, so I can’t speak to the book’s accuracy there, but I suspect it’s more of the same. I regret that this book was purchased at full price and he potentially got royalty money from it. It mainly upsets me that people are going to pick this up as potentially one of the few books they read on the subject since Barnes & Noble stocks it, and they’re going to come away from it with a very skewed and inaccurate portrayal of the region. Disappointing and wrong-headed.
Warnings for: everything that comes along with the history of these three nations, mass killing, rape, horrific atrocities. During the Imjin War (1592-1598) the Japanese killed about 1/3 of the Korean population, cut off the noses of 214,000 Koreans and Chinese in 1597, pickled them in barrels, and shipped them back to Japan where the hill covering their tombs still stand in Kyoto (I wonder why there’s still tension!?!?).