[Opinion] About Grandmothers

When a family goes through hard times, the mother, rather than the father, often becomes a strong buttress for the entire family. The virtue of women is that they embrace everything with their warm heart and tenderness. When they encounter with a crisis, however, they becomes warriors fighting their fate. Japan is no exception in this general observation. It was the `mother power` that revived the country from the devastation of the war. Japanese mothers at that time often had to skip meals for the rest of the family as they went through extreme poverty.

▷A Japanese novel titled `A Bowl of Noodle` begins with a scene when a mother and her two little sons visited a noodle restaurant in winter times and ordered a bowl of noodle. Living without the husband and father who was already dead, they were too poor to order three bowls. And it took some courage to order only a bowl for three people, especially in eastern culture in which pride matters. Her sons, feeling embarrassed and shamed as they were, understood their mother. She wanted to tell them to have courage to go through difficult times. Ten years passed and the two sons, now grown-ups, visit the restaurant again and order three bowls of noodle that look so invaluable to them. Their mother is now a grandmother with gray hair.

▷Ishihara Shitaro, governor of Tokyo province, was sued by a group of Japanese women after making disparaging remarks about grandmothers. He used to say `it`s meaningless for women to live without the ability to reproduce,` or `grandmothers are the most detrimental part of the civilization.` He is already known for his infamous way of seeing the people in the third countries potential criminals, but it still makes us wonder what on earth he was thinking about when he made the recent provocative remarks. It is not that out of sense in Japan, however, a country where the emperor himself keeps a patriarchic idea of forcing women to make sacrifice. Ishihara is representing the right in the Japanese politics and he doesn`t seem to mind about displaying his or the emperor`s patriarchic and chauvinistic ideas.

▷The Japanese rule approves only succession of male rulers, legitimizing a male-dominating hierarchical system. Apart from the underlying mindset of the society, Japan seems to have gone too far to the right given that a political leader made such provocative remarks without hesitation. We wonder, then, where it will get in the end. It is almost like denying the identity of the country by denying respecting the old mother generation.

Hong Chan-shik, Editorial Writer, chansik@donga.