The Big War: When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park

For Koreans in 1940, World War II had already begun generations before, in 1910. Occupied by the Japanese Imperial forces, native Koreans were forced to think of themselves as second-class Japanese, subjects of their fascist rulers. On the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, sister and brother Son-hee and Tae-yul Kim, ten and thirteen years old, learn that all Koreans have been ordered to assume Japanese names and forbidden to use their true names again. Son-hee Kim becomes Keoko Katayama and Tae-yul Kim becomes Nobuo Kateyama.

In their home, however, the two become aware of a developing Resistance movement. Their scholarly father is not allowed to be headmaster of the local school because only Japanese are allowed any position of leadership, but secretly he contributes writings to an underground Korean newspaper printed by their uncle. When the Japanese order all Rose of Sharon trees, the national symbol of Korea, destroyed, the Kim family save a small one that can be potted and hidden from the authorities. While the family is outwardly compliant, all their hopes are pinned on an American victory over Japan.

When her Japanese playmate Tomo warns Keoko of her uncle's coming arrest, her uncle flees to the mountains. Because of his sudden disappearance confirms her uncle as a traitor to the Japanese government, the entire family falls under suspicion. In their isolation, Nobuo takes comfort in his interest airplanes when he is forced to labor at building a Japanese airfield. Keoko, a gifted student, turns to her studies of Kanji (character writing), poetry, and her journal.

As the war drags on, daily life becomes more difficult as the Japanese drain Korea of its food, materials, and manpower to support their failing forces. Hoping to help his family get more food, Nobuo enlists in the Japanese Imperial Army, and goaded by officers who regard Korean troops as cowardly dullards, volunteers for special service in the air corps, only to learn that he is being trained for Kamikaze duty. Although bad weather causes his mission to be cancelled before the pilots can sacrifice themselves, Nobuo's squadron is imprisoned in shame, and his family receives notice of his death. With this loss, the family seem to lose all hope. Almost in despair Keoko writes in her journal

Uncertainty: a flower
dying for want of rain,
the nearest cloud a world away.

After the long, sad summer of 1945, word comes of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and the Japanese surrender. American soldiers support the Koreans in taking back their own land, and without any notice, Tae-yul appears one day at the gate of the Kim house. Brother and sister Tae-yul and Son-hee Kim assume their birth names and look forward to a future in a land where a Rose of Sharon tree blooms at their door.

A first generation Korean-American writer, Park, awarded the Newbery Medal for her historical novel, A Single Shard, has with this novel made the little-known story of the Korean Resistance accessible to young readers in America, linking their story to those of the better-known European fighters for freedom.