Crossposts:

http://badgerbag.livejournal.com/498323.html

Glitch is still down for an upgrade so I have had to look at the "real" world. I finished Constellation Games last night and found it excellent! Swoony, even! And so relevant as... obviously... I am awash in ludic splendor. Read it.

In the middle of my Korean War book I started reading Wikipedia articles that were related and found two really interesting lines to explore -- one about the Jeju Uprising and massacre, and the other about Dimples Cooper.

About the Jeju Uprising. So in the late 1940s keep in mind the Japanese occupiers are just barely kicked out of Korea which is now full of MORE foreigners and all these many years most of the guerilla fighting and resistance to the Japanese were communist nationalists. There was a commemoration of kicking out the Japanese on Jeju, which police fired on. Then rioting people attacked all the police stations on the island and destroyed the voting centers. I would presume because of extreme poverty, and anger at the people they were having to vote for being the same elites who knuckled under to the Japanese. The island people wanted a unified (communist /populist) Korea. Okay I'm a little hazy on what happens next but the south korean army and police burned down and destroyed nearly every on the island and killed at least 15,000 people, gang raping the women first. They sorted everyone into A, B, C, D categories of politics and then killed C and D. It was HIGHLY illegal to even refer to this event up until about the 1990s.

Fascinating... and horrible.

Oh also I learned that during WWII in Japan about 25% of the workforce was Korean. The populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were very heavily Korean when they were bombed by the Americans.

Onward to Dimples. Isabel Rosario Cooper aka "Dimples" aka Elizabeth Cooper was a silent film star known for having the first on screen kiss in a movie in the Philippines. She became General MacArthur's mistress.

According to one biographer of MacArthur, William Manchester, MacArthur "showered [Cooper] with presents and bought her many lacy tea gowns, but no raincoat. She didn't need one, he told her; her duty lay in bed."

That wasn't going to last.... Yeesh! After they broke up, Dimples became a hairdresser somewhere and then moved to L.A. She died in 1960. I found a photo of her!