Board Thread:Legitimate Canon Questions/@comment-68.253.132.177-20140403201054

I have to give Teen Wolf credit for at least attempting to be accurate about a character's ethinicity/cultural background, but Kira's background  is highly unlikely. I understand from reading an interview with Arden Cho that because she is a Korean portraying a Japanese character, the producers decided to make her character both Korean and Japanese. In episode 3.15 "Fireflies" Kira's father explains that he is Korean, that he has extensively studied Japanese internment camps and that he took his wife's name. I'm sure there are many wonderful exceptions to this, historically the two nations are often at odds and as recently as March 2014, the Council on Foreign Relations has issued statements urging the two nations to resolve their political stalemate. A recent survey by Asan Institute of Policy Studies revelated that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is more unpopular in South Korea than Kim Jong-Un.

There are many reasons for the tension, but the ones most applicable to this aspect of Kira's storyline involves the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 until the end of WWII in 1945, concurrent to the Japanese internment camps featured in episode 3.21 "The Fox and the Wolf." During its time as a Japanese colony, Korea was under strict military rule and Koreans were force to assimilate with the Japanese. Many Koreans were forced to take Japanese names. Specifically, between 1937-1945, Koreans were forced to serve on the Japanese front lines, work in Japanese factories and tens of thousands of young Korean women were forced to serve as "comfort women," basically sex slaves for the Japanese soldiers.

I find Kira's backstory to be highly implausible, even in a world were werevolves exist and there's no homophobia, because so much of the story hinged on this specific part of history. I've heard Jeff Davis say that he loves research, so I wonder how he completely missed this, and why it never came up with the actors. I'm second generation American of Korean descent, but even I know this. I heard stories about this time from my grandparents, and even my mother has told me stories passed down from my great grandparents. I've actually seen some evidence of this in recent trips to Korea, where they are still restoring/rebuilding historical sites destroyed not only in the Korean War, but palaces and temples that were desecrated during the Japanese occupation. There's a daily reminder of this history in the current division of Korea, as the nation was divided into US and Soviet sectors as a part of the Japanese surrender in 1945.

None of this takes away from the horror of what the Japanese Americans faced, but it seems like a glaring error on behalf of the writers not to have taken this into consideration. And I'm not saying that there can't be wonderful Korean-Japanese marriages, but I find it highly unlikely that a Korean man, a history teacher, would take a Japanese name, even if his wife is the last of the line. I question that Mrs. Yukimura would ask him to take the name, seeing as she is 900 years old and would know of the conflicts between toe two nations that go even farther back than 1910. As happy as I am to see Asian Americans represented, I wish they hadn't introduced the Yukimura family in this manner. I'd rather have had them misrepresented as fully Japanese than to gloss over this aspect of Korean history. I acknowledge that this is just a TV show about teen age werewolves, but since the creators often chose to throw in facts, I find this to be a glaring error. 