Last week one of my former classmates, who was half Japanese, was murdered by her boyfriend. As I was vocally trying to grasp situation, my boyfriend said, “I don’t understand murder.” This comment struck me because to me murder was a “mundane social fact,” as Hamamoto comments, “that transcends historical epoch, geography, and culture.” I had never taken the time to actually try and understand murder before.
While reading I was angered by the story of Warren James Bland, a white sex criminal, whose primary victims were Asian women. Bland took on a mail order bride from the Philippines, whose family hoped that Bland could somehow save the family from poverty, and then presumably killed her when she tried to escape. I believe that Bland targeted Yellow females because they are stereotyped as submissive and are exotified in the media. Perfect sex-slave material. Furthermore, Hamamoto attributes the rise in murder to the legitimization of violence in American society, rooting from the Vietnam war. Additionally, Yellow people have become the preferred victims of sociopaths because in the second half of the twentieth century Yellow people were the targets of race wars in Korea and Southeast Asia.
I can’t help but wonder, where these factors to my friend’s murder? On some level they probably were because Hamamoto states that “murder does not occur in a social vacuum.” Will this knowledge bring me any closure or any closer to an understanding of murder?
Breana Inoshita
Section A02
Reflection #5
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