Embedded Voices In Between Empires The Cultural Formation of Korean Popular Music in Modern Times

Transcription

1 Embedded Voices In Between Empires The Cultural Formation of Korean Popular Music in Modern Times By Yongwoo Lee Art History and Communication Studies McGill University, Montreal A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies. Montreal May, 2010 c 2010 Yongwoo Lee All Rights Reserved

2 ii ABSTRACT Embedded Voices In Between Empires: The Cultural Formation of Korean Popular Music in Modern Times Yongwoo Lee, Ph.D. McGill University, 2010 Supervisor: Will Straw This dissertation examines the historical trajectory of colonial mentality and the genealogy of cultural modernity and Americanization in South Korea by recontextualizing popular music as a narrative of collective memories and mass trauma. By mapping out two continual colonial histories, those represented by the periods of the Japanese Empire and of the American military government, I develop a narrative of Korean popular music that echoes this submission experienced by Koreans, a movement empowered by modern western technology such as the gramophone, radio and phonograph records as well as by the appropriation of various foreign popular music genres. This research primarily explores the ways in which consumption and production practices of Korean popular music were intertwined with structures of Korean cultural modernity. By examining socio-historical transformations such as urban development, commercialization and modernization, I examine the colonial experiences of Koreans as manifest in popular music narratives that gradually embraced collective sentiments and mass perceptions of everyday life under colonial circumstances, particularly as these were influenced by burgeoning concepts of western and American modernity and represented in song lyrics and musical performances from within the interior of Japanese colonial surveillance. As I shall argue, the submissive colonial narrative in Korean popular songs was enforced by the mobilization of Japanese militarism and imperial discourses concerned with becoming an imperial subject within the imperial national body, such that the colonial narrative was present continuously from the post-liberation era until the 1950s when the U.S. military controlled Korean society.

3 iii Thus, this research raises a set of questions concerning, first, the embedding of Japanese colonialism within Korean popular songs, and secondly, the means by which Americanization and modern life circulated within the colonial and postcolonial discourses in Korean popular song. By addressing new technologies, colonial and postcolonial debates on popular songs, and the audience s reception of popular songs, I will discuss the ambivalence of Korean subjectivity in the years of Japanese colonial occupation, the Korean War and the American military stationing, the ambivalence of a people eager to experience modern life and who tried to erase the boundaries between a burdensome pre-modern history, one that doubly divided Korean mentality by making distinctions between the inner and the outer, the us and our other. Meanwhile, colonial Koreans also tried to be free from dominant transcendental ideologies and traditional conventions such as neo-confucianism and patriarchy, while self-censoring against indoctrination by Japanese imperialism. These contradictory interactions between the Japanese Empire and colonial subjectivity were counteracted by an unexpected western influence through local accommodations of western and American cultural influxes as offshoots of modernity. Therefore, I will expand on the persistence of this embedded colonial submission in Korean popular song narratives from the introduction of the American military government in 1945 through the end of the Korean Wars in the 1950s. Popular music may be seen as offering narratives that reveal the fascination and revulsion in response to colonial modernity. As such, popular music offers us a means to develop alternative ideas regarding the formation of cultural modernity in the periphery. The discourse on popular music in Korea serves not only as an ambivalent epistemology for Koreans positioned in the distinction between colonizers and colonized, but also represents the collective memory of different empires, the contradictory sentiments of colonial modernity and the idea of Americanization in the periphery. Considering the influential role of popular culture in contemporary East Asian circumstances, this dissertation offers greater conceptual and methodological fluidity.

4 iv RESUMÉ Des voix gravées entre deux empires La formation culturelle de la musique populaire coréenne dans les temps modernes Yongwoo Lee, Ph.D. Université McGill, 2010 Directeur de thèse: Will Straw En replaçant la musique populaire dans le contexte d une histoire de mémoire collective et de traumatisme de masse, cette thèse examine le parcours historique des mentalités coloniales et la généalogie de la modernité culturelle et de l américanisation en Corée du Sud. En traçant les contours de deux histoires coloniales successives, de l Empire japonais au contrôle du gouvernement militaire américain, les expériences modernes des Coréens font écho à la soumission implicite du récit colonial au sein du texte culturel, autorisée par le trope moderne des technologies occidentales le gramophone, la radio et les enregistrements phonographiques et la conciliation entre divers genres de musique populaire. Cette recherche explore comment les pratiques de consommation et de production de la musique populaire, s enlacent intimement dans la formation de la modernité culturelle en examinant la commercialisation et la modernisation, avec le développement urbain. La représentation des expériences coloniales des Coréens dans le récit de la musique populaire a progressivement englobé les sentiments collectifs et les perceptions de masse des circonstances coloniales en insufflant le concept naissant de modernité occidentale/américaine dans les paroles et dans les performances, à travers plusieurs processus de modernisations macroscopiques dans la vie de tous les jours à l intérieur de l imaginaire colonial japonais. Par conséquent, le récit assujetti à l empire japonais de l expérience coloniale, dans les chants populaires, avait été renforcé par la mobilisation du militarisme japonais et des discours sur le «sujet impérial» à l intérieur du corps impérial de la nation qui ont refait surface sous la forme de la soumission continuelle à l intérieur des mentalités coréennes qui avaient repris les pleins pouvoirs après la libération du joug japonais durant les années Cette étude s intéresse à la période de la guerre de Corée, quand le gouvernement militaire américain contrôlait la

5 v société coréenne. Ainsi, cette recherche questionne la structure scellée du colonialisme japonais, l impact du processus d américanisation et l invention de la vie moderne à travers une enquête sur les traces des discours concernant l introduction de diverses technologies orales, les débats coloniaux et post coloniaux sur la musique populaire et la réception des chants populaires par le public. Les sujets coloniaux ambigus étaient prompts à expérimenter la vie moderne et à essayer d effacer les frontières du fardeau de l histoire pré-moderne, qui divisaient les Coréens historiquement parlant- entre ceux de l intérieur vu de l extérieur, et le nous vu des autres. Pendant ce temps-là, les Coréens coloniaux ont aussi essayé de se libérer des idéologies transcendantales qui dominaient à l époque et des conventions traditionnelles, alors qu ils étaient en train de s autocensurer contre l impérialisme japonais endoctrinant. Ces interactions contradictoires entre l Empire japonais et la subjectivité coloniale étaient brouillés par une alchimie culturelle inattendue en accueillant le flot culturel occidental/américain comme un mouvement neutralisateur. C est pourquoi je traiterais de la continuité de la soumission coloniale gravée dans le récit des chants populaires coréens de l introduction du gouvernement militaire américain en 1945, en passant par la guerre de Corée durant les années La musique populaire en tant que récit de la fascination et de la révulsion pour la modernité coloniale offre des idées alternatives concernant la formation de la modernité culturelle dans la périphérie. Le discours sur la musique populaire d après guerre fournira non seulement des épistémologies positionnées en distinguant les colonisateurs et les colonisés, mais aussi des représentations de mémoire collective covalente, des ressentis contradictoires de la modernité, et une idée de l américanisation. En considérant le rôle influent de la culture populaire dans le contexte de l Asie orientale contemporaine, cette thèse peut fournir une fluidité conceptuelle et méthodologique plus grande.

6 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter1: Undoing Archived Voices: Oblivion, Collective Memory and Colonial Modernity in Korean Popular Culture Introduction Recorded Memory, Collective Sentiments and Postcolonial Reflections Korean Popular Music and Collective Memory Trajectory of Modernity, Coloniality and Americanism in Korea Colonial Modernity and a Plural Postwar in Korea Coloniality as Self-Consciousness Genealogy of Americanism in Korea as Westernized Modernity Methodology Chapter Summaries Chapter 2: The Cultural Formation of Korean Popular Music in Japanese Colonial Era in 1930s Empire, Cultural Modernity and Popular Music in the Japanese Colonial Era: Writing a Cultural History of Korean Modern Times of Popular Song Disseminating Modern Sound in the Colonial Metropolis: Modern Landscape, Sound Culture and the Cultural Topography of Gyeongseong 3. The Sociocultural Condition of Korean Phonograph Culture in 1930s Social Reconstruction through Popular Song in 1930s Vulgarization of Popular Song and the Mobomoga s Cultural Appropriation Commodity Fetishism and the Cultural Discourses of Vulgarized Popular Song Between American Fever and the Patriotic Gesture: Jazz, New Folksong and the Formation of Colonial Locality 6. Colonial Ventriloquism through Popular Songs Cultural Censorship of Popular Songs and Phonograph Records in Japanese Colonial Times

7 vii Chapter 3: Two Phonographic Realities Continual Colonial Submission and the Interstitial Voices of Colonial Specters 1. Introduction: Continuity and Rupture In-Between Two Contradictory Realities Imperfectible Narratives in the Colonial Mentalité ( ): Maternalized Sovereignty and the Technology of the Gendered Subjects in Wartime Korea 3. Ambivalence of Collaboration and Colonial Tactics: Remasculinizing the Expressionless Melancholia through Volunteering 4. Narratives of the Feminized Voice as the Colonial Home Front: Colonial Women and the Gendered Phonograph records, The Imaginary Geography of the Colonized Mind The Enchanted Colonial Subject in-between Military Fanaticism and Tropical Malady/Melody 6. Can the Colonial Subject Sing? Between Politics of Ambivalence and Strategies of Colonial Resistance Chapter 4: Plural Post-Wars Within ( ) Sociopolitical Condition in North and South Korea in the post-liberation era Continual Subjection, Colliding Colonizers and Memories: Narratives of Postwar Relations between South Korea and the United States in Popular Songs 3. Sociocultural Conditions of Korean Popular Music during the Cold War: Vaudeville shows, Radio Broadcasting and the Local Phonograph Industry ( ) Voices That Resuscitated: Revisited the Total War Narrative in Popular Songs during the post-liberation era 4.1. Popular Songs during the post-liberation era ( ) Korean War, Revived Colonial Specters and Traumatic Mimesis ( ) Hauntology of Unremitting Traumatic Modernity

8 viii Chapter 5: Audible Memories and Postcolonial Melancholia U.S. Military Ghetto Culture and Modern Soundscapes in Postwar Korea Cultural Landscape of Americanized Postwar Korea in 1950s Sentiment of Changing Partners and Vocing the Americanized Modern The Socio-Political Conditions of Postwar Popular Music in Korea Americanized Soundscape in Postwar Korea AFKN and the Formation of the U.S. Military Landscape in Postwar Korea Military Ghetto Culture and the Diffusion of Americanism Americanized Modernity in Korean Popular Music in the 1950s: Fetishization of Americanism and the Commodification of Music Genres Conclusion: On the Ambivalence of Americanized Modernity Conclusion: Popular Memory and Its Repetition Appendix 1: Narration of Siam to Korea (1931) Appendix 2: First advertisement for radio sets for home use, ( , left). Number of registered radios and their distribution rate in colonial Korea and Japan Appendix 3: Military popular songs narrating feminized colonial subject Appendix 4: Social Movement after the liberation in Korea Appendix 5: The original song sheet of G gotmacha Appendix 6: Music Sheets of Gohyangmalli (Nostalgia for my Hometown, 1946) and Gwigukseon (Homecoming Cruise, 1948) Appendix 7: Local musicians performing for American soldiers in 1950s Appendix 8: Map of Downtown Seoul and the Eighth United States Army Compound Bibliography

9 ix <List of Figures> Figure1-1. Portrait of a young Japanese soldier and his family members during Asia-Pacific War, Figure1-2. Portrait of a postwar Korean orphan kid Figure1-3.Newspaper advertisement of propaganda play I Chose Freedom (Anti-Communism Dream), and Music Festival for Korean-American Friendship performed by the American 5 th Army Jazz band during the Korean War ( ) Figure2-1. Part of the Keijo/Gyeongseong map in 1920s and photograph of Honmachi, a Japanese quarter in Seoul in 1920s Figure2-2. Postcard of Mitsukoshi department store in modern Gyeongseong (up), Cartoon in Chosun Daily Newspaper describing Korean schoolgirls infatuation for shopping in Mitsukoshi department in summer (Chosun Ilbo Daily Newspaper, 1930, July 19) Figure2-3.Phonograph records advertisements in newspapers, Mansebo ( ), Columbia portable phonograph advertisement (1931. April) and Victor Phonograph in Samchulli magazine (1936.2) Figure2-4. Newpaper article entitled Kimi Koishi( 君恋し ) in every home. (Chosun Ilbo Daily Newspaper, 1929, September 1) Figure2-5. Burton Crane s song sheets, Dashimodol yichungchun, and Suljujeonbangyi, No , Figure2-6. Paul Whiteman s La Paloma and Merry Widow Waltz in Dong-A Ilbo Daily Newspaper ( ) The prize competition for new popular music song (1934), phonograph record billboards and shops in Gyeongseong(Seoul) district in 1930s Figure2-7. Ballot and ranking of the most popular Korean singers in 1935 of Samchulli magazine Figure2-8. Song sheets of Shin-Arirang and Caravan, Chieron Record, in the late 1920s Figure2-9.Covered American Jazz song in Korea, Sing Sing Sing and Diana Figure2-10. Song sheets of Carioca, Okeh Panphonic record, Figure2-11. Victor phonograph advertisement, Chosun Daily (December ) Figure2-12. Songsheets of typical Japanese Shin-min yō pentatonic scale Figure2-13.Two reasons for Japanese censorship in Korean phonograph records from 1933 to Figure2-14. Table of articles regarding popular music in Korean magazines during Total War era Figure2-15.Withdraw Yuhaengga! The reappearance of military songs and patriotic songs, Maeil Shinbo Newspaper, 1939, January Figure3-1. Film, Jiwonbyeong (1941) sequences, direction of the colonial male s eyes entrapped within the gaze of the Empire Figure3-2. Film, Jiwonbyeong (1941) sequences Figure3-3. Film, Jiwonbyeong (1941) ending sequences Figure3-4. Sheet Music of Jongkungannobuui Norae (1938, Columbia Record) and Portraits of colonial women holding their babies in Sinyeosung (New woman) magazine Figure3-5. Bouken Dankichi (The adventure of Dankichi, serial publication ) and Shouchouno Musume (Daughter of chief, Polydor record 1930)

10 Figure3-6. Sheet music of popular song representing northern territory, Female singer Ok Jamhwa s Harbin Punggyeong (The Landscape of Harbin, Columbia 1941) (left), Seon- Wooilsun s G opineun Shangai (Blooming Shanghai, Polydor 1939) and Japanese-Chinese vocalist Rikōran s Tanoshii Manshu (Pleasant Manchuria, Columbia 1941) Figure3-7. Album cover of Kalua Kamaainas (left). And the performance of Kalua Kamaainas (right) Figure3-8. Sheet music of popular song representing southern territory, Namgukui Dalbam (Moonlight of the South, Left), Nambang ui Chuok (Memory of the Southward) Figure 3-9. Korean Cartoon representation of Nambang, Maeil Shinbo, 1942, July Figure3-10. Sheet music of Flower of blue orchid representing typical visual image of southern territory with tropical island, orchid and palm trees Figure4-1. After the Liberation Day (August 16 th, 1945) in front of Seodaemun Jail in Seoul, South Korea, (left), picture representing the moment of liberation (right) Figure4-2. A boy in Busan asylum in 1951 ( ), Beeswax figures during Korean War--159 Figure4-3. Member of KPK Grand shows and Newspaper advertisement of KPK Grand show, Dong-A Daily Newspaper ( ) Figure4-4. Advertisement of Nam Insoo s, Kageora Sampalsun, Hyun-In s Manghyangui Soyagok (Serenade of Nostalgia) and Cheongchun Station (Station of Youth) ( ) Figure4-5. Most requested popular songs in Gayomudae Figure4-6. Song Min-Do s appearance in the Korean Popular music show, Gayomudae 1000 th anniversary, ( ) Figure4-7. Hyun-In (left) and Yoo-Ho standing in front of the Lucky Record in Figure4-8. Postwar the South representation in popular culture Figure4-9. Geum Sa-Hyang, recording Nimgyesin Jeonseon in Figure4-10. Calligraphy of parents of ROK Army soldier and photography of a Korean mother feeding her son who is about to be dispatched to the battlefield, Daegu Station ( ) Figure5-1. Hollywood western film Rock Island Trail advertisement (1952) Figure5-2. Marilyn Monroe visits the troops in Korea after the Armistice, February 17, Photo by Corporal Welshman for Army Signal Corps, Courtesy of National Archives Figure5-3. Sequences of Jiokhwa (Flower in Hell, 1958) Figure4-5. Victory record member in Busan (1954.2) Figure5-5. Special celebration show for the foundation of Hyundae Grandshow in 1958 at Gukdo Theatre (left). Back-up Korean performers for the USO camp show at the American Air force in Gyeongnam province in Figure5-6. Danma Park s Grandshow Performance Figure5-7. Map of the Itaewon area and the Eighth United States Army base in the late 1950s-218 Figure5-8. Sequence of Madame Freedom (Jayu Buin, 1956) Figure5-9. Kim Sisters performing on a stage (Jan ) Figure5-10. A satirical representation of mobomoga s tiresome westernized configuration, caricatured by Seukjoo Ahn, Byeolgeongon, July 1927 (left) Modern girls singing western and Japanese songs while playing a phonograph in colonial Korea ( ) Figure5-11. Album designs and their representations of Americanized culture Figure6. Portraits of colonial singer Lee Erisu x

11 xi Note on Transliteration, Spelling and Translation My transliteration of Korean words and phrases follows the Revised Romanization of Korean (RR, by Ministry of Culture 2000) and the transliteration of Japanese words and phrases follows the Revised Hapburn Romanization system. Personal names and the name of places are more recognizable in Anglicized forms which do not follow these rules of pronunciation, for example, Choi and Woo should be Choe and U in the revised Romanization, but in this dissertation, the entire Korean surname and the name of place (such as Chosun to Joseon) will be written in the form used most frequently in Korea. All translations from Korean and Japanese sources including Song lyrics in this dissertation have been done by the author, with the exception of those listed in the work cited.

12 xii Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to many people for their warm advice, guidance and support. My most heartfelt thank you goes to my supervisor, mentor and friend, Will Straw, who has guided me patiently, nurturing me intellectually through his exciting lectures and invaluable cultural criticism during my doctoral student years. His tireless support and encouragement at all stages of this project encouraged me enormously. His warm advice, insightful questions and generosity drove me to pursue scholarship in Canada. I always wish to be his proud student, and I hope this dissertation will be but a small step. Thomas Lamarre generously and patiently guided me through out the process of this project and gave me many sharp and encouraging comments and useful bibliographies. Carrie Rentschler provided insightful comments at an early stage of this project with her always pleasant character and smile. Anne McKnight read part of my manuscript and provided invaluable feedback. My time at McGill University as a graduate student in Communication Studies was more than rewarding, and I want to acknowledge and thank Jonathan Sterne for introducing me to the sound studies and the wider scope of aural and phonograph history; Jennifer Fisher, whose broad knowledge of feminism and gender studies constantly inspired me to keep focusing on my own local history; Jenny Burman, whose engagement with diasporic popular culture and postcolonial studies reminded me of the necessity of building local methodologies as a decolonization tactic; and Charles Levin, who enlightened me to alternative methodological possibilities of thinking and writing history through psychoanalysis and cultural metaphysics. I also thank Sumi Hasegawa, who always made me happy to learn the Japanese language, Maureen Coote, who patiently and generously assisted in all of my administrative work to solve problems more smoothly, and the Beaverbrook Fund for the dissertation completion grants that allowed me to conduct my writing year in Montreal. In Japan, I was fortunate to have Yoshimi Shunya as my advisor during my fieldwork in Tokyo, affiliated with his lab at the University of Tokyo. His sharp and insightful comments on my work were extremely helpful in improving my project. I would like to thank Takeshi Sano and Tomi Sano, who showed me invaluable Japanese military song collections and many other phonograph records, as well as Jung Ji-Hee for

13 xiii her grateful comments on early stages of my project and for sharing her positive energy and great friendship. Cho Jungwoo shared his critical ideas on my work. I would like to thank the Japan-Korea Cultural Foundation for their generous financial support during my field research in Japan, and especially to thank Kikai Hiroyuki for his patience and assistance. I thank the faculty and graduate students of Yoshimi Seminar for their hospitality, especially Choo Kukhee, Gillian Hudson, Hiromu Nagahara, Sarah Edwards, Jun Abe, Nam Ja-Young and Kate Rakate. In Korea, I wish to thank Kang Myungkoo, who taught me much about analytic criticisms regarding cultural studies and critical communication studies, gave me lots of insightful comments and imparted a sense of the connections between history and culture in communication studies, and who always inspired me to keep in mind the balance between local histories and western methodologies. Lee Dong-Soon generously provided me with valuable phonograph archives, materials and books. Park Seong-Seo and Choi Si-Yeon shared their personal photography collection; Park Myungjin, Baek Sungi and Joo Misuk first introduced me to critical cultural studies and continuously encouraged me to study various scopes of cultural history in Korea. I thank Baek Misook and the graduate students of the History and Culture Seminar at Seoul National University for their insightful comments on my project. I am grateful for the tremendous support that I received, while writing my dissertation from many friends and colleagues. I especially thank Yoon Choonsik for his conscientious efforts to read parts of my chapters and for providing rare old magazines, cartographies and photography from the archives of Korea University, and Oh Sehoon for his encouragement, inspiration and correction of Japanese terminology. Ahn Jun-Yong gave me moral support and encouragement and provided me valuable phonograph records and video footages from the archives of the Korean Broadcast System; Aingeru Aroz Rafael offered stimulating conversation that broadened my ideas for my project; Ian Danes, Genee Speers, Katica Prpic, Catherina De Goede, Olivia Hollingsworth, Ely Wolfe, Karen Sendybyl, Shin Youngji, Yeom Changil, Kim Hyun Zine, Park Min-Jeong, Cho Hyunsuk, Park Yeon-Mi, Choi Jieun, Park Mikyung, Park So-Young, Elise Shin, Cho Culwon, Lalai Manjikian, Sara Zambotti, Kim Gyewon, Taisuke Edamura, Tasha Anestopoulos, Anna Lev, Ariana Moscote Freire, Kang Inhye, Fan Lin, Lee Jae-Yeol and

14 xiv Park Meeyoung I thank for their constant encouragement during my emotional fluctuations, Emily Raine especially for her painstaking proofreading, Aska Monty for translating my abstract into French, and my many colleagues at McGill, Tokyo and Seoul National University for their discussions, comments, support and the friendship they have extended to me. My greatest gratitude I save for last. It is hard for me to imagine writing this dissertation without the presence and support of my family. I would like to thank all of my family, and especially Lee Young Soon, for her self-sacrifice and generosity as a sister, congenial friend and mentor. The individual lives of my family members often provided me with inspiration while writing this dissertation, such as an aunt who unexpectedly passed away after being hit by an American military vehicle during the American military occupation era and another aunt who lived her entire life as a Korean Japanese (Zainichi) in Osaka since Japanese occupation era. Their lives made me connect their personal and specific histories with an extended scope of national history. My parents used to sing a lot of Korean popular songs that I didn t much like in childhood, which eventually became my Ph.D. project a fact that still makes my mother curious as to how popular songs could be a theme of dissertation. My father and mother have given me enormous affection and inspiration to finish this project, challenging me through their own lives as living proof of modern Korean history. I dedicate this dissertation to my mother, Lee Jeong-Ock and my father, Lee Dong-Suk.

15 Chapter 1: Undoing Archived Voices Oblivion, Collective Memory and Colonial Modernity in Korean Popular Culture 1. Introduction This project aims to trace the persistence of colonial mentality, notions of plural cultural modernity and the genealogy of Americanization in Korea by recontextualizing popular music as a narrative of collective memories and mass trauma. By mapping out two successive and foreign structures of control, those of the Japanese Empire and the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea, we see how the modernizing experiences of Koreans have manifested themselves as an implicit submission through the inclusion of colonial narratives in various cultural texts. Seen in the context of popular music, the Korean experience of colonial control was heightened by modern technological devices such as the gramophone, radio, phonograph records and television, as well as by musical appropriations and crossovers involving a variety of foreign popular music genres. Representations of the colonial experiences of Koreans in popular music narratives gradually embraced collective sentiments and mass perceptions by instilling a burgeoning concept of western and Americanized modernity. Song lyrics and performances of popular song during Japanese occupation era thus played a pivotal role in representing and preserving what has been called collective memory while remaining at the interior of the Japanese imperial imaginary, whose macroscopic modernization processes transformed colonial life at the level of quotidian experience. Consequently, submissive narratives in popular songs betray a colonial trauma generated and reinforced by the mobilization and exploitation associated with Japanese militarism by forming the discourse of the imperial subject. The submissive narrative attached to the imperial national body resurfaced during the post-liberation era through Korea s continuing surrender to the U.S. Thus, this project deals with three primary theoretical issues: (1) the influence of colonial experiences and Americanism on Korean modernity after two consecutive postwars, seen here as an epistemological transformation of postcolonial Koreans; (2) the ways in which collective consciousness and public discourses on Empires in popular music are represented as a kind of re-figuration of Koreans self-modernization; and lastly (3)

16 2 popular music as a colonial narrative through which collective memories and trauma are preserved. The discourse of cultural modernity in Korea has to be reassessed in terms of the continuity of these two colonial experiences, and, as such, in relation to the two strands of social modernization and cultural modernity. Due to the complex intersections of specific dual colonial histories and the theoretical dimensions of cultural modernities, westernized modernization and Americanization, Koreans during this period were located in multilayered interactions with a doubly structured colonial experience and trauma, marked by a concomitant desire toward empires. Thus, the fundamental problem in historical writing on Korean popular music produced between these empires concerns the incommensurability of peripheral modernity, which rests on a Western-oriented unitary usage of modernity that tends to overlook the historical specificity in the Koreans modernity and the complex substratum of peripheral modernization process. In this introductory chapter, I will discuss Korean cultural memory and traces of critics and debates vis-à-vis Korean modernity in relation to various current notions of modernity, coloniality and Americanization. In particular, I will investigate the controversial notion of a Korean colonial modernity that reflects and mediates continuity and rupture within the distinctive colonial experience of Korea. By redefining the term colonial modernity, as it has come to be attached to various cultural transformations in Korean modern times (1930s-1950s), I seek to account for the workings of coloniality as self-consciousness, collective memory and the ambivalence of mimetic desire in colonial discourse. In doing so, I hope to delineate and analyze the cultural context surrounding the formation of Korean local modernity in relation to modernization, urbanization and Americanization. I want to begin with a personal anecdote and related reflections, in order to clarify the complexity of the historian s position and the stakes of a distinction I would like to address that between collective sentiments (collective memory) which we come to internalize or accept as a dominant structure of feeling through their popular representations, and a remembering which situates the subject in an ontologically uncertain status. To fill the lacuna, the lack within the text, I have engaged with the text, with its return of the repressed as a marker of my own place within the accumulated past (the archive) by myself becoming, on occasion, an object of my own analysis in this

17 3 project. As Michel de Certeau has said the other is the phantasm of historiography, the object that it seeks, honors, and buries. 1 This project on Korea popular music in the era of two empires occupation aims at questioning the otherness of peripheral modernity and soothing the unearthed voices that have long gone unheard, taking them through a process that Certeau called calming the dead who still haunt the present, and at offering them scriptural tombs Recorded Memory, Collective Sentiments and Postcolonial Reflections Voices, loved and idealized, of those who have died, or of those lost for us like the dead. Sometimes they speak to us in dreams; sometimes deep in thought the mind hears them. And with their sound for a moment return sounds from our life's first poetry like music at night, distant, fading away. Constantin P. Cavafy, Voices While tracing Korea s cultural modernity through popular songs from the late 1930s to 1950s, two arresting images incessantly haunted me, acting as signposts compelling me to relocate myself in an ambivalent position. These bewildering encounters with two images attached to popular songs enabled me to perceive the complexity of my own research, allowing it to embrace and inhabit the entire trajectory of the in-betweenness of individual colonial subjectivity and the contradictory aesthetic origins of cultural modernity in Korean popular music. Just as the narrative of the Greek poet Cavafy conveys a subtle sense of ephemerality and the existential nostalgia of loss resonating through the voices of the dead as a memorial residue, so these images that summon surplus ghostly matters 3 to me is necessarily added to the fact that the voice as the object to reconnect memory that is reproduced as agents in the re-enactments of the events through insurmountable representations of subjectively experienced everyday life from the banished past. When recalling events in the past, one inevitably interprets and reconstructs a history 1 Certeau, Michel de (1988) The Writing of History, translated from the French by Tom Conley, Columbia University Press, p2 2 Certeau, Ibid., p2 3 See Avery F. Gordon ([1997] 2008), Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. She uses the term ghostly matter to suggest that the past haunts at us at all moments, saying To be haunted is to be tied to historical and social effects [ ] though you can repeat over and over again, as if the incantation were a magic that really worked. (p.190)

18 4 of oneself that is nurtured both by consecutive memories recreated since the time in which the events occurred, as well by the figure of the self at the moment of recollection. However, the use of memory and the remembering subject to recollect history can never be grasped objectively, especially when memory evokes traumatic experiences. The recalling of fragments of images and voices can only constitute a tentative attempt at reconstructing the traumatic past for those who did not live in that era, who seek to reconstitute a body inscribed by the trauma of Total War 4 and Korean War and produce a painful but necessary commemoration of the remains. The first image is a photograph of Sano s family. Sano is an old friend of mine from my time in Tokyo, where I conducted my primary archival and field research in Takashi Sano s grandmother, Tomi Sano, a renowned 89-year old Tokyo-based traditional Kimono maker, collected transwar Shōwa 5 phonograph records, mainly of Gunka (Military songs) and Tenjikayō (Interwar popular songs) from during and after the Asia Pacific War. The phonograph records were generously displayed and played one by one from her old collection of phonograph records, which has been enshrined for more than half a century in deteriorating record cases under a black and white family snapshot that was stored as if sacred. Although Sano s husband passed away long time ago, she kept the records for more than a half century until unpacking them off to a descendant of the once colonized. 4 Usually the period of Japan s Fifteen Year War, from September 1931 to August 1945 is commonly referred to as Total War, indicating the mobilization of the entire nation and colonial territories to a wartime social system. The phrase Total War (Chongnyeukjeon in Korean, Souryokusen in Japanese) is frequently used in both nations as an expression of putting all of one s energy toward a certain work or event. Unlike in mainland Japan, the Total War system was gradually established and embedded during late 1930s through discourses of colonial territories as Japan encroached on Singapore and the Southern Archipelagos and Nambang discourse was prevalent in colonial Korea. Thus, in this dissertation, I use the term Total War as confined to a certain period, from 1937 to 1945 to adjust the socio-political circumstances in colonial Korea. 5 The Shōwa era was the longest period in Japanese history, corresponding to the reign of Emperor Shōwa from December 25, 1926 to January 7, The term is often used as a prefix attached to words like era, period, culture, or philosophy to indicate a specific sense of time in Japan.

19 5 <Figure 1-1> Portrait of a young Japanese soldier and his family members during the Asia-Pacific War. Sano s grandfather is in the center of the photo, while his wife, Tomi Sano, is on the right. 1944, photo courtesy of Takashi Sano. The photo seems to have been taken before her husband was attached to the Imperial Japanese troops. The image of the stiff young soldier in the middle, surrounded by his family members before being conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army expresses a subtle tension. He devoted himself to the rhetoric of the healthy national body (kokutai) surrounded by a Rising-Sun Flag (Kyokujitsu-ki), a symbol of Japanese Imperialism alongside the taciturn yet uncertain expectations of his family members. As Sano belatedly explained to me, 6 the photograph was taken for a commemoration right after his grandfather received his call-up papers and following the mandatory physical examination from the Imperial Japanese Army. After being conscripted into the Japanese Army, however, his grandfather was not sent to the battlefield due to chronic illness. While the Allied powers were dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in the Emperor s capitulation, the everyday lives of both Japanese and colonial Koreans under 6 Post-interview with Sano Takashi conducted on Regrettably, his grandmother, Tomi Sano passed away in May 28, 2008 at her age of 94.

20 6 the Total War system were inevitably constituted by the fanatic militarism under which, as Kundera has said of European totalitarianism, public life and private life become one. 7 However, the mobilization of Japanese and other colonial citizens into a forced homogeneity destroyed individual life, since, as Yasushi has argued, [Japanese totalitarianism] is not the active individualism expressed in the social activism of contemporary civil society but a passive individualism wrapped in silence and isolated from the sites of social activity, (Yasushi 1998). This type of snapshot is commonly found in ordinary Japanese homes where there were family members engaged in the Asian Pacific War. These lingering apparitions of the Total War in ordinary Japanese homes stimulated an unpredictable feeling of confusion in me, one related to the colonial coevalness of Korean society under the name of Imperial mobilization and the lives of colonial people who were doubly repressed during the Total War era. The concealed reluctance of this stiff Japanese soldier s participation, like the military songs, echo the fanaticism of the War ethos of that time, simultaneously locating my stance as a subjective marginal historiographer a very heterogeneous position than that of the objective historian. The past and present were intermingled. This framed diplopic time of the individual life of the colonizer in the snapshot tangles with the memory of my once-colonized past-homeland, inviting me and simultaneously stimulating the melancholic discourse of the void and of the loss of quotidian life. Under the colonial circumstances of Korea, all types of sociocultural activities were strictly regulated under the surveillance of Imperial Japan, and individual colonial lives were passively assimilated into or actively interacted with the discourse of naisenittai (the idea of Japan and Korea as one body). The representation of the deceased Imperial soldier, along with Japanese military marching songs, redirected my interest toward popular music history by casting my search toward the existential conditions of the individual lives of citizens regardless of their colonial regime and individual subjectivity during the Total War era. This led me to consider the engagement of popular song with everyday life in terms of the musical syntax, vocabulary and structure of recorded sound as cultural and 7 Contrary to the totalitarian life as he describes it in his novel The Joke, Kundera also mentions the individual intimate life, saying that, Intimate life [is] understood as one s personal secret, as something valuable, inviolable, the basis of one s originality. Quoted in Philip Roth(1975) Reading Myself and Others, New York: Farrar, Straus

21 7 psychological habits in an era that lingers in the listener s consciousness as collective memory. The second image I encountered that enabled me to realize the contradictory nature of the Korean past was in a corner of the War Memorial Museum exhibition in Seoul in Located in front of the Yongsan Garrison in Itaewon, the War Memorial was opened in June 1994, on what was once the Headquarters of the ROK (Republic of Korea) Army. This massive complex, decorated with war monuments and collections containing over 13,600 items, instantly provokes a historical narrative of undefeated moments for Korean ancestors and public commemoration as a form of the standard narrative of Korean history. This narrative underlies the claim that Korea has survived despite the encroachment of numerous empires, colonialization and fratricidal inter-wars. After observing the tedious collections of war memorabilia -- from actual pieces of swords to cannons, modern weapons and simulation combat displays that narrating the conflicts in Korean history over 2,000 years, from the Three Kingdom period through the Vietnam War, I finally found myself standing in the middle of booth called the Hungnam 8 store under the dim lights, where people supposed to sell sundry goods in postwar era. The beeswax bodies in the voiceless museum representing postwar circumstances testified to the everyday lives of Koreans during the post-liberation and Korean War era. While listening to the famous Korean War hit song, Be stronger, Geumsoon! (Gutseora Geumsoona), with Hyun-In s crooning voice reverberating throughout the entire hall, I was situated in front of the war orphan stretching his hand out to me with a sullen face, his begging for a chocolate echoing the narrative of the song: At the port of Hungnam in the middle of fluttering snowstorm, I was desperately calling and searching for you If Benjamin s philosophy of history and/or cultural history was centered on the embedded history of modernity and the ways in which an original thing is produced in a certain moment of history and how it contains the possibility of its reproduction within time, as McCole argued (1993:248), then history might be a matter of the representation of the afterlife of modernity. Buck-Morss elaborates this issue when she illustrates Benjamin s 8 Hungnam is a port city on the eastern coast of North Korea. The port at Hungnam was the site of one of the main evacuations of both U.S. military and North Korean civilians during the Korean War in late Most North Koreans relinquished their homes to South Korea during the Korean War.

22 8 fascination with a female wax figure, 9 saying Her ephemeral act is frozen in time. She is unchanged, defying organic decay, (Buck-Morss 1991:369). This embodiment of a certain historical moment for commemoration constantly remains as an afterlife of history by querying memory and remembrance acts that reproduce the experience. <Figure 1-2> Beewax portrait of a postwar Korean orphan kid begging for chocolate from a U.S. soldier. Courtesy of the Korean War Memorial Museum. Photograph by the author. Consider Ong s remarks on the centering action of sound : sound is created as an external occurrence in relation to the internal self and the self s ability to match what is heard to the occurrences that create sound. External sound is reconstructed internally what 9 He describes the wax figure in the Musée Gravin as a Wish Image as Ruin: Eternal Fleetingness, that No form of eternalizing is so startling as that of the ephemeral and the fashionable forms which the wax figure cabinets preserve for us. And whoever has once seen them must, like André Breton [Nadja, 1928], lose his heart to the female form in the Musee Gravin who adjusts her stocking garter in the corner of the loge (V, p. 117) quoted in Buck-Morss (1993: 369).

23 9 makes sound and where sounds come from. 10 Thus, one combines external sound as an agency of internalization. Using Ong s insight to recontextualize Fisher s (2004) remark on the engagement of visual, auditory, and proprioceptive faculties 11 in creating memories, the articulation between the sound of Hyun-In and my subjective engagement with this recreated situation of the Post-Korean War were interwoven into a synesthetic experience to represent memories in the War Memorial museum. This presence sensing the place cannot be a part of me, and since this split sensation and its dissociated cognition are already alienated, I felt the absence of presence with full melancholia, as if I experienced a doubled and simultaneous simulation of postwar Koreans lives. Freud described melancholia as a state of loss and mourning without a subject, 12 and this display in the War Memorial museum and the recorded sound of Hyun- In served as vehicles for expressing an ongoing melancholia, where the sounds and images of the past and present mix in a suspension that raises traumatic memories. Given these characteristics of aurality, then, it must be emphasized that popular music as a kind of ritual incantation witnesses and preserves Korean history through its repetition of structured musical formulas. Compared to more literary cultures, popular music can create a greater sense of collective sentiments and tends to preserve a strong sense of collective memory and express the internal psychology of group members through the repetition of shared rhythmic patterns and covalent narratives as what Ong remarks, For groups who communicate aurally, redundancy, repetition of the just said, keeps both speaker and hearer surely on track. 13 Double consciousness towards these virtual experiences of colonial and postcolonial life always overlapped with my pre-colonial citizenship as a member of the postwar generation in Korea, endowing my confrontation with these scenes with perplexity. 10 Ong s comment is quoted from Steve Jones (1993) A Sense of Space: Virtual Reality, Authenticity and the Aural, p Jennifer Fisher (2004) Speeches of Display: Museum Audioguides by Artists, in Aural Cultures (edt. Jim Drobnick). Toronto: YYZ Books, pp He said, [T]he patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him. Sigmund Freud (1980), Mourning and Melancholia, in Essential Papers on Depression, ed. James C. Coyne, New York University Press, New York, p Walter Ong (1982), Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World, London: Routledge, ch.3. Quoted in William Howland Kenney (2003), Introduction, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, , Oxford University Press, p.xix.

24 10 Japanese martial songs enshrined in ordinary Japanese homes and Korean popular songs repeated in a silent museum reterritorialized the cultural memory in terms of remembering the past as an ambivalent figuration. These experiences related to popular music negotiating between public memory and historiography enable me to reimagine popular songs not only as mass commodities but as vessels of collective memory in relation to national history. These themes will be delineated in my project by my asking the following questions: (1) how can we describe Korean popular music as a historical narrative, aside from portraying it chronologically as a part of Korea s cultural history? (2) What has been represented / unrepresented in the history of Korean popular music at the threshold of Korea s modern national development? And, analogously, (3) how has popular music portrayed these ambivalent structures of desire and revulsion directed towards industrialization and modernization and situated between two empires? 3. Korean Popular Music and Collective Memory: Beyond popular music criticism Korean popular music in modern times, especially from the Japanese occupation era to the period of American military government control, has been little discussed because of its sociopolitical complexity. It necessarily involves various historical factors such as the colonial experience, the internalization of Cold War logics, the political engagements of the U.S. and lingering Japanese infrastructure in the post-liberation era, all of which were articulated in representations of popular culture. Since the cultural turn that began to reshape Korean cultural studies in the late 1980s has had an influence on colonial histories of Korean modernity, many scholars focusing on the colonial and postcolonial periods have drawn significantly on institutional and intellectual developments involving literary criticism and feminist critical studies and leading to work on the formation of colonial subjectivity, film studies on colonial female subjectivity, and colonial and postcolonial governmental tactics in Korea. Korean historians have also continued to draw primarily on sociological and political approaches to popular culture. The influences of cross-cultural problems relating to postcolonialism and cultural imperialism have been a recurrent theme of cultural analysis since the early 1990s. Consequently, historians have explored the colonial implantation of culture imbued by various ideologies and propaganda,

25 11 the interplay of culture attached to socio-political incidents and cultural identity in the formation of the modern Korean nation state perspectives that flourish in particular in literary criticism and critical communication studies under the name of cultural studies. Since these path-breaking works have opened up popular culture as a subject of research, many Korean historians as well as foreign scholars have devoted attention to the cultural encounter as it relates to the colonial history of Koreans. Although scholars have since examined notions of cultural modernity related to various popular cultural texts, academic criticism on popular music is a somewhat more recently established field in Korea. There have been discussions on popular music in journalistic criticism or as a subsidiary exposition of other cultural histories through comments on popular songs vis-à-vis a national ethos, or through analyses of commodity culture and modernization that make reference to song lyrics and phonograph record designs. Chronologically organized books on Korean popular music history have changed the way scholars of Korean popular music think of the field, inspiring interpretations situated within historical overviews such as Park Chan-Ho s Hangukgayosa (History of Korean Popular Song [1992] 2009) and Lee Young-Mee s Hangukdaejunggayosa (History of Korean Popular Music, 1998). Since then, the small body of Korean-language work on Korean popular music and its history has divided into two camps, between which lies an interpretive gap. One camp consists of historical studies treating the formation of popular music in a chronological way (Hwang 1981, Roh 1995, Lee 1998, Jang 2006, Park 2009). The works in this group have been focused on biographies of artists or on song content analysis, which sometimes mire academic accuracies within personal impressions and recollections added to sentimental (Hwang 1981) or nationalistic descriptions (Roh 1995). Popular music studies in Korea were embraced by academia in late 80s. Critical approaches by scholars such as Lee (1998), Roh (1995), Jang (2006) and Park (2009) have stressed the cultural exploitation of Koreans during the colonial occupation and their cultural mobilization to serve the empire by designating the period as one of cultural retreat or as a cultural dark ages within a narrative of colonial victimization. Although this primary research has circumscribed and developed the outline of the modern cultural history of Korean popular music, it has often focused on texts or artist biographies while failing to articulate this

26 12 within a cultural engagement with popular music that is cognizant of the multilayered socio-political contexts shaped by colonial / postcolonial differences of nation, gender, class and age. Moreover, during the process of modernization and the introduction of industrial capitalism, popular music not only produced a new form of economic integration between metropolitan and rural colonial communities, but also stimulated the emergence of new customs and morals through the modernization of individual subjects. Thus, the history of popular music in this era cannot be explained adequately without investigating the various strata of its social context. Furthermore, narratives of Korean popular music have internalized the selfcontained national allegories of pessimism, nihilism and self-duplication, driven by colonialism and modernization. By confining these notions within highly stable binary oppositions such as those between the rational and the emotional, the colonized and the colonizer, or West and East, this work has failed to grasp the diverse forms of subjectivity in modern colonial society. Therefore, it is more fruitful to discuss the cross-cultural aspects of Korean popular music alongside various forms of modernity produced across the space of geographical, historical and gender differences in colonial Korea, since modernity necessarily implicates the spaces of others who work to create forms of difference and intervene in the reproduction of homogeneity, (Mitchell 2000: 24). The other camp is made up of historical accounts mainly focused on record and gramophone historiography, the context of popular music during this period and Korean music genres. These are often seen as intertwined with issues of cultural hegemony in a colonial and global stance (Lee 2004, Shin et al 2005, Lee 2007). This work has been based on primary archival research and oral interviews with musicians and phonograph record company owners, so as to sketch the process of identity formation and the position of popular music during the colonial and postcolonial decades. This research has limitations, however, inasmuch as it leans heavily on those primary sources that record collectors and archivists have provided. These research projects often provide a naïve viewpoint on their subject without linking it to historical analysis, with the result that they often lapse into the trap of analogy by evaluating a specific cultural text as a cultural entity or as representative of the entire era.

27 13 Thus, my principal aim in this project is to open up the rhetorical necessity of popular music as a medium with which to read Koreans historical narratives and to further investigate Korean coloniality, continual colonial mentality and collective memory that make up the heterogeneous practices of remembering Korean modernity and individual life. I begin with a simple assumption, that popular music is engaged in both the preservation and construction of the collective memory of an era. By exploring the cultural significance of recorded music in colonial and postcolonial Korea, I hope this dissertation will help to portray, if circuitously, Koreans mentality and trauma by explaining the fundamental conflicts of colonial consciousness between colonial history and collective memory. The coexistence of socio-political circumstances brought by two foreign hegemonies and the cultural influxes and technologies associated with the West present one of the central challenges to those seeking to analyze the integration of cultural vicissitudes into modern Korea. These difficulties underscore the persistence of colonial consciousness and the importance of aural technologies of sound reproduction gramophone, radio and the broadcasting system as vital elements of the construction of a collective mentality for Koreans. Following Foucauldian discussion of the discursive production of the subject, in which he stresses that the matrices of power and discourse that constitute the subject are singular nor sovereign in their productive action, perhaps we should begin differently, since this statement regarding colonial modernity and cultural mobilization by empires already assumes too much, depends too much on a viewpoint that presumes the general hegemony of Western modernity. Popular music in Korea during this era offers one of the most fertile grounds for studying the dissemination and enculturation of Western and American modernity through ways of hearing, producing and consuming sounds since the phonograph was introduced in colonial Korea in the early 20 th century. Koreans reciprocal engagement with popular music production and consumption in its complex history of colonization by Japan amplifies the nation s colonial cultural formation in terms of a filtered westernization determined by the Japanese colonizer s tastes. We might understand Koreans infatuation with western culture by seeing it as an act of subordination and normalization of a genuine modernity, or by merely designating it as a counter modernity against the Japanese colonial occupation. Modern colonial subjects were burdened with a doubly appropriated modernity,

28 14 marked by a fractured tension between a passionate attachment to western modernity and the Japanese colonial modernization that mobilized colonial labour and infrastructure to serve military expansionism. Butler s insightful adoption of the Foucauldian postulate of subjection is useful in rethinking the circumstances of colonial, in-between status of Koreans during the formation of colonial nation-state. As she has argued, the simultaneous subordination and forming of the subject assumes a specific psychoanalytic valence when we consider that no subject emerges without a passionate attachment to those on whom he or she is fundamentally dependent. (Butler, 1997:7) The primary colonial conditions, seen in terms both of their socio-political formation as through their role in forming cultural modernity, imply a continuous subordination after the post-liberation era when the U.S. Military Government controlled the sovereignty of Korea. Butler explains the formation of subjectivity through the engagement of the fundamentally dependent, a precocious formation of colonial/capitalist modernity within the Imperial body that is marked by the singularity of time and space within Gyeongseong (Seoul), the continuity of colonial forces, the co-presence of Empires after the liberation, and by the way in which the Korean War is inscribed in Koreans subjectivity formation, as I shall discuss further in relation to coloniality. After the liberation of Korea from Japanese control, the U.S. began to meddle in Korean politics through various diplomatic, economic and coercive strategies rooted in Cold War logics. As Bruce Cummings s Origin of the Korean War demonstrates in great detail, the U.S. occupation of South Korea resurrected the pre-existing colonial bureaucracy at the expense of North Korea (Cummings 1981, 1991). U.S. imperialism in post-liberation Korea was pervasive and prolific, unilaterally engaged in sporadic military interventions, exercises in rooting out the Communist and leftist parties, while interfering in national politics, social rehabilitation and the dissemination of American capital and goods from its military bases. The cultural impact of various forms of American popular culture paradoxically restructured the newly independent nation-state in a pseudo colonial circumstance by accomplishing its cultural dependency on western modernity. Popular music had been an efficiently permeable cultural medium within everyday Korean life during the colonial and post-liberation eras. Contrasting to literature or film, the focus of most academic cultural research, Korean popular music from the

29 15 foreign occupation era has often been overlooked. The result has been a failure to grasp the collective memories and core sensibilities of the majority of Koreans who did not have access to literature or films owing to illiteracy or for economic reasons. In this respect, the fluidity and ambivalence of popular music made it a peculiarly compelling means through which to address the terms of the colonial relationship between Korea and Japan. 14 In the context of postwar Korea, two empires not only dominated Korean sociocultural hegemony but also presided over the structure of knowledge in and about the consciousness of the postwar Korean as agents of desire and self-reflection. The ambivalent situation of Koreans within colonial continuity and traumatic repetition was both doubly repressed and implied in the historical context marked by the formation of cultural modernity, colonial modernization and Americanization. Therefore, it is significant to interrogate the relation between the sociopolitical vulnerability of the nation during the era and to inquiry as to the role and meaning of popular music during these significant periods of history. Music was interwoven with the very form of colonial power repression, regulation, and prohibition- during a period in which foreign hegemony formed the structure of Koreans consciousness in relation to coloniality and a doubly appropriated western modernity. To underscore the continuity of colonial subjection resonating in popular music narrative, I will argue not only the ways in which colonial Koreans constructed self-identities and mimicked western modernity by negating the remaining colonial past during the post-liberation era, but also the ways in which colonial experiences were internalized on an unconscious level through the embedded narratives of popular music. Halbwachs notion of Collective Memory, emphasizing the interpenetration of social groups and individual memories, is valuable in delineating the characteristics of Korean popular song and its relation to historical incidents as cultural narratives. As he suggests, just as groups encourage individuals to think in terms of group continuity over time, so too collective memory generates impressions of stopped time in which favoured images of the past resist change, (Halbwachs 1980). Halbwachs main goal as a historian, 14 Popular music in this era as a narrative of the national ethos reflects the notion of ambivalence which Bhabha argues, haunts the idea of the nation, the language of those who write of it and the lives of those who live it. Homi K. Bhabha (1990) Introduction: Narrating the Nation, in Nation and Narration, New York: Routledge. p.1

30 16 therefore, was to elucidate how unreliable memory was as a guide to realities of the past. Thus, his explanation of the formation of collective memories can help us understand how popular song acts as a vehicle for preserving memory, functioning by shaping certain memories as stopped time. Novick (1999) has built on the ideas of Halbwachs, arguing: To understand something historically is to be aware of its complexity, to have sufficient detachment to see it from multiple perspectives, to accept the ambiguities, including moral ambiguities, of protagonists motives and behaviour. Collective memory simplifies; sees events from a single, committed perspective; is impatient with ambiguities of any kind; reduces events to mythic archetypes (pp 3-4). He further argues that in contrast to historical consciousness, which is related to the historicity of events, memory has no sense of the passage of time; it denies the pastness of its objects and insists on their continuing presence. 15 The larger picture in which collective memory is central is usually formulated in terms of conflict and negotiation rather than as an approximation of an accurate representation, such as that of struggle between western culture and vernacular culture (Wertsch 2009: 123). In this sense, the relationship between sociocultural circumstances and popular music as a vessel of collective memory of the time can be reciprocally reinforcing, since music s hybridity enables it to cross the borders that society defines; as Said remarks, music has a tendency to transgress any boundaries inside which it is placed. 16 By recognizing the role of popular music as a narrative of collective memory, we acknowledge that music s ongoing presence, in phonograph recordings and in narratives that reflected upon the past through the crooning voices of colonial singers, was very much a part of the historical events and has transmitted the sensibility of that period through to the present. Therefore, writing a history of Korean popular music in this era is not only a matter of recounting a specific cultural history, but also of summoning the uncanny voices of those who were within that history and who told it simultaneous with its unfolding. I begin with these particular experiences of Korean cultural modernity in relation to popular music, driven by the images of the Japanese soldier and postwar Korean orphan boy in order to observe that what is referred to as Korean popular music in relation to the state and the colonial / postcolonial culture 15 Ibid., p Edward Said (1991) Musical Elaborations, London: Vintage, p. 55.

31 17 implied by empires, is clearly a heterogeneous entity, since two colonial experiences have certainly had been inscribed in the consciousness of Koreans as a post-traumatic response reified as collective memory. The hypothesis that popular song serves as a narrative of collective memory is still apparent in the ubiquitous cultural texts of empires that act as narratives within popular culture after the postwar period and the Korean War. The instinctual desire to pursue western modernity and its rhetoric in postwar Korea seeks to naturalize the symptoms of this split mentality in narratives of popular culture that engender the empire as a significant other. From this perspective, three significant issues need to be clarified in order that we deal with the formation of modern Korean popular music: (1) Post/colonial modernity between two empires, (2) coloniality as selfconsciousness and (3) Americanism as a naturalized lexicon of western modernity. 4. Trajectories of Modernity, Coloniality and Americanism in Korea 4.1. Colonial Modernity and a Plural Postwar in Korea If modernity is characterized by economic, political and sociocultural transformations, it is equally a matter of beliefs, values and human consciousness. It is also concerned with a public consciousness of the past, which is essential to defining social understanding, for there must be a shared narrative or stories about how we came to be the way we are, to differentiate from what we haven t thought or imagined and hence how we came to be modern. Thus, premises concerning modernity involve a change that presents a particular set of temporal relations and historical values, (Lamarre 2004). However, this hypothesis inevitably produces a paradox, since modernity is a relative concept, conceived in relation to historical differences that evolve out of a certain tradition and values which came from the old norms and morals are taken to imply something new in a temporal period that is compared to when we were not modern. The notion of modernity also presumes the parallel existence of others who are not (could not) be modern even now. Therefore, the concept of modernity entails a matter of convergence and rupture from the past that is often engaged in matters of the totalization, singularity or homogeneity of a public understanding regarding changed values, sociopolitical structure and cultural

32 18 identity. Modernity also raises the issues of temporality, coevality or contemporaneity, If we posit that modernity had its origin in reticulations of exchange and production encircling the world as Mitchell argued (Mitchell 2000:2), modernity insinuates an interaction between the West and the Non-West, which prefigures the significance of empire, the colonizers' regulation of time and space, and the proliferation of self-replication, mimicry and hybridization by positing an original. Modernity is often misused or reterritorialized as modernization, as is apparent in the East Asian context during colonial and post-liberation years, a period of fast industrialization and colonial mobilization where the rejection of anything labeled old fashioned, pre-modern and traditional was obliterated. The West has long presided over East Asia as a central epistemic and political entity. Sophisticated Western and American modernities, which have usually been recognized as emblems of modernity in East Asia, have resulted in spatialized notions of modernity centered on the West / America that render it indistinguishable from westernization, Americanization and a repertory of empowering Eurocentric gestures. Therefore, East Asian discourses of modernity have internalized western notions of modernity regardless of their own multiple historical ruptures. These notions include a doubly repressed colonial experience, imperial history, the mobilization of various political rhetorics rooted in militarization, imperial mobilization and Cold War logics and the resultant forms of colonial subjection that have arrived as East Asian subjectivity has been imbued with a mimetic desire for the West. In this sense, the thesis of Korean modernity needs to be posited within the doubled structure of modernity formation, marked by an institutional modernization brought by Imperial Japan and an imaginary modernity tied to the West and America. These are not clearly bifurcated but often intermingled, and they are part of the traffic in Korean subjectivity formation in relation to modernity. Coloniality (Sikminseong in Korean) has long been controversial term within the Korean academy when designating the formation of Korean modernity. Since the late 1980s, many scholars have discussed colonial modernization and Korea s achievement of a local modernity and the ways in which these came to be experienced, driven as they were by Japanese expansionism. The discourse of colonial modernization (Sikminji Geundaehwaron) is a subversive one to nationalist historians, who often neglect the

33 19 implied coloniality of Koreanness by overvaluing its modernity. Ironically, coloniality and modernity cannot be compatible in the field of colonial modernization or at least in the circumstances of colonial Korea since modernity is situated alongside coloniality as its antithesis. These two categories for defining Korean modern history are thus situated in complex and overdetermined relations and are complementary, as many scholars have argued (Jeong 1997, Park 2000, Lim 2000, Cho 2006). Since a compatibility between coloniality and modernity does not apply to Koreans specific circumstances and since the relation between the two cannot be delineated in terms of simple complementarity, it is essential to evaluate the tensions, ruptures and reciprocal infiltration of these two categories to better address the heterogeneous structures of coloniality and modernity within the two empires in Korean history. As Balibar emphasizes in his study of nation formation, every modern nation is a production of colonization: it has always been to some degree colonized or colonizing, and sometimes both at the same time, (Balibar, 1993:112). 17 Korean modernity cannot exist without the thesis of coloniality, but coloniality can only subsist as a form bonded to modernity. As Mignolo points out, the limitations of arguments about modernity without coloniality, such as Wallerstein s, is that modernity is the center and coloniality is relegated to the periphery of the history of capitalism modernity is deprived of the memory of colonial differences and the forces, still at work today in the mass media, of the coloniality of power, (Mignolo 2000; 42). From this perspective, the idea of modernity in the periphery acquires a layered character in relation to coloniality. In the mid-1980s, Japanese economist Nakamura Satoru and Korean historian Ahn Byeong-Jik ignited the dispute vis-à-vis colonial modernization (Sikminji Geundaehwaron), confronting the predominant trope of Korean history as a history of colonial exploitation and mobilization. The typical arguments about colonial modernization can be summarized as: (1) the Governor-General of Korea officially utilized Korean territories, and there is no evidence that Japan exploited the country s vast government-own 17 He further argued, regarding the systemic overdetermination of a historical capitalism, that the constitution of nations [is] bound up not with the abstraction of the capitalist market, but with its concrete historical form: that of a world economy which is always already hierarchically organized into a core and a periphery, each of which have different methods of accumulation and exploitation of labour power, and between which relations of unequal exchange and domination are established. Consequently, the mobilization for wars with colonization played a decisive role in configuring national / local capitalism, which drove the formation of the modern nation-states, as Ching has also argued (2001).

34 20 lands; (2) by creating a modern land system, Japan updated a pre-modern system to contribute to Korean capitalism; (3) statistically, colonial Korea steadily progressed under colonial capitalism, reaching an annual rate of economic growth of 3.8% (Cho 1998). By redefining Korea as one of the poorest countries in the 1960s, Ahn argued that South Korea s current economic growth was the result of an economic base forged by Japanese colonial modernization (Ahn 1997: 39-42). Many historians have criticized this argument; as Jeon puts it, colonial modernization theory is only focused on the Japanese period, in which various modern societies experienced the characteristics of modernization. Thus, he argues, modernization emerged not because of Japan but was rather institutionalized during the Japanese colonial period, (Jeon 1999). Meanwhile, Bae has argued that although the colonial modernization theory implies a pro-japanese tendency to emphasize the benefits of industrialization and colonial modernization instituted during the Japanese occupation era, without describing a coloniality centered on the role of Japanese capital as a trigger for Korean modernization, the basis of this theory requires framing the origin of Koreans successful modernization around Japanese contributions to it (Bae 2000:17). In other words, Korean colonial modernization was driven by imperial Japan s internal needs and external sociopolitical exigencies. Thus, to use these categories in order to evaluate Korea s present day economic circumstances is not methodologically appropriate. Within the colonial modernity approach, as it is applied to colonial Korea, there have been two strands. The first has been shaped by Western-oriented Korean Studies scholars such as Shin and Robinson; their main arguments are focused on the limitations of nationalist rhetorics (such as the failure of Enlightenment and colonial modern education) and the complexities rooted in coloniality, nationalism and modernity. From these premises, researchers using the colonial modernity approach argue that coloniality, modernity and nationalism are not separate factors but are strata enclosed within colonial modernity as a term, linked to various subjectivities and narratives that evolved during the colonial era: Colonialism intervened in Korea s path to modernity [ ] Koreans participated directly and indirectly in the construction of a unique colonial modernity a modernity that produced cosmopolitanism (a sense of shared universals) without political emancipation. (Shin and Robinson, 1999)

35 21 Geundaeseong 18 The second strand is mainly focused on a synthetic consideration on Sikminji which is different from the western idea of colonial modernity, since Sikminji Geundaeseong is inclined to a rhetorical approach that (re)considers and reconnects with the past, beyond the boundaries of what colonial exploitation and colonial modernization can delineate (Cho 2006). Park has argued that while the colonial modernity approach uses the prefix colonial, it is used as secondary modifier, since Koreans historical specificity is not elucidated, resulting in a diminished account of Korean modernity as implanted modern (Park 2000). Park Myeong-Gyu s critique of these western-oriented Korean Studies scholars finds alternative critical analysis to support, since Shin and Robinson have defined the origin and nature of Koreans modernity as a western phenomenon, and thus, although Shin and Robinson suggest the multiplicity of kinds and fields of modernity, 19 result of a cultural diffusion of external influences. 20 they implicitly explained this specific modernity as the On the other hand, the Sikminji Geundaeseong of local historians actively tries to connect the historical specificity of Korean modernity with western colonial and postcolonial criticism. Jeong and Kim (1997) argue that, all the hypotheses regarding the contradictory colonial modernization and exploitation try to understand the modernization process as a something eventually to be accomplished, yet, if modernity as something to be overcome, then the topography of argument is altered. Thus, their account problematizes the presumed yet undertheorized universality of western-centered modernity by discussing the specific modernization process of Koreans. Baek proposes that a specifically Korean modernity cannot be confined to exceptional, local circumstance lacking universality, but requires overcoming the western modern as a standard of universality (Baek 1993). Colonial difference and colonial interiority are the main concepts in Sikminji Geundaeseong. Jeong and Kim further differentiate between the western modern and the colonial modern in terms of a mental internalization regulated by colonial formations of disciplinary power and the production of 18 I use the term Sikminji Geundaeseong in Korean to differentiate this from western versions of colonial modernity, since the circulatory method and conceptual implications of both terms are different, although the term has an equivalent value in translation. 19 Ibid., p Ibid., They write that, The rise of modernity in Korea was also closely associated with external influences. In particular, it was the emergence of modern Japan and its intrusion into Korea that stimulated and provided as direct model for the effort to build a nation-state in the late nineteenth century, (p.10).

36 22 modern subjectivity under colonial control. This control includes such features as Imperial patriarchy, feudal organization and the making of Imperial subjects (Jeong and Kim 1997: 25). Kang describes Korean modernity as the product of impact and hybridity, which result not from diffusion or dissemination but through cultural contact. Thus, he proposes that its expression, activities and effects do not represent a pre-modern desire to be modern but, rather, a modern arrangement and its aftermath (Kang 2000). To summarize, the arguments of the Sikminji Geundaeseong group are developed as dominant streams of scholarly discourse, while sharing their critical perspectives with colonial modernization approaches and exploitation. Nevertheless, their approach proposes to look at the colonial interiority of Koreans as part of a larger discussion of Korean modernity. The formations of modernization and nationalism in the transition toward capitalist expansion in the postwar Korean context appeared coevally and have been engaged as homogenous processes, mobilized by governmental regimes. However, a new geopolitical sovereignty and socio-cultural differences in postwar Korean provoked a significant change in practices of subjectification as well as in governmental regimes, which were still problematized by the relation between Japanese colonial remnants and processes of capitalist liberalism in the global era. Not surprisingly, since World War II there have been numerous theorizations of hegemonic westernization processes, while Japanese colonial memory is still superimposed onto postcolonial East Asian circumstances. The term Postwar, which often resonates with the Japanese Sengo ( Postwar in Japanese) became an official prefix to describe the circumstances of Japanese society after their defeat in Many Japanese scholars have analyzed bilateral relations with the U.S. and their influence on Japanese national identity in terms of an economy of desire and cultural appropriation through various discursive rhetorics like nihonjinron (theories about the Japanese). The narrative of postwar Japan provides a rupture with Japan s militaristic past, which Igarashi describes as Japan s defeat as a drama of rescue and conversion: the United States rescued Japan from the menace of its militarists, and Japan was converted into a peaceful, democratic country under the U.S. tutelage (Igarashi 2000, Naoki 1995). In accounting for the heterogeneous character of the Korean postwar compared to the postwar period in Japan, Ivy s psychoanalytic approach to the Japanese postwar is useful. In her essay In/Comparable Horrors: Total War and the Japanese Thing (2005)," Ivy

37 23 suggests that Japanese consciousness is marked by an ontological repetition of the postwar circumstances that positioned Japan in a state of perpetual peaceful constitution through the activation of Article 9 of the Japanese constitution 21, which made Japan eternally unable to wage war as a result of its defeat in the World War II. She argues, as well, that this serial reminder of Japan s defeat as national ignominy (yogore) eventually makes Japan into a divided unity, the aberrant split personality (jinkaku bunretsu), split from the catastrophe of war defeat and its occupied aftermath, inasmuch as the time of postwar (sengo) for Japan is perpetual insofar as the defeat in World War II will always represent the last war for Japan. (Ivy, 2005) Contrarily, postwar in Korea has to be rearticulated in terms of its historical specificity: doubled colonial experiences. Koreans Postwar ( Jeonhu 전후 in Korean or alternatively called post-liberation, Haebang 해방 in Korean) was mobilized by anti-communism and Cold War logics, hastily suturing Japanese colonial legacy. As Silverman explains, suture is the process whereby the inadequacy of the subject s position is exposed in order to facilitate new insertions into a cultural discourse (Silverman 1983); postwar Korea can be encapsulated in the colonial trauma of being subordinated to a westernization driven by American controls echoing anti- Communism and social reconstruction ideals. Koreans disarticulation of the notions of modernity / modernization from the Japanese empire to the U.S. military government signifies the transition to an uneven modernization produced by the shift from non-western to Western dominance while dealing with the Japanese colonial residues. Naoki argues, regarding the emergence of multiple modernities, that although historicist schemas have focused on the single overarching process of homogenization of modernization as westernization, the notion of multiple modernities must be interrogated to account for multiplicity and multiple histories (Naoki 2001). Generally speaking, the notion of modernity has been delineated as a totalizing mode of logics, regulations, practices and mediations that naturalize the pervasive developmental regimes of modernization in postwar/post-liberation Korea. However, considering Koreans subjective positionality 21 Article 9 prohibits Japan s further engagement of war, effect on May 3, Complete text of the official English translation of the Article 9 is as followed; ARTICLE 9: Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. (2) To accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

38 24 from the period of Japanese colonial occupation until the postwar (post-liberation) era, we find a continual coloniality, a system of repetitional and ideological contradiction doubly imposed by the Korean War and in the post-traumatic memory. In this respect, I will further elucidate how coloniality functions as self-consciousness for Koreans Coloniality as Self-Consciousness Loss, Absence and Mourning as a form of cultural representation Alongside the discourse on colonial modernity, alternative researches on the character of everyday colonial life and cultural practices in colonial modernity have emerged since the late 1990s in South Korea. Kim Jin-Song s research on various cultural practices of colonial subjectivity in modern times is mainly focused on the modern experience as changes to everyday life and individual consciousness in relation to modernization and industrialization. Interestingly, he uses the term Hyundae ( 現代 ) rather than Geundae ( 近代 ). Both translate as modern in English; however the usage of Hyundae and Geundae is somewhat different in practice in Korean, since Hyundae insinuates something closer to coevalness that includes the current time, present age and today, while Geundae designates the recent modern excluding the present time. However, modernity in Korean is translated as Geundaeseong ( 近代性 ) which comes from Geundae. Kim alternately defines colonial modernity as Hyundaeseong in his book The formation of modernity: Please permit the dance halls in Seoul, in relation to Hyundae, to position himself in the 1930s when modernity was taking form in colonial Korea (Kim 1999). According to Kim, colonial subjects had to find their starting point for colonial modernity in exteriority, imposed by the Japanese empire, rather than from interiority. Consequently, the concreteness of the everyday lives of Koreans in colonial circumstances and the narrative of a logical perspective of modern thingness are separated in the tension of a dichotomized discourse that developed as western = industrialization = urbanization = good versus orient = rural = underdevelopment = bad, while expanding other doubled discourses as national = traditional = independent = valuable = good versus western = modern = dependent = vulgar = bad (Kim 1999, 16-18). This binary structure of knowledge in colonial Korea resulted in diverse formations of colonial subjectivity and

39 25 cultural activities such as the modern boy and modern girl, 22 New Women, representations of popular culture, a colonial landscape of modern life and the emergence of the new modern subject. Kim s research on the relations between tangible everyday colonial life and new formations of subjectivity inspired much subsequent research (Yoo 2001, Kim 2004, Kwon 2005, Kim 2005, Jang 2006). The dynamic interaction between colonial Korea and empires, which I emphasis in my analysis through popular music, is, I presume, a result of the continuous consciousness of coloniality and exteriority in Korean s definition and recognition of their own culture. Since Korea acquired independence in 1945, a Cold War system that enervates the formation of a local decolonization movement has effectively substituted itself for the structure of colonialism. The cultural influences of empires as well as their impact on sociopolitical power have been embedded as a part of local histories and cultures that cannot be eradicated easily. Nonetheless to say, this widespread sense of being locked within the colonial circumstances was actively reflected upon and engaged with in vernacular popular cultural activities, which resonated with melancholy and an ethos of loss in the representation of popular songs. While the flood of western culture and mass infatuation towards the other scene 23 in the cultural arena during the 1930s reshaping the way in which colonial subjects engage with highly commercialized environments, full of commodities that energized modern boys and girls, the social mood in 1930s Korea was full of melancholic sensibility for the loss of sovereign power. Korea s transformation into a staging area for Japanese militarization following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the development of Korean territories as an integral part of the metropolitan Japanese economy accelerated the steady inflow of Japanese population to their colony, bringing with them western commercialism, the cornucopia of colonial commodity culture 22 According to Yoo (2001) who cites a Dong-A Ilbo daily newspaper, modern boys (mobo or mob) and modern girls (Moge or Mogel) or Ultra-modern girls were terms used to describe the latest fashion-nae in the 1910s, becoming common nouns by the mid-1920s. Yoo Sun-young (2001), Embodiment of American Modernity in Colonial Korea, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2(3), p Žižek describes the other scene as a form of thought whose ontological status is not that of thought which means that he further says the form of thought external to the thought itself ( ) whereby the form of the thought is already articulated in advance. The symbolic order is precisely such a formal order which supplements and/or disrupts the dual relationship of external factual reality and internal subjective experience. (Žižek 1989:19) In this respect, the western modernity to the colonial subject became a second scene to accommodate modernity, which is an unconscious theatre by Žižek term where modern/colonial subject were staged.

40 26 and the idea of western modernity, whether or not the idea of western modernity was fully embedded within colonial Korean s self invention and identification on a conscious or unconscious level. Colonial modernity involved the adaptation of all bodies to a technological society, a sensory adjustment to new experiences of space and time, speed and movement, self and other (Kern 1983). The experience of looking at the colonial landscape also helped Koreans to imagine through a new visual mode. Various western music genres, such as jazz, blues and swing, also captured the pace and power of the industrial soundscape. This quintessential shift entailed a gradual loss of traditional identities and neo-confucian 24 principle previously embedded in local social structures. The making of the modern individual in colonial modernity thus involved a radical shift in the experience of time and space. However, such ambivalence towards colonial modernity was mediated through imperial spectacle, in relation to which colonial subjects were in a position of exteriority. Popular music production and consumption during the Japanese colonial occupation era provided and delievered a uniquely veiled sense of voices that were suppressed, repressed through metaphorical lyrics or through uneasily accommodated western-style music that resonated with the bodily pleasures of mass consumerism. Since overtly addressing the loss of the nation and its sense of melancholic ethos was impossible, popular songs were often enveloped in ways that either reappropriated the traditional folk song genre (Shinminyo) or adopted the similar vessel of a Japanese popular song genre (ryūkōka) to convey their emotion of loss and absence. LaCapra draws his own reflection in Trauma, Absence, Loss vis-à-vis the difference of conversion between absence and loss. When absence is converted into loss, one increases the likelihood of misplaced nostalgia or utopian politics in quest of a new totality or fully unified community. When loss is converted into absence, one faces the impasse of endless melancholy, impossible mourning, and interminable aporia in which any process of working through the past and its historical losses is foreclosed or prematurely aborted. (LaCapra, Critical Inquiry, 1999: 698) 24 Neo-Confucionism or seoungnihak in Korean is a dominant national ideology or system of belief amongst scholarly yangban class in Korea since Joseon Dynasty. The Confucian ideas of chung(loyalty 忠 ) hyo(piety 孝 ) in(benevolence 仁 ) eui(righteousness 義 ) and ye(civility 禮 ) are the basic five duties.

41 27 In Korean s case, it was a little bit of both, since the loss of absence can be seen both within the post-liberation era, in the adoption of Americanism after the Japanese prohibition of the western culture, and in the historical loss of the nation and sovereign power during the Japanese colonial occupation era. The specificity of coloniality as Koreans selfconsciousness has significant connotations that we may contrast to western self-figuration. Colonial difference during the formation of mass consciousness on modernity within the two empires left Koreans with an indelible interior mechanism of self-identity, which is that of coloniality. According to Stuart Hall, there are two different ways of thinking cultural identity. The first notion is defined in terms of shared culture; a sort of collective one true self hiding artificially imposed collective selves. 25 A second definition of cultural identity is a matter of becoming as well as of being. He further argues that, It [cultural identity] belongs to the future as much as to the past. 26 The former definition of identity is likely to be suitable to the case of the colonial subject accommodating western modernity; the latter is applicable to the Japan forceful incitement to colonial Koreans to become Japanese. Looking in between two imperial contact zones 27 where the influx of western culture meets the local, shows us two major constructions: on the one hand, the cultural identity of the local (colonized), on the other, the authenticity of culture itself. The notions of westernization and western modernity implanted in Korea during the Japanese colonial era composed a filtered modernity structured by the colonizer s tastes. Undoubtedly, Korean popular culture was influenced by a western culture filtered through a Japanese lens as an object of fetishism related to Japanese colonial policies of cultural assimilation, resulting, for Koreans, in an ambivalent coloniality. Thus the Korean subject, caught between the contradictory positionalities of the West and Japan, is incarcerated by a dominant global American modernity and by the Japanese imperialist Gaze. How, then, 25 This notion is similar to Anderson s idea of the imagined community. See Stuart Hall (2003) Cultural Identity and Diaspora, Theorizing Diaspora, eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Blackwell Publishing, p Ibid., This concept is borrowed from Mary Louise Pratt s work. See, Mary Louise Pratt (1992), Introduction: Criticism in the Contact Zone, in Imperial Eyes: Traveling Writing and Transculturation, (1-11).

42 28 were aspects of a directly American modernity, disseminated through the U.S. military army base and thus not mediated by Japan, appropriated into Korean society subsequent to the liberation after World War II? How were narratives of local culture hybridized into two colonial experiences as a doubly-embedded coloniality? The answers to these questions could explain not only the specificity of the modernization process in response to globalization, (post)coloniality and political differences in colonial experiences but also the way in which East Asian modernity is subjugated to a Western modernity, yet is still struggled over, syncretized and hybridized in terms of coloniality. As Andrew F. Johns argues concerning the Chinese condition of colonial modernity through investigating Chinese gramophone culture, the historical apparatus of modern culture in colonial modernity can help to place recent theoretical debates on the nature of transnational cultures on firmer historical ground. 28 Thus, the implications of this postcolonial appropriation of Americanism as well as industrialization and modernization can possibly cast similar insights into the Korean cultural context in detail Genealogy of Americanism in Korea as Westernized Modernity The term, Americanization ( 美國化 Migukwha) carries with it broad definitions of westernization, economic modernization and cultural adaptation. Confined to a Korean context, the American occupation after World War II was not only engaged in a sociopolitical and masculine dominance over South Korea, but may also have overtly signified the glamorous influx of a westernized modernity. Uncovering a plural Americanism/Americanization under the name of modernity posits the centrality of the American role in forming the idea of modernity and the multiple experiences of Koreans within colonial/postcolonial life. In the early 1930s, the Korean intelligentsia began to use the term Americanization to point to a newly emerging social and cultural phenomenon. Initially, the direct interactions between western culture and colonial Koreans were the 28 Andrew F. Jones, The Gramophone in China, in Lynda H. Liu, ed. Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999, p The recent globalization process of Korean popular music has occurred through the market in Korea. In other words, the Korean music market segment was rapidly expanding, upsetting previous western market domination. However, the problem of this massive influx of popular music from western countries still demonstrates the rise of questions in relation to cultural identity.

43 29 primary source of cultural contact. The idea of modernization in colonial Korea included aspirations for the nation s wealth and power; as a result, westernization and Americanization became identical terms of modernization in the Korean consciousness during the Japanese colonial period. The perception of American modernity during the colonial era also fulfilled the function of a counter imaginary to the grip of Japanese colonialism (Yoo 2001). Koreans desire for self-modification as Westernization generated a new life-world (Sinsegae) that included, on an individual level, what Yoo designates individual modernization, enacted by copying and mimicking new modern bodily gestures, ways of speech, facial expressions, language and outlooks. Yet the colonial subjects were already embedded in a westernized reformation of self-identity, one situated not only in their subordination to a colonial cultural influx or their consequential dependency upon a western modernity filtered through a Japanese lens, but also in the autonomic passionate attachments of modern phantasmagoria positing themselves outside as spectators of their own history. Within this double process of assimilation, the colonial subjectivity favoring western modernity under Japanese occupation were generated that had doubly constructed inferiority on the level of individual psyches, delineating the boundaries of a simultaneous subordination to the imperial Japan and an autonomous assimilation to the western modernity. Therefore, the desire to survive in colonial circumstances could be transposed as a desire to be subordinate, as per Bhabha s concept of mimicry. Rethinking the colonial oblivion after the liberation of South Korea, I find that the persistence of a colonial experience under USAMGIK control, which drove Korean subjects continuing submission and mimicry towards being Americanized, lends itself to an analysis which sees it as a continuous post-traumatic symptom of colonial dependency and colonial formation of attachment. The question of Americanization in colonial Korea always remains in view in discussions of westernized modernity and in relation to how Americanism redefined the concept of modernity in Korea. Considering how the discourses of the modern boy and modern girl were negatively represented and even mocked by various left-wing Korean intellectuals during the Japanese colonial period, the ambivalent reaction toward western modalities and Koreans imaginative proximity to western culture could be read as a

44 30 contradictory reorientation towards the dual modernity and modernization process through the ways in which western physicality was mimicked as an invisible agency of counteracting Imperial Japanese control while the sociopolitical conditions of colonial Korea were constantly being reformed under the surveillance of the Japanese empire. Americanized or broadly westernized modernity was represented through various cultural activities as an agency engaged in refiguring a modern self detached from the gaze of Japan s Orientalist perspective on its colonies. As Paik has argued regarding Korean colonial experiences, Koreans unsteady condition under Japanese control during the Total War era gave birth to less westernized and even occasionally anti-western tendencies concerning the discourses of western modernity, which eventually intensified the Western values by giving impetus to Japanese decolonization. 29 Subsequently, the anti-western prohibition of cultural activities during the Total War era by the Japanese regime gave colonial Koreans a more affirmative receptivity to westernness. Choi Chungmoo argued that the formation of a Japanese imperial body mimicking western imperialism in colonial Korea was a psychological projection of the simulacrum of the western fantasy to colonial Koreans imaginary by Japanese implanting pseudo-scientific knowledge in order to materialize a colonial pastiche of Japan and the western (Choi, 2001). This is partially because the mechanism of colonialism was different from that of a western colonialism rooted from scientific racism. As Ching has argued concerning the Japanese strategy of positional superiority as colonizer, the non-white, not-quite, yet-alike, Japanese domineering gaze towards its colonial subjects in the East Asia must always invariably redirect itself, somewhat ambivalently, to the imperialist glare of the West. (Ching, 1998:66) Since the concept of racial difference and visibility of otherness cannot be a primary criteria by which Japan could distinguish between the colonizers and colonized, Japanese imperialism must rearticulate and recontextualize the existing Eurocentered racial schematization (Ching, 1998:67) by mimicking western colonialism. Historically speaking, the Japanese inclination toward western-centrism made its colonies more inviting for western colonization, beyond logics hybridizing the idea of western civilization as colonial tool to control East Asia since the Meiji era through 29 Paik Nak-Chung (1999), Colonialism in the Korean Peninsula and the Dubious Problems of Modern Korea (in Korean), Creation and Criticism Quarterly (Changjakkwa Bipyung), Volume 99

45 31 adopting Fukuzawa Yukichi s Datsu-A Ron 30 ( 脫亞論 Leaving Asia or Overcoming Asia). Fukuzawa has argued that the Japanese accommodation of the structures of western civilization made it easier to control the colonial territories and to fulfill the nation s imperial needs (Fukuzawa 1985). Thus, western modernization in colonial Korea was initially introduced not by direct western influence but by the Asian deputy of modernization, the Japanese empire. In contrast to the active reception by Japan and its colonies of western-centrism, the American perception of East Asia was often blurry and obfuscated in its descriptions. Traveler from Tokyo, a miscellaneous book written by John Morris in 1944, who was assigned as U.S. ambassador in Japan from 1932 until 1942, unfolded an exotic travelogue intended to help western audiences understand the enemy. This vivid essay, devoted to a description of Japanese everyday life is divided into two parts; My life in Japan and After Pearl Harbor. The book is mainly concerned with illustrating the bizarre character of culture within a pseudo-anthropological western viewpoint towards Asia. The first part of the book consists of first impressions, skimming over an exotic Japanese culture and society with the paternalistic western gaze. For example, Japanese music, through the gaze of the American ambassador, was portrayed with full compassion for those Japanese who were anxiously mimicking the western. The younger generation in Japan is intensely interested in Western music; in fact many people have been accustomed to listen it from their earliest years. To such, their own Japanese music sounds as foreign as it does to Europeans. (Morris 1944: 147) Morris further wrote in the preface that With regard to one of our enemies, Japan, our people in general are sadly deficient in knowledge, their way of life, their sense of logic, their processes of thinking and many of the factors that influence that thinking are not ours, and too many of our people try to measure these things by western yardsticks (Morris 1944). Similarly, the theatrical documentary about Korea produced in 1931 for MGM by producer and narrator James A. FitzPatrick describes colonial Korea as a part of the body of 30 Fukuzawa argued the need for adopting western civilization by prognosticating the fate of China and Korea as follows: Japan, as a national mind, despite the fact that the country is located in Asia, accepted the modern civilization of the west In my view, China and Korea cannot survive as independent nations with the onslaught of modern civilization to the East if they stay the way they are It is because locking self up in a closed room and shutting the air flow avoiding the wave of modern civilization, will only suffocate themselves (Fukuzawa 1985).

46 32 its Japanese master, although they(korean) firmly declaims to admit the superiority of Japan intellectual and moral culture over his own. 31 Encountering imperial Japan and colonial Korea during 1930s, the French surrealist poet Henri Michaux claimed that western logics and modern selfhood had been shrewdly insinuated into Korea, saying, The cinema, the phonograph, and the train are the real missionaries from the West, (Michaux 1933). As a reflection of the spillover of American culture in East Asia, a symposium organized by the Japanese magazine Chuo Kouron in 1942 drew attention to Americanism and the embedded western culture in Japan. 32 Tsumura Hideo, a journalist from Asahi newspaper, wrote, concerning the prevalence of Americanism and its reason for its influence in the world. There are various reasons for the prevalence of Americanism in the world, but briefly to say, the elements of optimism, speed and eroticism in American film provide the proper means for the American infiltration into European culture where dilettantism and moral confusion were widespread after the World War I. Second, the strong production system of American film renders the quantity and quality of American film superior to any other in the world, since a similar production environment within the European film industry is impossible.third, America doesn t have its traditional cultures, thus enabling it to generate a common universality since they can honestly reflect the unrootedness of their culture. [ ] the lack of traditional culture in American film generates this universal attraction, while transmitting another appeal which is the idea of a nation as a whole new world, the novelty without any tradition through democracy, machinery culture and Jazz music that resulted from American multiracialism. In this sense, Americanism and western-oriented modernity was deeply rooted in the consciousness of Koreans, where it served as a significant anchor for modernity formation until a total prohibition of American films came into effect in January Spectators/audience gradually perceived and embraced a burgeoning western modernity and various techniques that required a process of cultural self-reinvention in contrast to western/american understandings of Korea/East Asia. Interrelated with imperialism, colonization, modernization and western-centrism, negotiated notions of westernized 31 Siam to Korea (1931), FitzPartick Picture, Narrated by James A. FitzPatrick, see the appendix 1 for some visual images of how American/western described the native Koreans during Japanese occupation 32 Chuo Kouron (1942) Sekaisiteki Tachibato Nippon translated in Korean, Taepyeongyang Jeonjaengeui Sasang (2007) Imagine Context Publisher pp

47 33 modernity in colonial Korea derived from a doubleness of colonial consciousness between Japanese modernization and western modernity. The latter was clearly provided during the post-liberation era by the American cultural cornucopia and the visibility of American soldiers during the USAMGIK control era, which structured the essential relationship between westernized modernity and Americanism for postcolonial subjects. Hence, it is essential to distinguish between the notions of the filtered Americanism of the Japanese empire and the genuine Americanization under USAMGIK control in Koreans consciousness, although these are situated within the logics of continual colonial submission and experienced as two colonial periods. In pointing out the monumental technological progress achieved after the liberation, including the production of the first local phonographic records by the Goryeo phonograph record company (1947.August.3) and the launching of a local radio station in 1947, 33 I examine colonial modernization as a backdrop in broader historical threads of colonial discourses that still influenced Koreans continuous colonial submission after the liberation era that triggered their responses to Americanism. To stretch the issue further, after the liberation and during the Korean War, the postcolonial desire for Americanization in Korean popular music was received by Korean musicians and audiences as situated between the liquidation of Japanese colonial remains and the cultural influx coming from the American military base. During the Asia-Pacific war, American popular culture was restricted, since America was defined as Allied country hostile country to the Japanese empire. In this period, massive psychic suffering was caused by this interruption on the way to modernization, resulting in both unconscious colonial submission through the nation s military mobilization by the Japanese empire and a repressed desire for western culture and psychogenic trauma among Koreans. Through their prohibitions on the uses of both vernacular language and American / western popular culture during wartime in colonial Korea, the legal restrictions of Japanese colonial rule aggrandized the fantasy of Americanism in the Korean consciousness. At the same time, these generated symptomatically contradictory pseudo-colonial tendencies in Japanese colonial territories, which coexisted within the discourses of tropical Nambang (Japanese 33 The Joseon Housou Kyoukai (CHK; call sign JODK, 朝鮮放送協会 ), established in 1927, were radio stations reorganized and launched as Seoul Broadcasting in 1947, eventually branching into television broadcasting in 1961 and becoming the current Korean Broadcasting System.

48 34 Nanpō, which literally indicates the southern colonial territory of the Japanese empire) and an active propagandism directed at the northern outpost exhorting it to support Japanese military expansionism. After the colonial experiences of Koreans self-modification and mortification during and after the Japanese colonial period, the psyche of Koreans persists today, generated in the un/consciousness as a result of colonial repression and surveillance which overlapped with the continual colonial control by the USAMGIK. As Butler argues, regarding Freudian ideas of subjection and psychic topography, if subjection signifies the process of becoming subordinated by power as well as the process of becoming a subject, the colonial subject is initiated through a primary submission to power, whether by imperial interpellation or Foucauldian discursive productivity (Butler 1997). Thus, colonial submission during the intensive Japanese Total War era, which is often referred to as cultural genocide, enabled the colonial consciousness of the politically liberated postwar Koreans to transpose America as another master / interior colonizer (naichi 内地 ) of Korean subjects. As Butler clearly demonstrates, Freud s reference to the conscience as among the major institutions of the ego suggests not only that the conscience is instituted, produced and maintained within a larger polity and its organization, but that the ego and its various parts are accessible through a metaphorical language that attributes a social content and structure to these presumably psychic phenomena (Butler 1997: 178). How can we explain the interiorization of the colonial psyche after liberation from the Japanese empire and the continuous submission under USAMGIK? Or, more precisely, how has this implicit colonial control emerged in the representation of popular songs as a structural necessity of the topological model, one that follows from melancholia and from a withdrawal of attachment? (Butler 1997: 179) The Americans and anti-communist Koreans created an independent South Korean government as a constitutionally drafted body by supporting American-educated Syngman Rhee against Communist-ruled North Korea, since the South Korean government retained remnants of the Japanese colonial system including landholders, businessmen, and former employees of Japanese enterprises, while indoctrinating these with anti-communism. However, many anti-american sentiments were expressed through political demonstrations by the Korean left wing, and other manifestations of social and economic discontent toward America during the post-

49 35 liberation era were suddenly sutured after the outbreak of Korean War. During the war, the U.S. Army and General MacArthur began to rebuild the Korean Army and to dispatch American troops to help South Korea. The social mood for anti-communism was concretized as a mechanism with which to integrate Koreans and served as a civilian religion, so that Americanism was reinscribed in South Koreans as a defining factor in Korea s self-invention. <Figure 1-3> 1 Newspaper advertisement of a propaganda play performed during Korean War called I Chose Freedom (Anti-Communism Dream), which was loosely based on the Russian refugee Victor Kravchenko s (1946) anti-communism memoir of the same name. American liberty

50 36 statues are juxtaposed with a slave prisoner, clearly symbolizing freedom. Yeongnam Ilbo Daily Newspaper ( ), 2 Newspaper advertisement of a Music festival for Korean-American friendship, performed by American 5 th Army Jazz band during Korean War. Yeongnam Ilbo Daily Newspaper. ( ) 5. Methodology The methodology of this dissertation embraces extensive archival research, scrutinizing short interviews, autobiographies and oral history primarily related to popular musicians, content analysis of colonial Korean popular music records and Japanese Shōwa records which I have digitized. I also engage in the discourse / critical analysis of sheet music, magazines and journals - mainly focused on major journals and magazines during 1930s to 1950s such as Chogwang, Samchulli, Daedonga, Sinyeoseong, and newspapers such as Chosunilbo, Dongailbo, Maeilshinbo, Yeongnamilbo, Mainichi Daily - songbooks, photography, cartography, films, visual archives and footnotes from the KBS (Korean Broadcasting System) and short novels that I have collected over two years in Tokyo and Seoul. Also, the repositories and libraries in the University of Tokyo, Seoul National University (Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies), Korea University, The National Library of Korea, collections from War Memorial Museum, Seoul Museum of History, Gugak Gramaphone Museum, Charmsori Gramophone & Edison Museum have copious collections concerning pre- and postwar Korean popular music, which I have examined carefully in my research for comparative data about Japan and Korea that may serve to illuminate the social phenomena surrounding the genealogy of westernization and Americanism and yield insight into the germination of a modern way of life and the formation of cultural modernity in an East Asian context. 6. Chapter Summaries In Chapter One, Undoing Archived Voices, I have examined diverse notions of Korean colonial modernity that reflect and mediate the continuance and rupture of colonial difference in Korea. By interrogating the terms, colonial modernity, coloniality as self consciousness, and Americanism I attempt to account for the

51 37 workings of mimetic desire in colonial discourse and hegemony, and to study the term s usage by western and local scholars with a careful articulation of historical context regarding coloniality and Americanism as westernized modernity. Chapter Two, The Cultural Formation of Korean Popular Music in Japanese Colonial Era, examines the cultural formations of Korean popular music in relation to socio-political and geopolitical history during the Japanese colonial era. In order to trace the effects of popular songs as a reflection of national events and conditions and/or of colonial subjectivity, I attempt to illustrate how popular music, within a shift in quotidian life, has an impact not only on socio-political realities by instilling the ambivalent consciousness of both colonial submission and negation in the Empire, but also as the discursive formation of modern selves in the colonial situation through the mimicking of western modernity. With a particular emphasis on the discursive formation of colonial modernity and the quotidian life of Koreans, I explore major magazines and newspaper of colonial Korea in the 1930s such as Chokwang, Samchulli and Maeilshinbo, which imbued the consciousness of Korean intellectuals with the ideology of colonial regimes of militarism, of modernity, and of becoming an imperial subject. Archival history supports the claim that the modern sounds of popular songs transformed colonial subjects into a part of the Japanese national body for shaping various colonial spectra such as class, gender and even race and identity. Chapter Three, Two Phonographic Realities: Colonial Submission and Interstitial Voices of Colonial Specters, examines the mental interregnum of colonial Koreans between two opposite realities: first, the mobilization of the male volunteer soldier and the female colonial home front, and secondly, discourses on Nambang (Japanese southern territory) and Bukbang (Japanese Northern territory) through popular music. I attempt to show how popular music not only became a contradictory expression of the fascination and revulsion regarding discourses of imperial subjectivity but was also a means of expressing traumatic symptoms. Thus, I explore the formation of subjectivity during the Total War system in colonial Korea. Furthermore, I analyze how the narratives of exotic music genres within the predominant discourse regarding Japanese Empire s Southern territories, called Nambang, were ironically interwoven in order to reinforce Japanese militarism and then invoked to revise and resuscitate Western fantasies in contrast

52 38 to the discourses of Bukbang. I argue that popular music acts as a vehicle for representing the post-traumatic symptoms of the Japanese colonial era, serving as an unconscious narrativization of the way in which, in an efficient psychic operation, colonial subjects were continually subordinated during the two periods of colonization. Chapter Four, Plural Post-Wars Within, investigates the Koreans continual colonial submission, from the Japanese occupation to the U.S. military government, as a linear coloniality. Looking in particular at the postcolonial interregnum between the two empires as it is revealed in popular song, I look closely into the persistent colonial submission in popular song narratives as a traumatic mimesis and a surplus fantasy in relation to colonial experiences during and after the post-liberation era. The paradoxical coexistence of popular music narratives reappropriating Nambang fantasy in the postliberation era and reterritorializing Total War sentiments during the Korean War era, summoned a post-traumatic narrative while invigorating postwar logics of Cold War tropes and anti-communism. The fifth chapter, The Audible Memories of Postcolonial Melancholia: The U.S. Military Ghetto and Modern Soundscape In Postwar Korea, deals with spatial discourses to show how the relations of urban space have not only become socio-cultural realities with which we might rethink the postcolonial situation, and through which various cosmopolitan identities were reshaped, but also a discursive framework that enabled new senses of westernized modernity to resurface for postwar Koreans. Focusing on Americanized modernity, I explore the American military ghetto, Itaewon, as an intermediary space where the imaginary modern was implanted into the consciousness of Koreans. In this chapter, I mainly argue that there is a triangular intersection between Korean identity, westernized modernity, and a stateless mimetic desire for Americanization apparent in the production and distribution of popular songs in the postwar era. The production and consumption of popular music by Koreans reverberated with a postcolonial melancholia that combines the sounds sampled from Japanese colonial musical heritage with the sophisticated compositional techniques Korean musicians were adopting from the U.S. military subculture. The lyrics and style of the music reflected the implicit memories 34 of Japanese 34 Implicit memory is a type of recollection in which previous experiences aid in the performance of a task without conscious awareness of these previous experiences. D.L. Schacter (1987),

53 39 colonial experiences as these collided with imaginary articulations of Americanized modernity. The conclusion restates the function of popular song as a historical narrative of Korean history that assembles an emotional social structure of feeling for Koreans. To sum up the arguments regarding the Korean epistemology on modernity and doubly embedded colonial experience before and after the postwar period, I attempt to highlight the trajectories of conceptions of modernity, coloniality, Americanization and the continuous colonial consciousnesses specific to the Korean case. Positing the interpenetration of voices in popular songs that we may trace to the Japanese urban modernizing process and the role of the American military ghetto as a site of the diffusion of colonial modernity, I will show how the expatriated sensibility and postcolonial melancholia of colonial subjectivity have been represented in popular song narrativization and thus offer us a genealogy of colonial modernity. Considering the influential role of popular culture in contemporary East Asian society, this dissertation can provide greater conceptual and methodological fluidity to future accounts. Implicit memory; history and current status, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning memory and cognition 13,

54 40 Chapter 2: The Cultural Formation of Korean Popular Music in the Japanese Colonial Era 1. Empire, Cultural Modernity and Popular Music in the Japanese Colonial Era: Writing a Cultural History of Korean Modern Times through Popular Song To define the cultural formation of modern Korean popular music in the context of empire, the early transition to capitalism and modernity, its context must be carefully articulated without parenthesizing a holophrastic idiom that singularizes or homogenizes that which is studied, as in the case of many existing historical accounts. A cultural history specific to Korean popular music must deal with the complex relations of colonial modernity, the agency of modernization and Imperial mobilization in and of the periphery, a difficult endeavour that has not been undertaken without casting the specificities of Korean song into familiar narratives of the vicissitudes of western culture such as the birth of the Blues, racial authenticity debates in jazz history or the impact of Tin Pan Alley. The historical project of dealing with the popular music of colonial Koreans must be situated not only in the problems of multiplicities and overdetermination by various socio-cultural incidents, it must also be positioned within an approach that considers poststructuralism s preoccupation with the untranslatability and incommensurability 35 of history itself, which can exclusively be understood by local people in a local context in order to analyze local popular culture as a whole. Questions then arise: do these modes of modernity the colonizer-sponsored modernization - interrelated with colonial regime inhibit or motivate certain types of specific colonial modernity, and if so, would this different formation of modernity involve a cultural significance that posits a common (Japanese or the Western) continuity or specific (Local or specifically Korean) rupture in terms of any universalised application of the notion of modernity in the consciousness of Koreans? I raise these questions because certain positions seem to be omitted in the writing of Korean cultural history, especially vis-à-vis the colonial occupation era; much of this written history merely identifies the local progress of cultural modernity in terms of the 35 Chakrabarty (2000, p. 75) describes this incommensurability as the sheer madness of postmodernist and cultural-relativist, an idea cited by historians such as Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacobs. However, the term here is borrowed from Ivy s definition, when she refers to it as the historical specificity / the burden of difference (1995, p. 6) accompanied by the contradictions from the rupture of modernity.

55 41 preservation of cultural hegemonies and cultural imperialism as they are inserted into a global configuration of contemporary popular music history. However, the landscape inside colonial Korea from the late 1920s was intermingled with the complex by-products of historical incidents and negotiations of identity / subjectivity formation following the country s coerced amalgamation into the Japanese Empire and things had dramatically changed after the Japanese invasion of China (1931). The Japanese Empire obviously promoted its imperial ambitions in colonial Korea and began to redefine mass culture as a tool of colonial mobilization for its expansionism. During the development of capitalist modernity under the Japanese occupation era, Korea engaged in the staging of differences by representing the hybrid structure of colonial modernity and producing a deviant form in relation to the colonial regulation of cultural practices. Hence, colonial modern times should be interpreted not through the allegory of a fixed victimized colonial culture, which sublated various individual processes of self-positioning within the colonial regime, but as an operational way by which Koreans, through their perception of, and engagement with, the colonial system, formed their local identity. However, the early twentieth century of Korean cultural history has been historically-and (a)politically-naturalized, canonized and even fossilized as the period of cultural retreat or as a cultural dark ages within a patriotic narrative of victimization by many historians and philosophers and this mythologized history has been shrewdly mobilized and misused by long-reigning totalitarians who imbue an imaginary collective nationhood to invent Imagined community by instilling a jingoistic national consciousness in the Korean populace. Meanwhile, many alternative discourses have been formed by rather disenchanted scholars within various sub-fields of Cultural Studies, unprecedented branches that were originally initiated in the discipline of critical communications when the immense popularity of postmodern discourses swept through South Korean academia during the 1990s. Seeking to re-evaluate colonial modernity by scrutinizing deeper into archives, diverse investigations into the formation of colonial modernity by young scholars inevitably brought several crucial problems of the continuing coloniality of Korean culture into light, something that we do not really know how to identify, recognize, define or analyze, by interrogating the effects of the imperial gaze upon Koreans, the inescapability of postcolonial dependency upon colonial infrastructures and the problem of coloniality and

56 42 authenticity that pervades Korean modern culture at a subconscious level that came from an ineffaceable colonial formation in the archive. Thus, writing a heterogeneous account of the cultural formation of the modern state that deals with colonial modernity and empire is always concomitant with self-reflection and a hard look at the doubly-structured mirror that supposedly reflects self coloniality. The Lacanian concept of the capital-o Other, which is centered in discourses on the Imaginary, must be metaphorically juxtaposed with the actual empire and its colonial discourses vis-à-vis controlling the colonies (attached to the Imperial body) when we write such histories of ourselves. The imperialistic pivot is centered within a discourse of the Other in which the colonized are constantly inclined to identify with this Other in terms of Butler s passionate attachment, but the reverse has never been accomplished, of being identified by the colonizers while (it seems like) the colonizers are (always) performing as a standard for all ideological discourses of knowing and perceiving the world outside. In this complex trajectory that describes colonial cultural modernity-versus-empire in terms of both an imperishable Other and an embodied coloniality within the formation of the modern nation-state and the structure of the modern state, bureaucracy and capitalist enterprise system, I interrogate the subjective roles played out in writings on the cultural formation of Korean popular music by investigating broadly vis-à-vis the formation of a burgeoning modern consumer culture and the impact of colonial influences in relation to socio-political / geopolitical discourses during the Japanese colonial era. In doing so, I will trace the impact of popular songs as a reflection of national events and conditions as well as of colonial subjectivity. Stretching this issue further, I will attempt to illustrate how popular music was framed within a shift in quotidian life as a consequence of aural technology and its discourse during the Japanese colonial occupation era, established not only on a fissure within the colonial reality that embedded an ambivalent consciousness bearing the marks of both submission and negation as well as on a discursive formation of colonial subjectivity. Thus colonial subjects echoed a rootless western modernity which was doubly appropriated via Japan s mimicry of the West since Japanese society during the late Taisho and early Showa era ( ) heavily influenced by Japanese reflection of Americanism as coeval experience of cosmopolitanism.

57 43 Various archival materials will be presented and interpreted to support the claim that the modern soundscape transformed and reshaped colonial subjects and their lives as parts of the Japanese imperial nation by challenging various sociocultural categories such as class, gender and identity. In order to trace the effects of popular songs as a reflection of national events / conditions and/or the formation of colonial subjectivity, I will attempt to illustrate how the production and consumption of popular music within everyday life under colonial circumstances contributed to negotiating the incommensurability between colonial/western modernization and the formation of a local modernity. To clarify these issues further, I will first examine the establishment of Gyeongseong (the colonial designation of Seoul since 1910, in Japanese Keijo ) as a metropolitan city and explain cultural discourses on popular music and the production and consumption of popular music as a vulgarization that contested local values, causing ambivalent colonial feelings among the populace as they took up the phonograph as a modern technology. Secondly, I will explicate the social connotations of consuming and possessing phonographs as a modern fetishization in the quotidian life of Koreans under the name of individual leisure time. Lastly, I will analyze Korean popular music genres such as Shinminyo and Jazz as media for preserving local values and expressing a desire for the West as these played out in the introduction of radio broadcasting and phonograph record companies in Korea. 2. Disseminating Modern Sound in the Colonial Metropolis: Modern Landscape, Sound Culture and the Cultural Topography of Gyeongseong In 1930, an actress named Bok Hyesook 36 appeared in Columbia record advertisements as a model representing the Columbia record company. The jolly female actress was positioned next to a brand-new 110 Columbia phonograph; her body was held in a boasting pose and transformed by a faux-jazz singer s outfit, captioned Let s go to the mountain and valley with the portable Columbia phonograph! Please come visit the Columbia-Japan gramophone Gyeongseong ( 京城 ) branches! During the 1930s, the 36 Bok Hyesook ( ), a famous movie celebrity in the late 1920 appeared in Nungjongjo and Nakhwayusu, released several jazz number boosting unforgettable high-pitch soprano voice under the Columbia record label in 1930, such as Jongno Hangjingok, Aeeui Gwang, Mokjangeui Norae.

58 44 cultural landscape of colonial Korea bore the hallmarks of colonial infrastructural changes, the reformation of colonial subjectivity and a cultural rupture and discontinuity from premodernity. Probably one of the most remarkable changes in the Korean cultural scene of the 1930s was the mass distribution of phonograph records and the emergence of a range of new western style urban popular music genres, which were broadly categorized as Jazz. Unlike the introduction of talkie films with synchronized sound that enjoyed an enormous and immediate popularity in colonial Korea in 1935, 37 the phonograph didn t acquire instant commercial popularity until the late 1920s. The early stages of the phonograph and recordings industry in colonial Korea needed time to mature into a major popular medium, while bilingual radio broadcasting was also boosting the popularity of foreign sounds in an experimental phase that was initially deployed to spread Japanese propaganda. Radio broadcasting officially started in colonial Korea started on February 16 th, 1927, two years after Asia s first public radio broadcast was transmitted around Tokyo (Kasza 1988). The Japanese-Korean bilingual broadcasting in colonial Korea was the fourth Japanese broadcast, after Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya; it symbolized cultural assimilation and had the call sign JODK. Bilingual radio programming was mainly broadcast in Japanese (7:3 in Japanese to Korean, Baek 2008:314), mostly containing information about current issues, stock and rice prices, and playing current popular songs. 38 After 1928, when various transnational recording companies such as Victor, Columbia, Regal, Polydor, Chieron and the Japanese labels Nipponophone and Nitto were introduced into colonial Korea, the phonograph began to bring sounds with fidelity into common people s daily lives. Attali has described music in prefigurative terms, arguing that [music] makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things: it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the every day, the herald of the future (Attali 2006:11). Recordings containing a wide range of 37 Talkie films were introduced in colonial Korea in The first talkie film was Choonhyangjeon ( 春香傳 ) by Lee Myeong-Woo. Although poorly received by critics, the success of Choonhyangjeon reflected the popular acceptance of films with sound. As Ahn puts it, From now on, Joseon (Korean) film has to transform as talkie film and it is from the popular s demands. Ahn Seok-Joo (1936), Joseon Yeonghwa Junhwa, Joseon Geup Manju, p See the appendix 2 for the number of registered radios and distribution rate in colonial Korea and Japan

59 45 voices, from foreign music to traditional folk songs, urban noises and new sounds filtered through colonial Korea in relation to a complex veil of social and cultural assumptions. <Figure 2-1> Part of the Keijo/Gyeongseong map in 1920s (up), Japanese Honmachi area( 本町, currently Myeong-Dong), Courtesy of the University of Chicago (Scale [ca. 1:21,500], 1 map: col.; 49 x 36 cm. on sheet 54 x 40 cm), Japanese billboards in Honmachi, a Japanese quarter in Seoul in 1920s (bottom). Courtesy of Old days of Korea through Pictures (I), Lee Gyuwon, Seomundang Publisher (1986)

60 46 Japan s seizure of Manchuria inevitably drew colonial Korea into a position of state-led industrialization and urbanization within Japanese empire, since Japan was threatened by economic isolation as trading nations erected tariff barriers to protect their own economies. (Robinson 2007:76) Subsequent to the turn toward economic development during the imperial expansion of the 1930s after the Japanese incursion of China in 1931, colonial Koreans as an outpost of Japanese empire gradually perceived and embraced the coeval idea of empire s western modernity through a process of cultural reinvention of a western modernity and cosmopolitanism filtered through Japanese cultural tastes; that is, from the level of colonial infrastructure such as the renewal of urban infrastructure like the road and sewage systems, urban public facilities and transportation systems, to the level of colonial mass consciousness through various mass cultural consumption that helped to embed Japanese imperialism. By remapping the colonial metropolis, Gyeongseong (figure 2-1 shows the spatial allocation and changes in street formations of Gyeongseong), as a central narrative of corporeal modernity, the Japanese urban landscape in Korea became a representation of the complex geometry of imperialism under the programmes of municipal district improvement (Shigugyesu Saeop) in 1912 and street reorganization planning (Gyeongseong Sigajigehoek Saup) in Both campaigns formed part of the Japanese colonial remodelling plan of pre-modern Gyeongseong to build the Great Keijo ( 大京城計劃 Dae Gyeongseong Gyehoek) (Kim, 2006: 263). Following the civil planning programmes of 1930, there was widespread immigration of Japanese in Gyeongseong. The Japanese settler community created by the general governor of Korea had increased its population through both an influx of Japanese inhabitants and provincial Koreans moving to the metropolitan city. Geographically close to the mainland Empire, these Japanese settlers including elite administrators, entrepreneurs and professionals built up their new community in the heart of the Gyeongseong area, while rural immigrants from provincial Korea such as tenant farmers and the impoverished lumpenproletariat made up the community outside of this Japanese territory. The highly commercialized culture and opulent metropolitan façade in Gyeongseong was in contrast to that of the wretched rural countrysides, which remained unchanged, both together symbolizing the imperial spectrum in the Korean dual economy. Needless to say, the

61 47 gravitation of the population towards the colonial metropolitan was mainly the result of Japanese colonial regime policies, geared by Japanese immigration incentives and the colonial construction that followed, encouraging Japanese citizens to immigrate to Gyeongseong to maintain the body of the late comer Imperialist. 39 Comparing the population growth from 1920 to 1940 in the major colonial cities, the population growth of the Japanese colonial cities has highest rate of increase (Manchuria 48%, Korea and Taiwan, 35%), while other colonial cities experienced relatively low population growth (the rates in India, Latin America and Africa, for example, were around 15%). 40 Because this traditional capital of the Joseon Dynasty was strategically reformed as a modern city by Japanese imperialism, the city was created in a doubly segregated structure of the colonizer and the colonized, projecting the binary structure in the consciousness of Koreans as Japanese controlling presence. Although urban life grew lively and attractive to a large portion of Japanese population, Gyeongseong was divided into northern and southern regions by ethnic bifurcation along the line of the Cheongyecheon River. A Japanese downtown in the southern area called Namchon was built up using Japanese terminology to indicate the districts, machi ( 町 ), such as Honmachi ( 本町 ) and Meiji Machi ( 明治町 ), as manifestations of the irreducible disparities that signposted the Japanese path to colonial interpellation, while backward Korean towns in the northern territory called Bukchon were 39 Nihontoshinenkan ( 日本都市年鑑 ), 1942, p37, p692, Nihonno Kaigaikatsudouni Kansuru Rekishideki Chousa ( 日本人の海外活動に關する歷史的調査, historical inspections regarding the activities of Japanese citizen living in foreign countries), p1210. Quoted in Hiroshi Hashiya (2004), Teikoku Nihon To Shokuminchi Toshi, Yoshikawa Kobunkan, p. 16. Korea Taiwan year Number of cities Population (scale 1000) City, village (A) 579 1,190 2, ,068 Non-city (B) 16,685 19,869 21,508 3,301 3,973 4,804 A ---- (%) A+B Manchuria ,432 37, Sakhalin Mizuuchi Toshio 水內俊雄 (1985), Shokuminjitoshidairennotoshikeisei 植民地都市大連の都 市形成, jinbunchiri 人文地理 37-5.

62 48 reorganized as Dong ( 洞 ) in traditional Korean geographic terminology like Insa-dong ( 仁寺洞 ) and Gongpyeong-dong ( 公平洞 ). As the Japanese population continued to shift northward and more Japanese took possession of the residential area in Gyeongseong, colonial Koreans perception of this doubled spatiality of the Gyeongseong area grew distinctly compartmentalized, dividing the colonizer from the colonized in the Korean imaginary. Furthermore, this doubled spatiality of the Japanese and Koreans was not only represented in the demarcation of the residential districts but also expanded into the commercial and entertainment districts. Colonial Koreans were allocated a downtown space in the northern part of Seoul, in the Jongno area, while major Japanese commercial quarters were predominantly built around Honmachi (current Myeong-Dong) and Ougon machi ( 黃金町 current the Uljiro area) in central Gyeonseong. 41 Indeed, Honmachi, as a miniature of the Japanese modern city, became a metonymy of synchronic colonial alienation to the Koreans. This dual modern life in Gyeongseong engendered cultural hybridity since the colonial landscape forced Koreans to adopt Japanese language and modern values as a means of participating in the new modernity. Kim Young-Keun (2004) investigated the consumer culture of department stores in Gyeonseong and found a contradictory situation for colonial subjects in forming the modern nation during this time, when the public experience of everyday modern commodities and the sentiments of colonial duality were closely related to the sharpened demarcation of the spatial allocation of Gyeongseong. The affirmation of difference is basic to a colonial epistemology. As Dirlik has argued regarding postcolonial difference, difference is important not just as a description of a situation, but more significantly because it shapes languages, and therefore, the meaning of identity; thus, every representation of the self carries upon it the trace of other, (Dirlik, 1997: 5) In this respect, although colonial Koreans were situated within a modern 41 Double structure of the Gyeongseong Populace: Japanese (A) Korean (Gyeongseong) Total population Foreigner (B) A/B (%) Machi ( 町 ) area Dong ( 洞 ) area 99,689 11,632 94, , , , Total 113, , Keiseijoukoukaikisho, 1935 pp. 1-6, quoted in Hiroshi (2004) p. 76.

63 49 landscape, the colonial subjects were constantly positioned as outsiders or spectators of the modern city. <Figure 2-2> Postcard of Mitsukoshi department store in modern Gyeongseong in 1930s (up), Cartoon in Chosun Daily Newspaper describing Korean modern girls infatuation for shopping in Mitsukoshi department in summer (Chosun Ilbo Daily Newspaper, 1930, July 19) The ambivalence of colonial subjects thus reinforced the colonial desire to become a modern self, indexing the profound transformations of the social and cultural lives of colonial Koreans in the 1930s triggered by territorial distinctions and ethnic differences. These issues appeared in the colonial institution of dual topographies and in the dissemination of modern culture, mobo moga and popular cultural forms that were gradually embedded in the colonial consciousness and their daily life. The relationship with the modern landscape that the Imperial Japanese built into the colonial territory and the

64 50 invisible discrimination against the colonial subjects who witnessed these scenes with ambivalence imposed a doubly imposed colonial mentality in Koreans imaginary. Colonial subjects were haunted by a contradictory desire for modernity, simultaneously craving the spectacle of modernity while fearing the surveillance and violence of the colonial control that was posited between modern capitalism and their colonial position. The colonial modernist poet Kim Girim wrote that the landscape of colonial Korea as a consequence of this ambivalent desire: Gyeongseong has been gradually undergoing its transformation into a modern urban city. However, the advent of department stores here and there in the heart of Gyeongseong might be merely modern makeup as a guise for the wrinkled-old face of Gyeongseong in (Kim Girim, 1931, Dosipungyeong 1.2, p. 386) Kim s account demonstrates how the imperial modernization process in the contested contact zones made for a dissonant landscape in colonial Korea, from which colonial Koreans were excluded as non-citizens / non-sovereigns. The perspective of the modernist poet is underpinned by metaphors such as modern makeup and wrinkled-old face, demonstrating the recognizable discrepancy between the Japanese colonial modern landscape, which was mainly focused on exploitation and mobilization of colonial territory to serve imperial expansionism. Considering that the intentions of the Japanese were geared toward colonizing Korea as a staging area for military expansionism to Manchuria and northern China, the colonial modernization obviously transformed ( makeup ) the Joseon s wrinkled old face, where colonial modernization and infrastructural industrialisation supplied the metropolitan Japanese economy. Subsequently, the noises of the colonial urban metropolis as a symbol of modernization and industrialisation surreptitiously permeated the modern landscape, based on the ostensible demarcation of geographic boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized, forging a common ethics and a homogenized concept of the modern. When the Joseon Dynasty was forcibly annexed to the Japanese Empire in 1910, the discourse of sound in colonial Korea was organized according to the mandates of the colonial elite group, who were disciplined by the modern education system in Imperial Japan. The high point of the Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule, called the Dongnip Undong

65 51 (independence movement) failed in 1919, but it did give colonial Koreans some space to publish Korean newspapers and magazines and organize social gatherings under the name of cultural rule instead of the military rule imposed during the regime of Admiral Saito Makoto. Consequently, Korean intellectuals such as pianist Kim Young-Hwan and vocalists Yoon Sim-Duk and Han Gi-Ju started to promote charity concerts to introduce western music as an edificatory tool to enlighten colonial Koreans. The activities of these groups reflected a desire to revitalize the notion of music as art to combat the prevalence of the discourse of music as a tool for enlightening people and to spread the cultural hegemony of western musical theory. Koreans gradually began to enjoy western classical music by casting its appreciation as a precondition for highbrow tastes, and western music s consideration as art and as an emblem of high taste became social craze during the 1920s. As the Japanese Governor-General of Korea, Ugaki Kazushige provided the impetus for the modernization of Korean infrastructure in order to better supply the Japanese military in Manchuria and China after 1931, and the gramophone and radio broadcast also began to get the upper hand through the growing popularity of commercial recordings. Playing western instruments was also becoming more popular amongst the colonial populace in the mid-1920s. As Na Hye-Seok, the first Korean female western painter wrote, I am full of hope to see the students walking along with a violin or mandolin occasionally. 42 The phonograph spread a taste for opera and symphonic music to those who could never have heard them in performance. However, the new acoustic inventions and noises of the colonial metropolitan were not solely represented in a utopian light. Many colonial intellectuals perceived them as machinery that kills humans; 43 example, Ryu Kwang-Yeul criticized modern noises as a metaphor for the drying blood, carving bones of Koreans, an image closely related to the dysfunctional side effects of both Japanese economical exploitation and modern capitalism. As a consequence of the Japanese urban reformation of the colonial metropolis in the name of modernization, Gyeongseong began to lose the original nature of its traditional landscape. In this shift, the dazzling transformation of the city s downtown stimulated 42 Na Hye-Seok ( ), Mixed Feelings about Gyeongseong after One Year s Absence, Gyebeok 43 Ryu Kwang-Yeul ( ), Gyebeok. for

66 52 ordinary Koreans desire for modernization. The increase in traffic and the noise of horns coming out of the lively colonial city rapidly naturalized representations of the modern urban city. Newly-introduced modern concepts of time and speed in Korea regulated and domesticated colonial urban dwellers everyday lives. Thus, accommodating the modern way of life that suddenly transformed the quotidian habits of colonial Koreans required adaptation, not only in terms of the physical transformation of fitting themselves into new customs and morals but also in becoming sensitized to the double consciousness of city dwellers when consuming culture. The complex experiences of the colonial subject in the modern metropolis were tied to ambivalent sentiments that were located not only in their recognition of being a part of the imperial national body, but were also situated in a hazy consciousness of the blurriness of identity caused by the internalization of colonial circumstances. Raymond Williams argued that the modern metropolis acts as an intersection point in the experience of imperialism, saying This development had much to do with imperialism: with the magnetic concentration of wealth and power in imperial capitalism and the simultaneous cosmopolitanism access to a wide variety of subordinate cultures. 44 The discursive terrain of the Korean intelligentsia gradually proselytized from a nationalistic patriotism for praise of a colonial modern capitalism where the discourses of enlightenment were faded in validity after the late 1920s in the aftermath of the failed independence movement. 3. The Sociocultural Condition of Korean Phonograph Culture in 1930s Several phonograph companies plunged eagerly into the Korean market during the early 1930s. The phonograph industry quickly turned to recording popular vernacular songs like traditional folksongs and non-verbal classical music. This ultimately led the colonial recording industry to a multi-culturalism where Korean traditional songs, Japanese popular songs and Eurocentric classics coexisted. The Columbia Gramophone Company from England initiated its business by merging with a Japanese subsidiary called Nipponophone in 1928, while rival company American Victor Gramophone opened its first branch in 1930 and established a direct enterprise in Meanwhile, the German company Polydor 44 Raymond Williams (1989) The Politics of Modernism, London: Verso, p. 44.

67 53 started its entrepreneurship in Korea by trading western instruments in Japanese retail shops in 1926, then extended their business by manufacturing phonograph recordings of various traditional ethnic folksongs in 1932 (Hwang 1982, Kurata 2006). 45 Okeh record company, the first Japanese-Korean recording industry collaboration (different from the American label of the same name), entered the market rather late by conglomerating the Japanese Empire Gramophone Company in Various foreign corporations swiftly sought to sell their stylish phonographs to the nascent audiences of Korea, who were willing to accommodate phonographs and recorded sound in their quotidian lives. The companies were eager to provide more vernacular recordings suited to Korean musical traditions while introducing the Americanizing influences jazz and the blues, but this involved a fascinating process of cultural reconstruction to tailor modern western culture to fit the experiences of the colonial Korean intelligentsia during the 1930s. By advertising the phonograph as the medium able to reach the largest possible audiences and stirring a modern vanity in the colonial mentality, the record companies developed different types of marketing by promoting records of various musical genres such as jazz, Shinminyo (a Korean music genre with local / traditional tunes and lyrics rich with local color), Korean traditional Gugak and Japanese ryūkōka to appeal to different audiences. The unfamiliar western cultural elements were thoroughly intermixed with familiar Japanese ryūkōka-style sounds, so that the foreign culture was presented through a reassuring Japanese perspective. However, there was a wide range in the quantity, quality and diversity of early phonograph records, which were also troubled by the crude fidelity of the recordings sound and the audience s varying ability to purchase the relatively expensive modern products. Accommodating new sound technologies was, thus, a pleasure confined to the privileged few who could afford to possess and enjoy these commercial products on their 45 According to Tokyoongakukyoukai (Tokyo music corporation), the dates of the transnational record companies establishment in Japan are as follows: Nihon chokuonki joukai( 日本畜音器商會 ): Nitto chokuonki kabushikikaisha ( 日東畜音器株式會社 ): 1920 Nihon Columbia chokuonki kabushikikaisha ( 日本 Columbia 畜音器株式會社 ), 1928 Nihon Vitor chokuonki kabushikikaisha ( 日本 Victor 畜音器株式會社 ), 1928 Nihon Polydor chokuonki kabushikikaisha ( 日本 Polydor 畜音器株式會社 ), 1927 Taihei chokuonki kabushikikaisha ( 太平畜音器株式會社 ), Unknown Teikoku chokuonki kabushikikaisha ( 帝國畜音器株式會社 ), Unknown

68 54 magnificent horns. According to Dong-A daily newspaper at this time, the production and distribution of phonograph depended entirely on foreign companies: due to the infrastructural imperfections of domestic recording technology and record reproduction in colonial Korea, gramophones and phonograph records were entirely manufactured and imported from Japan and other foreign countries. Consequently, approximately 1 million phonographs were imported and distributed 46 in colonial Korea, represented roughly one for every fourteen people. The price of a phonograph record in the 1930s was signalled by its label color: black (popular version, 1 won 20 to 1 won 50), blue (3 won 50), red (5 won 50) and brown (7 won), 47 while the prices of phonographs in 1930s were 50 to 300 won. 48 Based on the monthly income of colonial Koreans (for example, a medical doctor made 75 won, a bank clerk 70 won, a journalist 50 won, a female teacher 45 won, a police officer 36 won), 49 the activity of consuming recorded sound at home on a phonograph and regularly purchasing gramophone records would be expensive even to the middle classes. <Figure 2-3> 1 The first newspaper advertisement for phonograph records in Korea, Mansebo ( , top left). 2 Popular edition of a Columbia portable phonograph advertisement, co- 46 Dong-A Ilbo, Considering the population of Korea in 1935 was 2,240,000, the distribution rate of phonograph was only 7 % (Lee, 2002). 47 Hwang Munpyung (1983), Yahwa Gayoyukbaeknyeonsa, Jeongoksa Publisher, Seoul p Hong Nanpa ( ) Concerning Home Music, Singajeong. 49 Dosieui senghwaljeonseon (Opinionnaire), Jeilseon, 1932, June

69 55 advertised with Burton Crane s 50 Columbia Jazz band s Drunk Last Night record in 1931 (1931. April. Bottom left). 3 Victor Phonograph advertisement, Samchulli magazine ( p 347, right) Despite the financial limitations to the spread of records, the enormous popularity of the phonograph and its social discourses permeated colonial Korea, providing a glimpse into the changes to quotidian life caused by the pervasiveness of commodities that transformed Koreans colonial modernity in both physical and cognitive ways. As phonograph advertisements changed over time (figure 2-3), the phonograph was cast as an indispensible modern appliance for individual leisure in the mid-1930s, in ad copy such as: After finishing your daily work around 6 pm, one of the most enjoyable things in your resting time at home would be Victor phonograph and records. It is ideal amusement facility in any time regardless of age, (Figure 2-3, right) while early advertising copy mostly emphasized sound fidelity (1907) and the phonograph as portable and light-weight (1931). The advertisement implies a mimicry of westernized perception and an accommodation of leisure time through privatized entertainment facilities. Juxtaposed with the image of a clock symbolizing domesticated leisure time, it also represents the practice of enjoying private domestic life mediated by popular phonographs. Thus, it is important to consider the ways in which phonographs began to change colonial daily life by bringing mass-produced sounds into people s living rooms. According to Bae (1993) and Lee (2002) s research on phonograph commercials in colonial Korea, the advertisements mainly focused on the phonograph s introduction as a new modern technology and the abilities of sound reproduction in the 1910s. Throughout the 1920s, however, phonograph advertisements gradually became centered on the trope of the phonograph as a modern necessity, while advertising various popular urban crooners. Therefore, the phonograph became an emblem of both technical modernity and the sphere of accommodating domestic leisure. Such discourses homogenized colonial Koreans and habituated them to gramophone culture as cultural connoisseurs, and by labelling it as a necessity of modern life, the gramophone was sophisticatedly inserted into social discourse as an essential part of the modernity. 50 In Japan, Burton Crane, a financial journalist for the Japan Advertiser who earned a sobriquet the Rudy Vallée of Japan also had a great success with his debut record Show Me the Way to Go Home / Drunk Last Night in 1931 (E. Taylor Atkins, p. 79).

70 56 From the first, Korean music as commodity-objects adapted western music such as evangelist Christian songs or traditional folksong, and they usually utilized music as a tool for enlightenment tactics toward the decolonizing project while consuming a modern modality of popular song filtered through Japanese tastes in western music genres. Until the late 1920s, records were used very little. According to Provine s preliminary research on the American ethnomusicologist Alice Fletcher s notes regarding the oldest sound recording in Korean history, which are mainly dedicated to illuminating technological improvements of recorded sound fidelity, the first recording was of three frontier Korean students in America in 1896, who were interested in experimenting with sound recording to preserve their voice in the Edison wax cylinder. 51 The earliest stage of the commercial marketing and distribution of the phonograph in Korea arguably began in 1907, when the Tokyo-based Juji Corporation started a local branch in colonial Gyeongseong. 52 According to an advertisement in Mansebo in March 1907 (figure 2-3, left top), the first promotional phonograph record in colonial Korea was made by Columbia Gramophone company, issuing phonographs of court musician Han Inho and official Gisaeng, 53 Choi Hong-Mae who was familiar with performing various repertoires of traditional folksongs such as Korean Minyo, old form of Korean verse Shijo and Korean short lyric poem. However, it was difficult to anticipate the prospective demand for such 51 Robert C. Provine (2007), Alice Fletcher s Notes on the Earliest Recording of Korean Music, Presented at the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts conference, Unpublished paper. In this paper, Provine suggests several important facts on the history of Korean discology by investigating the archives of Alice Fletcher s scribbles on the cylinder boxes that had been recorded in Several important discoveries followed, which quoted from the Provines s paper: (1) Since the Fletcher notes state, in nearly every case, the date 24 July 1896, she made the recordings in her Washington, DC residence on that date; (2) Three Korean men came to her house that day to make the recordings; (3) The presence of a myth song on the cylinder reflects the type of materials that Fletcher sought from her native American informants; (4) These six cylinders, by virtue of that date, are eleven years earlier than the earliest recordings made in Korea itself (1907); (5) It is very surprising that Fletcher would make cylinder recordings of anything other than Native American music. 52 For the specific reference, see Bae Yeonhyung (1993) Reference data related to Korean music ( ), Korean Musicology. Vol. 3. p Gisaeng indicates that female Korean entertainers entertained the higher classes, such as Korean Confucian intellectuals (Yangban) and kings. During the 1930s in Japan, traditional folk song popular genres were mostly performed by geisha (female Japanese entertainers), while café waitresses and bar hostesses engaged in performing westernized counterparts (Silverberg 2004, Yano 2002).

71 57 records, since cylinders and discs had not yet been marketed. Between 1910 and the close of the 1920s, the majority of the SP records in Korea came out of the producers doubts as to the commercial profitability of native/ethnic musical forms, and they failed commercially since the majority of the recorded phonographic repertoire of Korean traditional music, Gugak, was considered a non-marketable commodity to Koreans. Records in this time were mainly manufactured on discs, recorded in Japan, and then the masters were sent back to America for processing and manufacturing before selling the products in Korea. However, due to this vexing manufacturing process and the low selling point in the Korean market, many foreign gramophone companies in the early stages of this transnational circulation of phonograph records were either on the verge of bankruptcy or barely maintained liquidity by merging with other companies as local departments. This was the case for both Ilchuk (owned by Columbia) and Daedonga (owned by Polydor), companies that imported the manufacturing equipment and infrastructure into colonial Korea for their local marketing. <Figure 2-4> Newpaper article entitled Kimi Koishi( 君恋し ) 54 in every home. (Chosun Ilbo Daily Newspaper, 1929, September 1) It says Currently, almost every home has grammaphone. In the evening, you can hear Kimi Koishi in every home regardless of their age or gender in accordance with the sound from grammaphone. But who do you love and who are you yearning for? The mass production and distribution of phonographic records became possible only when popular songs came to serve as commercialized musical memories under 54 Kimi Koishi( 君恋し ) is a Japanese popular song with a Foxtrot rhythm, performed by Futamura Teichi (composed by Satsa Kouka, written by Shigure Ottowa) in October, 1928 (Shōwa 3).

72 58 severe Japanese colonial surveillance and control, a period that produced such hit numbers such as Sauichanmi (Praise of death, 1926, Nitto record, performed by Yoon Shim-Duk), Hwangseogyeteo (The Ruins of Hwangseong, Victor record, performed by Lee Erisu). Moreover, various transnational phonograph companies treasured Japanese jazz records reminiscent of American popular song genres alongside Japanese cultural policy to articulate the Korean people as Japanese citizens and subjects of the Emperor. By launching propaganda campaigns, however, phonograph records spread the taste for blues, jazz and dance music, so that Koreans developed intense feelings of admiration for western / American modernity. Jazz records created a potent modernist counterculture that flourished in tension with the Korean sensibilities of western modernity and Japanese colonial occupation. 4. Social Reconstruction through Popular Song in 1930s 4.1. Vulgarization of Popular Song and the Mobomoga s Cultural Appropriation <Figure 2-5> Burton Crane s song sheets released in colonial Korea, Dashimodol yicheongchun, (Farewell to my Youth) (A-side, adaptation of the original Wilhelm Lindemann s song Trink Bruederlein ), Suljujeonbangyi (Drink last night!) (B-side, adaptation of a traditional drinking song The Goddamned Dutch ) Korean lyrics were written by Kim Ung-Jak, performed by Columbia Jazz Band and Burton Crane, Columbia record, No , 1936.

73 59 A young American journalist and financial editor affiliated with the English newspaper company the Japan Advertiser, Burton Crane recorded several jazz songs on the Columbia record label between 1931 to 1934 in Japan. 55 During the regime of L.H. White, the American owner of the Columbia Company s department in Japan who also rapidly expanded the music industry in colonial metropolitan Gyeongseong, Crane released his own songs, including titles such as Sakega nomittai (I want to drink some liquor) and Ieekaeritai (I want to go back home), which gained an enormous popularity in Japan. Sagawa Akiraku recollected that, in every corner of Ginza area, you can hear this song 56 and Enomoto Kenichi remembered, you can hear the song to songs of Crane when the bar and café is closed, and you re hopping around groggeries grabbing some cocktail with Odeng (fish cake) in Ginza and Asakusa area. 57 The majority of Crane s recordings were reminiscent of popular American jazz songs in style, with comical lyrics written by Crane himself. Although he wasn t fluent in Japanese, his slow and awkward Japanese pronunciation and exultant vocal style interested the Japanese, resulting in a series of big hits in mainland Japan, made possible by the rampant commercialism of Columbia s smart jazz business establishment. 58 There are no historiographical materials documenting the context of Burton Crane s jazz songs released in colonial Korea during mid-1930s, however considering the popularity of jazz in Korea and the considerable volumes of local phonographs labelled as jazz 59 such as Iteri jeonwon (Italian Garden, Columbia Records, performed by Choi Seong-Hee), Burusu cheonggong (Blues Blue Sky, Okeh Records, performed by Kim Hae-song) and 55 Nakamura Touyou (2000) Recodono Uraomote (front and backward of records), recodo korectazu, 19-8 (2000.6) p Akiraku Sawaga (1998) Originarubonniyoru showanorukouga, betsatsukaisetsusho, Nihoncolombia, COCP , p Kenichi Enomoto (1947), Enokenno nakiwarahijinsei, Nihon Atosha, p Barton Crane returned to New York in 1936 due to the growing militarism in Japan and was working as a reporter for the New York Times after Japan s defeat. He was seriously injured in Seoul during Korea War. Crane never referred to his success as a jazz singer during the prewar Japanese era. For more information regarding Crane s life history, see Yamada Harumichi (2002) Burton Crane Eki (in Japanese), Communication Kagaku, Tokyo Keizai Daigaku Publisher, vol. 17. pp I investigated the popular song lyrics from remained music sheets in 1930s, and only 43 songs were labelled its genre as jazz song. (Victor 1, Polydor 3, Okeh 6, Columbia 24, Regal 8, Cieron 1) However, jazz song was broadly considered among Koreans as a western style popular song, which most of Yuhaengga (popular song in Korean) can be embraced within the genre.

74 60 Urineun meotjengyi (We are the dandies, Columbia Records, performed by Pak Hyang- Rim), jazz songs like Crane s could have been released due to the huge popularity of jazz as modern culture in colonial Korea. The jazz song Suljujeonbengyi (Drink last night!) was a Korean cover version of the Japanese hit number Sakega nomittai, (I want to drink some liquor) which is a Japanese localization of American jazz song. The escapist tendency in song lyrics like drunk last night, drunk the night before, gonna get drunk tonight reflect the social mood and an atmosphere of nihilism and pessimism regarding colonial circumstances, ironically narrated by an amateur American singer with awkward Korean pronunciation. The rapid expansion of the mass production and consumption of phonograph records in colonial Korea, along with the popularity of jazz during the mid-1930s, brought about a number of social debates amongst colonial intellectuals in journals and local newspapers. These were often associated with harsh mockery, describing the colonial mimicry of modern modality as wearing unsuitable clothes. The local adaptation and consumption of westernized popular songs was described as unhealthy sleepwalkers stupefied by western waltzes out of the phonograph record shops, 60 or shaking bodies like clockwork marionettes dancing with cow-weeping Jazz sounds out of phonograph. 61 Although the gatekeepers of traditional musical culture labeled trendy popular songs as vulgar, illicit, and uncontrollable, jazz records appealed to significant numbers of Koreans all the more for that reason. Ironically enough, one of the most influential critics of Jazz in pamphlets and journal articles were the founders of an expanding discourse on modernism influenced by Marxism and the Japanese intelligentsia proletarian movement. Members of Modernism are Mobo Moga (modern boys and modern girls), and its modes consist of Jazz, dance, speed and sports. Modernism is usually represented as an essential of Erogro (erotic, grotesque) and nonsense. The condition of becoming Mobo Moga is confined to the upper classes. They originate from modern capitalism. 60 Kim Girim (1931), Dosipunggyeung 1,2, Kim (1908-?) is a poet, critic and literature professor at Seoul National University. His poems usually represented the urbanization of modern life in colonial Korea and were influenced by T.S. Eliot s modernist poetry during the 1930s. The modernist poets had a peculiar resonance with colonial circumstances by describing sounds as arts and paying attention to a set of visual analogs and antecedents. 61 Modern realtor, Byeolgungon, 1930, January

75 61 Their living environments were surrounded by mechanized civilization. Their mottos are basically Americanism embedded within a parvenu nature (narikin 成金 ), vulgar taste, pro-japanese. Oh, Seok-Cheon, a delightful discussion on modernism, Sinmin, 1931, June Oh heavily criticizes modernist activities by juxtaposing them with Americanism and pro-japanese activity, suggesting that it was natural to be hostile to nationalist inclinations originating in Marxism while searching for new possibilities for social reconstruction and national independence in colonial Korea. As Agamben (2007) explains regarding the correspondence of certain cultures to a specific experience of time which eventually evolves into an implicit condition in terms of both the revolutionary concept of history and a traditional experience of time. He says that, the vulgar representation of time as a precise and homogeneous continuum has diluted the Marxist concept of history: it has become the hidden breach through which ideology has crept into the citadel of historical materialism. 62 The representation of westernized culture to colonial intellectuals, one that embraced the experience of an ahistorical western / foreign modality under the Japanese occupation, was internalized as a conception of negation to overcoming the unresolved problems of national independence and social reformation in the colonial process. Thus, to colonial Marxist intellectuals, colonial accommodations of western culture and especially the jazz craze reflected no more than the success of a dismantled colonial mentality that betrayed fraudulent pretensions by abandoning colonial problems. Mobo Moga s modern way of life was criticized by the colonial intelligentsia for its limitation, as a form that was confined exclusively to the leisured classes. Americanism as a modernism disseminated through vulgar taste and pro-japanese proclivities surfaced as a social discourse. The domain of western popular culture emerged with the introduction of western capitalism, creating swiftly-spinning new musical worlds of jazz that many youngsters wanted to consume. Consequently, kitsch culture and recorded music as commodities threaten the privileged status of the realm of art or high culture 62 Georgio Agamben (2007), Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum, Infancy and History on the Destruction of Experience, Verso, London, New York, p. 99.

76 62 such as western classical music, which had been considered the art that represented the best of a civilization. 63 The cultural characteristics of colonial Koreans consumption of jazz thus represented kitsch-ness as an advanced modern capitalist popular culture by displaying its intercultural aspects through mimicry. Mimicry of western popular songs and the bodily transformation of Mobo Moga s modern performativity were doubly articulated in colonial Korea depended upon a colonial system of differentiations between colonizers and colonized, one that poses an immanent threat to both normalized knowledge of traditional culture and disciplinary powers 64 in the geographically demarcated Gyeongseong metropolitan. Borrowing Japanese transliterations of English vocabulary such as Mobo Moga (modern boy modern girl), Nonsense, and Eroguro (erotic grotesque), these lexical adaptations in the local domain were controversial amongst the colonial intelligentsia who defined the colonial jazz craze as vulgar modern. As Bhabha has argued, the gaze of colonial authority is troubled by the fact that colonial identity is partly dependent for its constitution on a colonized Other (Bhabha 1994; ). Colonial mimicry was no longer a representation of colonial essence and elegiac collective sentiments but a partial presence and device in a specific colonial engagement by accommodating western modality in a castrated sociocultural context. The discursive formation of a vulgarized modern atmosphere by colonial intellectuals and pro-japanese writers ascribed negative tendencies to western modernity for colonial Koreans by designating the agents of the western fad as the offspring of modernity, and fixing them in negative position. As Ku-Wangsam, the Korean Protestant church hymn composer writes of the popular songs, these industrialized commodities are the same as prostitutes tagging black labels on sassy phonograph records to fill the businessman s belly by plagiarizing foreign compositional styles. Popular songs are unstoppable in their popularity. It s like a smoking cigarette the addiction to popular song is socially toxic and harmful to the Korean morals and values. 65 Social critiques of modern popular music culture in colonial Korea targeted the introduction of transnational 63 John Storey (2003), Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization, Malden: Blackwell. 64 Homi K. Bhabha (1994), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, p Koo Wangsam (1935), Akdansigam (Current feeling for the musical circle), Samchulli, vol 3 p. 148.

77 63 phonograph companies and an influx of new musical genres, especially the records of nonsense, comic chat, jazz and elegiac popular songs emulating Japanese ryūkōka, which was usually considered to be vulgar culture. These records became the object of a veiled desire among the populace when phonographs became more popular as cheap editions of gramophones and lower-priced phonograph records circulated through Korean society. <Figure 2-6> The first jazz advertisement in Korea for Paul Whiteman s record La Paloma and Merry Widow Waltz. It reads: King of American Jazz band, Paul Whiteman newly contracted with Columbia record. Dong-A Ilbo Daily Newspaper (left). An advertisement for a prize competition for new popular music song in Editorial intentions were clearly written into this ad for the competition was held for the purpose of eradicating the vulgarized popular songs, 66 (middle) A rare image of phonograph record billboards and shops in Gyeongseong (Seoul) in 1930s (right). 67 In this ghostly portrayal of a fleeting instant, colonial subjects wearing modern school uniforms stand in immobile postures (figure 2-6, right) under the giddy multilingual billboards written in Japanese, Korean and English. The image was taken during the speedy infiltration of phonograph culture into colonial Korea, as the experience of the modern way of life was fixed in the empty symbols of capitalism, sundering the historic consciousness of the colonial subjects regarding the colonial situation. Colonial popular music conveying 66 Byeolgeongon (1934.2) The 2 nd prize competition for new popular music song to lead 1934, vol 9, p Courtesy of Temptation of Modern, Tears of Modern; Strolling Modern Korea by Hyungsik Noh, Photography donated by Jonghak Lee, Saeng gakui Namu Publisher, p.136.

78 64 local experiences and mass desire of the colonial subject appeared in the initial stages of the formation of colonial cultural modernity in the homogeneous yet empty landscape, sharing coeval cultural sentiments with the Japanese Empire Commodity Fetishism and the Cultural Discourses of Vulgarized Popular Song in the 1930s The social context of popular song and the popular accommodation of secularized culture among Korean audiences often collided with traditional notions of social value and local conventions that produced conflicts in popular reflections on modernity. Choi Youngsoo s Electronic Phonograph (Jeongi Chukeumgi 電氣畜音機 ), the short novel published in Chogwang magazine in 1936, describes the excessive fetishism of the febrile activity of collecting phonograph records, comparing it to chasing modern technology through the phonograph records. Choi s text offers a rare suggestion of the relationship between the phonograph culture of the Korean middle class in the 1930s and the abnormal tendencies of the machine that made colonial subjects confront the speed of material modernization and its reception. The protagonist, I and his wife are middle class colonial Koreans eager to purchasing phonograph records regularly each payday. The narrative opens with a monologue describing his wife s eccentricity about the phonograph, which he didn t mind at all: I m also fond of phonographs, but cannot compare with my wife s affection to them. I never thought of her new proclivity and peculiar devotions on phonographs as a weird obsession. My wife and I loved music, so we purchased an electric phonograph at the store by paying over 180 won in cash, including my wife s deposit and my bonus. Pleasantly enshrined in the shade of my home, the electronic phonograph, baptized by grease with my wife s delicate touches glittered on a wooden floor. Choi Youngsoo, Jeongi Chukeumgi, Chogwang, 1936, p His wife s fastidiousness with the gramophone made for a plague of troubles; for instance, they had to dismiss the housemaid for making an indiscernible scratch while wiping their beloved phonographs, considered like a first born baby, and his wife wails after the records are warped by the heat of the room s floor while she was organizing them.

79 65 However, after his company went bankrupt owing to a bout of economic depression, they had to sell the phonograph and records one by one, making his wife nervous and highstrung. One day, a colleague comes to visit him, who warns him of the danger of his constant indulgence in phonographs. When his friend inquired about the expensive hobby, he confesses, I thought the phonograph belongs to the house, but in fact, this home was the phonograph s belonging. The expensive consumption of and new proclivity for phonographs was driven by commodity fetishism in the early transition to capitalism, by colonial audiences who identified themselves as civilized and modern, yet were often denied the ability to consume modern culture due to the social circumstances of economic depression during the colonial occupation. As Attali remarked of the interdependence of a phonograph and records usevalue, the record object is not useable by itself. 68 Its use-value depends on that of another commodity; its repetition requires a reproductive device (the phonograph). The duality between the object used and its user are constantly exchanged, giving both the character of a thing, a relation that evolves into commodity fetishism as an autonomous phantom objectivity that seems so strictly rational and embraces the senses to conceal the trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people, (Lukács 1971). 69 Nevertheless, the process of commodity fetishism in phonographs culminated in its materialization in colonial life through the rise of various music genres, sales of new records, consumption of phonograph records and the technological progress of gramophones. The material objectification of the phonograph seems to embody the magical formation of fetishized modernity following the progress of technology, the speed of modernization and the gap between the material and its colonial consumers. Marx s concept of the fetish usefully enacts a colonial substitution, an imaginary personification of an unknown historical shift, over which colonial Koreans had no control. Thus it is significant to look at the response of Korean critics to the production and consumption of popular music during this time, for a broad sense of cultural discontinuity 68 Jacques Attali (1985) Noise: The Political Economy of Music, translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p Georg Lukács (1971), History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 83. Quoted in Thomas Keenan (1993), The Point is to [Ex] change it: Reading Capital, Rhetorically, Ithaca: Cornell University, p. 179.

80 66 generated discourses of both cultural vulgarity and colonial modernization in this transition to capitalism. These various discourses regarding popular songs production and consumption during the mid-1930s were initiated by a famous controversy among music critics, broadly referred to as the problem of producing Korean popular songs 70 by Yi Hayoon, who was a director of the Korean branch of Columbia Records in Yi worried about the vulgarized cultural transition of colonial Korean music, which was influenced by Japanese nasal Enka sounds and melancholic lyrics. He compartmentalized Korean popular songs as either those emulating western tunes or Jazz music or Shinminyo new type of traditional folksong that originated from the Korean traditional folksongs. Yi argued the need for musical collaboration in producing Korean popular songs by actively introducing western compositional methods and establishing local orchestration practices that could be hybridized with Korean traditional tunes and instrumental accompaniment. He also emphasized the importance of song lyrics as a means of overcoming the vulgar aspects of contemporary popular songs. Koo Wangsam, music critic for the Dong-A daily newspapers refuted this position in an article entitled Regarding the current popular songs: Counterargument to Yi s point. 71 Koo was especially critical of the accommodation of western tunes in Korean popular songs, saying, It is absurd to adopt so-called Japanized Jazz as a criterion to creating Korean popular songs. He strongly expressed his antipathy to the popular deluge of the American Jazz craze following capitalist materialism in order to criticize the Korean accommodation of the jazz fad as a crippled act of mimicking and quasi-plagiarising western songs. Stretching these issues further, he argued that there was a fundamental harmonic incompatibility between western tunes and Korean compositional traditions, because Korean music is based on a delicate, minute feminine melody rather sparse in harmonic elements that consists of pentatonic scales. It is impossible to express in the western scale. Thus, he concluded it will be a monstrous combination, either of Korean popular songs collaborating with western accompaniment or of a Korean and western instrumental ensemble. 70 Yi Hayoon, , Dong-A Ilbo daily newspaper 71 Koo Wangsam , Dong-A Ilbo daily newspaper

81 67 Kim Gwan, one of the foremost music critics, fiercely retorted, defining Koo s article as the sophistry of formalist and claiming that Koo misinterpreted Yi s argument about the potential for Korean popular music accommodating western music styles and instrumental orchestrations. Gwan found that Koo overlooked musical aesthetics, which addresses the cross-fertilization of music. 72 The notable aspect of Kim s argument on popular music, however, was his interpretation of Korean traditional folksong, Minyo. He said Minyo is a pulsation of the national heart, so we [Koreans] need to resuscitate the originality of Korean popular song by rediscovering Minyo in the new system of sound, which he called Joseonui eumgye (Korean musical scale). Thus, cultural discourses on popular music at this time focused on the vulgarity of appropriating music genres especially western ones a perspective developed by harnessing arguments about musical authenticity, notions of the appropriateness of musical forms and technological developments in the music industry and the consequences of music s commercialization, enabled by phonograph culture and the circulation and popularity of gramophone records that radically changed the socio-cultural landscape of colonial Korean life. As Attali has said of the cultural shift triggered by technological evolution, the gramophone acts as a stockpile playing on time and space, becoming a tool for the generalization of representation in imagining the Korean cultural atmosphere. 73 From the mid 1930s, the dominant cultural forms of jazz and popular song Yuhaengga recordings (Yuhaengga is Korean term for popular song, a translation of the Japanese wod ryūkōka) tended to oscillate between developments from western and Japanese trends, which provided the dominant influences on jazz and popular music in colonial Korea. There was an influx of multiple and diverse popular forms, and genres such as jazz, blues, nonsense songs, enka, rumba and tango continued to proliferate until 1937, when Japan began to launch propaganda campaigns announcing that Koreans should think of Japan and Korea as united in a single body (naisenittai), and to regard their Korean selves as a part of a greater national entity (kokugo). The emergence of jazz in the mid-tolate 1930s in colonial Korea involved to a large extent musician-celebrities such as Lee Nan-Young, Lee Erisu, Kim Hae-song, Lee Jae-Ho, Wang Su-Bok and Che Gyu-Yup, who 72 Kim Gwan Sophistry of formalist Refutation of Koo s comment regarding Yi s article on producing Korean popular songs Dong-A Ilbo Daily newspaper, Attali, Ibid., p. 95.

82 68 appropriated and copied the rhythms, chords and vocal styles of western compositions and performances. In a musical terms, appropriation is often considered a kind of betrayal of origins, where musicians perceived as copying other musicians styles or inflections are associated with an assumed exploitation of weaker or subservient social or ethnic groups by more dominant and powerful groups as the appropriation of Black-American musical forms by white musicians, (Mitchell 1996:8). However, in the Korean context, mimicry and the appropriation of jazz and other western or Japanese music genres by colonial musicians and composers increased the subjective sense of the present and crystallized cultural perceptions regarding colonial circumstances, acting as a symbolic and ritual means of consuming western modernity, morals and values systems through the appropriation of hip jazz songs, while also incorporating indigenous elements to preserve Korean sentiments and traditional values in the form of a new kind of traditional folksong, Shinminyo. However, Korea s cross-cultural dilemma illustrates a displaced western modernity shared by and filtered through the imagination of the Japanese colonizer. Thus the use of jazz as means of both consuming western vanity and indirectly counteracting the Japanese modernization was also reflected in the Korean popular songs. With the advent of jazz culture, youngsters accommodation of western culture through jazz songs and the trendiness of the middle class consumption phonograph records empowered and homogenized these unidentifiable exotic western sounds as commercial commodities that could act as an oppositional and liberational signifier, as Gilroy puts it (Gilroy 1991:9). Gilroy describes an overarching Afro-centrism which can be read as inventing its own totalizing conception of black culture. This new ethnicity is all the more powerful because it corresponds to no actually-existing black communities. Thus colonial Koreans imaginative relationship with jazz strengthened the idea of America and American culture and communities as a genuine and even utopic modernity, geared by the commodity fetishism of jazz records and modern technologies such as the gramophone and radio transistor. Despites its popularity, many critics and conservative Koreans considered jazz a serious threat to the nation s morale, blaming it for supposedly implicitly welcoming

83 69 rebellious behavior and producing an evil influence at home that could result in immorality or even dementia. Critics of the domestic play of phonograph records brought up issues regarding the wife s use of sane, sound music at home. As Park elucidates, singing a vulgar song at home is an unpleasant thing. Clean and cheerful songs have to be played at home by utilizing radio programs to expel vulgar popular songs Currently, many military songs and patriotic songs are played at home, which is a very stimulating fact. Having cheerful and immaculate songs at home is equivalent to having a sound and noble home. 74 Since women, who played phonographs during the day while their husbands and children were away, dominated the market for phonograph records, the discourses of popular music selection, purchase and appreciation of recorded music were focused on the housewives of colonial Korea alongside articulations of Chonghu (home front) identity. Meanwhile, the Charleston, one of the modern dances associated with jazz music, ignited the popularity of jazz for the Mobo and Moga. The jazzy gestures and the allure of American popular music under the suppressed colonial sovereignty quickly gained enormous popularity amongst colonial youngsters. Younger generations were desperately looking for a good Charleston player [as long as he/she can expertly dance to Charleston], they don t care even if it s Negro, 75 which challenges dominant social morals. By appropriating alternative colonial narratives by consuming western culture as a means of sustaining emancipatory impulses, the colonial subject mimicked western attitudes by consuming modern symbol-jazz, and, at the same time, the appropriation of western culture in this younger generation also embraced the idea of a strategic reversal of the process of domination that turns the (colonizers ) gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power 76 by destabilizing colonial authority and challenging traditional morals in accommodating the febrile jazz craze as a subversive narrative. The first poll vis-à-vis the most popular singer in Korea (figure 2-7) displays the popularity of phonograph records the supplementary prize was a gramophone, as shown on the left and the degrees of public preference for the singers at the time. Over ten thousand people participated in the poll to choose the most popular singer in Korea in 74 Park Tae-Joon (1941) Gajeonggwa Eumak (home and music), Shinsidae, vol p Ahn Seokju ( ), When 1931 comes, Chosun Ilbo daily newspaper. 76 Bhabha, Ibid., p. 116.

84 70 September 1935, 77 evidence of the enormous public interest in this music. Meanwhile, various phonograph records issued in the 12-inch, 78 rpm (revolutions per minute) format changed the music business following the popularity of phonograph record consumption and the new dance crazes along with blues and Jazz genre. <Figure 2-7> Ballot and ranking of the most popular Korean singers in 1935 by Samchulli magazine 78 The gradually rising popularity of radio also helped to disseminate jazz music throughout colonial Korea in the mid-1930s (see Appendix 2). As early as 1931, the KPK band of Kim Hae-Song, whose repertoires included a smattering of jazz numbers, first began to be played on the radio. But Korean musicians were, with few exceptions, largely excluded from performing on early commercial radio. According to Chogwang magazine in 1936, radio programming consisted of playing music, entertainment (radio drama, radio novel, radio poem) and gossip news (talk about movie stars, humorous stories), education (national physical exercises -Gukminchejo, cooking method), and newscast. Korean music was usually divided between popular music (western and Korean popular songs) and traditional Korean music such as Pansori or Japga. 79 Beginning in the earliest years of the 1930s in colonial Korea, ambivalent imperial subjects seemed eager to experience modernity and to go beyond its boundaries, which had historically divided them as the inner from the outer, creating an us and an other. Colonial Koreans tried to be free from dominant transcendent ideologies while protecting 77 Samchulli, Samchulli, , p. 8 (left), p. 5 (right) 79 Antenna Seng (1936), Who does the Best in Radio Broadcasting? Chogwang, vol 2.1. pp

85 71 themselves against indoctrinating Japanese imperialism. These ambivalent interactions between the Empire and colonial subjectivity, however, were blurred by various unexpected cultural chemistry between local cultures and the West /America. Various traditional notions that regulate the sovereignty such as nation state, vernacular language and territoriality were conflated with the experience of Empire, which was easily subsumed in the logics of modernity. The colonial intelligentsia s endeavours for a rural enlightenment campaign were gradually substituted for patriotism as an unfinished business in order to accommodate the influx of cultural products from the Empire and western countries. Antinomic colonial mentalities were represented in various popular music genres in 1930s colonial Korea, especially by the two dominant popular music genres, Jazz and Shinminyo. 5. Between American Fever and the Patriotic Gesture: Jazz, New Folksong and the Formation of Colonial Locality According to the sheet music of a Chieron record written in both Korean and Japanese (figure 2-8), the recording of Shin-Arirang was originally planned to deliver jazz tunes as frontier culture to Koreans for the first time, stating that, Paris is the center of world cultural phantasmagoria, since all cultures and new fashions (à la mode, Japanese neologism aramodo for the brand new fashion ) come from Paris. Jazz dominating the whole half hemisphere also came from Paris. Thus when we met him in Japan, we instantly asked to the famous Mr. Gerut to play a traditional Korean folksong, Arirang, in jazz tunes. Although Jazz wasn t originally innovated in Paris, during the late 1920s various commercial novelties such as the introduction of transnational phonograph record companies, the formation of the early stages of radio and encounters with talkie motion pictures played a significant role in delivering these trendy popular songs to Korea.

86 72 <Figure 2-8> Shin-Arirang (New Arirang) and Caravan, labelled as instrumental jazz songs. Performed by Jean Gerut and Friends (a Paris Moulin Rouge Orchestra member), Chieron Record, supposedly released in the late 1920s This ultimately resulted in a hybrid style, mixing Korean folksong with jazz tunes for far-removed Korean audiences. Jazz, America s favorite popular music genre during the 1920s, was introduced to Korea near the end of the decade. The genre initially reflected the expanding African American influence on mainstream culture in the U.S. The prominent jazz musician Duke Ellington remarked that Jazz is beyond category, 80 and the concept of Jazz as a music genre in colonial Korea exemplified the Duke s remark, because the genre was loosely and widely considered as simply American/foreign popular music, beyond genre category. The vague term Jazz that embraces a range of music genres in colonial Korea was not equivalent to the present norm of jazz, so words like swing and jazz emerged as a way to initiate the local music scene into this exotic cultural hegemony, even becoming a profitable promotional rhetoric within the foreign cultural influx into a Korean context. 80 He said, Jazz is only a word and really has no meaning. To keep the whole thing clear, once and for all, I don t believe in categories of any kind. Duke Ellington, quoted in Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow, p. 244.

87 73 Following the advent and success of transnational gramophone companies in 1928, the quotidian lives of colonial Koreans rapidly altered in various ways through the phonographic mediation between a sense of colonial sentiments and the practice of listening to recordings of foreign sound. Mass desire for the phonograph as an essential modern commodity was discursively articulated through media via advertisements and newspaper articles that focused on domestic usage of phonograph as a vehicle of modern life. Thus, it is essential to map the cultural trajectories beginning with the introduction of Jazz and its ensuing popularity in colonial Korea, in order to account more precisely for how jazz songs were imbricated in complex and contradictory discourses of quotidian life and their effect upon the colonial subjects who consumed this cultural symbol from the West. <Figure 2-9> covered American Jazz song in Korea, Sing Sing Sing and Diana by Kim Neung-Ja (1939.January 20, Okeh Panphonic Record) The influx of Ja-zu ( ジャズ Jazz in Japanese pronunciation) music genres were hybridized with Japanese tastes for Americanized pop music and Yuhaengga of melancholy moody ballads, arriving in colonial Korea as a symbol of modern musical tunes. Japanese versions of American jazz generally ignored the standard sixteen-measure chord

88 74 progression and blue-notes characteristic of American blues, latching on to its peculiar melancholy mood instead. 81 Thus jazz songs were considered synonymous with Yuhengga, which emulated western 7-scale popular songs arranged and performed with various western instruments. Many popular songs at this time in Korea were broadly categorized as jazz, borrowing scales, vocal techniques, and other musical elements from western genres, or to cover the American original in vernacular language that filtered through what Japanese colonizer considered to be modern. Popular discourses on jazz song whose assumptions are taken for granted today combined ideas regarding western-style tunes and musicians engaged with a notion of western formality created in opposition to the concept of the pre-modern. It suggested that popular songs in Korea, by appropriating jazz as a music genre, had a central role in defining what it meant to be modern while retaining a safely delineated other genre called new traditional folksongs (Shinminyo). While jazz music focused on western values with technical and musical support from various aural technologies like gramophones and radio, traditional folksongs were considered more as ethnic or indigenous music genres that preserved and represented Korean-ness. Such binaries orchestrate the ways in which jazz songs/yuhaengga and Korean folksongs invigorated the rise of the urban middle class to demarcate the conceptual separation between music genre as either modern or traditional. The ready-made western jazz song became a mirror to reflect the feeling of colonial inferiority about the pre-modern self, making these colonized feelings ontologically unstable for colonial Koreans during the Japanese occupation era. When Japan tried to localize jazz genre in the 1930s by creating a distinctively Japanese kind of jazz music by hybridizing jazz with Japanese folk or theatre songs, 82 colonial Korean audiences were captured by the western aesthetics and assimilated into the dynamics of western popular music genres like jazz, blues and swing. Therefore the distinction of a colonial subjectivity that detaches from the pre-modern by consuming modern jazz songs and western technologies reveals an irresistible but coercive origin to an ambivalent set of sensibilities and recognitions of the colonial self. 81 Christine R. Yano (2002), Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p Atkins, E. Taylor (2001) Jazz for the Country s Sake : Toward a New Cultural Order in Wartime Japan, Blue Nippon, Durham and London, Duke University Press, pp

89 75 The idea of indigenous jazz songs was complex in several respects. First, the Korean singers vocalization is reminiscent of Japanese singers mimicking American jazz singers such as Rudy Vallée, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra; these were filtered through Japanese performers such as the Calua Mamainasu Band and Columbia Nagano rizumu boyz, who in turn influenced the jazz vocal styles of Korean singers such as Nam In-Soo, Chae Gyu-Yeop and Kim Hae-Song. Secondly, the majority of the song lyrics were also overflowing with expressions of emotion, using excessive exclamation (Oh! Ah!) to express self-indulgent tendencies. Thirdly, the jazz songs often overused modern English as buzzwords, particularly in songs such as Sarangui rangdebu (Rendezvous of Love, performed by Chae Gyu-Yeop), Dinah (Diana, performed by Kang Hong-Sik and Ahn Myeong- Ock), Sarangeui Yoreitie (Yodel Song of Love, the first yodeling song in Korea, sung by Chae Gyu-Yeop) 83 and Neonui Paradaisu (Paradise of Neon sign, performed by Yu Jong-Sup). Korean jazz songs and Yuhaengga had to be modeled on westernized Japanese music, with its notation, composers, compositions and instrumental arrangements. Notably, many Japanese arrangers were engaged in the production and arrangement of many Korean jazz songs, such as Okuyama Teikichi ( 奧山貞吉 ) of Sarangeui Yoreitie (Yodel song of Love, performed by Chae Gyu-Yeop), Jeulgeun naesalim (Happy Housekeeping, performed by Kwon Young-Geol), Seoul Myeonmul (Special Products from Seoul, performed by Kang Hong-Sik), Sugita Ryozo ( 衫田良造 ) of Sarangeui Rangdebu (Rendezvous of Love, performed by Chae Gyu-Yeop), Hattori Ichiro ( 服部逸郞 ) of Dainah (Diana performed by Kang Hong-Sik and Ahn Meong-Ok), Yukwehan Sigolyounggam (Pleasant Rural Old Man, performed by Kang Hong-Sik) and Nikitakio ( 仁木他喜雄 ) of Iteriui Jeongwon (Italian Garden, performed by Choi Seung-Hee), Neonui Paradaisu (Paradise of Neon Sign, performed by Yu Jong-Sup). They were also involved in song composition, by adapting Japanese songs as Koga Masao ( 古賀政男 ) of 83 Recorded in 1934, Sarangeui Yureiti of Chae Gyu-Yeop was the first Korean yodeling song, a remake of the famous German folk song Alpine Milkman by Franzl Lang. This song was made by British singer songwriter, Leslie Sarony ( ), a famous artist and radio celebrity in 1920s to 1930s and was remade in 1933 as Nakano Tadaharu s Yamano Ninkimono ( 山の人気者, lyrics by Honmaro Jirou) in Japan. It is interesting to see the cultural concurrency by juxtaposing these two versions of Alpine Milkman in both Imperial Japan and colonial Korea.

90 76 Ggotseoul (Flowery Seoul, performed by Kim Hae-Song, a remake of the Japanese Tokyouraburapsody ), and Suleun Nunmulilgga Hansumilgga (Is Drinking a Tear or a Sigh, performed by Chae Gyu-Yeop, a remake of the Japanese Sakewa Namidaga Tameikiga ). <Figure 2-10> Carioca, 84 the first rumba popular song labelled as jazz song, performed by Kim Hae-song and Lee Nan-Young. The B-side is blues song, Cheonggong, which is a famous Japanese jazz song remake of Aosora, ( 靑空 ) performed by Kim Hae-Song. Okeh Panphonic record, Thus, all the western-style songs were categorized as jazz song in colonial Korea by depending on Japanese selection and musical adaptation. Thus the Japanese influence on the formation of jazz song in colonial Korea was exercised through a shared western musical knowledge and notions of westernized tunes fitting to Japanese tastes, shaped by reproducing the westernization in conjunction with technologies of recording and radio broadcasting. Considering the colonial cultural 84 Carioca, a term that also refers to the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro, is a ballroom dance genre, mixing Samba, Maxixe, Foxtrot, Rumba and Tap. It was performed in the movie Flying Down to Rio by Ginger Rogers for the first time. Carioca as a music genre was introduced in 1933, in a song composed by Vincent Youmans and written by Edward Eluscu and Gus Kahn and introduced in the move Flying Down to Rio. Carioca - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." 4 August 2009 <

91 77 situation, these western tendencies in jazz songs and the mass infatuation to Yuhaengga were anachronistic and escapist, because popular songs represented the dislocated imagination and utopian ideals of western modernity. However, unlike the visible Japanese colonial modernization to make Korea into a staging area for militarism and imperial expansion, the invisible aural modernity of appropriating jazz and western modalities, from fashion to manners and attitude, permeated colonial Korea as an embryonic cosmopolitanism by using various languages as follows: (Man) Moshi Moshi, Ah, Moshi Moshi Honkyou Houtasen Nanahyaku Hachijiu Yanpayo (Speaking in Japanese: Hello, hello, ah, hello hello Central Houta line 980 Yanpa) (Man) Hello Hello, Dangshinei Jeongheesiyo? (Speaking in English & Korean: Hello, Hello, Are you Ms. Jeong hee?) (Woman) Yes yes, what is your name? (Speaking in English) (Man) eotjeonyeok sokdal pyeonjin bosyeotsultaejiyo (Speaking in Korean: You must have seen the last letter I sent you (Woman) Ah! Yakgwanggonjul Jalmodalgo Bulsoshigel hetkunyo(speaking in Korean:Ah! I thought it was a medicine advertisement, so I used it as kindling. (Man) Jeog jeog I love you (Speaking in English: Er-r-r, I love you) (Woman) Aigo, Mangchikhera, I don t know bye bye (Speaking in Korean and English: Oh my god, that s absurd; I don t know, bye bye) (Man) Acha cha cha cha cha, eung eung eung eung jeo keunchimalayo, jo jo jo jottomatte (Speaking in Korean and Japanese: Ooops, oh oh oh Don t hang up, P-pp-please wait for me) (Chrus) keuneumyeon Nanunshireo Nanunmollayo(Speaking in Korean: I don t like you to hang up, I don t know what to do Jeonhwailgi (Telephone Diary) Written by Park Yeong-Ho, composed by Kim Song-Gyu, arranged by Nikitakio, Performed by Park Hyang-Rim and Kim Hae-Song, Columbia Records (1938) Colonial subjects were located within this disturbing sociocultural transition from traditional to modern by consuming and producing popular music mediated by the transnational record marketing system and the Modern Boy and Modern Girl colonial consumerist ethos. Koreans adapted the colonial ethos through a Japanese-filtered westernized modern, trying to find a new self-identity by dissociating themselves from the colonial condition and a mutilated pre-modern. The vacillation of cultural identity was apparent in various Korean jazz song genres and their consumerist reproducibility of colonial sentiments along with colonial connoisseurs appropriations of jazz tunes, which were epitomized in Koreanized jazz songs that imprinted not only the cultural modernization in the colonial imaginary but also carved a vague perception of western modernity in Koreans minds as an expression of colonial mourning. The production and consumption of elegiac tunes of Yuhaengga and cross-fertilized jazz songs, where the

92 78 cultural origins of the musical authenticity were erased in the text, was anchored in a colonial context that fetishized and utilized the geography of foreign countries 85 and exotic language 86 in song lyrics as an expression of colonial indifference. Individual modernization and the agitation for a Westernized/Americanized modernity under Japanese colonial circumstances through the consumption of jazz songs was confined in the implicit desire to form a counterculture to that of the Japanese occupier among the urban middle class bourgeois. However, this collective imagination of western modernity was confined only to the metropolitan bourgeoisie in Gyeongseong, who found themselves situated in this subversive, contradictive double consciousness. On the other hand, Shinminyo, which literally means new Korean traditional song, was one of the most popular music genres in 1930s. This also emerged after the proliferation of foreign phonograph companies and the subsequent release of diverse traditional ethnic Korean recordings. Based on familiar traditional tunes and rhythms of Korea, Shinminyo gained popularity from late 1920s to the middle of 1930s. Consider Korean traditional folk song, Minyo, which is believed to be both a prototype for preserving national identity and a pre-modern form that needs to be modernized through colonial modernization processes under the Japanese occupation. Minyo as musical genre was seemingly limited by its ability to gain audience attention because of its unstable popularity and a pejorative attitude towards local ethnicity, which hindered its ability to form a modern state of its audience, driven by Japanese censorship. By defining Minyo as an expression of traditional Korean values, Choi Younghan initiated the urgent need for making a new type of Minyo that appealing to Koreans in order to protect Korean values against the emergence of modern technology and the diffusion of vulgarized popular song. 87 Following various discourses on Minyo amongst critics, Shinminyo, literally meaning new folksong, was introduced into the commercial market as a genre to succeed 85 Geographies in song lyrics are divided between those that indicate a specific territorial name such as the Alps (Sarangui Ureiti), Italy (Itali Geongwon), Hawaii (Hawaiiui ggum), Mexico, Amsterdam, Heidelberg (Cheongchungeukjang), or those that point to certain places such as ports (Hanguui burus, Biryeonui cheongchunhang), or trains (Hyangsooui yeolcha). 86 Using exotic or foreign language is very popular in jazz songs. In my investigation of 1930s popular song lyrics, I found English, Japanese, French, Russian and unidentified constructed language in Korean jazz and Yuhaengga song lyrics. 87 Choi Young-Han (1932), Joseonminyoron (Essays on Korean Minyo), DongGwang, vol 33. (1932.5), pp

93 79 Minyo s locality while accommodating a harmonic adaptation of western tunes. From the introduction of Shinminyo as genre, record companies tended to market what can be called crossover styles, songs pairing ethnic aspects with western instrumental arrangements fitting to Korean tastes; therefore Shinminyo was at first identifiable as reflective of Koreans exclusively, since record companies were in the business of selling as many records as possible. By incorporating the tunes, rhythm and melody of traditional Korean intimations, Shinminyo progressively accommodated western tunes and instrumental orchestration into the genre, to reflect both traditions of musical elements while building a single musical genre. As a result, Shinminyo records materialized a more self-conscious, modernized, traditional and commercial experience in colonial Korea. While in the early stages of the global transnational music industry re-portrayed Shinminyo as a national symbol to appeal to the Korean audiences on the market, Shinminyo fuelled collective pathos through its elegiac song lyrics and traditional tunes, assisted by western instrument arrangements. Since its introduction as a commercial musical genre, Shinminyo explicitly sought to provide colonial audiences with traditional Korean elements as a tactical intervention against the Japanese empire and to cultivate a tortuous performative nationalist discourse through the distribution of this genre under colonial circumstances. The project of Shinminyo, proposed by Korea s nationalist intelligentsia, eventually became a topsy-turvy cultural activity representing local values and morals by hybridizing the western music scale to appeal the Korean audience while engaging the stereotypes of ethnic nationalism by using dialectics and representing regional customs and scenery. The nationalist intelligentsia tried to graft the western scores onto Korean popular songs to use Shinminyo as a decolonizing narrative by legitimating the tunes, harmonics and experimental arrangements from western culture as modern technique. By embracing both the common musical tastes of colonial Koreans and a fidelity to traditional tunes reinforcing local sentiments, Korean nationalists tried to overcome the contradictory colonial situation where Japanese popular songs, ryūkōka (in Korean, Yuhengga) and jazz songs dominated every corner of the urban streets. Thus, Shinminyo was inaugurated into the market as not only a modern vehicle for revitalizing traditional folk song melodies, rhythms and vernacular

94 80 vocalizations, but also as a hybridized medium of ethnic identity that fused various modern music genres from Japanese ryūkōka to western jazz songs. <Figure 2-11> Oldies traditional songs for seniors, Shinminyo for youngsters, Children s songs for kids, Happiness will go round and round in your home with Victor phonograph. Chosun Daily Newspaper advertisement for Victor Records (Victrola) in December (bold type shows my emphasis, to stress the popularity of Shinminyo). However, considering the severe colonial surveillance and Koreans cultural inspection under the Japanese occupation, how did the nationalist movement avoid being accused of colonial agency by Japanese sovereignty for engaging in this explicitly subversive cultural activity? In other words, by defining Shinminyo as a hybridized popular music genre that adopted western instruments such as the violin, harmonica, guitar and xylophone, then translated various modern music genres including Japanese ryūkōka into Korean traditional tune and melody structures, what was the cultural connotation or tactic of this musical transformation that lay in-between invention and the authenticity of music genres? Interestingly, during the Meiji ( ) to Taisho era ( ) in Japan, Shin-min yō (using the same Chinese letters 新民謠 ; also known as Sōusaku Minyōu), literally designating new Min yō in Japanese, was one of the major music genres, distinct from traditional folk songs as well as Korean ones. Shin-min yō was closely linked with

95 81 traditional regional folk songs that were predominantly composed by professional urban songwriters and recorded in the urban studios for nationwide sales during the Taisho era. 88 <Figure 2-12> Characteristics of typical Japanese Shin-min yō pentatonic scale of 5 pitches per octave with Japanese-style 2/4 rhythm. Famous Japanese Shin-min yō, Ginzano Yanagi (Willow of Ginza, composed by Nakayama Shinpei, performed by Yotsuya Humiko, Victor records, 1932) and Tōkyokōsinkyōku 89 (Tokyo Marching song, composed by Nakayama Shinpei, performed by Sato Chiako, Victor record, 1929). In the early Showa era, localized Shin-min yō, simply called local ballad ( 地方小唄 Chihoukōuta), was discursively articulated as a unified notion of Japanese localism among composers and poets such as Nakayama Shinpei (figure 2-12), Hujii Shimizu and Noguchi Ujo, a form that embraced universal Japanese culture in its modern/imperialistic turn by representing specific regions (Ginza, Asakusa). Influenced by the NAPF (Nippon Proletarian Artist Federation), formed around 1928 by Japanese leftist intellectuals to counteract the western cultural influx, the KAPF (Korean Proleta Artiste Federatio) also tried to search for an ethnic genealogy of the Korean spirit and national ethos by building the trope of Daejunghwaron (Popular discourses) to neutralize anterior Japanese musical practices. The composers and lyricists who covertly projected Shinminyo as a modernizing vehicle were intelligentsia well-educated on the mainland of imperial Japan, who were not bound by tradition and were thus appropriate custodians of tradition. These modern musical 88 Christine R. Yano (2002) Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song, the Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, pp The song is used as theme song for Kenji Mizoguchi s same-titled film in 1929 (released in English as Tokyo March on May 31 st, 1929).

96 82 reformers tried to instil local identity to colonial Koreans by defining the western as a true modernity, differentiating it from the cultural products of imperial Japan. By re-creating Shin(new) minyo to preserve the local values of old Minyo, Korean nationalist intellectuals believed that the Korean sentiments and national mentality inherited from the independence movement of 1919 could be revived through the narratives of Shinminyo as a new mode of building interiority by blocking diverse foreign cultural influxes, especially (and ironically) those from Imperial Japan. The characteristics of Shinminyo, with pentatonic scales derived from the traditional scales of Korean Minyo, are similar to Japanese Shin-min yō s emulation of traditional scales. The musical interpretation of Shinminyo under colonial circumstances intensified a sense of ethnic alienation, nostalgia and sense of separation resulting from colonial occupation, expressed through the repetitive use of words from traditional Minyo and Japga rhymes representing Korean onomatopoeia and mimetic phrases such as Eheeya Eheeya (Supsai Mulbanga, performed by Sun Wooilsun), Dunggi Dangsil Danggi Dangsil (Juritde Chima, performed by Sun Wooilsun) in song lyrics. Shinminyo was usually performed by Korean traditional female entertainers Gisaeng, such as Wang Soo-Buk, Seon Wooilsun, Yi Eun-Pa and Lee Hwa-Ja, who authenticated its ethnic locality and vernacularism to Koreans. 90 Thus colonial audiences listening to these modernized local folksongs, which stimulated an elegiac ethos by the traditional tunes and song lyrics that transmitted powerful emotions of colonial nostalgia and an implicit collective understanding of national memories. The simultaneity of jazz and Shinminyo as the domain of colonial modernity signalled a new set of discourses not only about the relationship between the local and the imperial or transnational but ultimately vis-à-vis ambivalent situatedness of colonial subjectivity and the formation of local popular music, as close as possible to imperial cultural mode. In the 1930s, jazz and Shinminyo, as modern ideas of popular music influenced by western compositional technique and Japanese cultural practices yet still narrating the collective sentiments of Koreans through insinuating traditional value and moral, became the central metaphor for articulating the cultural practices of colonial Koreans with the production and consumption of popular music. 90 There are also male performers of Shinminyo, such as Kim Young-Hwan, Kim Hae-Song and Choi Nam-Young.

97 83 Aesthetically dependent upon and motivated by western jazz songs and Japanese Shin-min yō, Korean jazz and Shinminyo genres cannot, however, be easily designated as merely the result of a process of homogenization and colonial capitalist transition, nor are they just an accommodation to colonial modernization by appropriating western tunes. Within the context of the colonial situation of the composers, writers and singers of Korea, jazz songs and Shinminyo interiorized colonial identity in terms of production, consumption and performance practices by building on either modern notions of westernized modernity in mobomoga or by establishing a nationalist project that mimicked imperial strategies against western cultural infiltration. 6. Colonial Ventriloquism through Popular Songs: Cultural Censorship of Popular Songs and Phonograph Records in Japanese Colonial Times Starting in the late 1930s, Korean popular culture rapidly transformed the everyday life of Koreans following the interwar conditions of the Total War system by interiorizing colonial subjectivity in newly-formed imperial discourse that demanded new type of identity of colonial citizens. Many Korean popular songs in this era began shape a pseudoimperial subjectivity, yet these impulses were self-censored due to political issues. The term imperial subjectivity as it is used here not only indicates the suturing desire of the colonial subject for modernization/modernity within the discourse of militarism but also expresses the peripherality of the pseudo-imperial subject, intensified by the continuity and rupture of coloniality in appropriating popular music in a different way at this time. Since the 1920s, during Japan s late Taishō period, Japanese mass culture had begun to adopt a distinctly American tone, as the American cultural industries started to dominate the world markets in cinema and popular music. From the first Sino-Japanese War (1931), the promotion of Japanese culture and its dissemination around their colonies began to change as imperial ambitions sought an expansion of territories. Under the auspices of a Japanese cultural assimilation policy that approached cultural genocide, colonial Korean professionals and intellectuals set about building imperial discourses to mobilize colonial subjects toward Japanese militarism and imperial expansionism.

98 84 Due to the exceptional popularity of phonograph records and radio 91, the Imperial Japanese government s Governor-General of Korea hastily imposed phonograph record regulation rules (domain of Governor-General of Korea 47 th ) on May 22 nd 1933, which were put it into operation on June 15 th of the same year. 92 Under the terms of the regulation, those who sought to sell or perform popular songs were made to attach two copies of a description concerning the precise contents of the performance within ten days of producing or importing the music product. If the contents of the record were found to contain any threat to public security or to confront social morals and customs by addressing promiscuous matters, the provincial governor could prohibit its production, sale or performance. Reason year Disturbance of public peace (Chianbanghae) Moral disorder (Punggimullan) Label Columbia Polydor Okeh Chieron 3 4 Taepyeong Victor Regal Teichiku Total <Figure 2-13> Two reasons for Japanese censorship of major Korean phonograph records from 1933 to According to Samchulli magazine, popular songs could be prohibited for two reasons: disturbance of the public peace (chianbanghae) or moral disorder (Punggimullan). 93 Consequent to this regulation s passing, 88 Korean popular songs were banned from being played or performed in public between 1933 and 1935, including releases by major phonograph records labels such as Victor, Columbia, Okeh and Regal (figure 2-13). After the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, politically conversant Korean musicians and composers produced a number of obsequious songs, the so-called military 91 See appendix 2 for transition of radio popularity among Koreans in this era 92 Phonograph record regulation rules quoted from Report of Governor-General of Korea, 1933, May 22 nd. 93 Samchulli, What kinds of records are prohibited? Vol 8.4 (1936.4) pp

99 85 popular songs (or Gungukgayo, upon which I will elaborate further in Chapter Three). Korean popular songs of the late colonial period were often interpreted as a manifestation of fanatic militarism or a representation of coercive colonialism denoted by several phrases, such as Toyo discourse (discourse of oriental), Koreanness as imperial local ethnicity, and self-transformation into a good imperial subject. Consequently, not many popular songs were recorded or performed nor mentioned(figure 2-14), in part due to the censorship and surveillance by the Japanese government but also because of the social mood given a colonial power hostile to the entertainment activities. Year Name Chogwang 조광 Samchulli 삼천리 Sinsidae 신시대 Chunchu 춘추 Moonjang 문장 Aisenhwal 아이생활 Yadam 야담 Bandouigwang 반도의광 Gajeonguiwu 가정의우 Total Number <Figure 2-14> Number of major journal articles regarding popular music during Total War era Subsequent to the successes of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War, Japan s overseas possessions were greatly extended and organized into a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Daitōakyōeiken). Transnational phonograph companies such as Victor and Columbia closed shop in colonial Korea because their parent companies were from the U.S. and Britain, aligned with the Allies in World War II. Consequently, the themes of popular songs emphasized justifications for Japanese militarism while representing colonial survival under their social order. Critics of popular music in Korean

100 86 periodicals frequently focused on serving Japanese militarism and consolidating home front identity formation. According to the Police monthly (Gyeongchalwolbo) in 1936, the Governor- General of Korea organized the Korean Theatre Culture Association (KTCA, 朝鮮演劇文化協會 ) under the supervision of the Bureau of Educational Affairs ( 學務局 ). In 1941, the KTCA only permitted performances by entertainers who acquired a Kiyejeong (Entertainer s Certificate), and they divided all cultural activities into several categories such as theatre, music, musical drama and entertainment. Ban-Yaweol, one of the most renowned Korean composers during this era, recollected the incident in his autobiography as follows: To acquire the Certificate of Art, we need to pass a certain test. The test was executed twice a year, in spring and fall. At the actual examination site, Japanese government authorities often accompanied the local officers and interfered in each question. For example, if the officer asked us to memorize the Royal edict of the Japanese Emperor, we were to recite without any hesitation that We are the Imperial subjects of Japanese Empire and reward our own sovereign and country as fidelity to the nation 94 There were also questions like what is Jazz? and some failed to answer as it is improvisational music ( 出鱈目の ), but we all knew we were supposed to say that Jazz is the music of the hostile country, America. 95 Numerous singers and composers of popular songs emulating western jazz songs and Yuhaengga released several sycophantic military songs representing a fanatic militarism and cartographic imaginary that mapped a specific Chinese and Manchurian territory (the northern Chinese area of the Japanese colony), a trope influenced by the Toyo discourse that depicted Japan as the center of an oriental society confronting the West. Toyo discourse was characterized as an anti-western modernity, so it mainly focused on the importance of oriental values such as Asian tradition, provinciality and folk customs. As a result, popular songs of this time concretized the consciousness of colonial Koreans by representing oriental values as national ethos. By either voluntarily presenting or reluctantly faking an affection for imperialism as Imperial subjects, colonial 94 In Japanese, 一, 我らは皇国臣民なり忠誠もってこ君国に報ぜん. 95 Ban Yaweol (2005) Bulhyojanun Ummida (Undutiful son s crying) in Banyaweol Reminiscences, Hwawon Publisher, Seoul, Korea

101 87 musicians and composers had to construct imperial subjectivity through song lyrics expressing colonial ambivalence and expounding imperial-colonialist discourse. <Figure 2-15> Withdraw Yuhaengga! The reappearance of military songs and patriotic songs, Maeil Shinbo Newspaper, January 6. Though a synecdochic chain of musical representations including keywords like Chonghu (home front) identity and Hwanggukshinmin (imperial subject), this newly conceived domain of colonial interiority in Korean popular music reconstructed the ways that production and consumption circled outward from commercialism to the total militarization effort to mobilize colonial labor. These efforts included cultural censorship, the complete acculturation of Koreans as Japanese citizens and subjects of the Emperor though propaganda campaigns, reimagining Korea as part of the single body of Japanese empire, exhorting Koreans to speak only the national language (kokugo the Japanese language) and forcing colonial Koreans to attend patriotic ceremonies such as worshipping at Shinto shrines or bowing to the spirits of Japanese war heroes. Thus, the aspects of popular music in its appropriation and crossover resonated with Japanese modern culture and engaged with a vibrant cross-cultural atmosphere of colonial quotidian life under Japanese surveillance were suddenly sutured to an epistemic involvement in the discourses of Japanese militarism and imperial expansionism.

102 88 Chapter 3 Two Phonographic Realities Continual Colonial Submission and the Interstitial Voices of Colonial Specters 1. Introduction Continuity and Rupture In-Between Two Contradictory Realities The following two chapters examine continuity and ruptures in colonial mentalities that are apparent in discourses of imperial assimilation during the Total War era and the post-1945 national division under American military control in South Korea. By analyzing the selective processes of cultural memory as it is expressed in the popular music that underlies the formation of two contradicory identities, I investigate why doubly embedded colonial experiences were posed in the mentalities of interregnum Koreans as tropes for self-fashioning, self-invention and self-censorship between these two successive colonial masters. Tracing the narrative transformations of popular cultural products such as popular music, films and literary work during this era serves to highlight the post-colonial contradictions that accompanyied the ruptures of modernity and westernization during the Total War period, in order to uncover a confessional narrative in postwar popular music. Total War rhetorics imply the continuous submission of colonial mentality, while Americanism, under the surveillance of the U.S. military government, re-emphasizes the notion of a western modernity as a preferable mimetic strategy for Koreans, acting as a counter-imaginary to the not white, not quite Japanese modernization after the War. In this chapter, I investigate two conflicting positions of collective mentality represented in popular culture by looking at the ways in which discourses of collaboration with Imperial Japan become an imperfectible narrative 96 in colonial Koreans production of local discourses. I argue that this is the result of Koreans being Imperial subjects who 96 The term imperfectible is used to clarify the limitations of cultural discourses in the naissenitai, since the discourse designating Korea and Japan as a same body was originally an incomplete one aimed at colonial citizens without cultural autonomy. The discourse was seemingly apt as a colonial discipline, but it overtly discriminates against the colonized in various ways, as it implies certain assumptions about gender, race and class to the mobilization of Koreans for the imperial body. Even though most Koreans tried to adjust to the colonial control after the late 1930s when Total war system was introduced as a form of Korean colonial modernity, the socio-political discourses, colonial regimes and the cultural narratives of Imperial Japan only intensified the exploitation of colonial labors, unlike the idealizing naissenittai. Thus, I prefer to describe the dilemma of colonial citizens cultural engagements as imperfectible.

103 89 refuse the self-figuring of the colonial body as pseudo-japanese, while dealing with the discourses and strategies the pressure to become more western following liberation. Using popular music to explore the narratives that penetrated colonial collective sentiments, I explore two of the dominant symptoms of the Total War era. First, I look at feminized narratives in cultural texts and how these betray a desire to become an Imperial subject while establishing a colonial frontier state in the Northern Manchurian territory for the Japanese Empire. Secondly, I address the influx of exotic sounds into Korean popular song and discourses surrounding the Southern territory, Nambang, in order to argue that both of these serve to express a surplus colonial desire. The 1940s witnessed a contradictory crisis surrounding the production and consumption of cultural activities, one marked by a militarization of cultural practices and an explosion of new forms of Korean identity alongside exotic music genres and a faddish interest in Japanese southern territories. Through a close examination of narratives from various popular songs and the literary works of female writers such as Choi Jeong-Hee and the recently-discovered pro- Japanese military film, Jiwonbyeong (The Volunteer, 1941), I aim to establish a theoretical and historical framework for analysing colonial modernity during Total War era and the formation of colonial epistemology in continuity. 2. Imperfectible Narratives in the Colonial Mentalité ( ) Maternalized Sovereignty and the Technology of the Gendered Subjects in Wartime Korea In the late 1890s, when Japan imposed a system of women s education under the ideology of the Meiji feminine ideal of good wife, wise mother, this slogan became the main thrust to mobilize female subjects for service to the nation-state as mothers and cultivators of future citizens. By fulfilling women s suffrage and providing equal educational opportunities to both sexes, the Japanese government justified its declaration of female citizens obligation to contribute to and make sacrifices for the Imperial nation-state. These obligations were to be fulfilled through frugality, hard work and productivity, in addition to modesty and submissiveness. 97 However, this good wife, wise mother education was morally and mentally unfit for the colonial female subjectivity. This ideal 97 Nolte and Hastings, The Meiji State s Policy toward Women, pp

104 90 could only possibly be embraced within a neo-confucian model of obedient domestic feminity in colonial Korea. Transformed by Kitamura Tokoku and Takayama Chogyū s intellectual discourses on the New Woman debate, during the Asia-Pacific War Japanese women sacrificed their sons in name of the good wife, wise mother ideology as part of their contribution to the mobilization of the nation-state. 98 However, the majority of colonial women in Korea were in a different predicament. These women were subject not only to inherited historical customs and morals but also to a doubled patriarchic domination and self-subordination in relation to Japanese women as they struggled to embrace the Imperial request upon their bodies. With the institutionalization of the National Total Mobilization Law (Gokajoudouinhou in Japanese) in April 1938, the Total War System was concretized in mainland Japan. Although the project of cultural assimilation was carried out in varying degrees of intensity in all the colonies, including Okinawa, Taiwan and Korea, the fact that Korean targets of assimilation reluctantly came to identify themselves as Japanese added to the propensity to ignore the possibility of national disparity in colonial Korea. While consolidating national identity toward the project of becoming more Japanese, totalitarian government control in colonial Korea began to face vehement protests from anti-japanese activists. This shift in Japan, toward a system intended to embrace the exterior subject (Koreans) in the interior Empire (Japan) and to utilize the nation as a stepping stone for controlling the Manchurian territory, favoured the formation of one body to serve an Empire, an alignment with the nation s Emperor-centred morality that drastically changed the lives and consciousnesses of colonial Koreans. This reformation of the various strata of colonial subjects and circumstances into single entity consolidated as part of Imperial Japan was usually accompanied by the absence of a simultaneous reformation of the Korean character. Japanese identity was constructed as the sign that neutralized and erased the colonial differentiation from modern Japanese to colonial Koreans. By introducing the discourses of naisenittai (Japan and Korea as one body), Minami Jiro, the Governor- General of Korea, began to produce various tools of propaganda conceptualizing the 98 On the formation of historical Japanese New Women discourses in late Meiji era, see Dina Lowy, The Japanese New Woman: Images of Gender and Modernity (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London : Rutgers University Press, 2007) pp

105 91 Japanese woman s movement as a form of modernity for colonial women. The women of the Korean intelligentsia were generally influenced by the Enlightenment movement and had had opportunities to study in Imperial Japan, and few of these women dedicated themselves to improving the social, political and cultural status of women in colonial Korea. Thus, Japan mobilized colonial female labor in support of the Total War System during the Asia-Pacific War by juxtaposing the discourses of the New Woman and female equality as identical with those of the Imperial subject. Since 1941, several female writers, including Choi Jeong-Hee, put their energy into writing pro-japanese opinion pieces in newly emerging women s magazines and journals. The majority of Choi s prior work was known for posing self-sacrificing female protagonists, such as in her acclaimed debut novel, Jeongdanghan Spy (A Justifiable Spy) influenced by the proletarian KAPF 99 novels, Hyung-Ga (A Haunted House) and the Pulse Trilogy Jimaek, Inmaek, Cheonmaek (Land, Human and Heaven), which unveil the characteristics of the complex identities and subjective transformation of colonial females during the Japanese colonial era. 100 Choi s ideological reversal toward pro-japanese literary activities is radically opposed to her previous works and against the movement of nationalists. She does not depict any of her novels female protagonists as a doubly masked subjectivity under duress, or describe subjects reconciling contradictory social mores or experiencing psychological confusion with regards to identity formation under the Japanese occupation. Instead, she reorients herself in the face of national crisis in several essays narrated from a purely maternal perspective as a metaphor for an entire generation of Koreans, implying a pro-japanese tendency in her work from between 1941 and In 1942, this already-famous pro-japanese writer penned lines beginning, I cannot speak well enough, cannot preach as well... But recently I have tried to be stronger, tried not to be a weak woman. The reason I decided to hold 99 KAPF is an abbreviated word for Korea Artista Proleta Federatio. Initiated in 1925 (and lasting until 1935), this Korean literary movement mainly focused on the class struggle and was heavily influenced by Marxism. Novelists such as Choi Seo-Hye, Cho Myeong-Hee, Lee Ki Hyeong and Han Seol-Ya were members of the KAPF. 100 Regarding the colonial feminity in Choi s early works and the transformation toward this masculinist narrative in her novel, see Shim Jin-Keong (2006), The Study on Feminity in Choi- Jung-Hi s Works, Journal of Modern Korean Literature, 7 (1), May 2006, Wol-In Publisher, pp

106 92 my courage and faith in myself is not for the Asia-Pacific War, not from the discipline of my mother and my mentor s instruction, but for my very own son. This essay justifying sending one s sons to the Japanese military, entitled Mother of Sovereignty ( 君國의어머니, 1942), 101 is a reflection of Choi s own personal experiences as a colonial mother whose son was deeply immersed in the discourse of naissenitai and who counteracted his mother s hesitation regarding his hypothetical death by referring to the grandeur of the Japanese Empire. Interestingly, she intentionally writes a homonym Gunguk ( 군국 : 君國 sovereignty; 軍國 militant nation) in which the pronunciation of the Chinese characters can give it different meanings. In the context of cultural activity, the frequent usage of the word Gunguk denotes militant nation during the Total War era; 102 while sovereignty is deliberately alluded to in order to trigger lexical ambivalence. The expression Gunguk is used ambivalently since the term has two phonetic meanings in Korean. According to Althusser, the subordination of the subject takes place through language, in the effect of the authoritative voice as it hails the individual. By accepting subordination recognition of their interpellation, as Althusser describes it, subjects were inculcated with the consciousness of the colonizer, which implicitly embedded the colonizers structures of regulatory norms and its mode of power. 103 In this respect, Choi localizes the interpellation of the Empire during the Total War System by transposing 軍 (military) onto the neo-confucian term 君 (Lord, Sir, Emperor, or simply indicating the second person, Mister or You, in Japanese Kimi), to which colonial Koreans were accustomed: 101 Daedong-A, pp See the similar writing Mother of Militarism, ( 軍國의어머니 ) which describes a lower class rural woman sending her only son to war. The essay clearly emphasizes that, the volunteer soldier s mother (Park) does not worry too much about sending her son as a sacrifice for the Empire, and that, she is living happily with the rest of the four members of her family in Heungnam. Samculli (1941) vol p 155. Most of the stories regarding volunteer soldiers focus on the mother s pride in her son s self-annihilation in the name of the Empire. 103 Althusser, L. (1970), "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, p. 162.

107 93 My son once asked me, Mom, are you going to cry if I go to war and die? I was puzzled by this question because I knew that this was the righteous and reasonable path for him. But he is the only son I have.when I got confounded, he said with a disappointed face, You are doing wrong, Mom. Then I realized that I was really an inept mother. So, as I was holding my unsatisfied son, I said, I won t cry. You will die for the Imperial Service in the War, so why should I cry? My son suddenly got excited and said, Yoshi! (Written in Japanese meaning, You re right! ) Then Mom, you have to say, Wagakoyotsuyokatta! 104 (Written in Japanese meaning, my son was strong! ) (Choi 1942, p 116, bold is my emphasis) The mother celebrates the thought of her son s mobilization in the Imperial Army as a righteous and reasonable form of sacrifice, demonstrating the pervasiveness of victimization and colonial responsibility for War and Empire as a predominant discourse among Koreans. When the Empire wields power in its ordering of society, society exercises power in its shaping of the Empire (Young 1998) through organizations such as chambers of commerce, political parties and women s groups. In the 1940s under Japanese imperialism, colonial subjects unwillingly identified themselves with discourses of imperial mobilization and were inscribed in the colonial imaginary. The pervasiveness of the values of militarization is one of the main reasons that the Japanese Empire interpellated colonial Koreans, not only to fixate them as male or female Imperial citizens but also to locate them as a potential home front labourers. Since the mobilization of the colony nurtured the expansionism of the Empire, the process of Imperial control reshaped the conditions of modern life for the colonized. What J.A. Hobson calls the psychology of jingoism 105 became a familiar feature of colonial Korea during the Total War era, which was established in the discourse of the Home Front for the purposes of mobilizing female labour for the cultural, military, political and economic benefit of the Japanese Empire. However, 104 吾が子よ強かった! (My son was strong!) in Japanese. In this essay, her young son shows a certain symptom of the colonial bilinguality in communication in the early 1940s even when he s speaking with his mother, which is supposed to be one of the most personal and comfortable communicational circumstances. 105 Hobson argues that small-franchise book publishers influenced British policy and changed the representation of the colony in South Africa. By asserting the important role of the press and, thus, the pervasiveness of ideology he tries to explain the roots of the imperial fervor that gripped the nation before and during the War. Regarding the critique of economic imperialism in Hobson s work, see P.J. Cain (2002) Hobson and Imperialism: Radicalism, New Liberalism and Finance, , Oxford University Press.

108 94 militarization is a gradual assimilation through which a colonial subject comes to be controlled by the military regime or comes to depend for its ideology for well-being. However, as a result of the institutionalization of the National Total Mobilization Law, all of the colonial citizens were forcefully located in the interior of the Imperial body and had to constitute new self-identities in order to serve the Total War System and military mobilization. The exterior subjects, who were repeatedly discriminated against by the Japanese colonizer, were not fully recognised themselves as legitimate citizens of the Empire. Although they lacked the motivation to become active agents of the Total War, the mobilizing system of the Japanese Empire unremittingly attempted to unite all the people under the slogan of a common destiny as citizens of a single national community. The problem of enforced homogeneity brought various intrasocial conflicts to colonial Korea (Yamanouchi 1998). The converted pro-japanese writer Choi s essay contributed much to the circumlocutory discourse of Imperialist social reform, just as Imperial Japan did to the colonial Koreans during the construction of the Empire. The gendered discourse emphasizing the creation of a feminized homefront operated as a common metaphor of territorial possession, wherein Korea and its colonial Empire are discursively linked in a mother and child relationship, like the one that naisenittai ideology (same body of Japan and Korea) accelerated. Interestingly, maternity in the mother of sovereignty trope that Choi echoes is not exactly the fully enlightened good wife, wise mother of the Imperial ideology of naisenittai. Rather, it expresses the neo-confucian form of a maternity that supports paternity and masculinity by sending one s own willing son to war. 106 Japanese imperialists encouraged colonial women to promote voluntary enlistment and draft orders for their sons, an emulation of the wifely virtues of their Japanese sisters and of the militaristic mothers who voluntarily sacrifice their sons to wage war for Imperial Japan (Lee 2002). However, the difference between Japan and Korea with regards to the recognition of maternity and its use for the mobilization and embeddedness of the Total 106 Lee agrees that the ideology of wise mother, good wife was applied differently in mainland Japan than in colonial Korea. See, Lee Sang-Kyung (2002) A Study on the Korean Women Mobilization and the Image of Militaristic Mother under National General Mobilization System by Japanese Imperialism, Feminism Yeongu, Vol , Korea Women s Studies Institute.

109 95 War System stages ambivalent gender identities and uncertainty about the reaches of imperial rule. Consequently, during the Asia Pacific War there were various engagements in literary works written by female writers or of male writers narrating as women, dedicated to improving the status of women as an Imperial Homefront by suppressing personal sorrow. Examples of such works include Mo Yoon-Suk s Women are Warriors Too (Daedonga 1942), Park Tae-Won s Militaristic Mothers (Chogwang 1942), Kim Sang-Deok s The Power of Mother (Namchangseogwan 1943) and Choi Jeong-Hee s serial essays Phantom Soldier (Kookminchongnyeok 1941), Mother of Sovereignty (Daedonga 1942) and Dawn (Yadam 1942). Through this process, gender categories such as mother and wife play a nodal role in defining and negotiating the self-positioning of Koreans under colonial rule in the Total War System. In summary, the Total War situation entailed negotiating hegemonic gendered narratives that sought to shake, loosen, invert and slip colonial subjects into desired categories, while also generating pressures on these subjects by establishing dichotomized relationships. The colonial subjects were compelled to exhibit their bodies as feminized sites, resulting in a self-reflexive gaze that confirmed the patriarchal nature of modernity. Thus, narratives of feminized colonial subject circulated as a form of morality that prescribed acceptable feminine behaviors while re-projecting the images of enlisted Imperial soldiers as a genuine form of masculinity that involved the colonial man s selfidentification as a husband and son. To better explore this, I will examine images of colonial masculinity through recently discovered filmic representations. Images taken of rare performances of military popular songs provide significant evidence from the past, helping to explain how militarization transforms cultural meaning for colonial individuals and society. As shifting colonial narratives are often mediated through specific photographic images symbolizing masculinized citizenship dependent on Imperial control, recovering a narrative of colonial male subjectivity and the representation of feminity as local value in the film Jiwonbyeong (1941) shed lights on the transformation of colonial masculinity and the homefront by depicting how enlisting Japanese Army forms the Imperial subject. By constructing a social and national identity during the Total War, male and female colonial Koreans were placed

110 96 in their respective spheres of the public and the domestic, under the slogan of a common destiny as citizens of a single national community. Imperial arrangements regulating colonial subjects within this military homefront enacted discourses of enforced homogeneity through the appropriation and manipulative emulation of the Empire. This was carried out by the colonial Koreans, who thereby created a fusion of masculine modernity and feminine tradition suited to their own culture and history. 3. Ambivalence of Collaboration and Colonial Tactics: Remasculinizing the Expressionless Melancholia through Volunteering Following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, from 1937 to 1945, the Governor-General of Korea Minami Jiro produced national policy films in order to build a supply base in Korea. As the War intensified, Jiro merged all existing film production companies and established the Joseon Film Production Company (Joseonyeonghwajejakjusikhwesa) (Kang 2009). The majority of the films in the collection were created as pro-japanese propaganda that presented positive images of life under colonial rule. Following the mobilization of colonial forces for War in 1941, director Ahn Seokyoung made a film titled Jiwonbyeong (The Volunteer), about a young Korean man enlisting in the Japanese Imperial Army. Ahn has clearly stated that, As a citizen of Imperial Japan I made this film, Jiwonbyeong, for the Empire in collaboration with the regimes of Korea s Governor-General, to recruit healthy colonial males. 107 Rethinking Ahn s artistic background, however, it is interesting to closely examine this seemingly pro- Japanese film. In the early 1930s, Ahn Seokyoung pioneered an influential new brand of illustration, manmun manhwa (literally translated as desultory cartoon ), in several daily newspapers, including the Dong-A and Chosun Ilbo, and he was one of the founding members of the KAPF (Korean Artists Proletarian Federation). Ahn s life and his various cultural careers have long been overshadowed by criticism from Korean nationalists of his second film, Jiwonbyeong 108 and his declaration in 1941 that he was an Imperial citizen. 107 Quoted in Choi Gilsung (2009), Colonial Joseon through Image Minsokwon Publisher, p His first film, Shimcheong (1937), is based on a traditional Korean fairytale and focuses mainly on Korean locality. He stated, When I filmed Shimcheong, I tried to express prudently the Korean localism even in the descriptions of natural landscape by using various camera angles, (Samchulli revived publication vol ).

111 97 How do we reconcile these disparate portraits? Appropriating Bhabba s concept of mimicry, the problem of colonial ambivalence lies in its ambiguity since the overlapped standpoint between the colonizer and the colonized makes colonial ambivalence unclear from the perspective of the mired gaze of the subject (a problem of who is appropriating who). However, the colonized viewpoint is located in the impossibility of fully knowing the Other, the imperial colonizer. In this respect, the mimicry of the Empire always puts the elite groups of the colonized under colonialism in a dangerous interpretation, such as by overemphasizing the colonized s subversive activity against imperialism. 109 In accentuating his new identity as a Japanese Imperial subject, Ahn carefully traces and portrays the narrative of the young colonial Korean man dealing with the contradictory desire to become an Imperial subject. He sees this as a chance to transform his low status (he is a tenant farm manager s son), but he is at the same time wary of the incoming body (the colonizer) of Empire. This body represents the convertibility of colonial identity in the Japanese discourse of consolidation, creating new vehicles for the mobilization of popular support. The first outspoken filmic representation of voluntary enlistment in the Japanese Army manifests a symptom of a colonial faltering, transforming the colonial man so that he identifies himself as a Japanese Imperial soldier. Marked within the consciousness of interwar Korean society, this in-betweenness or awkward gap between the ideology of ethnic homogeneity (naisenittai) and heterogeneous colonial life concealed the colonial ambivalence of the social Korean imaginary. Alongside this, Japanese military mobilization and its paternalistic enforcement of cultural assimilation are the hallmarks of Japanese colonial policy throughout Korea. Nevertheless, alternative margins are present in the film s narrative. Japanese supremacy is constantly being nudged out by the colonial male, who leaks sentiments of melancholy throughout the film. In addition, other colonial homefronts, women, are added as representations of local values and to provide a dubious 109 Bhabha (1994) points out the ambivalence of mimicry as follows, It is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double, which my instances of colonial imitation come. What they all share is a discursive process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely rupture the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixed the colonial subject as a partial presence. Bhabha, Homi. K (1994) Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse, in The Location of Culture, New York, London: Routledge, pp

112 98 affirmation to Japanese totalitarianism. These images are presented in the narrative of Jiwonbyeong. Jiwonbyeong begins with a full pan shot of crowds on a train platform in the Korean countryside. The camera starts from the ground and gradually scrolls up. The scene is like a déjà-vu of the opening sequence of Gunyongyeolcha (The Military Train, 1938, directed by Seo Gwangjae), manifesting the train as a symbol of modern masculine technology. It represents the speed, noise and rhythm of colonial modernization. In Jiwonbyeong, this military train slowly pulls into the platform, where Korean onlookers express their support for the soldiers by waving Japanese flags. The protagonist, Choon-Ho (Choi Un-Bong), watches the train until it leaves, a pointless melancholic look in his eyes. He then meets his fiancée, Bun-Ock (Moon Ye-Bong), to whom he expresses his desire to get away from the countryside. This sequence takes place at the edge of a cliff, which intensifies the enclosed feelings of the colonial male with nowhere to hide. After trying to cheer up Choon-Ho by telling him that his ambitious nature will one day lead him to the success he desires, she asks him where he wants to go. Bun-Ock receives negative replies from a pessimistic Choon-Ho, who says he does not know where he wants to go nor how he will reach his destination. What was the cause of this ambitious young man s melancholy in this so-called pro-japanese film? Consistent with the film s title (The Volunteer), the protagonist eventually volunteers for the Imperial army. Why must the young man add to the surplus colonial sentiment of melancholia and the excessive expressionless interior of the colonial male? When Choon-Ho receives an urgent telegram to go to the landlord s house in Kyeonsung (Seoul), he discovers that the tenant farm manager position has been given to Kim Deok-Sam, a man with a long mustache. In his role as an antagonist, Deok-Sam is presented as a stereotypically hostile, greedy Korean. Choon-Ho s feelings of enclosure in the colonial metropolitan under heavy Japanese surveillance are best represented using his viewpoint the camera follows his gaze. A sequence of parallel editing tracking Choon- Ho s gaze juxtaposed with the slogans hung on every building reads: Japan and Korea are the same body (Naisenittai), One million one mind (Ichioku Itshin), and Generating Japanese Spirits (Nihon Seisin Hatsuo); the male gaze is never seen as a close-up of a full headshot, even though he is the only observer in the scene (Figure 3-1).

113 99 Two points should be emphasized with regard to this connection. First, it is with the gaze that Choon-Ho expresses his feeling towards colonialism. With regards to the colonial male gaze, Laura Mulvey (1975) suggests that the concept of the gaze is distinct from that of the look. She does this by using gaze to account for a one-way subjective vision of a doubly projected by the male gaze ( the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film ). The colonial male gaze in this film raises questions about the demasculinized male subjectivity entrapped within the gaze of the Empire. This scene clearly directs where colonial subjectivity should look, what is to be visible, who controls the look and the object of the look. The colonial male subjectivity (Choon-Ho) still remains Other, representing uncertain identity controlled by the gaze of the camera (Empire). <Figure 3-1> The interchange of demasculinized colonial male s gaze and the slogans of modern edifices in Gyeongseong. The direction of the colonial male s eyes entrapped within the gaze of the Empire and its propagandism mobilizing colonial labors. Second, as he enters a building, Choon-Ho encounters a group of seemingly welleducated colonial women in modern costume, meant to signify the figure of the New Woman. They are sewing a thousand person stitches (Senninbari) 110 to send to the soldiers as a good luck charm. As he is passing these women, Choon-Ho bows his head in shame as if he were sinner (Figure 3-1). As many feminist critics (Moore 1988, McClintock 1995) of modernity have argued about the male-centered nature of modernity, we may question 110 Senninbari is an amulet believed to bring luck, instill courage and provide immunity from injury (especially bullets) for its wearer. According to the Ockcheon newspaper (September 27, 2003), the mother of the first Korean volunteer soldier, Lee In-Seok, who died in the Sino-Japanese War in 1938, was unwilling to give a senninbari to her son. The senninbari was so popular in Japan that in 1938, a film on the subject of serving the Japanese Military Army as the feminine homefront was made under that name.

114 100 whether the universal application of modernity is possible, particularly when discussing the colonial circumstances of the Total War System. The demasculinized colonial male subject is juxtaposed with the colonial New Women weaving senninbari. This evidently portrays the reified and material nature of the Total War System that mobilizes female labor and effaces the masculinity of the colonial male who cannot enlist as an Imperial soldier. As Hall (1996) notes, the gaze that obliterates involves a desire which is refused. 111 The hesitant feeling of the colonial male enlisting in the Japanese Army is comparable to the imprisoned and restricted colonial man trying to recuperate his own masculinity. On his way back to his hometown, Choon-Ho sees a group of Korean children pretending to be soldiers in training for the Japanese Imperial Army, who are all fluent in Japanese military terminology. When the boys march on after their training, they sing the Roeino Unta (Field Encampment Song) 112 in Japanese. In contrast to the children s cheerful performance as Imperial subjects, the colonial male, with no cooperative role in the exterior of the Empire, suddenly ceases to smile and once again drops his head in shame. I am leaving my hometown shouting out that I will return after the victory I won t die without meritorious deeds in the War When the waves of the national flag are upraised with the marching trumpet, Remember the vermilion face of my comrades dying with a smile How can we forget the roars of Imperial subjects? Roeino Unta (Field Encampment Song 露営の歌, Columbia Record) Lyrics by Yabuchi Kiichiro, composition by Koseki Yuuji. Released in 1937 Considering the symptoms of colonial lethargy in this film, Lee (2008) points to the lack of filmic narrative. 113 The confusion of colonial subjectivity regarding Japanese Imperial policy changes from severe colonial control to a consolidation into one body, and it seems as if this will be resolved through dissolution, for the title of this film, The 111 Requoted from Ann Kaplan (1997) Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze, New York: Routledge, p.xix. 112 Roeino Unta (Field Encampment Song) was manufactured by Mainichi newspaper advertising for its lyrical contribution to enhance militarism to coincide with the outburst of the second Sino- Japanese War in Although it was released as a B-side to Shingunno Uta (Marching Song), the record was an unexpected hit, selling over 60 thousand copies. 113 For more minute analyses of recently-discovered interwar pro-japanese Korean films including Jiwonbyeong, see Lee, Young-Jae (2008)

115 101 Volunteer, leads the audience to anticipate that the colonial man will at last become a Japanese soldier. Why does the man remain expressionless throughout the entire film, demonstrating feelings of exclusion, periphery, void and surplus to the audience? Throughout the filmic representation of the homefront campaign and propaganda supporting the narrative of colonial martyrdom and the expansion of the homefront as a form of defence for the Empire, why does the surplus sentiment of colonial subjectivity leak out onto the screen by intimating the presence of an absence? To stretch this issue further, why do Choon-Ho and Bun-Ock not marry, even though they are engaged and seem to get along well? On the subject of the mechanism of melancholia, Freud wrote that, a loss has indeed occurred, without it being known what has been lost. The colonial male subjectivity haunted by such an unknown loss fixes himself as a useless homefront. Mourning is a conscious response to events such as a specific death, whereas melancholia is often unconscious, resulting from a loss, like love, which cannot be physically perceived. Melancholia is more contradictory due to the absence of a loss that can be observed. Freud said, In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. 114 The melancholic colonial male constantly tells his lover that he is inferior, unqualified and despicable, always using negative phrases such as I don t know where to go, or I don t deserve to serve as an Imperial soldier. He must find a way to recuperate from his unknown loss, whether this mourning is for the loss of sovereignty, the impossibility of consolidation with the Empire or with a lover, or the emasculization imposed by the patriarchic authority. The first pro-japanese film advocating active collaboration with the Empire was carefully calibrated to accommodate the propensities of foreign audiences by including Japanese subtitles and several lines in Japanese, to display the bilingualism of public life in colonial Korea. Japanese was not considered a foreign language to colonial Koreans. However, we can still find the irreconcilable temporalities juxtaposed in becoming an Imperial subject and compulsory cultural assimilation, betraying the contradictory feelings (the unknown loss ) toward collaboration for Koreans. 114 Freud, Ibid., p. 246.

116 102 <Figure 3-2> Dramatic facial changes of the melancholic colonial subject after his interpellation as an Imperial subject (Above), Choon-Ho s room with Ito Hirobumi s 115 portrait and a map of the Asia-Pacific (The first and second scenes on the middle), Choon-Ho s fantasy of enrolling in the Japanese Army as a purified Imperial subject. As Mizuno Naoki (2007) has argued, the Japanese logics of colonial control over Taiwan and Korea reveal the binary oppositional structure of Japanese consciousness with regard to the colonial nations, doubled by the empire s simultaneous stance of assimilation/inclusion and exclusion. While the Taiwanese were labelled as barbarous inhabitants, Koreans were by contrast categorized through a specific national ethos (minzokusei). By associating Koreans with poverty, filth, negligence and cunning, Imperial Japan executed colonial control by reinforcing the hierarchical difference between the Japanese and Koreans. Although Japanese assimilation policies include allusions to pan- Asian Civilization and Enlightenment, based on a rhetoric of universalism, the Japanese tried to implant the essence of Japaneseness upon their colonies (Naoki 2007). Japan s policy of consolidation operated from the premise that even though the colonized were assimilated to Imperial Japan, the Empire would not bestow the same status and rights as ethnic Japanese enjoyed upon colonial subjects. Consequently, colonial Koreans had to 115 Ito Hirobumi ( 伊藤博文 ) was a Japanese statesman, founder of the Resident General of Korea, Prime Minister of Japan. Ito was assassinated by An Jung-Geun, a Korean nationalist opposed to the the Japanese Empire s annexation of Korea.

117 103 embed their faith in the national Imperial body and Japanese supremacy while remaining in the contradictory condition of being the illegitimate son of the Empire. In Jiwonbyeong, we see dramatic changes to the melancholic Korean man s (Choon-Ho) expressionless face when his Japanese friend shows him a newspaper ad announcing that Koreans were newly permitted to volunteer in the Imperial military (Figure 3-2). 116 The widening smile on his face upon reading this news represents the chance for the colonial male to remasculinize himself, giving him the opportunity to resolve the conflict between reality and his desires. Evidence of Choon-Ho s remasculinization is represented in the following sequence, where he is furious at his friend for flirting with Bun-Ock. All of the local values and morals Choon-Ho needs for constructing his own family were betrayed by other male Koreans, specifically Park Deok-Sam, the landlord and his best friend. Remarkably, there is no father in this film. Choon-Ho s father is apparently dead, and the only father in this film, Park Deok-Sam, who is continuously pressuring Bun-Ock to marry his son, is represented negatively. After being rejected by other colonized Korean males, Choon-Ho s dedication to the Empire seems more plausible read as a discreditation of fathers. The most salient depiction of the fantasy of the colonial man intertwined with the Imperial subject is found when he returns to his private territory, his room (Figure 3-2), where his faithful colonial fascination with the Empire is represented by his hanging a map of the Asia-Pacific territory and a portrait of Ito Hirobumi, the prime minister of Japan. Here, in the returned gaze of the voyeuristic camera-as-spectator of the Empire examining colonial life, Choon-Ho is positioned as both the object of the Imperial gaze performing military marches under the Japanese flag (various tracking shots are used) and colluding with an unconscious imagination by remasculinizing the colonial Self. This context of diegesis in filmic time (1938) and the present time of the audience (1941) contribute to the creation of a colonial subject perfectly harmonized into the Empire by erasing the dissonance of colonial reality. Following the visual fetishization of the Japanese military, Choon-Ho s friend apologizes to Bun-Ock for misleading Choon-Ho. Bun-Ock and Choon-Ho eventually reconcile, and Choon-Ho confesses that he will join the military. By enlisting in the Japanese army, all sources of the colonial man s persistent melancholy 116 Therefore, the diegetic present is fixed in 1938, when Koreans were newly able to register with the Japanese military (as of April 3 rd, 1938).

118 104 are solved, and he is made fully a part of the Empire. Interestingly enough, the camera focuses down upon Bun-Ock s shadow then slides up to include Choon-Ho s silhouette, so that the colonized male and female (with full bust shot) become a metaphor for colonial subjectivities in-between, both changed by their new circumstances, in which they live and work for Imperialism. The vernacular mise-en-scène of Korean scenery, representing a typical rural Korean landscape, provides a moment of intimacy and familiarity for its colonial audience straw-thatched houses, a water well and costumes, particularly that of the male protagonist, Choon-Ho, who wears Korean traditional clothes for the first time in the film in order to symbolize conformity with the colonial exterior and the Empire. <Figure 3-3> Ending Sequence of The Volunteer (1941), on becoming an Imperial subject. Images of his mother and lover are overlapped with the Japanese Rising Sun flag over the soldier s face. See from left to right, from top to bottom. Leaving his mother behind surrounded by Japanese Rising Sun flags, Choon-Ho transposes his home as a maternal colonial state, which still remains a homefront within the Empire s body (Figure 3-3). The film ends as it began, with a crowd of people at the train station crying Banzai (Japanese term for Hurrah) to the glory of the Emperor s Holy War as they see off a military train. The difference is that this time Choon-Ho is on board as an Imperial subject serving the Japanese army. Interesting, here, is that the people in the crowd look neither joyful nor depressing; this is a departure from Choon-Ho s evident dismay at

119 105 the film s beginning. In the final shot of the film, Bun-Ock s face is just as difficult to read. However, a hint of a smile can be seen. There are a few interesting glimpses showing consolidation vis-à-vis colonial ambivalence about Empire. Firstly, the mustached Japanese character who told Choon-Ho about the opening of the military to Korean volunteers is the only person smiling in the last sequence, where he is shown standing next to Park Deok-Sam, the antagonist of the film (Figure 3-3, bottom left). By placing the Japanese colonizer and the local antagonist (Park Deok-Sam) side by side, the representation and meaning of the colonizer is overlapped and rearticulated, as is the repetition of resemblance. Secondly, as in Anderson s discussion of the bizarre conformity of colonial subjects who sacrifice themselves for country regardless of their colonial status, Bun-Ock wears a belted a sash with The Women s Patriotic Association (Aegukbuinhoe) written on it as she sends her lover off to war. As Anderson has said, Even in the case of colonized people, who have every reason to feel hatred for their imperialist rulers, it is astonishing how insignificant the element of hatred is in this expression of national feeling. Interestingly, he points to the importance of language in mobilization. Anderson further elaborates that, The nation was conceived in language, not in blood, and that one could be invited into the imagined community Seen as both a historical fatality and as a community imagined through language, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and closed. 117 The Women s Patriotic Association was a subbranch of the Japanese group with a similar name: Aigokuhujinkai, established in 1937 for the purpose of mobilizing the colonial female homefront using the nation as a family paradigm to locate women in subordinate positions by diffusing the spirit of the Imperial subject. Interestingly, Bun-Ock gives a charm to Choon-Ho in a traditional silk pouch, containing incense. The pouch is inscribed with the Chinese character Life 壽 (in the Japanese subtitles, it is simply translated as charm 御守り ). Considering that senninbari were gaining popularity among the colonial New Women, as already discussed, Bun-Ock s gift has profound significance. Her act symbolizes her desire to preserve vernacular values against those upheld by modernity and the Empire. Thus, from a women s perspective, the overturning of the Total War System in 1937 did not bring about a fundamental reordering 117 Benedict Anderson (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London New York: Verso, pp

120 106 of gender relationships. In sharp contrast to the bob-haired and short-skirted modern girls, the self-motivated housewife and mother are projected into the neo-confucian models of maternity, supporting masculinity by sending their own lovers and sons willingly to war. After the train leaves with Choon-Ho, Bun-Ock is on the railway track alone, and she picks up a blank sheet of paper, smiling strangely while staring at the screen with a full head shot. Why does she smile for the first time in this very last sequence? Why does the paper have to be an empty one, which seems to symbolize a bleached national flag? Her smile remains a surplus fantasy in this film because Choon-Ho, the main character, is finally on the way to war as an Imperial subject of the Japanese Empire. Fulfilling Choonho and Bun-Ock s wish ( for Chooh-Ho to become a successful man ), the mission is completed, but the surplus remains. As the Japanese military song Sending Volunteers (Siganheio Okuru 志願兵を送る ) 118 plays, loudly, but so that one can barely distinguish the lyrics, and the screen becomes full. A colonial woman stands still, in a position that Mulvey explains as patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male order, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of a woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning. 119 By transposing colonial melancholia and the demasculinization of the colonial male into reality, the colonial female body serves as a metonym for the localized ideological indoctrination into the Japanese Total War System by embracing colonial ambiguity and ambivalent feelings of consolidation in the matrix of surveillance. In the following section, I examine how this embodied ambivalence of the feminized homefront is motivated in the narrative of popular songs in between 1937 and Narratives of the Feminized Voice as the Colonial Homefront: Colonial Women and Gendered Phonograph records, This is a B-side song (written by Saito, composed by Eguchi, performed by Uchida Eichi 内田栄一 ) accompanied with A Song of Volunteer ( 志願兵の歌 ) performed by Korean singer Chae Gyu-Yup, released by Polydor Records. In this film, we can barely hear the lyrics of the song except for some fragmented words such as, You re Chosen 選ばれた, Continent 大陸 or To attack and to Protect 攻めるも守るも. 119 Mulvey (1989), Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Visual and Other Pleasures, p. 15.

121 107 Following the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, popular pro-japanese records promoting Japanese militarism were released for the first time in colonial Korea. Among them were: Namaui Uiki ( Spirits of Man, 1937), Jeonguiui Sayoe ( Master of Justice, 1937) and Jongkungannobuui Norae ( Song of a Nurse Serving in the War, 1938). Commonly known as Gungukgayo ( Popular Military Song ), this music disseminated new symbols, images, beliefs and practices of the Total War System by promoting militarized nationbuilding in the early years of the Total War era. The Columbia Phonograph Company began to produce military-style music in Korea under the genre name Shiguka (Song of State Affairs) or Singayo (New Popular Song). In the United States, as Allies during World War II, war-inspired songs during this time were clearly divided into tunes that touted the isolationism and patriotism of the late 1930s and post-pearl Harbor songs with themes of enlistment, army life and national pride. A wide range of genres were used, including romantic ballads, dance tunes and novelty songs, to support the dispatched soldiers, and functioned much like the patriotic songs and songs boosting patriotism performed during the heyday of American big bands era, including works by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, Kitty Kallen and Andrews Sisters (Johns 2006). In contrast, the Japanese nation-state mobilized popular songs to establish linear conditions between the Empire and its colonies as complicit others the colonial homefront who wished to elevate their diminished status by sacrificing volunteers and embracing the ideology of Imperial subject. These popular songs were not categorized within conventional music genres like Shinminyo, the new traditional Korean folk genre or Jazz. Despite the similarity in rhythms and compositional styles, these songs were categorized as Patriotic Songs (Aekugga) or Songs of State Affairs (Shiguka), marked as such by their containing military themes such as patriotism and axis-bashing. Interestingly, one of the most scandalous popular songs in mainland Japan was Awaya Noriko s Farewell Blues, 120 which marked a noticeable shift toward Western feminine vocalizations and a shift toward the localization of the Blues 120 The first Japanese popular song using Blues in a song title was Sweet Home Blues, sung by Helen Yokiko Honda in However, Farewell Blues (Wakareno Burusu, lyrics by Hujiura Kou, composed by Hattori Ryouichi, Nihon Columbia Record 1937), was the first song that gained huge popularity among the general populace from Blues genre. She also sings a song titled, Rain Blues (Ameno Burusu).

122 108 genre, since the tune followed neither the conventional Blues chords nor lyrical style. 121 The composer of Columbia Records Hattori Ryoichi s 122 notable piece is a mixture of Chanson and Japanese popular song with powerful Blues-style vocals. Awaya sang several Chanson covers, such as Damia s Tu ne sais pas aimer (Hitonokimosiranaide, 1938) and Billie Holiday/Damia s Gloomy Sunday/ Sombre Dimanche (Kurai Nichiyoubi 1936), and she later released, Les Feuilles Mortes (Koyou, 1952) by Yves Montand. Considering the underlying exotic representation of the United States in these songs lyrics, this kind of aesthetic representation in popular song engendered a cultural gap from colonial Korea. The bold gestures of the female singer crossed racial boundaries, regretting an ephemeral moment of interracial love with an American sailor swaddled in Western style vocalizations. When I open the window, the light of an American 123 port is seen from the south/ fluttering in the night wind, sea wind, the lovely breeze/where does he go tonight/ my painful heart/ my short-lived love/ my sadness of whirling blues (1st verse). Carving anchor-shaped tattoos on the shoulder/ my sailor is stronger than Yakuza/ though our mother tongue is different/ (I know he is) weak with love/ softly whimpering/ never seeing each other again desperate heart to heart/ my sadness of whirling blues (2nd verse). Farewell Blues ( Wakareno Burusu ) by Awaya Noriko, Columbia, 1937 In April 1940, the Korean magazine Chogwang featured an open discussion 121 Traditional Blues verses usually go with the repetition of a single line and the conclusion of the single line. For example, I hate to see that evening sun go down/ I hate to see the evening sun go down/ Cause ma baby he done left this town (lyrics by William Christopher Handy). Although the song shows some blues forms by following minor pentatonic scales, it is also similar to Chanson and Japanese popular song styles. 122 Hattori Ryoichi exclusively belonged to the Columbia Record Company from the early Showa era (1931, Showa 11). He mainly composed of Western-style songs such as Blues, Tango and Jazz adapted to suit Japanese tastes. He also collaborated with the singer Ayawa Noriko, releasing many hit numbers such as Oshare Musume ( Classy Girl, 1931), Wakareno Burusu ( Farewell Blues, 1937) and Ameno Burusu ( Rain Blues, 1938). However, after the Asia-Pacific War broke out, Hattori Ryoichi s Western music orientation was highly criticized for mostly appropriating Western and American styles. In 1944, he moved to Shanghai to escape the Japanese government s request to compose military songs (Segawa 1976). 123 In Japanese lyrics, Meriken ( メリケン ) is old Japanese term for America. Lee Dong-Soon (2008) argued Meriken held sexual connotations during this era.

123 109 under the title, Popular Music of Japan and Korea: Interwar Popular Music Scene. 124 Conducted by cultural critics, the colonial intelligentsia and music authorities, this discussion addressed several characteristics of interwar popular song in relation to tense wartime conditions. The article discloses that in 1940, when the Total War System had not yet been fully applied in colonial Korea, the music industry in Japan reissued several famous Jazz records while accommodating the increasing popularity of exotic music from Argentina using Tango and Rumba rhythms. Specifically, the analysis of the rise of Blues music in 1937 caused by the sensational hit number Farewell Blues discusses how Blues chords and sentiments can appeal to Asian music tastes, revealing envy in the colonial subtext for the more advanced Japanese music scene in its discussion of the aesthetic and social ramifications of Blues and the Japanese localization of the genre as a reflection of Asian tastes. The tone of the arguments on interwar popular music in Korea mainly focused on promoting the need for entertainment in rural areas to soothe and enlighten local citizens and laborers estranged from the metropolitan cultural atmosphere. 125 For example, they lecture magazine readers on the importance of preserving the traditional folk spirit. Because Jazz and continental popular music mainly focused on representing the discourse of northern territory of the Japanese Empire to elucidate socio-political situations, these cannot be said to fully express Oriental feeling as such, yet they are utilized for mobilizing colonial Koreans by appealing to universal sentiments. Thus, in order to return to the Oriental mood, imbued with traditional values and vernacularisms, the academics who deploy the obscure term Asian sentiments must attend more to regenerated traditional folk songs. The reverberations of Oriental local values and collective tastes produced three musical genres, Traditional Folk Song, New Folk Song (Shinminyo) and Popular Military Song, to symbolize Korean modernity, at a time when Korean identity was in crisis due to the havoc wreaked by both socio-political transformation under the Total War System and the consequent forceful homogenization and cultural assimilation policies of the Empire. In addition, popular song at home has been cast as both an object of purgation in which to 124 Japan/Joseon Popular song ; Interwar Record Scene (Ilbon/Joseon Yuhangga ; Jeonsihaui recodeugye), Chogwang, (1940.4) p , Guwonhoe 125 See also, Kim Sa-Yeop (1941) special issue for rural culture, peasant and folk song, chogwang or visual representations of farm music in Chunchoo (1941) vol. 3.

124 110 eradicate sensual and inflammatory aspects of vulgar lyrics 126 and as a tool for elevating the mental cultivation (ingeoksuyang) of colonial citizens. The role to be played by the peasant class and Folk Song were also two of the main issues of debate during the Total War era amongst intellectuals, since the cultural intelligentsia tried to objectify the rural class as mere uncivilized masses in order to fulfill their own civilizing agendas by educating these peasants as modern subjects. 127 This new attention to the local values of Joseon Korea in intellectual circles was closely related to the colonial rearrangement of Imperial desire in colonial territories. By representing the relationship between the Empire and its colony through the demarcated spatial categories of metropolitan/rural and city/country, the Japanese Empire and pro-japanese intellectuals tried to articulate the national narrative as colonial hierarchy by transposing the importance of rural enlightenment as a spatio-temporal matter. The preservation of rural and vernacular values became a focal point in pro-japanese intellectual discourses in order to present the peasants as an ethnographic, pre-modern subject to be exploited and enlightened by reterritorializing the narrativse of local values within the tactics of Empire. Despite these various progressive constructions, many critics portray the time of the Total War as a period of cultural darkness by designating it as a period of cultural rupture in popular Korean music history (Lee 1998, Park 2007, Park 2009). The production and consumption of popular music in this era has been enveloped in this discourse of cultural blackout, particularly because people had to cope with Japanese militarism, contend with the exigencies of the stark conditions of the homefront and discourses of selfsacrificing for the Empire. The phonographs from the Total War era have never been completely published, re-recorded, archived or engaged with in intellectual discourses. How can the discourse of popular music during the late Japanese colonial occupation be defined and understood beyond this bifurcated category of pro-japanese patriotism, involving both the conflict against war trauma and collective sentiments in opposition to the possibility of polymorphous identities? Purgarion of popular music at home, Home Friend (Kagenno Tomo), February 1941, vol 40, pp Park Gyeong-Hee ( ) Music is an organ for mental cultivation; Founding the music institute in Joseon, Samchulli vol p In fact, there has been and still are several intense on-going discussions on the categorization of pro-japanese activity and the aftermath of the unresolved history of the late Japanese occupation era

125 111 The Total War years were one of the most fertile periods of songwriting, performance and recording, as were the culturally flourishing 1930s, when the Korean popular music scene emerged and grew exponentially by accommodating various popular music genres. The familiar tunes of popular songs of the time were blended with the regime s new ideologies, mixed with a strong sentiment for the military nation-state, which Shiguka and Aekugga frequently echoed. Thus, any relegation of this time as merely a cultural rupture under colonial conditions of severe surveillance and coercive sociopolitical consolidation must be reconsidered within a more complex and multifaceted approach that takes into account the lyrical content, music diffusion and performance styles of this period. It is impossible to account for the number of military-themed phonographs produced and consumed between 1937 and Introduced to colonial Korea by the Total War System, the majority of valuable recorded archives were destroyed during the Korean War. Judging by the few remaining phonographic records, sheet music and advertisements in periodicals and newspapers, military-themed records were not very popular among Koreans as a cultural commodity. However, the restrictions placed by colonial powers on local record companies and singers led the latter to make sycophantic songs that conformed to Total War logics. Interestingly, as I did more research into military themed songs, songs narrating the experiences of mothers or wives kept popping up, emphasizing the degree to which the feminine colonial homefront was mobilized. It is difficult to ascertain precisely how media consumers from the early Total War era may have understood and used these representations of feminines narratives. Nevertheless, it is necessary to inquire into how the repetitive convergence of the collective Chong-hu (homefront, literally translates to behind the arms 銃後 ) identity and colonial female subjectivity in popular song and how in the popular music scene. For example, a popular music festival that pays tribute to singer Nam Insoo was heavily criticized by a nationalist organization named the Institute for Research in Collaboration Activities, (see, since he contributed a song named Deep Gratitude of the Twenty Five Million (Icheonobaekman Gamgyeok, written by Cho Myeong-Am, composed by Kim Hae-Song, performed by Nam Insoo and Lee Nanyoung,1943) during the Total war era. Consequently, several singers and composers such as Cho Myeong-Am, Park Si-Choon and Baek Nyeon-Seol were also infamously categorized as pro- Japanese musicians. The issue unraveled on websites such as Ohmynews and Hopenews following the offensive and defensive claims of both nationalists and the fans of Nam. Due to hostile public opinion against perceived pro-japanese activity, the name of the festival was changed, named after the birth place of the singer s hometown to the Jinju Popular Music Festival in 2006.

126 112 other female representations functioned in social discourses during this period. Thus, it is imperative to analyze how the trope of Chong-hu was used to mobilize the female homefront and how this discursive formation mediated a significant transition in how colonial women were conceptualized in public life during this period. Chonghuui Giwon ( Hopes of the Rear, 1937) is arguably the earliest phonographic record depicting militarism extant in the archives. The first verse of the song establishes the justification of Japanese spoliation during the first Sino-Japanese War by promoting the ideology of East Asian peace. In this part, the song centers on the homefront desire to support the Japanese Imperial body by enlisting their healthy Korean men. 129 Come back when you win for your country/ Raise your masculine spirits up/ you have an obligation for the East Asian peace (1st verse) Following the sound of footsteps / Sally, sally and defeat the enemy Fulgurating flags up in the sky / Sweep away and march to the end of enemy s camp (2nd verse) Pak Sehwan, Jung Chanju, Chonghuui Giwon ( Hopes of the Rear ) 130, Columbia 40793, Recorded in 1937 (reissued in 1942), December The first military popular song exulting Japanese militarism clearly refers to a new female subjectivity, the Chong-Hu in the title of the song, by referring to the Korean female homefront supporting Japanese soldiers and Korean volunteers. The term Chong-Hu specifically connotes a collective motherhood of the homefront, those who sent their sons 129 According to Korea and Taiwan under Asia-Pacific War (Taieiyousensoushitano chousenoyoubitaiwan, 大西洋戦争下朝鮮及び台湾, Youhoukyoukai Publisher, 1961, p191) published in Japan, Korean military volunteer participation until 1943 is as follows: Dispatched Year Applicants Accepted , , ,443 3, ,743 3, ,273 4, ,294 6, This song was written by a British literary scholar, Lee Hayoon ( ) and composed by Son Mok-In ( ). This sycophantic military record was reissued, unusually, in 1942 (record number 40889). The Japanese composer Okuyama Teikichi rearranged the song, however this record has not been found.

127 113 or husbands to the Asia-Pacific War s front lines. If the category of the female homefront made up of colonial women imbued with Japanese colonial indoctrination can metaphorically designate new forms of female subjectivity that ironically accords with the traditional ideology of gender morals and norms, then what did this homogenization of all colonial women under the labels of militant mother or mother of sovereignty indicate to Korean society during the early 1940s? The colonial female subjects depicted in novels, popular songs, advertisements, radio programs and theatrical plays during the Japanese occupation were usually portrayed as either young, well-educated women (Sinyeosung, or New Woman) or as eccentric cultural harbingers of modernity (Modern Girl). Both types were interested in particular modes of fashion, attitudes and language that set them apart from elderly women, the roles of wife and mother, and traditional Korean femininity. While the bodies of Modern Girls in the 1930s were coded to represent extravagance and the pursuit of pleasure, New Woman transgressed social boundaries and questioned their dependence on men. 131 However, these categories of colonial feminity were influenced by Japanese mobomoga, and the New Woman Movement was driven by colonial modernization and expending consumerism. The New Woman moniker actually represented a progressive group of educated young elite women, whose identity was shaped by a women s magazine of the same name issued by female intellectuals, 132 while the etymology of the Modern Girl is vaguer, as this style was organically moulded rather than adopted from mass media depictions. Unlike the Modern Girl of the 1930s whose hedonistic lifestyle was largely mocked by colonial intelligentsia and critics or the New Woman of the late 1920s whose discipline and well-educated individualism was dedicated to improving the lot of rural illiterates while engaging in free 131 For an account of the fabrication of the New Women discourse in colonial Korea, see Kim, Soo- Jin (2005), Excess of the modern: Three archetypes of the New Woman and Colonial Identity in Korea, 1920s to 1930s, Seoul National University Ph.D. dissertation. 132 As many scholars have been pointed out, the main reason for the popularity of the Sinyeosung discourse in colonial Korea was due to the magazine, Sinyeosung, which advocated women s rights, education and the obliteration of illiteracy and child care. For more information on Sinyeosing magazine and its discursive formation among female audiences, see Kim Soo-Jin (2006.3), The Day of the New Woman: Women s Magazines in the Colonial Communication Field of Korea, Economy and Society, Vol 69. pp Mobilizing colonial female subjects by designating them as warriors on the homefront, the Chonghu identity in the Total War System postulates a virtuous motherhood whose central concerns lay in supporting Japanese militarism by sacrificing their healthy sons without repentance.

128 114 romance, Chonghu demonstrated a collective female identity for the homefront grounded firmly in an ideology of Japanese Total War era militarism and nationalism. By expending with these alternative feminine identities and mobilizing colonial female subjects by designating them as warriors on the homefront, the Chonghu discourse of the Total War System postulates a virtuous motherhood whose central concerns lay in supporting Japanese militarism by sacrificing healthy sons without repentance. Female bodies after the late 1930s became metonymic for the interwar colonial Total War System because of how the colonial female body was enveloped by the colonizer s political propaganda. However, it was not an automatic transformation from the obedient female subjectivity inured in a patriarchal system to the active homefront woman geared toward supporting the Japanese Empire. Newly introduced Imperial symbols, such as the Rising Sun flag (Kyokujitsu shoudenki 133 ) and the Kimi ga Yo 134 quickly became ubiquitous, while more familiar forms of cultural consumption such as official bulletin movies and ingratiating popular songs also served to normalize the symbolic presence of the Imperial army. However, the hearts and minds of the crowds could not be so easily controlled, and colonial subjects ambivalence toward the enforced mimesis of Imperial Japan s cultural assimilation policy often troubled the colonizer. Consequently, until 1942 when the Pacific War began, sycophantic Popular Military songs weren t released due to their poor sales and low popularity. After the Second Sino-Japanese War, we women are trying hard to be the best homefront labourers for serving the Imperial nation. It is impossible to count all that we have done for the Empire, such as sending off colonial troops to the Imperial war, consoling the bereaved families and donating money for the national defense. However, during this time our brave volunteers standing out in the name of the Japanese soldier in the 133 The Rising Sun flag ( 旭日旗 ) is the military flag of Japan, that was used as the ensign of the Imperial Japanese Army until the end of World War II. The design consists of a red circle in the middle, signifying the sun (Japan) with 16 rays. Recently this flag was the subject of many controversial issues after the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force and the Japanese Ground Self- Defense Force adopted it. The flag is considered highly offensive in some countries, particularly in Korea and China, which experienced Japanese colonial encroachment, since it is considered to be a gesture toward the resurrection of Japanese militarism. 134 Kimi ga Yo (translated as May your reign last forever ) is a Japanese national anthem worshipping the Emperor as a deity. It is considered a symbol of wartime Japanese imperialism and militarism.

129 115 Asia-Pacific War, trying hard to expel the formidable British-American out of our East Asian territory since December 8th, we women must have a new determination entirely different from our past resolution. Thus, our life has to step forwards from the way we used to keep guard as a military homefront, towards the vehement sentiment that we are the warriors in this homefront. Kim Hwallan, Arming of Feminity (Bold is my emphasis) 135. Audiences had a phlegmatic response to Popular Military songs in colonial Korea. As a result, until 1942, there was a steady decrease in the production of popular military songs, while Japan increased its surveillance over the colonial territory to exploit the region for their material needs to support military functions. Considered to be obedient subjects, colonial Koreans were regulated and made docile by nationalist discourses, not only through the military reorganization of their quotidian life, but also in the structures of surveillance deployed to censor local identity. As war fever heightened in the wake of the outbreak of the Pacific War on mainland Japan, 136 Kim Hwallan, the chancellor of Ehwa Woman s University, announced the need for a collective female labor force to serve the Empire, designating these subjects as warriors in the homefront. However, the majority of colonial female subjects still maintained the traditional postures of passive neo-confucian feminity because of their lack of affinity with the Empire. Thus, the producers of popular songs recognized the limits of mass-marketing military music as pure propaganda and realized that they needed to execute commercial strategies aimed at colonial women by appealing to local values and morals, with the assumption that the nation s future would be ensured by solidifying the female homefront and their cooperation with the Empire by supporting the War and sending colonial volunteers. This concept was clearly described during a music symposium conducted by business people during the period. 137 Since previous Popular Military songs did not get much attention from the general populace, the ero sentiments and melancholic melody 135 Daedong-A (1942.3), Vol.14.3, Samchulli Publishers p In Japan, female royalty in the state was symbolized by such slogans as dispense with frivolities (Kyoraku Haishi, 1937) and sacrifice one s personal interest for the good of the state (messhi hook, 1939) (Sato, 2003). 137 Symposium on the undisclosed story of the record business ( 레코드계의내막을듣는 좌담회 ), Chogwang, , pp

130 116 were not accepted in the wartime atmosphere after the second Sino-Japanese War in 1939, and the people in the music business found a solution to the sales problem: Wangpyung: After the Sino-Japanese War, the Polydor Record Company released several Korean language military songs but was not that successful. Since it is also categorized as one of the popular song genres, it must have the characteristics of a catchy popular song that the people will sing along to. Lee Hun-Gu: How about including a sentimental story about the homefront? Wangpyung: I think that this is impossible. Siguka (Song of State Affairs) has to embrace the sense of Siguka. If it is mixed with some kind of melancholic sentiments, we cannot even bypass government censorship. (Chogwang, , p315) Several gender-focused Popular Military songs representing fanatic militarism, 138 mainly narrating the voices of the feminine subject in the song lyrics, were released around this time. These included: Adeului Hyolseo ( Son s Letter Written in Blood, 1943, Okeh Records, performed by Baek Nyeonseul), Kyulsadaeui Anae ( Wife of a Suicide Squad Soldier, 1943, Okeh Records, performed by Yi Hwaja), Jiwonbyongui Omoni ( Mother of a Volunteer, 1941, Okeh Records, composed by Koga Masao, performed by Jang Sejeong) and Omoniui Giwon ( Mother s Wish, 1943, Taepyung Records performed by Cha Hongryun). These followed the popularity of military songs in Japan during the Pacific War era on themes of motherhood such as Koukokuno Haha ( Mother of the Imperial ), Hujinjougunka ( Song of Woman Serving in the War ), Hahano Uta ( Song of Mother ) and Ganbekino Haha ( Mother of the Quay ). By building feminized Chong- Hu identity through Popular Military Songs, ideals of maternal ideology and the mobilization of colonial women as the subjects of homefront service spread widely throughout Korean society. These songs were released alongside various maternal magazine images (Figure 3-4), essays by female writers narrating motherhood (such as Jeong-Hee Choi s works) and films (such as Jiwonbyeong). 138 Appendix 3 includes reorganized and additional references from several studies of complete feminized military songs, including those by Jang (2006), Lee (2004) and Park (2007).

131 117 As a result, feminized narratives in the context of popular songs 139 were arrogated to create a gendered national identity for colonial Koreans serving their homefront, cultivating the resources and sympathy to fulfill the goals toward military expansionism of Imperial Japan s inner body by building a multifarious discourse of militarizing feminity. 140 On the discursive consolidation of collective female subjectivity in Japan, 141 Chizuko cleverly argues that Japanese requests to colonial women encouraged various female subjects (particularly New Woman (Shinyeosung) and Modern Girls) to participate in military mobilization at the homefront and were closely related to a colonial female subjectivity whose desire for gender equality and impartiality were mobilized by focusing on the spirit of Total War. <Figure 3-4> Sheet Music for Jongkun Ganhobueui Norae (Song of a Nurse Serving in War, 1938, Columbia Records) Singer Kim Anna wearing a nurse s uniform (left). Portraits of colonial women holding their babies (without visible fathers), frequently found in Sinyeosung ( New Woman ) magazine. 142 The narrative imbalance between the Popular Military songs and the colonial situation of Koreans was harmonized by accentuating the bilateral relationship between sons 139 See appendix 3 for the complete feminized military songs in this era. 140 For more specific descriptions and discourse analyses of Chong-Hu in colonial Korea, see Myong-A, Kwon (2005) Chapter 2. Fantasy of Empire and Politics of Gender, Historical Fascism: Fantasy of Empire and Politics of Gender, Cheksesang Publisher. 141 Chizuko Ueno (2004), Nationalism and Gender, Trans Pacific Press. 142 Sinyeosung , , Sinyeosung magazines were printed by Gaebeok Publisher from September 1923 to April 1934.

132 118 (volunteers) and traditional motherhood, in which the destinies of the two subjects were tightly interlocked for the purpose of serving the Japanese Empire. These subjects were thereby cast as desirable Imperial subjects and were used as self-justificatory narratives of colonial citizenship. This was especially true for educated women (New Woman), who projected themselves into the modernizing elite. The rhetorical transition of Popular Military Songs from the Korean Volunteer System in 1938 to the Forceful Regal Recruitment System in 1943 captures and represents the transformation of maternal identity, directly appropriated to suit war themes. When I saw my only son off to battle, whom I had nursed to sacrifice for the State/ I did not cry but waved the flag with a smile on my face at the station when the dawn was just breaking (1st verse). I would be happy to see you when you came back dead / Rather you came back alive from the battle / I, the mother of a volunteer, will be proud/ my brave son s loyalty and devotion (3rd verse) The Mother of a Volunteer Soldier, Jang Se-Jeong (Okeh, 1941, 8) I write this letter to my mother/ To become an Imperial army soldier is to my mother s benefit/ When I am back after the serving the nation / I would rather die under the shattering bullets (verse 1). Yesterday (I was) in the wastelands, today I am climbing the secluded mountains/ My march towards the endless roads is fitting with the steps of horses and the traces of carriages/ My Imperial roads in the thousands of wide lands will become the glorious ways embellished with blood and bones of our own (verse 2). What can t I confess to my mother? / In the moments of Mother s perpetual time /When she is waiting for a royal grant/ Please do not anticipate seeing my face again in this life (verse 3). Son s Letter Written in Blood (Okeh, March 1942) Is this the letter written in sanguine blood from wounds?/ Did he cry between the lines when he wrote this letter?/ He wrote this letter while dispatching as a member of a suicide squad (verse 1). What love in this world can overcome this?/ The love sacrificed for the Imperial is like the moon and like the sun/ You gave up your life on the night when you fought your way through the besieging enemy (verse 2). When life fell and became a road for the Imperial troops / Oh, my brave beloved, don t save your life / I am wailing, I am wailing, I am crying my heart out with a strong sense of gratitude (verse 3). Wife of a Suicide Squad Soldier (Okeh, November 1943)

133 119 The first song above, written by Korean poet and lyricist Cho Myeong-Am and composed by famous Japanese songwriter Koga Masao, expressed a colonial woman s desire to sacrifice her son in the battlefield without any hesitance or expectations. The narrator of the song does not even expect her son to return alive; rather, she sent her only son off with exceedingly unusual happiness. This can be interpreted as an aberrant form of mourning, in which she denies the loss of her son and refuses the grief in exchange for what Freud refers to as melancholia. Melancholia thus returns us to the figure of the turn as a founding trope in the discourse of the psyche (Butler 1997). The lost object (son) is substituted for the State by the colonial woman s own sacrifice, creating feelings of ambivalence. Evidence of the colonial woman s ambivalence is given by her consuming these military songs that betray both the open expression of Japanese militarism and a feeling of unutterable loss. Freud remarks that, in mourning the object is declared lost or dead, but in melancholia, it follows, no such declaration is possible. 143 The themes of military songs illustrate the various boundaries of colonial subjectivity, shifting from the perspective of mother and wife to that of son as it is narrated in the second song. An imagined conversation between the homefront (Chong-Hu) and frontlines is found in these song lyrics, describing a mutual narration of sacrificing for the State as the mother s wish for her son to come back dead and the volunteers response to die under the shattering bullets. The subject stands for the object. By producing and invigorating the metaphor of death and the act of internalization, Written in Blood transforms colonial subjects into Imperial subjects serving the Imperial army. Popular songs communicate private experiences within a universalizing narrative of the colonial subject in the Total War System, frequently using lyrics that invoke faith and commitment to the colonial bodies embedded in colonial Koreans consciousness. The collectiveness of a universalizing love for the State persists in substituting the individual (mother for son, wife for husband) for the nation (citizen for nation), regardless of whether or not the object is alive, as is represented in the third song. The wife s ambivalent feelings toward her husband, who joins the Suicide Squad in the Pacific War, are expressed dramatically at the time the letter is written, for, by the time the wife reads the letter, her husband is dead. Not only do these 143 Freud, S, Mourning and Melancholia, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth, ), 14:256. Quoted in Butler 1997.

134 120 lyrics manifest the colonial woman s loss of her husband but also the loss of herself, displayed by her inability to speak of mourning (as the lyrics describe, she is thankful for her husband s death). Thus, the Japanese sought to mobilize the colonial homefront by recontextualizing local values to valorize a new sense of Imperial subjectivity through music. Using discourses of the homefront in Popular Military songs, they inscribed an extension of the homefront community from family and kinship to the nation-state by extending neo- Confucian notions of good wife and wise mother to include a militarily-oriented good wife and wise mother. As Gilroy has observed of this novel kind of nationalism, they appear more usually as a set of therapies: tactics in the never-ending struggle for psychological and cultural survival It is usually a matter of style, perspective or survivalist technique, before it becomes a question of citizenship, rights or fixed contractual obligations. 144 To further investigate this issue in relation to homefront identity, I will examine how this imagined nationalism uniting the Imperial nation manifests itself in popular songs. It does so not only by using parochial tropes like the bonded family, but also by aggrandizing Imperial desire in the colonial mind by invoking the Bukbang (Northern territory) and Nambang (Southern territory), both summoned frequently in these songs, to extend the scope of the colonial imagination. Thus, colonial Korea, in the body of Imperial Japan, becomes the pseudo-neo-colonist in the Asia-Pacific territory by appropriating these rhetorics of Japanese Asia-centrism that mask the expansionism of Imperial militarist agenda present in the narrative of popular songs from 1937 to The Imaginary Geography of the Colonized Mind The Enchanted Colonial Subject in-between Military Fanaticism and Tropical Malady/Melody We used to play together under the palm tree 145 I still remember those days 144 Paul Gilroy (1993) It s a Family Affair, in Small Acts, p Palm Tree (Yajasoo in Korean) also known as Palmae or Palmaceae, is usually found in the tropical and subtropical regions. Although Korea is not located in the regions where Palm trees are common, the frequent usage of palm trees in popular Korean songs during this era still remain as a symbol of the stereotypical tropical utopia triggered by Japanese military expansionism during the Asia-Pacific War.

135 121 Right in front of my eyes so vividly, But the memoirs elicit only my sorrow Alas! Reminiscence still remains, The sound of drizzling rain makes me cry Geumshim Hwang, Nostalgic Tango, Victor K-1137B Recorded March 4, The discourses surrounding Japan s southern colonial territory in Korea can in a sense be encapsulated in the simple question: Why are there so many Palm trees and exotic rhythms depicting the South and in the southern territories? We find these in song lyrics such as Songstress of the South ( Namgukui Gahi, Okeh Records), Shadow of a Palm Tree ( Yajasooui Geuneul, Victor Records), Memory of the South ( Nambangui Chueok, Columbia Records) and Nostalgic Tango ( Chueokui Tango, Victor Records). The rising popularity of Hawaiian guitar tunes and Latin American-inspired chords invokes an exotic imagination of tropical archipelagos that seems to draw upon geographically charged perceptions of the Pacific Rim for colonial Koreans. In imagining the Palm tree (Yajasoo in Korean) resonating with elegiac melody, an element not previously represented in the song lyrics, one wonders what was being articulated in the Korean colonial consciousness in the late Japanese colonial period with these references. During the Asia-Pacific War, Japanese colonial territories expanded to occupy the majority of the U.S. territories including the Philippines (1941), Malaya (1941) and Singapore (1942) after conducting surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor in Oahu, Hawaii on the Sunday morning of December 7, Following this expansion of the Japanese Empire s territories, discourses about Nambang (literally referring to the southern territory of Imperial Japan) spread throughout colonial Korea. After the successful Japanese encroachment into Singapore in February 1942, which acted as a catalyst of the Total War military confrontation between Imperial Japan and America in the Asian Pacific, the discourse of the entire colony s consolidation was referred to as Imperial Citizen Forming ( 皇國化 ). A new order topographically dichotomized the colonial regime by designating the two foremost Japanese colonial territories Korea and Taiwan as Imperial front bases, while allocating Bukbang ( 北方 ), the Northern territory including Manchuria, Siberia and China to Korea and the Southern territory including the Philippines, the Sumatran

136 122 archipelago and Singapore to Taiwan for a more efficient colonial control. 146 The sociocultural conditions of colonial Korea s support for Japanese militaristic expansionism following the Asia-Pacific War drastically changed as a result of the establishment of new colonial control policies. By designating its two forefront colonies as the outpost bases of Japanese Total War militarism, Japan positioned itself as the representative of a strong Asia confronting the West under the regime of a New East Asian Order ( 大東亞共領權 ), a gesture intended to coerce the colonial populace to unite behind the pan-asian banner in support of the Japanese Empire. From a logistical viewpoint, Koyama Iwao, a significant supporter of this ideology of the New East Asian Order (Toashinshitsujo), notes how Japan became the leader of a moral war by simultaneously confronting European hegemony and enlightening the uncivilized Asian people with a more sane Japanese interpretation of world history and moral energy (moralische Energie). 147 Consequently, Japan rearticulated an imaginary concept of Asia in the logic of the right colonial state in the proper position, to justify efficient colonial control. Notwithstanding, Imperial Japan had to convince its numerous dissatisfied colonial subjects of the need for this idea of Asian solidarity in support of Japanese militarism. This ideological disposition generated a wide range of responses in the colonies, including the bizarre case of colonial the Korean fever for southern territory, where the surplus fantasy of the southern colonial territories grew abnormally popular and the importance of emperor-centered Imperial superiority continued to be extolled by pro- Japanese propagandists and the intelligentsia by invigorating Nambang discourses. An explosion of mass curiosity about Nambang and the pseudo-anthropological science to the southern colonial territories engendered an embryonic racism against South Asians, which superimposed Korean s superiority over other Japanese colonies into the consciousness of Koreans. As the following describes, the local response was so unusually vehement that even the Japanese colonial government could not control it: 146 This topographical dichotomization was influenced by the Japanese ideologies of Hokushinron ( 北進論 ) and Nanshinron ( 南進論 ). 147 Koyama Iwao (1943) Viewpoint of World history and Japan [sekaishidekinyujouto nihon] Chuo Kouronsha, see pp 209, 232.

137 123 There are some pessimistic opinions regarding Korea s excessive overflowed expectations of the new Southern resources; nevertheless, this is a very dogmatic and absurd opinion since Korea, to Imperial Japan, is an extended head office of the Empire. Thus, even if many branches and increased associations are established, the prestige of the head office should not be degraded and suspended. The development of Southern territory and Korea, Governor-General of Korea, Information Department, 1942 In investigating Koreans current psychological trends, there are too many expectations of the Southern territories in Korea. We (Koreans) should not forget that Korea is the front base of Imperial Japan for the Northern territories. Guarding the Northern Territories, Chogwang, April1942. Initially, the Nambang discourse in colonial Korea had not evolved outside of a colonial context. Culturally speaking, the Southern territory had been a fad in mainland Japan since its occupation of the Micronesian archipelago of Germany s Pacific Island territories under the South Pacific Mandate. The discourse of the Southern expansion doctrine, called Nanshinron, was gradually formalized in Japanese society during the 1920s and 1930s as the ideological foundation of economic and military expansionism, and this agenda was officially adopted as national policy with the New East Asian Order in 1936 through the efforts of the Imperial Japanese Navy s South Strike Group (Breasley 1991). Following this attention to the Southern territories, a popular song called Daughter of Chief ( Shouchouno Musume, written, composed and performed by Isida Ichimasu, Polydor Records, September 1930), inspired by a true story of a young Japanese man married to a Micronesian chief s daughter in the Turk Islands in 1892, was released in 1930 (Figure 3-5) and achieved considerable popularity in Japan. 148 Subsequent to the faddishness of the South in Japan during this time, numerous songs about tropical places and exotic customs of the southern territories were released, such as Down South ( Minamie Minamie, June 1929), South American Joe ( Nanbeino Dateotto, 1935), On the Beach at Bali Bali ( Hamabeno Koi Bali Balino Hamabede, 1936) and The Moon Manakoora ( Nankaino Tsuki, 1939). 148 Hurushigeda et al. (1970) Nihonryukoukasha ( The History of Japanese Popular Music ), Shakaishisousha Publisher.

138 124 <Figure 3-5> Bouken Dankichi ( The Adventures of Dankichi, serial publication released between June 1933 and July 1939). A comic book that is a typical representation of Nambang discourse disseminating the racism of the Japanese Empire, courtesy of Shounenekurakubu ( 少年倶楽部 ),Kodansha( 講談社 ) (left). Record cover of The Chief s Daughter (Shouchouno Musume, Polydor Records, 1930) The Adventures of Dankichi (Figure 3-5) is a famous popular serial cartoon published from 1933 to 1939 by Kodansha s youth magazine Boy Club (Shonengurakbu), depicting an orientalized Southern territory filled with African natives stereotypically illustrated as cannibals, aboriginal barbarians and colored primitives. Southern tropical territories were contextualized using racially archetyped images of the aboriginal as uncivilized, primordial and colored; this, coupled with the popularity of Nanshinron discourses during the 1930s, was supported by various popular cultural representations of these tropical areas. While many cultural critics have criticized aspects of racialism (Russell 1991) and the imperial orientalism as an act of de-orientalizing Japan through depicting the South as backward in the cartoon (Minato 1993, Yamashita 2000), the story is simply the adventure of an innocent Japanese boy who was accidentally left behind on a tropical island in the South Pacific and became king of the island. The cartoonist Keijo Shimada talks regarding the original motivation to set the Southern tropics as a stage for the Japanese boy, saying, This is the extended dream of mine since I was a child, [ ] Japanese citizens were highly interested in the Southern archipelago and wished it was controlled by Imperial Japan at the time, along with the discourse on the South (Nanshinron) and the socio-political relation with the Southern territory. So, Dankichi as a protagonist,

139 125 the Southern island is the ideal place for a boy to have a real adventure. 149 comment on this Asian answer to Robinson Crusoe conflicts with aboriginal Keijo s representations of the Southern territory, revoking the collective sentiments of the civilized Japanese colonization towards the primordial South, which Nakayama describes as the nostalgic fantasy to the South Sea generated in the Meiji era (Nakayama 1996, Kenji 2008). According to Yano, the notion of the South Seas in Japanese consciousness has been divided between Southeast Asia, called, soto-nanyo (outer South Seas) and the Pacific region known as uchi-nanyo (inner South Seas). According to Shimizu, since the majority of Micronesia, the main part of the South Seas, had become de facto Japanese territory during World War I, even Japanese middle school geography textbooks expressed a sense of entitlement to this area, declaring, Although Japan is situated at the eastern edge of Asia, it can be said to be in a position in which it should represent all of Asia, lead all of Asia, and protect all of Asia, (Shimizu 1993:38). Although the idea of Southeast Asia as a regional concept has differs in meaning in Japanese and from the Western geographical perspective, 150 Southeast Asia as a market and a supplier of cheap raw materials was a fertile region for the support of Japanese expansionism. The Japanese public perception of the South Seas inhabitants was negative, and they were often described as lazy, undeveloped, inferior and unhygienic since Japan needed an Other that was definitely inferior, unlike the West and civilized Japanese colonial territories like China and Korea (Yano 1979). The discourse of Southern territory in Japan was therefore articulated by echoing the western viewpoint of the Orientalizing gaze onto the backward South by depicting its aboriginals as purely primitive objects. The colonial modernities between the empire and the colonial period built and shared a framework of conceptual knowledge that permeated every domain of the imaginary colonial territories. Since the introduction of the project aimed at forming the Imperial Citizen through notions of a New Asian Order and Overcoming (western) 149 Keijo Shimada (1967), Introduction, The Adventures of Dankichi: A Complete Collection, Kodansha, publisher. 150 According to Shimizu (1993), from the geographical perspective of the Japanese, formed in the Tokugawa period under the influence of Western education, only continental Southeast Asia was included in Asia proper, and the South Seas (Southwestern Pacific region) was considered an ocean region distinct from Asia. However, during the post- World War I era, Japan gradually embraced this imagined territory of South Seas and Oceanea as a part Asia, unlike the geographical perspective of the West.

140 126 modernity in colonial Korea, the expansion of military concepts of knowledge subjugated and contested existing epistemologies that Koreans experienced in the dual condition of a modern (colonial) system. These contradictory double edges of modernity and coloniality pin the colonial subject down within the Imperial imaginary, anchoring it in colonial difference by relegating colonial heterogeneity of the periphery within the Imperial body. In what sense, then, is this Japanese reformulation of the colonial epistemology functional in mobilizing colonial territories? In dealing with the foreign impact of colonizing Asian territories, Japan displaced strategic contradiction in the colonies by appropriating western modernity while preserving Japanese tradition and fusing the two together. Traditionally, China was the strongest Other in East Asia within Japanese consciousness because Japan was strongly influenced by the Chinese while developing a discourse of Japanese national traditions. China had long been Japan s source of self-recognition, a foil against which Japan might distinguish itself (Tanaka 1993, Koyasu 2003, Naoki 2004). The creation of a discourse vis-à-vis a New Asian Order was premised upon an extreme identity transformation of colonial subjects during the period of wartime military expansionism, a motivation supported by many scholars from the Kyoto school such as Miki Kiyoshi and Ozaki Hotsumi. 151 Japan had to make great efforts to strictly delineate what was civilized or rational while espousing a viewpoint against the West. However, many colonial intellectuals, who doubted that there were any substantial reasons why East Asian colonies had to confront the West, contested the logical validity of this position. To this inventory, the paradoxical arguments generated within the logics of the New East Asia Order in the last years of the colonial era produced an alternative form of colonial self-definition by suturing the scope of various discourses on ethnicity, gender and nationalism of colonial subjectivities by transposing colonial subjects as uncivilized and in need of edification. By rearranging entire colonies and shoving them into the body of one nation, Japanese colonial manipulation concealed the Imperial desire to amass colonial subjects for the purposes of militaristic expansion after the Second Sino- Japanese War. Disputing the essential Western structure of modernity and western notions of capitalism, democracy, individualism and liberalism, Japanese theorists (especially 151 Miki Kiyoshi (1968), Naisenittainokyouka ( Intensification of East Asian Solidarity ), Miki Kiyoshi Zenshou [Anthology of Miki Kiyoshi], Vol 16, Iwanami, publisher

141 127 scholars from the Kyoto school), writers from Bungakukai ( 文学界 ) and those associated with the Japanese romantic school, attempted to organize a new categorization of the world order, in a putatively alternative notion of modernity by interpellating colonial subjects into a sophisticated Japanese universality. 152 We glimpse a displacement of European culture in Miki Kiyoshi s announcement that, European history had been considered as world history, but it s their (European) perspective, we (Japanese and othe colonized) came to realize that European culture isn t the synonym of world culture. 153 The idea of overcoming modernity by relocating the centricity of European culture in world history to a peripheral position was accomplished by neutralizing the hegemonic idea of European modernity as merely a provincial culture. In doing so, Imperial Japan tried to relocate themselves at the very centre of world history. However, in the process of creating a substitute for European universality or positing an overcoming [of] modernity 154 by vernacularizing the western, Japan s goal was to coerce the citizens of mainland of Japan and the major colonial citizens in China, Taiwan and Korean to get involved in the movement for East Asian solidarity by becoming Imperial subjects; it was an interpellation intended to re-territorialize the colonial subjects within the body of Imperial Japan. East Asian was a vague terminology to most of Koreans, indicating a diametrical opposition towards the Western by highlighting its not being Western. For example, it fails to resolve the numerous ambiguities about the 152 Universal standpoint and Japan ( 世界史的立場と日本 ), the colloquium of Kyoto school was a venture intended to concretize the idea of overcoming (Western) modernity. 153 Miki Kiyoshi (1997), trans. and eds., Choi Unsik and Baek Youngseo, Ideological Theory of New Japan, Oriental recognition of East Asian (Dong Asiaineui Donyang euisik), Munhakkwa Sasang. 154 It seems rather vague when the term overcoming modernity is used on a regular basis in academic fields. By either normatively or critically positing modernity as a western world order, it contains an ambiguous mixture of two meanings: the first indicates a postmodern / beyond modern by alluding to a possibly advanced modernity that acts as counterpoint to the western term of modernity. Criticizing Liberalism and Communism in the ideological order of new Japan and the consequent argument concerning unionism in philosophical principle of unionism in posing themselves as superior to western Liberalism and Totalitarianism, Miki Kiyoshi s notion of overcoming modernity argued that that we (Japanese), need to be superior to any other western ideology such as Liberalism, Marxism and Totalitarianism, by overcoming modernity (Miki 1968). On the other hand, by identifying modernity as a western idiom, the term overcoming modernity signifies an alternative trial to find the path to their own notions of modernity (such as Tetsutaro Gawakami, 1995). For example, when Miki mentioned East Asian solidarity as the basis of a vague Asian traditional way (Miki 1997), Suzuki said that the Asia-Pacific War was a way of counteracting the whole West to overcome a Euro-centered world (Tetsutaro Gawakami 1995: 220).

142 128 geographic boundaries defining Asia and East Asia; for instance, by what criteria must Burma and Vietnam be excluded from Asia? If Asian solidarity purely signifies confrontation towards the West, then why must the term be restricted to East Asian? The denotation of kinship among East Asians only reveals the limitations of this line of logic, which explicitly articulates a totalitarian deterritorialization regardless of individual national identity. In the Japanese discourse of building East Asian solidarity during the Asia-Pacific War, the national identity and vernaculars of its colonial subjects were erased, collapsed and transformed. This emperor-centered imperialism set to confront the West, relocating the self-identity of the colonized by sacrificing colonial subjects in the name of a transcendent Empire. Needless to say, colonial subjects in Korea were caught in these contradictory desires, oscillating between a wish for modernization and a fanatic militarism in this repetition of Japanese altruistic totalitarianism. 155 Lacking an identifiable object in making local modernity, Korean colonial subjects experienced a circulatory déjà-vu reflecting their self-identity in the mirror of Imperial Japan; thus, colonial subjects situated in the colonial mise-en-scène exterminated their self-identities in exchange for the new formation of an Imperial subject during the Total War era. Consequently, during the latter years of the Japanese occupation of colonial Korea, Imperial Japan attempted to synthesize the Imperial inner national body (Naichi) with colonial Korean subjects by applying various stratagies, including: prohibiting Korean vernacular language in public (Hangul); mandating worship at Japanese Shinto shrines (since 1937) 156 ; legislating that colonial Koreans memorize the oath as a Japanese subject (koukokushinminnoseisi) (after 1938); Sōshi-kaimei, a policy of the enforced re-christening of Korean names to more Japanese-sounding ones; and, lastly, banning all vernacular 155 According to Eizawa, the Asia-Pacific war was a conflict between the Japanese hakko ichiu (global unification under the Emperor) and Western liberalism. Since the form of totalitarianism is a top-down, vertical relationship, Japan built the Emperor as a symbolic father to all the colonial subjects in a patriarchal form of family (Eizawa 1995). 156 The Yasukuni Shirine in Tokyo is still a politically controversial site for Japan and other countries such as China and Korea. Although the place is enshrined, there were thousands of war casualties, mostly Japanese soldiers and other colonial volunteer soldiers from Korea, China and Taiwan, who died during World War II. The enshrinement of the war criminals brought about major issues of diplomatic and socio-political conflict between Japan and its neighboring countries since Japan still honors them as war heroes for having fought and died for Imperial Japan.

143 129 publications (issued in 1939). Japanese colonial control over local artists and entertainers was intensified with the introduction of the Entertainer s Certificate (Kiyejeung in Korean, Gigeishō in Japanese), used as a measure to systematically monitor artists. The Entertainer s Certificate was an authoritative technology intended to prevent colonial musicians from voicing resistance to the Japanese authorities. If colonial musicians violated the rules, they were immediately drafted into the Japanese military. Therefore, Korean popular musicians in this era ( ) 157 were efficiently mobilized for purely pro- Japanese cultural activities. Aiming to inculcate military spirit in the colonial mind, cultural control and censorship by Imperial Japan became increasingly rigid by focusing on the direct indoctrination of colonial subjects. The production of popular songs was increasingly imbued with slogans and propaganda consisting of Japanese militaristic doctrine. In the cultural outpost of Imperial Japan, Korean pop composers wrote numerous songs portraying geographic representations of Manchuria, Siberia and the Northern Chinese territories of Japan. Chinese-style preludes and instrumental arrangements seasoned with the exotic aura of Chinese strings grew to be salient characteristics of Korean popular songs. Song lyrics frequently contained references to China and the Manchurian territories, such as (bold is my emphasis): Bukbangyeoro (Northern journey), Bukkukyeoro (Way to the Northern country), Manpo, 158 A Thousand Ways (Manposeon Chullikil) in 1939, Nostalgic Train (Hyangsoo Yeolcha) in 1940, Spring in the Night River (Yarukang Chunsek) and Traveler in Manpo (Manposun Gilson) in It is noteworthy that the Northern Chinese territories and Manchuria were of great military importance to both Korean and Japanese interests, for they served not only as one of the main colonial outposts of the Japanese Empire against Russian invasion but were also the primary base for the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea s Korean Liberation Army (hereafter KLA 159 ), that supported many Korean patriots and activists. 157 From 1943 until liberation in 1945, all popular forms of music with an exception of military songs were strictly prohibited in colonial Korea. 158 Manpo is the northernmost commercial city in Korea, facing the Manchurian territory. 159 After the declaration of war against Japanese Empire and Germany on December 9, 1941 by the Provisional Government, units of the KLA participated in the war effort, allied with the Chinese and Southern Asian theatres. The KLA increased the number of soldiers with an influx of Koreans escaping from Japanese service and through the conscription of Koreans in China. They also cooperated with the US Office of Strategic Service for specialist military operations within Korea, despite the fact that their most ardent wish, to play a significant role in Korea s liberation from

144 130 Let s go to Shanghai with a guitar/ The Mist is beginning to scatter, the Tempo is flying (verse 1). Under the street lamp covered with snow, shadows of nostalgia looms with the heart of a hero shedding blood in the foreign country/ you can hear the siren of hope in this port/ come to Shanghai before spring comes (verse 3). Let s go to Shanghai, written by Son Cha-In Composed by Lee Yong-Jun, performed by Ryu Jong-Sup, Columbia Records, 1938, No The abruptly violent lyrics in the 3rd verse, the heart of a hero shedding blood, can be read either as a reference to the mobilized volunteer soldiers or to colonial resistance against Imperial Japan. These popular songs depicting China and the Manchurian region are thus ambiguous, and they can be read as either validations of Japanese colonial encroachment during the Sino-Japanese War and Imperial expansion, or as an elegiac representation expressing the agonizing colonial reality embedded within the Japanese occupation. From the late 1930s, commercial recordings of Popular Military Songs representing China and the Manchurian area sold to colonial Koreans were produced under the surveillance of the governor of Japan. The music tended to describe universalized militaristic sentiments while retaining the commercial, romantic or melodramatic elements found in previous popular songs. After the Sino-Japanese War, major record companies such as Columbia, Regal and Okeh released popular songs representing the northern territory by recording colonial musicians and vocalists mediated through mixed stylistic genres such as Nonsense, Jazz, Singayo and New Operetta. Musical representations of China and the Manchurian area in the late 1930s and early 1940s were generally nostalgic, elegiac tunes of colonial sentiments, reflected and shared in a national sensibility and imaginary. China is often depicted as a spacious Japanese colonial territory juxtaposed with a melancholic Tango style to render these pro-japanese songs more inviting to Korean ears, a strategy evident in Moonlight of China (1941). Japanese occupation, wasn t fulfilled due to Japan s sudden defeat. This case resulted in a three year plan for sovereignty to handover, wherein the Societ Union and U.S. military government divided the region into North Korea and South Korea.

145 131 China Tango, Nostalgic Melody / As the soft pink lantern is flickering in the wind and a tune of the song/ Chinese streets are quivering on my eyelid / China town, Shiny moon, China Tango / In the midst of my dreams, restless sighs passing by/ on the head of a black-haired Chinese girl singing a song under the dim lights/ the night is getting deeper and deeper (verse 1). Moonlight of China, performed by Lee Gyu-Nam, Columbia Records, 1941 Tracks such as these use of pleasant rhythms and a repetitive conjuring China to convey the increasing interest in China for colonial Koreans, blurring the boundaries between exotic representations and familiar rhythms, while the melody homogenizes collective notions and memories of the northern territory with the colonial domain by commodifying the colonial Others. Foreign country (iguk) and foreign land (taguk) are terms found often in song titles and lyrics, referring to China and the Manchurian area. The Chinese language was also directly used in song lyrics, such as, Manmandi, Quaidi ( Foreign Car Loading Flowers, by Lee Mae-Yeon, kotsirun macha), Chunguo, Tinghao ( I Like the Mountain and Sea, by Kim-Hongmae, sanijoa murijoa) and Yi Er San Si, Chunguo, Gu niang ( Selling Flowers, Gu niang by Lee Gye-Nam, kkopaneun gunyang). <Figure 3-6> Sheet music of a popular song representing the northern territory. From left to right, Female singer, Ok Jamhwa s Harbin Punggyeong ( The Landscape of Harbin, Columbia Records, 1941), Seon-Wooilsun s G opineun Shangai ( Flowering Shanghai, Polydor Records, 1939), Japanese-Chinese vocalist Rikōran s ( 李香蘭 ) Pleasant Manchuria ( Tanoshii Manshu, Columbia Records, 1941), composed by Koga Masao, Courtesy of the Koga Masao Museum. The Chinese-born Japanese singer and actress, Rikōran (LĭXiāglan in Chinese, also known as Yamaguchi Yosiko) was a particularly influential cultural figure in colonial Korea in the context colonial singers negotiations with and relations to the Empire during

146 132 the Total War era. Born and raised in Manchuria, Rikōran frequently appeared in Japanese propaganda films created to mobilize the colonial Chinese such as Shinano Yoru (the night of China 1940), Netsano chikai (The promise in the desert, 1940), and she performed sycophantic pop songs praising Japanese militarism and expansionism. The founder of the Enka sound, Koga Masao, composed most of these songs after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Consequently, the cultural production of Korean musicians and vocalists during the Asia-Pacific War homogenized impressions of the northern territory and reinforced ethnic stereotypes by exploiting and regionalizing the colonial territory as a constructed landscape of collective aspirations (Appadurai 1990), positing an inauthentic appropriation of Chinese representation based on the Imperial perspective. Wartime governmental control was initiated through unswerving regulation and surveillance over popular music production. Jazz records and Western-style popular music were restricted after Transnational record companies such as Victor, Polydor and Columbia were incorporated into the local Japanese conglomeration, the Teikoku Phonographic Corporation. Other companies simply changed their names, since English names were stringently excluded. During World War II, when the majority of Western countries, including America, became enemy states, Imperial Japan banned Western or American popular culture as a way of intensifying Japanese advocacy of a New East Asian Order. Furthermore, Japan efficiently censored popular music containing either melancholic lyrics or remnants of Western tunes, casting them as spiritual enemies of the Japanese Empire. However, it was impossible to suppress the cultural dominance and pervasive influence of American Jazz and Hollywood imported into colonial Korea during the Japanese occupation era. For Koreans, American culture was synonymous with genuine modernity, and they were keen to catch up with global cosmopolitan fads. Controlling the habitus of colonial Koreans American fever imbued by western popular culture, Japanese cultural control doubly standardized the domains of colonial policy. Given the local cultural mood, Japanese administrators tacitly permitted American movie and Jazz performances, although they were still prohibited by law. However, the Japanese governor s systematic regulation of commercial local popular music compositions, performances and extra-musical activities gradually changed the form of local popular music consumption. This shifted from primarily individual ownership and consumption of

147 133 popular music commodities on phonographs, to active participation and engagement with a musical drama and operetta performance called Akgeuk after the prohibition on record production after Akgeuk ( 樂劇 ; literally meaning musical drama) was a unique cultural form that blended various kinds of cultural performance including comedies, popular military songs and allegorical theatrical plays, and it was the sole entertainment platform permitted by the Japanese governor. The format of the show usually commenced with performances by popular Jazz singers, broken up by comical interludes and a drama intermezzo. The Okeh Grand Show in 1937 (predecessor of the Joseon Group of Musical Drama), the Group of Victor Musical Drama in 1938, the Je-Il Group of Musical Drama in 1938 and the Columbia Group of Musical Drama in 1940 (predecessor of the Ramira Group of Musical Drama) were organized during this period and gained considerable popularity. Akgeuk shows in Korea featured many famous musicians, including Nam In- Soo, Lee Nan Young, Baek Nyeon-Seol and Kim Hye-Song, who ambivalently embraced military songs and military-themed theatrical plays in order to perform what they wanted, namely Jazz and other foreign music genres. Although the shows mainly focused on showcasing colonial popular music stars, Akgeuk shows aimed to please the Japanese occupiers and performers who ingratiated themselves by performing Naniwabushi. 160 The popularity of Akgeuk musical drama during the prohibition of American culture highlights the double bind faced by Japanese cultural policymakers in colonial Korea, where the aesthetic hegemony of American culture was still dominant among the colonial populace and not easily controlled by Japanese censhorship. Japanese governors had to reorganize colonial subjects into the matrix of surveillance by accommodating American Jazz while battling the Americans in World War II. By utilizing various popular music genres to 160 Naniwabushi ( 浪花節 ) is a genre of Japanese traditional music, both name form originating in Osaka (Naniwa is an old name for Osaka) in the middle of Tokugawa period (it then spread to Edo, currently Tokyo). Naniwabushi consists of mixtures of emotional sentiments. Therefore, it has a narrative within the song accompanied by Japanese traditional Samisen instruments. The genre is usually known as a form of melancholy melodrama, concerned with morality and self-sacrifice and very similar to Korean the traditional Pansori. During the 1940s, Korean musician Choi Palgeun tried to diffuse Naniwabushi by making a request to Jiro Minami, the Governor-General of Korea (and chief representative of the Japanese government in Korea). He released Naniwabushi phonograph records such as Chilbokui Chulse (Chilbok s Success) and Jangyeul Yiinsuk Sangdeungbyeong (Heroic Corporal Yiinsuk), as a way to promote Japanese militarism by making sycophantic songs in a traditional Japanese music genre (Lee 2007, Park 2009).

148 134 mobilize colonial subjects, the Japanese administrators localized Western Jazz as a subgenre of light, Japanese background music. In the cultural context of this partial acceptance of Western music and its cultural implications, these global flows of American culture during and after the War suggest how Western music operated as an idealized musical form. The American SP (Standard Play) record series (also called the V-Discs) played an influential role in diffusing American popular songs and propagating their musical forms and Americanism in local music. Between 1932 and 1948, the only viable retail phonograph format was a 10-inch, 78-rpm record, bearing one song per side. 161 However, special record labels, known as V (the V stands for Victory) Discs and consisting of a 12-inch, 78-rpm recording, were ushered onto the market by several record companies between 1943 and These included musical genres ranging from Jazz to Classical, since this larger size with smaller grooves on the Vinylite surface increased the time available per side, usually about six minutes instead of the customary three to four minutes (Young 2008). They were produced at the American government s request, to be used to console dispatched American soldiers abroad (Hackett & Haggard 2005, Jones 2006). During World War II, professional American songwriters produced more than 370 saying goodbye -themed songs for servicemen, narrating the voice of mothers, wives and children back home (Jones 2006). For the GIs overseas and the women back home, popular, Tin Pan Alley 162 songs and country music produced the same emotional responses. Production of the V-Disc as a morale booster began when Captain Howard Bronson was assigned to the Army s Recreation and Welfare section as musical advisor. The demand for these 12-inch, 78 rpm phonograph recordings was triggered by a strike between 1942 and 1944 by members of the American Federation of Musicians protesting against the four major record companies. This event culminated in the dissemination of American popular music as a globally influential pop music genre, with 161 See Keir Keightley (2004) Long Play: adult-oriented popular music and the temporal logics of the post-war sound recording industry in the USA, Media, Culture & Society Vol.26 (3): p Tin Pan Alley refers to the New York-based music publishers and songwriters association that dominated the popular music industry from the late 19 th century until the 1940s. When referring to a Tin Pan Alley musical style, it usually means typical popular music catering the masses by blending with popular music genres such as ragtime, blues and Jazz (Shuker 1998).

149 135 releases by artists affiliated with the four major record companies including Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and Count Basie. 163 Since the first Japanese Jazz song, Blue Sky (Ao sora 青空 ), was released in Showa 3 (1929), Japanese popular musicians had consistently followed American popular music genres and tried to localize them for Japanese musical tastes. To construct a collective Japanese popular music style able to transgress traditional cultural boundaries and political issues, prewar Japanese popular culture adapted Jazz to Enka, mimicking western cultural forms but imbuing them with nationalist and militarist narratives to echo Korean ideology. Colonial bodies suffered in between, identifying with the Japanese Imperial body and desiring a genuinely modern Western corporeality. The legacy of the Asia-Pacific War demanded that Korean nationals address issues of responsibility for their role as part of the Emperor s nation. With the reinscription of a heroic narrative of selfsacrifice during the Asia-Pacific War, Korean popular musicians sought to overcome this crisis and the ideological battle against the Japanese enemy, America, by rehabilitating their ironic desire for the West under colonial conditions. <Figure 3-7> Album cover representing a utopic southern by Kalua Kamaainas (left), A performance by Kalua Kamaainas in Japan, at Hibiya Koukaido Hall, on June 29, This reknowned Japanese Hawaiian band had to change its name to Southern Friends (Nangokurakuyuu, 南国楽友 ) after the constitution of Total War System in Japanese society, which prohibited the use of English. Courtesy of Columbia New Process Records. Korean musicians conscious efforts to detach from the legacies of the Asia-Pacific War were made by appropriating various elements of niche music genres. So-called exotic music, including Hawaiian pop music such as Hawaiian Song by Yeonjeonhapchangdan 163 For more information, see Bobby Hackett and Bob Haggart, V-Disc Recording Parties (2005) Stotyville Records.

150 136 and Hawaiian Song by Choi Richard (playing the banjo), was influenced by a wide range of styles, including the Japanese band Kalua kamaainas, 164 and Tango and Foxtrot rhythms in songs like Pungchadonun Gohyang (Homeland Spinning Windmill) by Kim HaeSong became popular in wartime Korea. 165 Shortly after liberation, this exotic fever reached its apex after local encounters with American cultural infusions, culminating in a hugely successful Latin music genre and Cabaret Dance Craze that popularized dances like the Mambo and Cha Cha in the late 1950s. It is imperative that scholars reconstruct how the recording, production and consumption of the Korean popular music scene were made possible through their appropriation of a wider variety of music genres as so-called exotic music. Meanwhile, ingratiating military songs such as Son s Letter Written in Blood ( Adeului Hyeoeolseo ), 166 still attempted to solidify the national ethos into a fanatic pro-japanese militarism as part of the collective colonial identity. The appropriation of exotic music genres in the context of wartime Japanese military expansionism redefines notions of appropriation and crossover, as the ways in which the exotic musical genre was deployed did not conflict with colonial rules regarding the inclusion western elements. Thus, the reorganization of the South through colonial musicians and the audience s imagination of their colonial reality spuriously generalized and mimicked an imagined Southern territory, which Japan exploited. The exotic music genre was typically filtered through its Japanese turn by appropriating Western popular music. The paradoxical exotic music genre was 164 After Showa 15 (1940), using foreign names or pseudonyms was strictly prohibited. Therefore, bands with English names such as Karuakama Ainas [hereafter KA] had to change to Nangokurakuyuu (Southern Friend, 南国楽友 ). KA was organized in 1937 during the cultural boom of Hawaiian melodies in Japan. Their repertoire was broad, including covers of Hawaiian masterpieces, American Jazz and local standards. 165 There are two main problems concerning phonographic history in Korea. First, most of the phonograph records from the 1940s were lost during the Korean War, and only a few releases remain. Therefore, we can get a glimpse of the popularity of these records and songs mostly through newspapers or magazine ads. Also, the sound quality of records discovered from this era is extremely poor for the purposes of archiving, for they were mostly found in second-hand record stores in the early 1990s, following a reevaluation of this period s musical and historical importance. However, recently a few original master records made in the Japanese branch of Columbia and Victor record companies have been found and remastered. Among the popular songs influenced by southern discourses from the remaining musical scores, there are 44 songs, ranging from children s songs and traditional Shinminyo to popular songs. 166 Interestingly, this song was re-released during the Korean War, after its pro-japanese lyrics were obliterated. I will argue further on this matter in Chapter Four.

151 137 trendy in colonial Korea because it allowed the consumption of an exoticized Southern territory as a substitute for the local thirst for Western culture. While military songs incessantly proliferated the ideology of Japanese expansionism, colonial Koreans were also captivated by the discourse of Nambang in their consumption of exotic popular songs with fast beats and rhythms conveying a foreign aura, playing a key role in fortifying the surplus Southern fantasy. <Figure 3-8> Sheet music for a popular song representing the southern territory, Namgukui Dalbam (Moonlight of the Southern country, left), Nambang ui Chueok (Memory of the Southward), the latter makes abundant use of English words in the song lyrics, such as Neon, cocktail, step and Jazz. Unlike Imperial Japan, which had an accumulated scientific system, knowledge and used achievements in the southern territories as military tactics for mobilizing colonial territories, colonial Koreans did not have a sufficiently robust intellectual structure to account for the southern territory, in spite of Koreans enormous social interest in translating Japanese popular representations. Tropical southern territories in colonial Korea were a mirage of an imaginary territory, frequently depicted with the image of a jungle expedition that transposed this representation as a surplus fantasy of the tropical area in order to render a colonial spectatorship translated by Japanese popular representations. This imaginary rhetoric of Nambang, a complicated mixture of passion and curiousity that many colonial subjects and intellectuals found persuasive, gave form to an interstitial colonial

152 138 desire of vanity embedded in a colonial subjectivity that wished to posit Koreans as better than or above other colonial subjects within the colonial territories of the Japanese Empire. As Kwon astutely describes, this feverish Nambang discourse in colonial Korea was an aftermath symptom of exploitation economy where colonies were reorganized to hold superior stations in the imaginary colonial geography (Kwon 2005). Thus, it is an embedded colonialism in the colonized subjectivity. <Figure 3-9> Korean Newspaper cartoon representation of Nambang territory. It reads, we can be arrogant in China and fatten in Sourthen Islands (left). The illustration of Nambang aboriginals also shows how Koreans imagine Nambang as a typical African native figure. The desire of Koreans as quasi-colonizers is clearly depicted in the cartoon. Maeil Shinbo, 1942, July 6. As the discourse on Nambang territory, where the staging of colonial subjects desires was enmeshed in colonial competition amongst the colonies, imperial mobilization and exploitation, transformed into a racial and territorial discourse, the more extreme Nambang discourse in colonial Korea unexpectedly prevailed by appropriating exotic musical forms like Hawaiian and tango. Even the Japanese Empire could not control the abnormality of Nambang fever in colonial Korea. Since colonial Korea had played the role of military frontier for Japanese imperialism in Northern Manchurian and Chinese territories during the Asia-Pacific War, military popular songs depicting the Northern landscape also implied the Imperial regime and its ideology. However, the unexpected popularity of the Nambang discourse and exotic popular songs gained popularity by contextualizing an imaginary topography in colonial Korea. Unlike the apparent absurdity

153 139 of the Japanese subject s unexpected enthusiasm for tropical fever, Nambang discourses gently yet effectively conveyed Japanese militarism to colonial subjects through localized jazz songs translated into local vernaculars as a form of colonial misinterpretation. The majority of the themes of popular songs were both directly and indirectly related to the military justification of the New Asian Order regime. Radio frequencies controlled exclusively by Japan after the Total War era tried to popularize the New Asian Order ideology by transmitting popular songs alongside JODK 167 updates on the War, such as the declaration of war, the victory of the Thai occupation and the successful attack upon the Philippines. 168 <Figure 3-10> Sheet music for Flower of Blue Orchid, representing a typical image of a southern territory with a tropical island, orchid and palm trees To the tropical island where the blue orchid blossoms / let s go pick some coconuts/ Shipping our youthful dreams in twelve sailing ships / let s go let s go to the horizon of a southern country (verse 1). This island and that sky belongs to the equatorial southern country/ new life and new flag are beckoning to us / the seashores with colorful coral reefs 167 Literally, Chosun Housou Kyoukai (CHK; callsign JODK, 朝鮮放送協会 ). Established in 1927, the JODK was the counterpart of the Japanese NHK It used two frequencies, one for Japanese and one for Korean. Most of the programs in the Korean frequency were for the Korean populace, usually disseminating Japanese war propaganda. 168 Yang, Hoon (November 1942), War and Music, Story of Military Song, Chokwang

154 140. and chirping aquatic birds / let s go let s go to the new world of East Asia (verse 2) Flower of Blue Orchid, Columbia Records, December Written by Nam-Ryesung, composed by Son Mok-In, Performed by Lee Hye-Yeon The aberrant Nambang discourse was prevalent as we see them in representation of popoular songs (tropical island, blue orchid, coral reefs and aquatic birds) despite the logical imperfection of the consonance between Japanese East Asian solidarity and the exotic popular songs released as part of Japanese cultural policy. As illustrated by the obsequious military songs and exotic Nambang rhythms and melodies released during the Asia-Pacific War in colonial Korea, it is necessary to reconsider the cultural connotations of popular songs of the transwar 1940s that embraced the rhetoric of war mobilization and ambivalently located colonial musicians and singers before hastily discounting them as pro- Japanese. Unlike the bilateral relations between postwar Japan and the United States, which had a profound impact on Japan s national identity, the relationship of Koreans in-between two empires must be analyzed in terms of continual colonial consciousness, related to both social modernization (imperial-oriented) and cultural modernity (west-oriented) and a doubly embedded coloniality between two empires. Thus, the production and consumption of popular music during and after the colonial period needs to be addressed in an analytical framework that scrutinizes popular cultural forms as structures of historical narrative and collective memory, rather than adopting an empirical historicist approach. During the Total War era, colonial Koreans were forced to accept Japanese Imperial ideology while experiencing the terrain of polymorphous realities in-between Nambang fantasy by displacing the Imperial viewpoint of the Orientalizing gaze onto the uncivilized South. They did so by depicting Southern aboriginals as purely primitive objects while mobilizing the Home Front by expressing maternal/femininized narratives in popular songs imbued with the slogans and propaganda of Japanese militaristic doctrine. 6. Can the Colonial Subject Sing? Between Politics of Ambivalence and Strategies of Colonial Resistance Debunking the pro-japanese activity of Korean musicians is probably a necessary first step to re-evaluating Korean popular music history, one that must begin by critiquing

155 141 the ideological forms of knowledge production in the hidden aspects of these narratives contexts. However, what is the proper definition of pro-japanese cultural activity under coercive processes of colonial transformation, where Korean subjectivities were not merely formed through mortifications of personal beliefs and lifestyles but are also situated within revisions of national, cultural and racial identities geared toward the total mobilization of the nation? In order to answer these complex questions, it is necessary to reconnect with that which has become incongruent in these discourses of inside and outside, within the Imperial formation during the Total War era. Colonial prohibitions against sovereign power such as banning the use of vernacular language (1937) and urging Koreans to translate their original Korean names into a more Japanese linguistic order, Sōshi-kaimei (1939 Changssigaemyeong in Korean), served to structure Koreans as exceptions within the colonial regime were located at the same time outside and inside the juridical order as this was delineated by the Japanese Governer-General of Korea. According to Schmitt, the exception is more interesting than the rule [general rule such as validity]. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives from the exception. (Schmitt 2005:15) The soverign state of exception imposed by Imperial Japan was based on generating domicile colonial subjects in order to mobilizing them for the Imperial body. Agamben s idea of language (the meaning of there is language ), a use of language ( the meaning of I speak ), is a transcendental logic and presuppositional structure in terms of sovereign power. He argues that one can be indicated, whose site and formula can be designated 169 through language. He extends this in The Logic of Sovereignty by quoting the Hegelian idea of language. He said Language is the perfect element in which interiority is as external as exteriority is internal, which only the sovereign decision on the status of exception opens the space in which it is possible to trace borders between inside and outside and in which determinate rules can be assigned to determinate territories, (Agamben 1998:21). In this sense, the structure of sovereign power is closely related to the use of language since the linguistic logic and Agamben s idea of an indistinguishability from the exception is directly linked to the power of life and law in colonial Korea during the Total War era. Colonial Koreans were 169 Agamben, Georgio, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Trans by Liz Heron, Verso, pp6-7

156 142 legitimately included in the body of Imperial Japan but they never acquired a structure of sovereign power members of the Empire, which Agamben plainly argued constituted the state of exception: The exception is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already included (Agamben 1998:25). To stretch this issue further, it seems that popular music and other symbolic forms of cultural expression that transcend peculiar colonial experiences must be considered and remembered in their specific historical contexts. Almost inperceptibly, musical forms created and perpetuated echos of shared memories regarding the ineffaceable event. The apparent cognitive disjunction between the exotic rhythms and sycophantic military songs in Korean popular music during this era, however, demonstrates the transgressive and oppositional aspects of colonial expression where popular music production and consumption have not merely acted as a crystallization of colonial regimes and imposed ideology, as empiricist critiques would have it. So, then, let s interrogate this formation by adapting Spivak s renowned query: Can the colonial people not sing? To answer this question, we need to consider the cultural articulation of colonial identity and its appropriation of popular song performance styles and narratives, as well as how this is interwoven into the core processes of the production and consumption of popular Korean songs during this era. By considering multilayered colonial strategies alongside Yi Jinkyung s (2006) careful deliberation of Korean intellectuals responses, in colonial literature, to the discourse of East Asian solidarity enunciated by the Japanese Empire, we can deduce various colonial strategies and counter-colonial metaphors in the context of Korean popular music that function as imitation, secession, traverse 170 and implosion (Yi 2006). Yi especially emphasizes implosion, which he designates as an excessive obedience of the colonized to the colonial regime that serves to collapse the interior distinction between colonizer and the colonized, eventually confusing the colonizer. 170 Unlike the terms imitation and secession, which clearly depict colonial tactics by either adopting the colonial mimicry or confronting the colonial regime, the traversal of Yi s argument is somewhat liminal in the discourse of popular music. According to Yi (2006), traversing is a strategy to cross the idea of national boundary, in this case by the Japanese performing the colonized position by looking at the colonial regime through the lens of minorities s eyes. He finds this exemplified by Korean novelist Han Seolya s Daeryuk (The Continent 1939).

157 143 (Yi 2006: 36). As many Asian critics 171 have argued regarding the limitations of Bhabha s thesis of mimicry and hybridity as signs of colonial resistance, Koreans consolidation into the Japanese Imperial body (naisenittai) cannot interpreted as a mere strategic mimicry of colonial confrontation where, as Bhabha argues, colonial differentiation and resistance of implosive threat towards the customized knowledge and discipline. By producing and singing obsequious military popular songs during the Total War System of the Asia-Pacific War and by generating the Nambang discourse which was even more prevalent in Korea than in mainland Japan colonial subjects could baffle the colonizer by mimicking their desires, language and attitudes. However, even though I propose that the colonial identification with the Japanese Imperial Citizen formation was not an act of opportunism but of strategic choice, it would be hyperbolic to interpret these imitations and mimicry as resistance by the colonial citizen. Although colonial subjects speak and sing like the Japanese by acquiring the colonizers position, who could precisely follow the Japanese discourses to eliminate national differences within the colonial situation where the colonial difference and discrimination against colonized still existed, and can this be still translated as strategic imitation? The analytical trap of the colonial subject s mimicry resurfaces when disposing of the colonial discourse in their own bodies by reappropriating the gaze of the Imperial. Thinking the act of mimicry as a symbol of resistance comes not from the voluntary viewpoint of the colonial subject but from that of the colonizer. As many nationalist empiricists and historians have argued, in the cultural secession from the discourse of military-emperor concentricity by denying self and taking on the Imperial subject identity against the Japanese colonial enunciation can be transposed as a colonial strategy of active confrontation. Hwang recollects that local musicians had to pass a test, held twice a year, in order to acquire their performer s license (Entertainer s Cerificate called Kiyejeung in Korean, Gigeishō in Japanese) and, in so doing, to get an exemption from conscription into the Asian-Pacific War. 172 Under the surveillance of Japanese administrators, an oral test was administered that attempted to examine how ready Korean musicians were to become 171 Regarding the limitations of postcolonial critique in the Japanese context, see Sakamoto Rumi (1996), Japan, Hybridity and the Creation of Colonialist Discourse, Theory, Culture & Society 13, pp Hwang 1983, pp

158 144 Imperial subjects and act to properly uplift the War spirit. Some Korean traditional instrumentalists were urged to play Japanese military songs on Korean traditional instruments, Haegum, 173 while Japanese administrators asked questions about Japanese legal holidays ( 四大節 ), which were generally related to Japanese emperor s birthday. Since the phonetic transcriptions of 節 (setsu / bushi) can be pronounced two ways in Japanese, the Japanese administrators were expected to pronunciate it as the setsu of Japanese legal holidays ( 四大節 yontaisetsu), but some Korean musicians deliberately responded by pronunciating 節 in Chinese characters (yomikata) bushi such as Kinsobushi ( 木曾節 ) or Naniwabushi ( 浪曲節 ), in order to indirectly mock the absurd question instead of responding to the Japanese emperor s anniversary. In the terrain of the formation of colonial discourses during the Total War era, colonial musicians and singers who lost the right to use fundamental elements of song creation such as the local language and the expression local values as a form self-determination, suffered where they confronted the inevitable rhetoric of national consolidation within the Japanese Empire. Perhaps only the rare case of the Chinese-born Japanese actress and singer, Ri kōran, who transformed her self-identity by singing the famous bilingual song, Shina no yoru (Chinese Night) during and after World War II, can be interpreted as an ambivalent coexistence with the Japanese imperative of Imperial Citizen Formation. 174 Recently discovered archives have allowed researchers in Korea to investigate the major works of colonial novelists, poets and singers. These analyses have focused on whether these artists voluntarily or reluctantly advocated and served Imperial Japan s militarism during the last five years of Japanese occupation, so the pro-japanese cultural products of the colonial era have been controversially reexamined and rearticulated in consideration of colonial circumstances in order to better understand the contradictory discourses of pro-japanese sentiment and longing to become a Japanese citizen while tactically reappropriating self-identity or even mocking or reterritorializing the master narrative in a local context (Kim 1999, Shin 2003, Kwon 2003, Kwon 2005, Lee 2006, 173 Haegum is Korean traditional string instrument that makes similar sounds like fiddle or violin. 174 For a discussion of gender and nationality in Ri kō ran s life and career, see Miriam Siverberg (1993) Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie Chaplin and the Case of the Disappearing Western Woman; A Picture Story, Positions 1, no.1:

159 145 Lee 2008). Consequently, the evaluations of pro-japanese works from this era need to be deliberated multilaterally. As Yi (2006) and Kwon (2005) have illustrated, casting the colonial intellectual engagement with Japanese militarism and expansionism as simply the by-product of sycophantic pro-japanese sentiment threatens to neglect various veiled narratives. Analysis of the works of colonial intellectuals and musicians involved in the production of cultural products celebrating Japanese militarism under severe surveillance and censorship, often found there convenient discourses of either resistance and colonial exploitation or in internalization of oppression and spontaneous assent. These bifurcated analyses of colonial engagement during Total War era are oversimplified, since they ignore the complex layers of colonial structure of fascism/totalitarianism, politics of embedded hostility, competition between colonies, Empire envy and race-gender discrimination. The narratives of Korean popular music largely signal the ambivalent sentiments of Total War circumstances; these are perceptible in Choi s homonymous usage of Gunguk and the maternal narratives of Popular Military songs embracing hidden local values, descriptions of blood mixture, and in the mythologizing localization of northern and southern territories as radical utopias through surplus fantasy, or as in the last sequence of Bun-Ock s mysterious grin towards the screen, as residual colonial melancholia. As Foucault explains, the insurrection of subjugated knowledge can be used to describe an epistemological transformation: on the one hand, I am referring to the historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systemization. [ ] On the other hand, a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity. 175 By emphasizing historical contents, as Mignolo (2000) argues, Foucault means to refer to something that is buried behind the disciplines and the production of knowledge that was neither the semiology of life nor the sociology of delinquency but the repression of the immediate emergence of historical contents. Thus, the analytical openness and alternative rhetorical possibilities in Korean popular songs need to be explained in the context of colonial ambivalence and collective sentiments containing the popular knowledge from the last 175 Foucault, Michel (1970) 1980, Lecture One: 7 January In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, Edited by C.Gordon, New York: Pantheon Books, p 82.

160 146 years of the Korean populace s colonial circumstances. Colonial subjects in Total War conditions get through the doubly embedded process of inner and outer colonial consciousness, what Agamben describes with reference to Michel Foucault s biopolitics and Karl Schmidt s concept of sovereignty, as colonial hegemony of sovereignty that is decided by the colonizing subjects choosing the exclusion from sovereign power or life per se. The bare life (zoë) and political life (bios) of Agamben s concept of sovereign exception/exclusion are located between the life of the colonial citizen and his or her life in the sphere of the polis. Becoming Japanese is not a simple assimilation to the regime s ideology, as Tomiyama describes in Senjō no Kioku (Tomiyama 1995). After the Kanto earthquake struck in September 1923, using an Okinawan language, Korean nationality and contact with American were considered not much better than espionage to the Japanese. By citing Higa Shuncho s experience with Japanese vigilante corps who suspected him of being Korean spy, Tomiyama indirectly highlights the exigencies of Korean life by delivering the dialogue of Shuncho who is Japanese justifying himself as Japanese. The contradictions of this Japanese identification as Japanese through pronouncing Japanese language ironically become an evident and crucial classification of Japanese racism towards colonial Koreans. The dialogue was simple and short: Are you Josenjin (Korean)? / No! / Your accent is somewhat different from Japanese / That s because I m Okinawan, so my accent is different from yours. As he recollects, many Koreans were murdered because they simply cannot use the standard Japanese during Kanto earthquake. This is similar to the case of many Korean popular musicians and singers during the interwar era who were incarcerated within Japanese powerful ideological formations intended to mobilize, reify and idealize a fanatic militarization. At the end of Total War era, many singers and composers were forced to perform in Japanese, and needless to say all musical plays and theatrical performances were performed in Japanese. Some of the performers were drafted into Japanese Army regardless of their musician s certificate. Choi Byeong-Ho, a singer, was conscripted into the Kyushu colliery, and Kim Jae-Seung, one of the founding members of Joseon music drama show, was imprisoned for his disobedience after enrollment. Unlike strategies of colonial counter-activity, strategies of implosion have an urgent aspect as colonial tactics for survival, which lies only in the dimension of the

161 147 imperfectible narrativization, since the more colonized resembled the colonizer, the more the colonized realized the discrimination and exclusion that they experienced from their colonizers. Thus, the impossibility of identification with the Empire engendered an autonomous coloniality as a passionate attachment towards Americanism and building national identity after liberation.

162 148 Chapter 4. Plural Post-Wars Within ( ) The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. Antonio Gramsi (1971) Sociopolitical Conditions in North and South Korea in the Post-Liberation Era: A Vacuumed Time, Oblivious Past and Doubly Embedded Post-Colonial Trauma The film Go to the Liberated Joseon ( 解放朝鮮を行く, People s film corporation, 1947), which visualizes the post-liberation conditions in both sides of Korea, was released to the public in 2007 after being discovered by archivists of the National Archives of Korea. 177 After compiling the remaining propaganda films and materials from the Russian Archives and the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) into the film, the National Archives of Korea released the documentary containing rare images of the emergence of early communist social structures in the veiled Pyongyang city after liberation. Social reconstructions including changes to the educational system, rural revitalization strategies, and postwar rehabilitation were vividly depicted in this film, which represents, captures and transmits the hidden reality of North Korea in a variety of ways. While the cumulative confusion and political conflicts resulting from Japan s forced evacuation of South Korea made the allied Soviets and Americans consider the newly-liberated peninsula unready for self-government and sovereignty, Kim Il-Sung s North Korean Communist Party regime initiated land reforms, with Soviet support, under the slogan of Anti-Imperialist Anti-Feudalist Democratic Revolution in the North. Already familiar with Lenin s cultural policies, 178 Kim Il-Sung nationalized the theatres, broadcasting system and other cultural infrastructure through the activation of his Peoples 176 Antonio Gramsci (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, New York: International Publishers, p276, requote from Choi Chungmoo(1997) 177 See some of the video clips can be seen at the Hankyoreh daily newspaper webpage < 178 Since the inexperienced Kim was attempting to construct his state in accordance with Marxist doctrine, he was ideologically dependent on guidance from the bastion of Marxism-Leninism (Weathersby 2001). While we cannot know precisely how Kim viewed his role, the extensive documentation of North Korean interaction with the Soviet Union from available in Russian archives suggests strongly that his declaration of subordination to Stalin was genuine.

163 149 Cultural Policy. The images in Go to the Liberated Joseon show the representations and monuments of the newly constructed Liberation Tower transmitting over the anonymous faces of a delirious crowd. During the incipient dismantling of Cold War structures in the Korean peninsula, Pyongyang was redefined through the manifestation of this gigantic spectacle. The urban landscape of North Korea, including its higher education system, museums, apartments, theatres and city hall, had been carefully planned and constructed over an unusually short time. The film traces the compressed layers of this transformation of Pyongyang s urban landscape into a showcase of modern city planning. Sennet proposes a symmetry between the design of the modern, cultural metropolis, the circulation of human beings within it and the arteries and veins of the human body (Sennet 1996); the first modern planned city in North Korea had already acquired an organic system like a human body after liberation. In the documentary, Pyongyang had compartmentalized the metropolitan territories by pivoting the monumental tower as if surveiling the entire city. By exhibiting portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Kim Il-Sung and billboards bearing the words Great Leader Kim Il-Sung and Women have a right to vote, propaganda slogans became integral to the landscape of the city, reshaping North Korean strategic ideology throughout the Kim Il-Sung regime era. As in many communist regimes, most popular art, including song and films, were tactically mobilized to reflect the regime s politics during this era, as North Korea endeavored to devote all cultural products to ideology, exhibited as a form of spectacle. The film Go to the Liberated Joseon was a recompiled version, originally produced as the Liberation News (Hyebang News) newsreel by the Joseon Film Company and the Korean Film Union, for an audience of Japanese and Zainichi (Korean Japanese) citizens in mainland Japan. The film was deployed to introduce this audience to post-liberation Korea, so the situations depicted in the film were imbued with positive images of North Korea and communist ideology, such as feats of modern architecture, the reconstruction of the state with technical and financial support from the Soviet Union and China and expansions to the education system through teaching Russian as a second language, while representing the fervor of South Korean crowds at political spectacles. In the South Korean post-liberation atmosphere, the unexpected freedom instigated a sort of mental drainhole for most of the Korean populace. Its outset was accompanied by

164 150 high hopes for political independence and expectations of social reformation. However, this was a time of great uncertainty in Korea, what Bhabha describes as significatory or representational undecidability (Bhabha 1994:35). The modernity and reunification of the Korean peninsula would remain an incomplete project; just four days before its complete liberation from Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union enacted a military demarcation along the 38 th parallel that would divide the nation. 179 This division not only deepened Cold War logics in the Korean mentality but also continued to accord the people an inferior and stigmatized status. Before the U.S. forces occupied South Korea on September 8 th 1945, the influence of Japanese colonialism had exposed millions of Koreans to a highly authoritarian model of development and modernization. Japanese colonial control had forced Koreans to provide soldiers for the Japanese military while mobilizing the colonial home front to sacrifice for imperial expansionism through bureaucracy and surveillance during the Total War period. This Japanese control imprinted as collective trauma on thousands of Koreans, while accommodating modernization, industrialization and a filtered western culture contributed to Koreans self-reinvention through the contradictory idea of the Imperial subject. Ruth Leys argues that, the history of trauma is marked by an alternation between episodes of forgetting and remembering, as the experiences of one generation of psychiatrists have been neglected only to be revived at a later time, (Leys 2000:15). The Korean reaction to both post-liberation and the experience of American military occupation was a practice of cathartic abreaction and the revival of abreaction as means of treating dissociative disorders and post traumatic stress disorder to remember the Total War and Japanese occupation experience. 180 In this sense, Koreans severe colonial experiences led them to engage well with U.S. authorities after liberation. The U.S. military government, officially known as the United States Army Military Government in Korea (hereafter USAMGIK) officially ruled South Korea from September 8 th, 1945 to August 15 th, 1948, effectively 179 Korea was intended to be nurtured as a neutral and independent country surrounded by the Soviet Union, United States and China (U.S. Government Printing Office 1955). According to the trusteeship at Yalta, Roosevelt and Stalin both agreed upon the idea of instilling a system of international trusteeship onto the liberated Korea to maintain the geographical balance of power in Asia. 180 Leys states, Just as it took World War Ⅱ to remember the lessons of World War I, so it took the experience of Vietnam to remember the lessons of World War II, including the psychiatric lessons of the Holocaust, (Leys 2000:15).

165 151 solidifying Cold War identity in Korean society. By reconstructing and modernizing infrastructure and industry in the South Korean peninsula, USAMGIK substituted a national aspiration to sociopolitical sovereignty, economic development, national security and cultural reformation for a Korean mentality geared toward anti-communist nationbuilding. Through various propaganda slogans designating South Korea as frontier state, 181 USAMGIK announced the new expansionist American desire to rebuild South Korea as a symbol of anti-communism in Asia. Thus, the conflictual nature of inter-korean relations, characterized by North Korea s nationalistic and revolutionary fervor and South Korea s liberal democracy and anti-communist tendencies, can be read as a direct offspring of Cold War mentality through the differential ideological formations under the control of their patron states. Although South Korea experienced greater turmoil than the North in its relentless political and social conflicts, Korean nationalists and revisionists tried to reconcile the diverse political atmospheres in South Korea by emphasizing the importance of sociopolitical hegemony and significance of USAMGIK presence. By adjusting their own narratives to USAMGIK aspirations and policies, revisionists such as Syngman Rhee articulated various U.S. diplomatic activities to rescue South Korea by summoning colonial memories of the Japanese imperial system, while accentuating Americanism by advocating military reformation, economic modernization, democratization, renewing the country s educational system, improving media structure, and promoting ideological renewal by instilling liberal democratic capitalism and the anti-communism of Cold War logic in Korean mentality. Thus, anti-communism became a work of mourning after the trauma of Japanese colonialism: the conjuration has to make sure that the dead will not come back, (Derrida [1993] 1994, 120). The specter of communism between Japanese colonialism and U.S. military occupation became an object of desire and fear as an apparition to Koreans which they know will not present anyone in person but will strike a series of blows to be deciphered by politicians. All possible alliances are thus forged to conjure away this common adversary, the specter of communism, (Derrida [1993] 1994, 124). Consequently, USAMGIK assisted the establishment of Syngman Rhee s interim 181 According to Hur Eun (2008) the term frontier state was commonly used to describe South Korea in many official documents outlining U.S. foreign policy.

166 152 government in 1948 and collusively obliterated the colonial past from Korean consciousness using propaganda slogans intended to stimulate collective hostility against communism. Thus, the South Korean state was gradually stabilized as a bridgehead to block communism through the negotiated hegemony of USAMGIK intervention. 182 <Figure 4-1> After Liberation Day (August 16 th, 1945) in front of Seodaemun Jail in Seoul, South Korea, (left), and an image representing the moment of liberation (right). These are the archetypal representations of the liberation day in most Koreans consciousness. Courtesy of War Memorial Museum (Jeonjengkinyeomkwan), Yongsan, Seoul, Republic of Korea. Rephotographed by the author. According to many historians, the homogenized collective memories regarding this specific moment between 1945, when Korea was liberated from the Japanese occupation, until 1948 when the South Korean interim government was established, were manipulated. Won argues that the joy of independence was not universally and spontaneously experienced among Koreans in the way that it is commonly represented by Korean media in newspaper photographs, beeswax puppets in the War Memorial museum or in the history textbooks which built this national discourse as the nation s historical myth (Won, Yong- Jin 2007). 183 In fact, reactions to the end of the Japanese colonial occupation period were often deliberately obfuscated, and rumours of placards and leaflets delivering false information abounded. The response to the emancipation of postwar Korea was often individually or locally different, depending on one s access to media. Korean writer Lee Young-Hee recollects that the news took quite a long time to spread to the majority of 182 After the Syngman Rhee government was formally augurated on August 15 th,1948, the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea terminated and withdrew its troops on September 15 th of the same year. 183 Satou Takumi and Son Ansuk, eds (2007) Memorial Day of the End of War in East Asia [Touajiano Shousen Kineni], Chikuma Shinsho Publishers.

167 153 Korean populace, describing how, In 1945, August 15 th, the news of liberation had been slowly spread from major cities in Korea, beginning in Seoul, however in case of rural area such as places near to the Aprok River, the news took more than 2 days. We (Korean) couldn t possibly estimate when Korea was liberated from the colonial repression. We couldn t even realize we were liberated properly. 184 As Derrida has argued of the condition of inheritance for making one s own history, freedom, liberation or emancipation is also appropriated in making national history through an inherited past. According to Derrida, since Men make their own history [ihre eigene Geschichte] but they do not make it just as they please [aus freien Stücken]; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past [überlieferten Umständen]. The tradition of all the dead generations [aller toten Geschlechter] weighs [lastet] like a nightmare on the brain of the living, (requote from Derrida [1993] 1994; 134, Marx and Engels, 1972, 308). Appropriating Marx s idea of the specter, Derrida elucidates a concept of the repetition of history (revolutionary repetition), where the more the new erupts in the revolutionary crisis, the more the period is in crisis, the more it is out of joint, then the more one has to convoke the old, borrow from it. Thus, Inheritance from the spirit of the past consists, as always, in borrowing. Figures of borrowing, borrowed figures, figurality as the figure of borrowing. And the borrowing speaks: borrowed language, borrowed names, says Marx, (Derrida [1993] 1994; 136). Ironically, the Maeil Shinbo daily newspaper published the headline news regarding Japanese defeat with full descriptions of Emperor Hirohito s original text (in Japanese) without any Korean translation on August 15 th, The Korean media described the national liberation as Hyebang literally meaning release in Korean two days after Hirohito s official announcement of Japan s defeat. Full of hope thanks to this sudden liberation, the Korean media gradually brought news about the joys of liberation mixed with feelings of anxiety using previously unutterable Korean words such as liberation (Hyebang), Independence (Dongnip) and glorious restoration (Gwangbok). The myth of liberation day was tautological; it only exists and explains itself ontologically but does not need to properly explain when, where, and how the liberation evolved. It is akin to the 184 Lee Young-Hee (1988) A Historical Process, Yŭkjeong, Creation and Criticism

168 154 Lacanian concept described as symptom/sinthome, which doesn t call for any interpretation, but in itself; it is not a call to the Other but a pure jouissance addressed to no one. 185 With spectacular representations of leaflets scattered from the sky and military units marching in single file, the moving images of liberated Seoul in Go to the Liberated Joseon were juxtaposed with scenes of Soviet and U.S. stations in each of the two Koreas in the first part of the documentary. In the second part, the film focuses on showing the celebration of national events like commemorative tree planting and political assemblies filled with crowds in South Korea. The anonymous crowds shown first listening to the speeches of reunification activist Kim Gu and politician Yuh Woon-Hyung, then presented in the thrall of Lee Nan-Young singing under the baton of the famous modern boy singersongwriter Kim Hae-song were in fact the same crowd. Le Bon describes crowd psychology as an unconscious inferior collectivity, wherein the crowd is always dominated by considerations of which it is unconscious. This unconsciousness is one of the secrets of their strength, and under the circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics of crowd is very different from those of the individuals composing it, (Le Bon [1895], 1982). These crowds, as an active and dynamic collective body, are kept silent in the film. They merely listened to their leaders, and their motions are unrepresented except in one scene showing people marching on the street in ecstatic euphoria. The history of these crowds has been written as that of a united entity that had no desire but to follow. They form an invisible background to accentuate specific historical events and personae. No one described how they were organized, gathered, or what was it like when they went back to their quotidian lives. During the period from 1945 to 1953, under this dramatic transformation, Korean society experienced two plural postwars shaped in a doubled time-space of implicit trauma. Consequently, Korean popular songs passively assimilated western culture and actively interacted with the social mood, which ultimately reflected the sociopolitical conditions surrounding the aftermath of the U.S. and Japanese colonial hegemony over Koreans lives. To shed light on both the persistence of colonial consciousness and the crosscultural exchange between U.S. and Korea and the audience reception of phonographs 185 Slavoj Zizek, Lacanian Ink 11, From Joyce through the Lacan Glass. Available at

169 155 and popular songs in this era, I will use the term postwar instead of post-liberation, which many Korean scholars have used, to render the ways in which the consciousness and psychological wounding of Koreans was sustained between two temporally close wars: the Total War system of World War II and the Korean wars. The word Postwar often resonated with the term Sengo (postwar in Japanese), which for Koreans became an official prefix to describe the circumstances of Japanese society after the defeat in As many Japanese scholars analyzed bilateral relations with the U.S. and their influences on Japan s national identity in terms of an economy of desire and cultural appropriation through various discursive rhetorics like nihonjinron (theory of Japanese people), the narrative of postwar Japan provides a rupture from Japan s militaristic past which Igarashi has described as Japan s defeat as a drama of rescue and conversion: the United States rescued Japan from the menace of its militarists, and Japan was converted into a peaceful, democratic country under the U.S. tutelage, (Igarashi 2000, Naoki 1995). Thus, Postwar/Sengo in Japan has been activated in terms of historical retrospection, and departure is an agency of rupture from the colonial occupation and imperial history that established the subjective national formation that goes by the name of modern capitalism. However, Post-liberation/Postwar in Korea, characterized as it was by anti-communism and Cold War logic, has not only been interrogated as the seat of the impossibility of national reunification and social reconstruction but has also been embedded into the national ethos as an ongoing national trauma and a site of repetitive melancholy and alienation. In a Korean context, the period after 1945 simply cannot be reduced to the postwar, however, since the notion of a Korean postwar must take into account the continuous colonialism of Japan and the U.S. as well as the modern ideological contradictions borne by war and postcoloniality. Rather, I wish to reterritorialize this era as postwar(s) following the liberation as well as the Korean War, in order to elucidate the leftover influence of the Japanese era, which is still controversial in discussions of the eradication of pro-japanese activity and the infrastructural remains of Japanese presence. By analyzing the narrative of national subjectivity (gukminjeok juche) or the more plainly-named people (gukmin), the circumstances of postwar Korea can be more clearly explained through a conceptual framework that clarifies the continuity of colonialism that

170 156 connects the two disjointed occupational eras, from the period of Total War to that of USAMGIK control. During the post-liberation era, Korean popular music stirred Koreans aural memories and collective emotions to help them make sense of their experiences in relation to these ideological transformations and westernized modernity. In this chapter, I will start by explaining the sociocultural conditions of the production and consumption of popular music during the post-liberation era by investigating various infrastructural changes such as the radio broadcasting system, newly developed local phonograph companies and various vaudeville shows, in order to explore postcolonial representations of Americanization in postwar Korea. To further contextualize the reception of Americanism, I will examine how Total War sentiments were fortified in the Korean mentality as a repetition of ongoing coloniality in musical representations such as resuscitated tropical sounds that resonated southern fantasy and the home front narrativizes of military popular songs from the postliberation era until the Korean War. I will look specifically into the narratives of postwar Korean popular song lyrics these reflect the national ethos from the post-liberation era to the Korean War, to better illuminate the persistence of colonial consciousness and the posttraumatic symptoms of the Total War mentality. 2. Continual Subjection, Colliding Colonizers and Memories: Narratives of Postwar Relations between South Korea and the United States in Popular Songs After the detonation of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 7 th of August 1945, the abrupt subsidiary liberation of Korean peninsula was followed by Emperor Hirohito s theatrical voice announcing the unconditional surrender to the superior power of the United States over nationwide radio. These were only the consequences of the handover of sovereignty from the Japanese Hinomaru to the American Star Spangled Banner in postwar Korea. The joy of emancipation from Japanese colonial oppression temporarily obliterated the subsequent colonial continuation of subjugation among Koreans. On September 8, 1945, when the American Generals for the Allied powers were posted at the Joseon Hotel in Seoul on their way to Tokyo for an official statement of

171 157 Japanese defeat from Emperor Hirohito, an assiduously assembled local Korean band 186 was waiting to amuse the American war heroes who had saved Koreans from Japanese encroachment. Their performance typically enshrined western values, orchestrating European semi-classical music and American folk songs reminiscent of western Jazz tunes. The performance s repertoire consisted mainly of such standards as Waves of the Danube, 187 Carmen and several American folk songs, to gratify the benevolent American sage, whose power and virtue the postwar Korean admired. Ironically, the Korean musicians were dressed in tidy western-style overcoats with Japanese traditional shoes, Chikadabi, 188 for the sake of American/Western formality (Hwang 1989). This paradoxical episode highlights the symbolic confusion regarding colonial self-identity, musical authenticity and the concept of the modern during this period of transition. The episode captures the essence of the postwar Korean s dilemma, of how to embody a authentic westernized musical expression for a genuine western audience. The band s performances intimated their fantastic ideas concerning the modality of modern/western and genuine western popular music. On another level, despite the problematic lack of authenticity or the ethnic handicap when playing western music, the performance was by all accounts impeccable and was even acclaimed by the genuine western audience. Furthermore, the group s repertoire included vagrant geographical roots drawn from widespread cultures spanning Europe and America. In this sense, what kind of trajectories could be found from the first postwar Korean band in front of western audience, appropriating Euro-American music repertoires wearing Japanese Chikadabi shoes? This confusion of colonial subjectivity and ethnic self-recognition before the paternalistic gaze of the Americans shaped the elaboration of various genres of popular music during this era. This music scene remains one of the most underutilized sites for addressing broader historical enquiries into the formations of Americanized modernity and culture in postwar Korea and showing how enduring colonial consciousness reinvented 186 The session band was constituted as Lee Dong-Chun, Kim Jun-Duk, Kim Hoe-Jo, Kim Ho-Gil, Jeong Bong-Yeol who are mostly remembered for performing sycophantic songs about Japanese militarism during Total War. 187 This famous waltz song was composed by Romanian composer Ion Ivanovici ( ), and remade in 1926 titled as Praise of death (Saeui Chanmi) by a legendary decadent Korean female singer, Yoon Shimduk, who committed suicide after an unconsummable love affair with Kim Woo- Jin right after the recording the song. 188 Chikadabi( 地下足袋 ) are mushroom-shaped Japanese traditional labor shoes.

172 158 itself through such appropriations of American culture. These precise replications of American jazz tunes were sanitized, cut-and-pasted into the complex discourses and historicity of Korean sound without any interpretation or thought to the socio-cultural contexts of the genre. However, these mimetic subjects playing western music reconnected forgotten Korean adaptations of western vanities forbidden during the Japanese occupation period, of the so-called modern boy and modern girl. Since the Japanese colonizer had temporarily prohibited American culture during the Asia-Pacific War, it remained a clandestine fantasy of the Korean intelligentsia and mobomoga, who consumed it either as a way to counteract Imperial Japan or merely as an intangible western fancy to provide solace in the face of implacable colonial circumstances. The American occupation of postwar South Korea is perhaps best encapsulated in the powerful image of benign American GIs tossing gums and chocolates to the people, an image that took hold in Korean politics and culture after the liberation. Since the U.S. military government suggested a different kind of power over postwar Korean society, originating neither from the edges of swords nor from the coercive logics of the national consolidation ( 內鮮一體,naisenittai) like the Japanese empire, but stemming rather from the aspiration to an ecstatic genuine modernity, the postwar rhetoric of Americanism/Americanization served as a postcolonial yearning to inculcate American/western values, morals, standards and ideas, that had been fleetingly forgotten and prohibited during the Total War. In the postwar era, American culture was a defining factor in Korean s selfinvention. While the gendered narrative of postwar Japan conceptualized a feminine Japan and masculine America, which cast Japan s defeat as a drama of rescue and conversion by the United States, 189 the relation between Korea and America was rather more complex, embedded in a triangle with the unexorcized pre-colonial master Japan, the benevolent U.S. and the communist North Korean Other. As a result, the production and consumption of American/Americanized culture throughout the USAMGIK era revitalized and invigorated the conflicting desires through a fascination with Americanized modernity and revulsion toward the Japanese leftovers, which was also affected by the Japanese-filtered Western cultural adoption during the Japanese occupation era. Given that Korean society had been 189 Yoshikuni Igarashi (2000), Bodies of memory: narratives of war in postwar Japanese culture, , Princeton University Press p12-13

173 159 exposed to various effects of modernization during the decades of the USAMGIK era and after the Korean War, the subjective terrain of the individual modernizing process underwent a dramatic transformation from a pre-modern to modern dualistic mode. <Figure 4-2> A boy named Song Jong-Tae, 12 year old prisoner of war taken by the North Korea People s Army next to an American soldier in Busan asylum in 1951 ( , Courtesy of NARA, reported by Yeonhap News, left). Beeswax figures depicting postwar Korean children begging for chocolate from a U.S. soldier, Courtesy of Korean War Memorial Museum, Photo by the author. Following these rapid changes of postwar socio-political circumstances in Korea, popular culture, and especially popular songs, was given the role of interweaving and even concealing cloaked political discourses while praising the liberation and ventriloquizing the negotiated hegemony between USAMGIK and the Korean Interim government. In contrast to the other cultural forms such as literature and film, which were mainly consumed by literate petit bourgeoisie and were actively discussed in the academy, popular music acted as a direct route to mimic and transplant ideology and veiled propaganda slogans, a role often neglected by academic accounts of this period. A peculiarity of popular music that I would like to use to distinguish popular music from other genres lies in its quality as an experience of music that is exclusively subject to time. Said argues that we are compelled to rigorous and linear attention by the sheer unfolding quality of the work of music in time; thus music has an ineluctable temporal modality. 190 To stretch this issue further, Halbwachs argued, in the essay entitled The 190 Edward W. Said (1986) After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, New York: Pantheon Books, p37

174 160 Collective Memory, that just as groups encourage individuals to think in terms of group continuity over time, so too collective memory generates impressions of stopped time in which favoured images of the past resist change (Halbwachs 1980). His explanation regarding the formation of collective memories can help us understand how the phonograph, as a vehicle for preserving memory, functioned in shaping certain memories as stopped time. In this sense, the relation between sociocultural reality and popular music can be mutually reinforcing. This is what I want to argue, precisely vis-à-vis what occurred to postwar Korean popular song narrative as a collective memory located in the colonial period of Japanese Empire and the American military government, why the cultural influences of this particular era are still effectuated in Korean mentality today, and how popular songs functioned as peculiar media that preserved social narratives by translating and sharing the collective ethos. 191 Popular song in this era, after the severe prohibition of various cultural activities during the last years of the Japanese Total War era, becomes not only a bodily technology for preserving the memories of the time, but also a living container for these ambivalent memories. Popular music could provide a basis for common understanding and experience by utilizing emotive language and rhythms. Thus, it is a tracing paper reflecting the public consciousness and sociocultural discourses by vividly embracing the time and space of the colonial populace. In this sense, postwar Korean popular music depicted national empathy through its shared feelings during the transitional colonial sovereignty handover and astutely reconciled many confusing narratives during the postwar era. 3. Sociocultural Conditions of Korean Popular Music during the Cold War: Vaudeville shows, Radio Broadcasting and the Local Phonograph Industry ( ) The symptom can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys (jouit) the unconscious in so far as the unconscious determines the subject. 192 Jacques Lacan, seminar Le sinthome ( ) 191 Concerning the relation between politics and popular music from critical perspective, see John Orman s The Politics of Rock Music (1984), Eyerman and Jamison s Popular music in the 1960 s (1995) or more specifically on generational politics of popular music, see John Street s Rebel Rock (1986). 192 "Sinthome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." 4 August 2009 <

175 161 These Lacanian symptom/sinthomes for the new world and the ephemeral ecstasy of emancipation were represented by various popular singers, either those who served the Japanese empire and were reluctantly mobilized to make sycophantic songs praising Japanese militarism during the Asia-Pacific War, or those diasporic popular singers who were expatriated to the foreign countries, mainly scattered in America and mainland Chinese cities such as Shanghai, Beijing and Manchuria. 193 Narratives of popular music lyrics were also divided between those by repatriated popular singers from foreign countries extolling the glory of Korean liberation such as Hyun-In in Leoki Seoul (Lucky Seoul, 1947) and Lee In-Gwon in Gwuiguksun (Homecoming Cruise), or the local singers engaged in vaudeville shows such as as Kim Hae-song, Lee Nan-Young and Nam In-Soo, who crooned in elegiac empathy and sentimentalism for the national partition and alienation. The cultural spectrum, from local Korean musicians who underwent the colonial experience to the repatriated diasporic singers who underwent immigration, was molded into various expressions and sentiments to cast the Korean point of view into popular songs. Many musicians organized countless vaudeville-style shows (Akgeukdan) to perform around the country, such as the K.P.K, 194 Joseon, Ramira, Taepyeongyang, Mugunghwa. As a piano based blues rhythm genre, Boogie-Woogie in particular gained enormous popularity among Koreans. After the U.S. stationing in South Korea, Korean musicians arranged their own music shows to perform on base stages for American military squads, such as Son Mok-In s CMC, Cho Choon-Gyeong s OMC, Lee Jeong-Baek s Hawaiian 193 These artists were one of the repatriated Koreans back to South Korea during USAMGIK control. (scale:head) Japan North Korea China/Manchuria Other Total ,512 5,591 18, , , ,170 57,350 27,768 1,680, ,103, , ,853 33,957 1,907, ,109, , ,557 33,959 2,034, ,110, , ,200 33,959 2,101,461 Total 5,193,239 2,145,536 1,253, ,643 8,711, , HQ, USAFIK G-2 PERIODIC REPORT The band name is taken from the initials of K (Kim Hae-song, the famous singer songwriter) P (Paek Eun-Sun, leader of Egreen orchestra) K (Kim Jeong-Hwan, professor in Seoul National University), (Lee, 2003, 141).

176 162 Tango band Gohyang Gyeongeumakdan, and the Korean first full orchestra band, Lee Andre and Tango Orchestra (Hwang 1989, Park 2009). <Figure 4-3> Photographs of the KPK Grand shows, Courtesy of Park Seong-Seo, Newspaper advertisement of KPK Grand show, Kyung Hyang Daily Newspaper ( ) Local records and performances accurately reflected the changing cultural patterns within colonial institutions during the period of U.S. military control, exposing the recurring colonial dilemma after liberation. Local popular songs in postwar Korea from this era whether their subjective matter concerns the national wealth, political emancipation, glorious independence or fantasies of westernized modernity appeared apolitically negotiated and even conspired to forget Japanese colonial history, while swinging between mass manic depressive psychotic poles, between expressing the excessive joy of liberation and soothing the collective sorrows of national dispersion. Discourses of Japanese colonial experiences after the post-liberation era in South Korea were considered to be monstrous leftovers in the consciousness of Koreans. Complex processes of detecting the pro-japanese activities among Korean musicians were deployed, to promptly extirpate the colonial past

177 163 from the Korean mentality with the tacit consent of the U.S. occupation authorities. For instance, even though Japanese ryūkōka style popular songs were heavily criticized, it was still a popular musical form among the populace, musicians and popular music entrepreneurs: Many Japanese songs are still overflowing into the streets of South Korea. Especially vulgar popular sings such as military popular songs or so-called blues tunes with lyrics that indulge in decadence are still popular. How sorrowful and pathetic this is! In consequence, the culture and education department of the government has been focused on the project of sound music education to make elegant and original music. Meanwhile, the police affairs department will start to keep strict order to eradicate vulgar popular music in every café and instrument store. Eradicate! Japanese color popular music Dong-A Daily newspaper, The process of forgetting what happened in the Japanese colonial period conspired with making Japanese-style popular songs into a national or collective taboo. Local popular songs acted as narratives of a new heyday of emancipation; songs such as Kageora sampalsun (Farewell to the 38 th parallel), Haebang Samchulli (Liberation to all of Korea), signaled this change while also campaigning for the eradication of Communism agitated for by the USAMGIK and Rhee s government, acting as veiled propaganda to purge any potential opposition to their rule by a Korean leftist party. In this complex political context, the collective consignment of the Japanese colonial experience into oblivion worked by transposing the unfulfilled grudge toward pro-japanese activity onto a fratricidal witchhunting Red-phobia, which resulted in the ideological disruptions of the Cheju Massacre and Korean War. Memories of Japanese occupation and any of its remaining infrastructure were symbolized as markers of an incomplete liquidation of the past alongside a new Korean modernization and continual colonial mentality, which concealed the hegemony negotiated between the Korean interim and U.S. military governments. USAMGIK supported anticommunism as a form of collective identification and nationalist activity, an ideological foundation for nation building that actively worked to forget the Japanese colonial experience by supplanting its memory with attention to the ideological conflicts in South Korea between nationalists and communists. Wendt proposes the concept of a collective

178 164 identification, the intersubjective, simultaneous process in which the perception of the self and the other is formed. This identification can span the continuum from negative to positive from conceiving the other as anathema to the self to conceiving it as an extension of the self (Wendt, 1994: 386). Thus, collective identification could provide a feeling of solidarity, community, and loyalty during the Cold War relations between North and South Korea. It is essential to consider individual decision-making, for, as Bloom argues, At the micro-level, identification theory can say little about how the individual decision-makers will behave. Certainly, a powerful public opinion and a mobilized national identity dynamic must affect the decision-maker, but the actual decisions will depend on the decision-makers own degree of identification, peer pressure, group mores, and individual psycho-history (Bloom 1993:104). The collective identification during the post-liberation era in Korea was effectuated as a national identity formation through various propaganda slogans, driven by both Northern and Southern interim governments and Soviet and American presences. Consequently, it is important to reconsider the legacy of Japanese infrastructural remains and how these made the continuous colonial submission to USAMGIK by postwar Koreans possible, or how leftover colonial institutions were mobilized to fix anti- Communist attitudes in Korean mentality. While American cultural policy administrators insinuated their political intentions for South Korea in such government documents as America should continue to precede the Japanese position of being Korea s big brother, 195 USAMGIK took advantage of the leftover Japanese colonial institutions and media infrastructure to spread their own Cold War propaganda. When USAMGIK started to use Seoul instead of Gyeongseong in official documents to cleanse the city of connotations of Japanese occupation, the Gyeongsung Broadcasting System (JODK) changed its name as Seoul Broadcasting System. 196 Although the American broadcast programming council in South Korea changed the title of the company, signals were still transmitted under the callsign JODK (Baek 2008). The American Military Government then rearranged and mobilized various national facilities including the broadcast system by 195 USIS Korea->USUA Washington, , Subject: USIS Country Plan for Korea, p.7, RG84, Korea Seoul Embassy Classified General Records, Box21, quoted in Hur Eun (2008). 196 According to Ban s retrospection (2005), he recollected the changed name of Gyeongseong Broadcasting System is Jung-Ang Broadcasting System (p. 191).

179 165 appointing an American electronic company salesperson and TV broadcasting specialist, Lieutenant-Colonel William A. Glass, to initiate a military broadcasting system in South Korea. However, the first channel of military transmissions was enabled by officers and workers formerly employed by the Japanese imperial occupation, since USAMGIK needed personnel who were able to work instantly. Although these modern broadcasting programs provided American-style objective journalism and proclaimed neutral broadcasting ethics while transmitting official reports on radio programs, they attempted to heighten Koreans reliance on news programming by reshuffling the local broadcasting system into three parts: a Continuity section, Production section and News and Special Events section, which transmitted propaganda to fortify anti- Communist and anti-soviet tendencies in the Korean mentality. This agenda was a significant one for radio broadcasting under USAMGIK control. The most widely accepted radio programs featured popular music broadcasting, playing American popular music like jazz, blues, swing and tango with which Koreans were already familiar from the Japanese occupation era. American popular songs such as You are my Sunshine, Besame Mucho, and Auld Lang Syne gained enormous popularity among Korean people, who were fed up with Japanese National Music (Kokumin Ongaku)-style patriotic songs. Radio broadcasting directly channeled the experience of American modernism to Koreans. After the liberation, USAMGIK tried to format the modern broadcasting system in Korea by substituting Japanese contents for American things (Baek 2008:340). Consequently, the spectral Japanese colonial facilities and institutions such as JODK, which mediated the U.S. Cold War propaganda and official reports, were not liquidated so that the colonial media system could continue to ventriloquize U.S. governmental propaganda (Kang 1985, p. 15; Rho 1986, p. 32; Yoon 1986, p. 57; Lee 1960, p. 66). The Japanese colonial infrastructure remained rooted in the mentality of postcolonial Koreans, now under the control of the U.S. Military government. Despite its official detachment from Japanese colonization, the Korean media still reproduced the submissive postcolonial symptoms under the new empire using pre-colonial techniques, including the same personnel and institutions. Therefore, the postwar landscape was permeated with a concealed colonial legacy shared by these two hegemonic occupiers. During the Korean War, the radio broadcasting system moved to Busan, a city in the south of South Korea, and

180 166 focused on boosting hostility against Communism to root out communists and enhance home front solidarity 197 by reporting war news in its first year, however after the second year of the Korean War, many programs such as comedy shows, quiz shows, and popular song programs were arranged to soothe the national malaise. Meanwhile, the phonograph record industry was established between 1945 and 1950 through the formation of small local companies like Corona (1946), Goryeo (1947), Okeh (1948), Lucky (1949), Seoul (1949) and the Orient Record Company (1947) (Hwang 1989, Lee 2004, Ban 2005, Lee 2007) since the major international phonograph companies such as Columbia and Victor were prohibited from releasing records or simply forced to cease doing business during the Total War period. However, due to the crude equipment and technological facilities, an increasing number of illegally copied phonographs and competition between these small phonograph companies, Korean music entrepreneurs had difficulty supplying locally-made records of Korean composers to their audiences, as Park Si-Choon and Kim Gyeong-Duk recount below. We didn t have enough phonograph compressors and raw materials to make phonograph records. Therefore, we had to collect old phonographs and melt and recompress them to press new records. When we repeat the records, we even could hear Japanese songs out of the newly recorded phonographs. Although there were long lines in every corner of phonograph record shops to purchase the Sillaui Dalbam (Moonlight of Shilla, performed by Hyun- In) we could only make records a day. 198 Gradually, however, they systematized and expanded their businesses by promoting a series of hit records imbued with patriotism and sung in the local vernacular, such as Kageora sampalsun (Farewell to the 38 th Parallel), Haebang Samchulli (Liberation to all of Korea), and Lucky Seoul. Since we didn t have enough condensed rubber and powdered slate to make phonograph records, we had to melt used phonograph records to fill the rill and then record songs on that material. We used to receive complaints from 197 Choi Yo-Han (1958) 10 years of Special Broadcasting, 10 years of Entertainment Broadcasting, in Bangsong (Broadcasting), August, pp , quoted in Baek (2008). 198 Park Si-Choon Naui iryeokseo, Hanguk daily newspaper, quoted in Park (2000), booklet of yuseongiro dutdeon gayosa.

181 167 people, because sometimes the record played Japanese songs from the old used phonograph. 199 The wartime phonograph industry between 1950 and 1953 was not simply the declining era of phonograph, as inferred by some scholars (Academy of Korean studies, 1998). The Korean War phase of the phonograph industry conveys the atmosphere of Korean wartime sentiment through the release of many popular hit songs such as Jeonseonyagok (Nocturne of the War Front, performed by Sin Se-Young, Orient Records, record number R815, 1950), Aneuinore (Song of Wife, performed by Shim Yeon-Ock, Orient Record, record number R815, 1952) and Gutseora Geumsuna (Be strong, Geumsun, performed by Hyun-In, Orient Record, record number T4286 R8025 A, 1953). For the phonograph industry, it was also a time of survival, when local phonograph companies in Daegu and Busan produced only a few phonograph records, since refugees including musicians and producers gathered for temporary protection away from the battlefield. The Korean War was not responsible for disconnecting pre- and postwar Korean popular music production, nor did it leave as a vacuum in Korean popular music history. In two major southern cities, Daegu, where Orient records was based and Busan, the home of Doremi records, the popular music industry continued to grow amidst the rubble of the national conflict. The Korean War created an opportunity for local refugees in cities such as Daegu and Busan, Masan and Jinhae to take part in popular music and film-making projects. Numerous hit records were produced under the Orient record label in Daegu, established in 1947 by Lee Byeong-Joo. 200 During the eight years of its business, from 1947 to1955, the Orient record company released phonograph records, including Gwigukseon (Homecoming Cruise, performed by Lee In-Kwon), Gutseora Geumsuna, (Be strong, Geumsun, performed by Hyun-In) and many other Korean War-themed military popular songs such as 6.25ui nore (Song of 6.25, Martial Orchestra Band), and Nimgesin Jeonsun (The War Frontier Line where my Lover Is, performed by Geum Sa-Hyang). 199 Kim Gyeong-Duk ( ) Kim Gyeong-Duk, Daugu senior songwriter, Daegu Ilbo Daily Newspaper. 200 For more specific story of Lee Byeong-Joo (1919), the founder of Orient Records, see the painstakingly researched and thorough archive of Orient record labels with an intensive interview with Lee Byeong-Joo of Lee Dong-Soon (2008).

182 168 <Figure 4-4> Newspaper advertisement of Nam Insoo s hit record, Kageora Sampalsun (Farewell to the 38 parallel line, 1947, Goryeo record, No. 1007, Top) Courtesy of Goryeo Record. Wartime Newspaper advertisement of Hyun-In s Manghyangui Soyagok (Serenade of Nostalgia) and Cheongchun Station (Station of Youth), 1951,6.20, Yeongnam Ilbo Daily Newspaper), left side photo is the founder of Orient Record, Lee Byeong-Joo, Courtesy of Yeongnam Ilbo Daily Newspaper Archive. The Korean War thus influenced the business expansion of the Orient record company by means of breaking with old conventions, minor restructuring and ineffective management. By promoting Korean War-themed popular songs, the Orient Record Company became a center of popular music production by harnessing resources including refugee musicians and performers from Seoul such as songwriters Kang Sa-Rang, Son Ro- Won, Lee Jae-Ho and singers like Hyun-In, Nam In-Soo and Baek Nyun-Seol. Consequently, Daegu became a dominant force in Korean popular music history during the Korean War. Many popular songs on Orient represented the emergence of complex and ambivalent feelings to the Korean Wars. The narratives of these records stimulated excruciating feelings about the fratricidal tragedy of this internal war by depicting dramatic images of the Korean War. This moment of yearning took hold in the Korean national ethos as a collective sentiment that intensified the sense of separation and placelessness.

183 169 Under these complex political circumstances, many Koreans were fascinated by the signs of American political power and material wealth conveyed to them by the U.S. military government. American popular songs were transmitted on every radio frequency, stimulating powerful emotions of an idealized America that struck a stark contrast to the harsh local situation, and the visibility of American military soldiers alleviated the sense of dislocation from the U.S. Subsequently, South Korean society relocated itself in between two continuous colonial legacies, saturated with Americanism through its accommodation of American popular culture while various remnants of Japanese colonial culture functioned as an implicit colonial memory that negated Koreans self-invention. 4. Voices That Resuscitated: Revisited the Total War Narrative in Popular Songs during the Post-Liberation Era Becoming is thus strictly correlative to the concept of REPETITION: far from being opposed to the emergence of the New, the proper Deleuzean paradox is that something truly New can only emerge through repetition. Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies, p Popular Songs during the post-liberation era ( ) Songwriter Bal Ya-Worl or Jin Bang-Nam, who wrote more than 5000 songs during his seventy-year long career, mentioned the unknown episode of Ggotmacha (Flowery Wagon, 1939), 201 reissued after the Korean War. In the retrospective Bulhyojanun Ummida (2005), he recalls that he composed the song with an unexplainable exotic atmosphere while touring the Manchurian area. The song was made during the Total War era, when Japanese military expansionism was being mobilized; the song describes this by alluding to the exotic Harbin scenery (Chinese girls as Guniang, Chinese Songhwa River) under imperial rule. Let s singing the Harbin, dancing in Harbin / Flowery wagon drives into the acacia forest / The sky is dyed orange color, Chinese girls earrings are shaking / I can here the sound of melodeon, I hear the melodic song (1 st verse) 201 See appendix 5 for the complete original Korean lyrics and music notes.

184 170 Harbin with the bumpy rough roads, dreaming Harbin / I can hear the ladies humming through the nose/ Songhwa river (Chinese river) waves up and down / shiny stars are twinkling in the breathing sky / I can hear the sound of saxophone, I hear the melodic song (2 nd verse) Performed by Jin Bang-Nam, Tapyeong Record, Ban claims that, Originally the lyric was let s singing Harbin, Dancing with Harbin, not let s singing flowery Seoul, (Ban 2005). Korean popular songs in the postliberation era were used to intensify a sense of liberation from Japanese occupation by ironically reorganizing and remaking the old songs from the Japanese colonial era. Thus, the song was performed and reappropriated as Let s singing Flowery Seoul and dancing in Seoul, because the Broadcasting Ethics Committee (Bangsong Yulli Wiweonhoe) asked Ban to change the song since the title and some lyrics specifically referred to the adversarial ex-colonizer s territory. Ban describes how Korean popular songs during Total War era had to be performed partly in Japanese, so he would compose the songs in Japanese, then rewrite the piece in Korean: When we rehearsed the performance before recording the song, lyricist Lee Jae-Ho made Japanese version of the song lyrics. Then we changed the Japanese lyrics to Korean. At that time, we (composers) used to use Japanese language all the time. When we went to Harbin for touring, the place remained so impressive to me, so I made the song. (Transcribed by Lee Young-Mee, Archives of Oral History) 203 Much evidence in extant sheet music indicates that Korean popular songs in the post-liberation era served to help local Koreans as well as Korean immigrants from Shanghai or Manchuria to psychologically adjust to life in their post-liberation homeland by reissuing various popular songs, which ironically had mobilized them for Japanese militarism. The content of these popular songs and their cultural messages served to document national sentiments and the identities of postwar Koreans, arousing emotional intensities and the exuberance of liberation, which implicitly accommodated past colonial 202 According to Lee Young-Mee s interview with Ban Ya-Worl, the phonograph record was released in 1942, and he changed the song lyrics right after the Korean War, saying, after recovered South Korean territory, I reissued the song, two or three times on different record labels. 203 The Oral History of Korean Arts has documented interviews with few prominent popular musicians and composers alive to record their individual memories. See

185 171 experiences. These collective memories were reflected in the national ethos or nostalgic sentiment in many Korean popular music shows. Memory in popular song was problematic during this specific period era, acting as a metonym of the national split and collective melancholy and showing symptoms of repetition-compulsion by rehearsing the Total War mentalities. The excruciating vocalizations and melancholic minor-key of songs narrating these sentiments of this national tragedy of separateness symbolize perpetual memory among Koreans. The experience of extreme colonial cruelty and the degrading practices of Total War were embedded within Koreans memories as if continuing the credence of Hiroo Onoda. 204 The narratives of Total War were resuscitated in a perverse way that was passionately attached to the southern tropical and led to a resurgence of the feminized narrative of sacrificing the healthy son/husband for the nation-state. Thus, popular music in this era (in between postliberation and post-korea War) particularily harbors some of the more dubious raw materials for forming Korean identity, elements that continue to have significance in the present. Kim Dong Geun is the host of Gayomudae (The Stage of Korean Popular Song), the Korean Broadcasting System s oldest popular music program, which has aired since 1985 to an audience made up of this older generation. In his introductory comments to each show, he reminds us that Korean popular songs between the post-liberation era and the Korean War were pure representations of the national ethos or collective feeling. The show s executive producer, Oh Jun-Gyu, says of the key to the show s longevity: I think Gayomudae can call national ethos to Korean mind. We can recollect the old days with tears and joys through listening Korean popular songs. 205 More than five hundred thousand audience members attended, fifteen thousand songs were performed, and twenty television producers passed through the show (Kim 2001); Gayomudae became a showcase for old Korean popular music as well as for collective memory and nostalgia. 206 As Yano 204 Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese army intelligence officer marooned in Lubang Island in the Philippines since He didn t surrender until 1974, almost 30 years after the second World War because he believed that news of the Japanese defeat was Allied propaganda. 205 Park Seong-Seo(2000) Old Song is our heartfelt hometown Interview with Gayomudae s Oh Jun-Gyu producer < As Yano (2001:19) said, the NHK, Japan s national public broadcasting system, acted as the apparatus of discourses, technologies and institutions that produce what is generally recognized as

186 172 explains it, the reason for the Japanese affection for Enka 207 is that, first, it rehumanizes the modern audience by returning them to their own emotional wetness, by narrating more personal and intimate details of their lives, and secondly, enka can specifically explain the Japanese sentiments (Yano 2002). For similar reasons, Korean popular songs are commonly called Gayo in Korean, build upon processes of nostalgically-framed sentiments and expressions which can serve as a displacement of collective remembering and forgetting. According to the research of Kim Jeom-Do (2001), the most frequently performed Korean popular songs on the Gayomudae program were created between 1940 and the 1950s, as follows: Rank Song Title Year Performer Record Label 1 Jjilleggot (Wild Rose Flower) 1942 Baek Nan-A Taepyeong Kumebon Naegohyang (I saw my hometown in my dream) 1953 Han Jeong-Mu Domino 2 Binarinun gomoryeong (Rainy Gomoryeong) 1947 Hyun-In Lucky Ulgoneumnun Bakdaljae (Sorrowful Bakdaljae Valley) 1948 Park Jae-Hong Goryeo 3 Naguneui Serum (Vagabond Grief) 1940 Baek Nyeon-Seul Taepyeong 4 Beonjiyupnun Jumak (Inn without address) 1940 Baek Nyeon-Seul Taepyeong 5 Cheonyeobaesagong(Virgin Boat Lady) 1957 Hwang Jeong-Ja Rara 6 Bulhyojaneun Ummida (Unfilial Son is crying) 1940 Jin Bang-Nam Taepyeong 7 Hwangsungyeteo (Ruins of Hwangsung) 1932 Lee Erisu Victor 8 Mokpoeui nunmul (Tears in Mokpo) 1935 Lee Nan-Young Okeh 9 Seonchang (Quay) 1941 Go Un-Bong Taepyeong 10 Mullebangadoneun Neryeok (Rounding history of watermill) 1954 Park Jae-Hong Doremi <Figure 4-5> The most requested popular songs on Gayomudae 208 What constraints does the colonial experience establish around popular song narratives during the post-liberation era? How do popular songs relations to social contexts exacerbate the national collective ethos of this specific era? The production of cultural memory through popular songs in this period is historically situated by generating recollections through voices tangled with historical incidents, such as the shift from the schizophrenic exhilaration of national liberation, capturing moments of longing and yearning and the excruciating sense of national separation and alienation accompanying the 38 th military demarcation. During the post-liberation era, the phonograph industry searched for a new icon of Korean popular songs by auditioning. Song Min-Do, born in Lungjing, the national culture. KBS also conveyed national ethos through popular songs, Gayo in s symbolizing it as sense of nation. 207 An elegiac Japanese popular music genre. 208 Kim Jeom-Do (2001) Database for KBS Gayomudae 15 th anniversary, KBC publisher.

187 173 Manchuria but repatriated to Korea after the liberation, was singled out to be the heroine singer and consequently debuted with a big hit number, Gohangcho (Forest of my hometown, written by Kim Da-In, composed by Park Si-Choon, Okeh record) in after an audition for Chung-Ang broadcasting s singer contest. 210 When petrol flies to the far southern sky / Camellia blossoms in the backyard garden / The girls picking mulberry left home behind to Seoul / Did you forget our beloved people and hometown! (1 st verse) When petals of wild rose shattered on the water / spring passed in my hometown with a frosty wind / where all my beloved people go / did you forget the smell of soil! (2 nd verse) Gohangcho (Forest of my hometown) Performed by Song Min-Do, Okeh Record 1947 In contrast to the alleged severity of Japanese imperialism, USAMGIK control instituted a scheme of colonial government through speedy rehabilitation, social projects and modernization, and by projecting an image of itself as a beneficent and humanitarian leadership in postwar Korea. Consequently, many Koreans moved to Seoul searching for jobs. According to Lee & Cho s study of social movement during the U.S. occupation era, the rate of population increase in metropolitan Seoul is considerable during and after the USAMGIK control of Seoul (25.4%), Gyeonggi (5.7%) (Lee & Cho, 1997:61, See appendix 4). Thus, the theme of the song Gohangcho is based in a nostalgic sentimentality and distance, depicting a hometown with camellia trees and wild roses, to signify the concept of original values and as places that people identify with and have strong feelings about (Nostrand & Estaville 1993:2-3). Song Min-Do became popular with her husky alto voice that was distinct from other singers, and she released many popular songs such as Nahanauisarang (My only love 1955), Cheongsil Hongsil (Blue thread, Red thread 1956), and Katyushaui nore (Song of Katyusha 1960). She retired from the entertainment business when she moved to Saigon 209 According to Park (2009), Gohyangcho was originally performed in the theatre play Odongnamu of Ramira vaudeville shows in 1944 (p. 58). 210 She recollected the contest, saying I should sing anything I can do best, so I sung Nina composed by Hyun Jae-Myeong. But the panel of judges asked me if I can sing some popular song, of which I know nothing. So I eventually sang Stagecoach runs (Yeokmachanun Dalinda) by Jang Se-Jeong, but I had to stop since I didn t know the lyrics. I was so embarrassed because the audition was on air throughout the whole country. Park Seong-Seo (2006), Korean first husky voice, Song Min-Do, Seoul Daily Newspaper,

188 174 to take care of her son who was dispatched to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. Thirty years later, Song was invited to Gayomudae to sing her very first number, Gohangcho, to celebrate the show s 1000 th episode in <Figure 4-6> Song Min-Do s appearance on the Korean Popular music show, Gayomudae 1000 th anniversary, ( ), Courtesy of Korea Broadcasting System (KBS). Captured by the author. Song Min-Do, an 87 year old former celebrity, sang her debut number Gohangcho in 2006, which delivered a mixture of hometown nostalgia and betrayed the passage of time through the dilapidated quality of her voice. It was as if she provided twentieth-century Korean modern history compressed into a single song, reflecting her entire life interspersed in countless emigration histories of the passage from Manchuria to Vietnam, a popular song summoning Korean audiences to collective memory, which Sturken (1997) describes as entangled between cultural memory and history as nostalgia. Thus, the process of Korean history is closely related to cultural memory, which is conveyed through popular songs engaged as a historical narrative of the Korean populace. Popular songs offer an appropriate terrain on which to examine how colonial experiences were engaged in post-liberation Koreans mentalities, and how this postcolonial imaginary evokes the relations between colonizers and colonized. Popular songs from this era also provide a site to examine the linked nature of colonial memories and post-colonial cultural activity and consumption as these are developed by colonial musicians through their appropriations of colonial experiences as tropes that rewrite the history of the post-liberation and Korean War era. Hyun-In, whose real name was Hyun Dong-Ju, is a reknowned diasporic popular singer repatriated after a long sojourn in Tokyo and several Chinese cities. He created many influential popular songs that were inspired by trendy western chords and melodies, such as Sillaui Dalbam (Moonlight of Shilla, 1949), Gohyangmalli (Nostalgia for my Hometown, 1946) and Binarinun gomoryeong (Rainy Gomoryeong, 1949). He was born

189 175 in 1912 and graduated from Tokyo s Ueno Music institute. As he looked back on his motivation to becoming a singer, he said I went to a Chaliapin 211 concert when I was in Tokyo. I was so moved by this performance, that I dreamt of becoming a singer. 212 If we accommodate Hannerz s insights on cosmopolitanism, which he elaborates as entail[ing] relationships to a plurity of cultures understood as distinct entities, (Hannerz 1990), then Hyun-In, as an expatriate, was a person who had chosen to live abroad since his father, the Japanese Mainichi Newspaper journalist, moved to Tokyo. His transnational life began during his childhood. After entering the Ueno Music institute to learn classical music, in 1935 he auditioned for the NHK chorus, since he preferred American Jazz and French Chanson over German music theory, and he was an NHK member until 1942 (Choi 2003). Tokyo, as a colonial metropolis and a core Naichi ( 內地 inner), was a melting pot of transnational cultures, so Hyun-In ( ) was living in a cosmopolitan social and cultural sphere. Since he was heavily influenced by various western popular music genres in metropolitan Tokyo, he commemorated his affection for them by adopting the stage name, Hyun-In ( 玄仁 ), which united his Korean name, Hyun Dong-Joo ( 玄東柱 ), and his Japanese name, Goto Hitoshi ( 後藤仁 ). However, when the Japanese empire strictly imposed its Total War scheme in mainland Tokyo and other colonial territories after the outbreak of Sino-Japanese War, Hyun escaped to China since he did not want to be conscripted into the Japanese army (Park 2009). He organized vaudeville shows with other musicians including Park Dan-Ma, performing many foreign popular songs during tours of Tianjin, Hangzhou and Shanghai. After the liberation, Hyun came back to Korea and performed many exotic songs intermixed with reproductions of foreign songs such as Besame Mucho, 213 and Under the Apple Tree onstage with the Hawaiian Tango Band (figure 4-7). Hyun-In pioneered a series of new music genres in postwar Korea, such as the Tango, Cha Cha and Mambo as well as Jazz, Chanson and Canzone. 211 Feodor Ivanovich Chaliapin ( ) is famous Russian opera singer with a bass voice. Hyun-In saw his performance when he toured in Tokyo, Hibia goukaidou when he was 5 year old. 212 Choi Gyu-Sung (2003), Hyun-In, Weekly Hankook, Bésame Mucho is a Mexican popular song, written in 1940 by Consuelo Velázquez. Although the meaning of the song title is in Spanish, meaning Kiss me much, many Koreans as well as Hyun-In himself thought that Besame Mucho was an exotic (beautiful) female name as in the Korean adapted song lyric like, Besame mucho! You re a cute little girl like a lilac flowers / Besame mucho! You re a lonely Santa Maria.

190 176 <Figure 4-7> Hyun-In (left) and Yoo-Ho standing in front of the Lucky Record in Courtesy of Park Seong-Seo. His most famous song, Shillaui Dalbam, with a Bolero rhythm, was originally written by Cho Myeong-Am, a renowned poet and lyricist who moved to North Korea; the original bore the title Indoui Dalbam (Moonlight of India). Cho was furious after recognizing the song lyrics were changed to Sillaui Dalbam by Yoo-Ho, 214 who became a musical partner of Hyun-In. In between the post-liberation era and Korean War, Hyun-In recorded many phonograph albums, collaborating with lyricist Yoo-Ho and composer Park Si-Choon. Gohyangmalli (Nostalgia for my hometown) was one of them. Constellation in southern country is my mother s face /That familiar face in my dream / Over the sea, where flowers bloom and birds chirp /I can clearly see the way to my home (1 st verse) 214 Park (2009) recounted to Hwang Mun-Pyeong the story behind Shillaui Dalbam, saying that the song was originally made as Taegukui ggum (Dream of Thailand) for the vaudeville show singer, Gye Soo-Nam. According to Lee Young-Mee s interview with Yoo-Ho, he denied the plagiarism of the Moonlight of India.

191 177 The bird, crying in the deep night in Borneo /Do you know my lonely circumstance deserted in this alien land / My heart s throbbing for yearning (2 nd verse) Gohyangmalli (Nostalgia for my Hometown) Written by Yoo-Ho, composed by Park Si-Choon, performed by Hyun-In Lucky Record, LUCKY L-7709, Among his many exotic popular songs, Gohyangmalli (Nostalgia for my Hometown, 1946) displayed an interesting postwar melancholia and reflected the Nambang desire (for Japanese southern territory). In these lyrics, which suggest the impossibility of escaping from the colonial past, he croons to represent a lingering melancholia by describing the Japanese southern territory of Borneo. The subject of the song s lyrics is situated in the southern island of Japanese occupation territory as a volunteer soldier. Pro- Japanese lyrist Yoo-Ho, 216 territories, as he recollects: wished to rewrite the colonial past in Japan s wartime southern Yoo-Ho: Why (did I write) Borneo? Well south, to the southern part, I would like to write somewhere in southern part. Then I thought Borneo, probably that s the reason why I wrote Borneo. Well as you know, during the Japanese wartime, they occupied Borneo, as you know. (Transcribed by Lee Young-Mee, Archives of Oral History) Postwar Korea s desires for American material wealth made it more difficult to achieve a proper liquidation of Japanese colonial experiences during the post-liberation era. Indeed, Hyun-In s nostalgiac reminiscing about the exotic southern territory with a Tango rhythm is very similar in tune to Kim Hae-song s nihilistic popular song entitled Pungchadonun Gohyang (Hometown where the Windmill Revolves, Columbia, 1938), 215 See appendix 6 for complete Korean lyrics and music notes. Bold is my emphasis for the postwar reappropriation of Nambang discourse (Imperial discourse on the sountern territory) 216 He recollected that he didn t want Korea to be liberated from Japan, in the interview that follows: Yoo-Ho: When I was in Tokyo, suddenly America occupied Japan. At that time, I had some money in my pocket, so I went out with my friend, Hong Young-Gi, who was a student of Waseda University in Tokyo. [ ] we drank all night at that night. Lee Young-Mee: Did you feel great? Because America occupied Japan, so you went out for celebration? Yoo-Ho: No, rather, I felt bad, I drank because I felt so bad. Lee Young-Mee: You didn t want to come back to Korea? Yoo-Ho: No, I didn t want to. You know, I hoped to live in the free world (Japan). And I love the art school that I attended.

192 178 which was composed in the early Total War period. In Chogwang magazine s special critical review of wartime Korean popular music in 1940, 217 the contributors concluded that the Jazzified (jazzuhwa) Japanese music business, influenced by western popular music, subsequently adopted serious Argentine Tango styles and exotic rumba rhythms during wartime, while increasing the production of military popular songs. Considering how the wartime situation gradually evolved in colonial Korea, various exotic rhythms and melodies preoccupied Korean minds as a means of imagining the tropical South of Japanese occupation territories through a sentimental Tango beat. As Said has said, an imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance between what is close to it and what is far away. 218 <Figure 4-8> Postwar popularity of Nambang discourses remained in popular culture, such as Hawaiian Tango band playing You and Me, Night of southern country (Newspaper advertisements from left, , top 1.18, bottom 2.13), Kyeong Hyang Sinmun Daily Newspaper. The imaginary hometown in Gohyangmalli suggests the placeless location where vanishing representations of the military southern specters were resuscitated as a form of loss and unlocatable yearning in the midst of postwar Korea. By recalling the colonial past in a rhythmic Tango, many musicians and composers tried to distance themselves from 217 Chogwang (1940) Jeonsiha recodugyeui hyeonghwang (Circumstances of record business in wartime) pp Said, Edward (1979) Orientalism, Vintage Books P.55

193 179 their feelings of guilt using forms of melancholic ambivalence. As Žižek argued regarding the Freudian terms of normal mourning as the successful acceptance of loss and a pathological melancholy, where the subject persists in his or her narcissistic identification with the lost object, (Žižek 2001) postcolonial fantasies of the South maintained an appearance of surplus fidelity to the colonial past, attached to Koreans as a kind of pure melancholy. Because colonial Koreans fantasy of the southern territory (Nambang) was of a thing that they never possessed, it is thus something which can never be lost, resulting in pure melancholy. This is consistent with Žižek s interpretation of postcolonial-ethnic mourning and melancholy, where he argues that, when ethnic groups enter capitalist modernization and are under threat that their specific legacy will be swallowed up by the new global culture, they should not renounce their tradition through mourning, but retain their melancholic attachment to their lost roots, (Žižek 2001:142). Koreans colonial experiences were twisted through a doubly structured (cultural) modernity and a (sociopolitical/capitalist) modernization. Since the Japanese colonial structure was so deeply rooted in the formation of Korean modernity, the experience of being colonized by Japan was also linked as an object of lost roots to post-liberation Koreans, resulting in a double loss. Thus, these narratives of postwar Korea, of colonial memory and post-colonial cultural activity, collided in popular songs, where they recalled historical events full of exotic melancholy by sanitizing the political histories of pain. The existence of certain colonial continuities or, rather, structural repetitions of postwar trauma, resurfaced in popular song lyrics as both an ambivalent dissociation from the colonial past and an absence from this past, in which the colonial subjects unconsciously repeated their colonial history by identifying with the new ruler, the U.S. military government. Butler argues that, the act of internalization transforms the object; the other is taken in and transformed into an ego, but an ego to be reviled, thereby both producing and strengthening the critical agency commonly called conscience, (Butler 1997: ). The post-traumatic experiences of this post-liberation condition can thus be linked to a state of hypnotic abjection and colonial discontinuity, where the loss of the colonial master is split off from the ego as an expression of postcolonial melancholy. Korean popular songs represent a posthumous melancholia through the voices of diasporic singers recollecting ghostly

194 180 memories from the imagined Nambang territory. Meanwhile, manifestations of patriotic narratives in the song lyrics were also associated with the complex form of codeswitching, as Silverberg calls it. People come back / they all come back / to the dreamy home country How long have we been yearning for the rose of Sharon (Korean National flower)? / How long have we been miss the Taegukgi flag (Korean National flag)? / Let the seagulls chant / Let the wavees dance / As I standing in the prow, my hope is growing further Homecoming Cruise (Gwigukseon) performed by Lee In-Gwon, Lee In-Gwon, who came back from Shanghai after liberation charged with the euphoria of emancipation and national reunion, expressed this in his song lyrics by building a patriotic ideology to share with other scattered Koreans, including his repatriated compatriots. However, he narrated this compulsory pure happiness by over-exaggerating national symbols. The efficacy of veiling ideology in patriotic popular songs consists in the formation of an unconditional patriotic conscience, where the concept of a conscience that popular songs transmit is defined by what was utterable or representable during the post-liberation era. The structure of feeling 220 in popular songs designated the limitations of rhetorical reflexivity to this post-liberation subjectivity, which convoluted internal and external identifications that constantly feeding back into self-identification with the colonial period. By building a structure of performative consciousness confined to excessive national patriotism reminiscent of the Total War ethos of patriotic mobilization through popular songs, the overstatement of nationalist jargons as popular narrative in songs in this era often hindered the rhetorical reproductivity of Korean subjects who experienced strict colonial control and surveillance. The ecstasy of liberation day and repatriation to the home country were depicted through various national signifiers, such as the home country (Gohyang), rose of Sharon (Mugunghwa), and Taegukgi flag. These rhetorical symbols paradoxically constituted the ambivalence of continuous submission, for the post-liberated Korean subjects held under foreign control by USAMGIK grew oblivious 219 See appendix 6 for complete Korean lyrics and music notes. Bold is my emphasis for Korean national symbol imbuing nationalism. 220 Raymond Williams used the term structure of feeling to designate the emotional bonding generated by values and practices shared by a specific group, class, or culture. The concept includes ideology, in the sense of an articulated structure of beliefs, but also ranges beyond it to encompass collective desires and concerns below the conscious level.

195 181 to colonial experiences by repressing past memories and by encouraging patriotism. This continuous submission of Koreans between USAMGIK control and the Korean War era bred the conscientious reproduction of anti-communist and pro-american sentiment in the Korean consciousness. The Korean popular music scene of the post-liberation era was characterized by a multitude of twists, where the narratives of each of the two consecutive foreign controllers and a disjointed modernity collided. The narratives of popular songs revealed both a nostalgia for a surplus Southern fantasy and totalitarian symptoms in the guise of patriotism. Thus, the bilateral relations with a Japanese colonial past and USAMGIK control had a profound impact on Korean national identity, enabling a self-transformation through the ideological self-reproduction of Cold War logics and a capitalist desire for westernized modernization Korean War, Revived Colonial Specters and Traumatic Mimesis ( ) The narratives of Korean popular songs during the Korean War ( ) are interesting for their revival of the Total War narrative, especially through in military popular songs. During the Japanese occupation ( ), ambivalent imperial subjects in colonial Korea were eager to experience western modernity, an impulse which they selfcensored in the face of indoctrinating Japanese imperialistic logic and military expansionism, which psychologically transposed Koreans as an outerside to the inner empire, and created an us against this other. These ambivalent interactions with empires were represented in the popular media. In the brief years between the post-liberation era and the outbreak of Korean War, posthumous colonial narratives were resuscitated and symptoms of the emotional residue of the Total War ethos were apparent in the surplus fascination with a southern fantasy and the public fever for exotic popular music. Significantly, the apporopriation of the Total War ethos in narratives of popular music during the Korean War shows the facinating spectacle of the sacrifice of South Koreans facing particular losses by narrating Imperial logics of Total War and by mimicking the Total War sensibility. Žižek designates it as the very act of sacrifice that we (presup)pose the existence of its addressee that guarantees the consistency and meaningfulness of our

196 182 experience so, even if the act fails in its proclaimed goals, this very failure can be read from within the logic of sacrifice as our failure to appease the Other. 221 The subject (presup)poses the narrative of Other in the guise of patriotism or nationalism by appropriating the feminine narrative of sacrificing the healthy son/husband for the nationstate, the narrativization of the home front female and the dissemination of patriotic military songs. There s nothing subversive or anti-colonial in these popular music forms, which instead betray a repetitious, spectre-like, victim story overlapping with the Korean War. Various traditional notions such as the nation state, vernacular language and territoriality of the nation-state were coterminous with past colonial experiences, so that Koreans were easily subsumed into the logics of militarism and masculinity expounded by the U.S. military during the Korean War, which ventriloquized Total War narratives. These contradictory colonial mentalities were represented in various popular songs during the Korean War. Indeed, the problems of popular representations during the Korean War lay in how best to represent and mourn for their own losses. Thus, with a particular emphasis on the revived colonial narratives in that were reminiscent of Japanese Total war narratives, I will now try to explore the intervenient mentalities of Koreans between two colonial experiences through popular songs where the consciousness of Koreans in post-liberation era was still struggling to deal with the colonial past. Shaking Taegukgi flags, I hear the train whistle was blowing in the day break platform where my beloved left When we hear the sound of Hurrah up in the sky Which battle front are you on now? (x2) Oh, my brave although you fight fiercely, please be well (1 st verse) Holding your hand and wishing for your blessing The platform where I saw you off is now in the sun The day when we departed under the waving flags Which battle front are you on now? (x2) Oh, my brave although you fight fiercely, please be well (2 nd verse) 221 Žižek, Slavoj (1992, 2001) Why Is Woman a Symptom of Man?, Enjoy Your Symptom! : Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out, revised edition, New York and London, Routledge, p56

197 183 Nimgyesin Jeonseun (The battle frontline where my beloved is) Written by Son Ro-Won, composed by Park Si-Choon, Performed by Geum Sa-Hyang, Orient record 1952 <Figure 4-9> Geum Sa-Hyang, recording Nimgyesin Jeonseon in 1952 Photo Courtesy of Park Seong-Seo When the Korean War approached its end with the proposal of a Korean War armistice under the aegis of the United Nation s, various popular songs were produced by the Orient record company such as Jeonsunyagok (Serenade in the Front line of the Battle Field, Orient records, ), Anaeui Nore (Song of a Soldier s Wife, Orient records, ) and Nimgyesin Jeonseun (Battle Frontline where my Beloved Is, Orient records, 1952). Since North Korea s invasion of the South on June 25 th, 1950 created another war memory in tandem with the Total War ethos, the Korean War changed thought regarding how the Cold War could be waged in South Korea through the return of the repressed Total War memory. According to Lee s oral history record, in an interview with singer Geum Sa-Hyang, Geum said after the 10 hour trip to Busan from Jeju Island, we went further to Daegu via military truck to record with the Orient record company. In the midst of wartime, I recorded this song and I was a pure virgin to sing this song (the song is a story about wife seeing off her husband). The original verse for the first part was where my beloved will leave not left. I don t know how it changed, (Lee 2008:312). This narrative repeats in the open wounds, the rituals of mourning reverberate in the

198 184 battlefield by imitating an unspeakable past. While the beloved has already left the hometown for the battlefield, the female left behind wishes for her husband/son back home safe again. This military song theme feels like a déjà-vu of the Total War military popular song and its ethos, reviving leftover Japanese memories. Whether the Korean government was engaged in the production of these military popular songs or not, the timing of the record industry s campaign to market this narrative, so similar to the Total War ethos, and their choosing issuing popular military songs is not surprising. Direct governmental engagement in the production of military songs during the Korean War has never been established, and considering the fierce wartime circumstances lacking any official censorship of cultural activities it seems safe to presume that this music originated spontaneously from local phonograph entrepreneurs such as the Orient and Doremi record companies to stimulate national sentiment and reflect emotional reactions to the Korean War. However, several military songs were produced under the auspices of the Orient record company in Daegu after the Headquarters of Republic of Korea Army moved to Daegu. The colonel of the department of information and education, Lee Jeong-Hoon, who was also known as a historian and former governor of educational affairs, opened his office as Lee Byeong-Joo, the managing director of Orient record recollected (Lee 2008). I went to Lee and asked, let s do some record business, since military song is also a central matter to the department of information and education. Then he said, I was timely to planning to make some songs. So we found a congenial spirit. 222 The result was the famous military song, Jeonwooya Jalgageora (Farewell to my Fellow Soldiers, 1950). 223 The circumstances of the Korean War provided a contrast to those of the Total War, in which Koreans were forcefully conscripted onto the Other s battlefield to supplement Japanese expansionist efforts. Thus, during the Total War era, colonial Koreans were situated in a spectatorial position. However, the Korean War set in motion the wartime conditions that shared a similar narrative to Total War military popular song themes. 222 Lee Dong-Soon (2008:326) wrote an oral history on Lee Byeong-Joo, the Orient record company s managing director and president of the company. 223 The song lyrics are as follows, Marching further over a fellow soldier s dead body, go to the front, go to the front / Goodbye to the Nakdong River, we will march to further /Defeating all the malicious enemies soaked in blood /Died like a shedding petal, rest in the grave, my fellow soldier (1 st verse), Jeonwooya Jalgageora (Farewell to my Fellow Soldier), written by Yoo-Ho, composed by Park Si-Choon, performed by Hyun-In, Orient Records 1950

199 185 (1 st verse) The road my beloved went was a glorious way / I turned back and hided my tears / After you went to the battlefield, your oath will be my lamp / In the midst of windy rainy road in a dark night / My lonely heart overflows with full of joy / (Narration) As if I saw your face when I received this letter from you / I fall a sleep with full of happiness / Your words to me that I should go through and endure everything I confront / I won t forget even in my dream, in my life / You are the one who decided to go further to make my country, my family and my people peaceful / How should I compensate your braveness with my wifely duties / I am indebted to you for my weak heart / When I get lonely I used to sing this song / Then your heart far, far away came to me and soothed me / this my weak heart, this heart/ my thou Anaeui nore (Song of Wife) Written by Yoo-Ho, composed by Son Mok-In, Performed by Shim Yeon-Ock, Orient Records R-815, Similar to the Total War military songs intended to mobilize the colonial home front, military songs during the Korean War narrated female perspectives using female singers. Anaui Nore (Song of wife) is reminiscent of Wife of a Suicide Squad (Okeh, 1943), which reports a woman s sentiments after receiving a letter from her husband. Describing the Korean War as a glorious way is controversial since it was an internal civil war. The Korean War resulted in high casualties: more than two million Koreans, the majority of them civilians, lost their lives on both sides of Korea for this ideological conflict between capitalism and communism. Those South Korean soldiers dispatched to the ROK (Republic of Korea) Army fought against their own. These contradictory narratives clearly reflect the feminine experience of the colonial home front, by expressing her overjoyed happiness after sending off her husband. By sacrificing her husband (or son), the project of nationalistic ideology mimicking the Total War narrative is completed, as figure 4-10 shows in the parental advice dispensed to a son sent to the battlefield. Many popular songs voicing the experience of mothers or wives can be found during Korean War era, such as Ilsunui Oppa (My Brother on the Frontline, performed

200 186 by Cha Eun-Hee, Sin Sin Records), Neadeulsosik (My Son s News, performed by Kwon Jeong-Ae, Orient Records), Weosingteon Burusu (Washington Blues, performed by Lee Mee-Ja, King Star Records), Danjangui miarigoge (Heartbreaking Miari Valley, performed by Lee Hae-Yeon, Oasis Records), Sarangui Gil (Path of Love, performed by Kwon Hye-Gyeong, Oasis Records) and Anaeui Nore (Song of Wife, performed by Shim Yeon-Ock, Orient Records). Meanwhile, male singers describing the Korean War ethos, also often represented the miserable circumstances of the women left behind in the wartime Korea, in tunes such as Ggutseora Geumsuna (Be stong, Geumsun, performed by Hyun- In, Orient Records, T-4286), Gyeongsangdo Agassi (Lady from Gyeongsangdo Province, performed by Park Jae-Hong, Midopa Records, M-502) and Hujeonseon Elegy (Elegy for the Truce Line, performed by Nam In-Soo, Universal Records P1043). Leys described mimesis as a form of hypnotic identification, borrowing Freudian Borch-Jacobsen s argument that mimesis does not refer to the simple imitation of a model or to fictive simulation, both of which presume the existence of a spectating subject (Leys 2000:14). Leys further argues that when dealing with a traumatic confusion, hypnosis acts as a condition that subject enters into on a conscious and voluntary basis and is the result of a consensual agreement between hypnotist and subject. Therefore, the hypnotic acting is not a reproduction of a prior trauma, but an imaginative, invented performance deliberately carried out according to the hypnotist s demands and the subject s expectations, (Leys 2000:165). Having not properly healed or liquidated the Japanese colonial experiences and Total War trauma, post-liberation Korean subjects can be read as still being hypnotized by their reproduction of the colonial past by narrating Total War sentiments in military popular songs. Thus, military popular songs released during the Korean War era can be conceived of as actors that performed or mimed their hypnotic role (Leys 2000:166) to conform with various narratives of colonial popular songs from the Total War era. Leys continues, quoting Ferenczi s philosophy of suffering to describing war trauma, arguing that the traumatized person, or in the Korean case those who are familiar with the War trauma, the collective of people who experienced the Total War are a people, shocked out of consciousness into a condition of trance-like incorporation or imitation of the violent other. Thus the inescapability of colonial trauma among Koreans, collectively, is rearticulated in

201 187 wartime military popular songs as a traumatic mimesis, yet this is done on a totally conscious and voluntary basis during the Korean Wars, which is equivalent to what Leys called hypnotic possession. 224 <Figure 4-10> 1 a calligraphy of parents of an ROK Army soldier. When you go to the battlefield, you must win and perform a meritorious deeds to accomplish the national reunification; written by grandfather of a soldier, Kim Won-Jun. Courtesy of the War Memorial Museum (Jeonjengkinyeomkwan), Yongsan, Seoul, Republic of Korea. Photographed by the author (left) 2 A Korean mother feeding her son, who is about to be dispatched to the battlefield, Daegu Station, Courtesy of NARA, reported by Yeonhap News ( ). Commemorating the 58 th anniversary of the Korean War, NARA recently released 47 photographs to the public in The black and white photograph of a mother feeding her son in Daegu station on December 19 th, 1950 (figure 4-10), captures the bodies situated 224 Leys, Ibid., pp She further mentioned that, traumatic mimesis was equivalent to hypnotic possession: the victim of trauma behaved like someone who, shattered and without ego defenses, had no other recourse than to become hysterically and hypnotically possessed by the aggressor. She explains the victims reactions to the consecutive traumas by borrowing Ferenczu s argument that the hypnotized victim as capable of beholding the traumatic scene, no ordinary spectating was involved. In his [Ferenczi] s account, the traumatic operation gave the appearance of deploying forces that were capable of brilliantly perceiving how to proceed in order to cope with the trauma by imitating the aggressor but the perception involved was not that of a fully integrated or volitional ego.

202 188 in wartime Korea, suffering from the bifurcation of North from South, the foreign controls driven and divided by ideological motives and two fratricidal (4.3 Je-Ju Massacre and Korean War), all engraved into the collective memory of Koreans. These revived memories transmitted through a photograph produce a sense of melancholia entangled into individual and cultural memories. Popular song encompasses and unites the voices of wartime Koreans and the standard narratives of popular song, retroactively shaping the cultural logic of the Korean War imaginary, engaged with excruciating memory. Hearing the noises of the gunfight as a lullaby/ I ran to my home town, my house in my dream/ My mother prayed for my credit putting Jeonghwasu (pure water drawn from well)/ I cried because my mother s hairs were so dazzlingly white / I wish I could hold her (2 nd verse) Jeonseonyagok (Nocturne of the War Front) Performed by Sin Se-Young, Orient Records, record number R815, 1950 After I heard the sad news about my son s, I came here/ Lots of Mugunghwa flowers blossom in a sunny spot on my son s grave/ I picked bunches of Mugunghwa decorating my son s grave (1 st verse) Goodbye my son, goodbye to anonymous nameless soldiers/ Who should I be looking for in my hometown where you are no more / Oh. My son, my crying, welling up with sorrow / It is my joy to become the mother of hero (2 nd verse) Neadeului Sosik (My son s news), Written by Son Ro-Hyun, composed by Son Mok-In, Performed by Kwon Jeong-Ae, Orient Records As if these songs dramatized the photograph, the narratives of mother and son intersect like the knowledge of the things behind the things. The popular song hauntingly captures the tragedy of each individual life, between the apparitions of a living soldier returned home to see his mother, and the mother standing in front of her son s grave. Gordon defined this as a ghost or ghostly matters, saying, the ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life, (Gordon, 2008). Postwar musicians inscribed wartime tragedy into the narratives of individual pseudo-histories to expose an extended national history. These narratives, appropriating the Total War ethos and

203 189 embodied in popular song, exposed the persistent colonial operations of empire. However, the tactility of this hypnotic possession by the colonial past is expressed through revived military discourses and excessive fantasies of the South, transmuting Korean subjectivity in their continuous colonial experience by constructing another peripheral position. Korean subjectivity, by doubling the postwars within, can thus be located as plural ways of being in the world, (Chakrabarty 2000:101). 5. Hauntology of Unremitting Traumatic Modernity The law of the State is not the law of All or Nothing (State societies or counter-state societies) but that of interior and exterior. The State is sovereignty. But Sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of interiorizing, of appropriating locally Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, a thousand plateaus, p. 360 At the end of its colonial control, imperial Japan deployed a powerful discourse emphasizing its solidarity between Japan and Korea policy (naisenittai) to keep colonial Korea united with the master s body. Serving and nourishing the body of Japan, Korea acted as a truncated sub-organ for imperial Japan s organic body, which was experienced in Korea as a schizophrenic colonial reality. Paired as Naichi ( 內地 inner, the mainland Japan) and Kaichi ( 外地 outer, colonial Korea), Japanese discourses of naisenittai gave forceful agency for suturing these two bodies during the Total War era. Using various tactics to control the colonized, the Japanese imperial regime tried to mobilize healthy colonial males and home front female labor toward militaristic expansion. Within various discourses such as Bukbang/Nambang and Chonghu as well as naisenittai, colonial Koreans were gradually subsumed into the single body of the empire. Borrowing from Deluze and Guattari s thoughtful deliberations on capitalism and schizophrenia, colonial Korea can be read as grotesquely situated outside of the imperial body, while supporting and nourishing the Empire. It is an image of herniated organs out of the host body. The sudden liberation of postwar Korea engendered problems that evolved from the nationalist idea of reconstructing the nation-state by projecting the nation not only as a

204 190 modernizing project but also as an independent subject, detached from colonial trauma. By building discourses on nationalism as well as Cold War logics dictated by USAMGIK, the collective consciousness and the nation-state as an organic body were empowered to split into two postwars after the Korean War, shaped in the overlapping time-space of implicit trauma. The sociopolitical mood in postwar Korea had been hastily sutured to discourses about the Japanese colonial past, ingesting western modernization as a guise for USAMGIK political interventions and the imposition of Cold War logics. USAMGIK also deliberately took advantage of Japanese colonial personnel and media institutions to spread their own Cold War propaganda, resulting in indelible post-traumatic fallout for Koreans seeking to reappropriate their colonial past. The two parts of this doubly colonial experience became entwined, as postcolonial subjects unconsciously transposed one colonizer onto the other as a psychic reality. Whether appropriating American popular music genres, following the elegiac mood of Japanese ryūkōka or voluntarily producing military songs praising nationalism and anti-communism during the Korean War, Korean popular musicians and their audiences reterriorialized the embedded narratives of their colonial past, such as the fantasies of South or the totalitarian patriotism of USAMGIK Cold War logics, by assigning a plurality to their postcolonial circumstances by reprocessing the Japanese colonial narrative. Therefore, the postcolonial experiences of the liberation, exercise of American hegemony and the subsequent exigency of the Korean War subconsciously enabled postliberation Koreans to be subjugated by America by accommodating the U.S. other as a new Naichi (inner). Enchanted by Japanese colonial phantasmagoria, the submissive relation to their masters has been strongly embedded within Korean consciousness as implicit memory, enabling the experience of contradictory memories by situating themselves in a spectatorial position to their own history. While Japan was rhetorically transformed after the war, made dramatically effeminate and cast as a war criminal, this gave Koreans permission to obliterate their colonial memories of holocaust and cultural genocide (Naoki 2001). 225 The ideal of a hyper-masculine America penetrated into Korean consciousness through the Americans 225 Naoki Sakai (2001) Kyoukanno Kyoudoutaito Kousouno Jitsenkai: Touajiani Okeru Amerika Gatsougokuno Sonzaio Megutte, Gendaijishou 2001,7.

205 191 deployment of discourses of male-bonding brotherhood after the Korean War. The liberation and armistice imposed by exterior forces endowed the doubly embedded Koreans with heavy burdens and liabilities. American control in the postwar South Korean peninsula harnessed Koreans colonial subordination to a different master as a kind of symbolic capital. 226 Unlike the postwar melodramatic narrative of rescue and the transfer of power from Japan to the United States, Korean colonial memories after the Korean War were intermingled with the colonial rhetorics regarding a paternalistic Big Brother Americanism. An epidemic of hastily-woven fantasies of America and the Japanese colonial past bled together into the interregnum Korean consciousness, as Korea was permeated with the euphoric discourses of western liberalism while Japanese colonial memories and experiences were remained entrenched. Musicians and composers of popular song during this complex and contradictory period engaged with these paradoxical narratives in the production of phonograph records, and they shared in Koreans ambivalent sensibilities regarding their two colonial experiences. Therefore, popular music functioned as a subjective form that not only aided in the exchange of meaning and information between Koreans under the circumstances, but also resonated socially, so that their audiences could unpack their separate yet resonant selfidentities under these historical upheavals. Thus, popular music enveloped the structure of feeling in this disjointed time of Korean history, acting as the aural dimension of the doubly embedded collective memories, which still reverberated in the Korean mentality. 226 Symbolic capital indicates as the amount of honor or prestige possessed by a person or certain regime regards to acting structures. This concept is borrowed from Pierre Boudieu s, coined to express cultural investment in the specific historic environment or urban form of a city as the portion of exchange that could be attributed to its symbolic content.

206 192 Chapter 5. Audible Memories and Postcolonial Melancholia U.S. Military Ghetto Culture and Modern Soundscapes in Postwar Korea 1. Cultural Landscape of Americanized postwar Korea in 1950s We should say alas to the 1950s. Through betraying all the logics, we need to say it as an incurable exclamation. If one loves the fate, fallacy and hopelessness of the 1950s, than it means one loves the ruins. Everything was over. And everything has to be begun. Goeun, in the 1950s 227 The Korean poet Goeun s symptomatic manifesto of the postwar Korean situation in the 1950s was Everything was over and everything has to begun; this statement echoes the uncertain state of confusion and ambivalence between the end of the war and the beginning of the social convulsions of what postwar Koreans experienced as mass trauma and material destitution. Postwar Korean circumstances are often represented in modern Korean history as a period of extreme poverty and social depression while the country slowly recovered from the Korean War; one might characterize it in a negative way by illustrating an accelerated mood of vehement anti-communism and the sudden sociopolitical upheavals created through the ideological diffusion of the idea of democracy and mass society from within ruins. However, the ambivalence of what Koreans confronted in the dilapidated postwar landscape of the 1950s was often articulated in public discourses of optimistic prospects, cynical opportunism or melancholic sentiments reflected in a plethora of popular culture and the speedy infiltration of western social modes and transformation of metropolitan lifestyles driven by Americanization, specifically mediated through the proliferation of mass popular media and pulp literature. Thus, this discussion will frame a critical engagement with the cultural discourses of the 1950s an engagement that seeks to avoid both repression and an idealization of Americanism which I describe through popular music and other cultural forms in 1950s. This discussion will center around three registers: (1) the Post-Korean War climate in relation to American GI culture, (2) the Military Ghetto and its cultural amalgamation with local sensibilities (3) the fetishization of 227 Goeun (2005), 1950nyeondae: Geupyeheouimunhakgwaingan (In the 1950s: Literature and Humans in the Ruins), Hyangyeon Publisher. Bold is my emphasis.

207 193 Americanism as a Western-oriented formation of modernity. Postwar Korea in the 1950s was at the threshold of a genuine westernized modernity because the period immediately followed two consecutive wars the Asia Pacific War (World War II) and the Korean War and this concept of modernity was promptly rearticulated in postwar Koreans consciousness in relation to the presence of the American troops who remained in South Korea after August 1953 when the United States and South Korea signed a Mutual Defense Treaty. Consequently, the postwar generation, called Jeonhupa ( 戰後派 ), emerged as a major trope representing the generation that experienced colonial occupation, two wars and a consequent rupture from traditions. The reknowned modern Korean literature critic Kim Yoon-Sik designated Jeonhupa as a new seed abruptly dropped from the sky, 228 and the advent of this neologism gives us a glimpse into the radical social transformation in postwar Korea, demonstrating how the generations were situated between social rehabilitation and postcolonial continuity by reinscribing Americanization. By differentiating between the present and the colonial state of wartime military mobilization and the chronic social anxiety under Japanese imperialism that purged individual autonomy and forged an ideal of self-sacrifice through propaganda, the postwar generation gradually embraced the individualism and privatization expounded by the Americans. At roughly the same time, American ideologies of democracy, liberal populism and commercialism formed the core dogma of the social reformation of South Korea in the mid-1950s. This (re)formation of an Americanization held sacred by many Koreans was functionally synonymous with a universal rhetoric with regard to postwar Korea as a late-modernizing nation state by installing a mass desire for the coevalness of Korean modernity with that of western/american modernity in the Korean national imaginary. The historical specificity of South Korea s postwar entanglements is often epitomized by three elements: political rigidity, economical destabilization and cultural prosperity. Despite stagnant sociopolitical circumstances, cultural transformation made resilient progress by enacting a postcolonial mimesis of American modernity. 228 Kim Yoonsik (1993), Hangukmunhakui Geundaeseung Bipan (Critique of Modernity in Korean Literature), Munyechulpansa Publisher, p. 340.

208 194 <Figure 5-1> The Korean Newspaper advertisement for a Hollywood western film, Rock Island Trail, directed by Joseph Kane. In Yeongnam Ilbo Daily Newspaper, December 28. Let s accomplish the South and North Korea reunification ( 南北統一 ) is printed at the upper left corner in the picture of the struggle between white frontier men and native Indians. Actively mediated through the visible spectacle of American military base culture, including its fashions, sexual morals, popular music genres like blues and swing and the fad for Hollywood films, postwar discourses of Americanization provoked an ambivalent longing to reinstate a national self-fashioning that incorporated American cultural disseminations while forgetting the socio-political instability and sentimental tribulations of the postwar situation. The movie advertisement above, disseminated during Korean War era (Figure 5-1), claims Let s accomplish the South and North Korean reunification. By juxtaposing with the confrontational representation of white frontier man and the native Indian, Hollywood s representation of the western frontier spirit unconsciously substituted the postcolonial imagination of Koreans, rearticulating it through American frameworks. 229 The American interpellation of South Korea as a frontier state to America in terms of its role as a bastion of anticommunism, 230 it should not be surprising that American 229 During the Korean War, American films occupied over 50% of the imported foreign film market, which mainly focused on melodramas, adventurous western and comedies. After the Korean War, American films were still dominant: a 1953 statistic of imported films tells that 94 films (72%) were imported in South Korea. See Dong-A ilbo Daily newspaper s article (1954), Statistics for the foreign films of the year December According to Heo Eun (2008), the American designation of South Korea as frontier state found in the documents written by Colon Associates Ltd for the request of the Senate Foreign Relation Committee (United States Foreign Policy Asia, November 1, 1959, C.Korea, p.1, RG84, Korea General Records , Box 5) Heo Eun (2008) nangjeonha migukui hegemony guchukgwa

209 195 expansionism under the Cold War system proclaimed geopolitical hegemony over the territory of South Korea, which is heavily influenced by American culture not only because of its extended military presence but also due to the circulation of popular culture and westoriented social morals. <Figure 5-2> Marilyn Monroe visits the troops in Korea after the Armistice, February 17, Photo by Corporal Welshman for Army Signal Corps, Courtesy of National Archives. Monroe, here performing for American troops, was among those 1950s Hollywood stars whose talents were mobilized to sustain military morale during the Korean War as a symbol of friendly U.S.-Korean relations. The American value system thrived because its ideological dynamics were well suited to the postwar period and they were efficiently disseminated through American broadcasting systems (American Forces Korean Network), the active engagement of United States Information Agency [hereafter USIA] and the social craze learning the English language among Koreans. Marilyn Monroe, Pattie Page and Ann Margaret came to South hangukui wuisang (Formation of American hegemony and the phase of South Korea in postwar era), International Conference of Dongguk University Cultural Academy, Unpublished manuscript

210 196 Korea after Korean War to perform in USO 231 camp shows, <figure 5-2> acting as transmitters of western modernity and American idealism. New terminology, such as the postwar generation (jeonhupa) and postwar women known as the Après girls, 232 reflected Koreans own way of perceiving the pulses of disorientation and rupture from tradition as they negotiated their own postwar circumstances alongside a westernized modernization. In keeping with the public sympathy toward the individualism and privatization prized in American lifestyles, many female-oriented magazines and periodicals were also published at this time, such as Yeosunggye (founded in 1952), Yeowon (1955) and Jubusaenghwal (1956), which intensified private subjective lifestyles by addressing topics like sex, free love and marriage, dealing with moral ambiguity and confronting traditional paternalism. In this respect, individual engagements with and collective understandings of the modernization and urbanization of the postwar period overlapped somewhat with prior experiences and formations of colonial modernity, yet the gap between their forceful assimilation into the Japanese empire and the autonomous engagement with American troops still entailed differentiating between new sets of western socio-cultural structures and the volatile collective memory of the colonial past while refiguring postwar Korean s new subjectivities-in-between. Korean s wartime memories of modernity were doubly embedded in the trope of in-betweeness as their homeland was the scene of dependency/colonization when it was controlled by the Japanese empire, while they accommodated an encounter with American/western culture that afforded them alternative forms of modernity different Japanese ideals. After World War II, America s growing military political and economic dominance in South Korea was accompanied by a rush of cultural imports that the American GIs brought into the country such as popular music, food and other commodities. Unlike the suppressive Total War circumstances when American/western culture was strictly prohibited, the U.S. State Department initiated a vibrant cultural diplomacy to 231 The United Service Organization Inc is an organization to provide recreational and morale services to U.S. soldiers around the world since They are famous for their live performances, called camp shows. 232 The Après girl originated from the French word Après guerre (post-war in French), influenced by postwar existentialism. According to Kwon (2009:79), references to Après girls in postwar Korea were often negative and limitating, for they were depicted as material women without sexual morals who weren t bonded to traditional values.

211 197 advance its political and cultural interests not only in South Korea but also in two of its prior enemies, Germany and Japan, during the post-liberation era. USIA sponsored a variety of international cultural programs, including student exchanges, foreign radio broadcasts, the publication and distribution of American literature and international tours of American musical entertainers in 1950s (Hixson 1997; von Eschen 2004). The problem, however, in this ideological and cultural interiorization of such adaptations of democratization and modernism in South Korea provided by the Americans, is that this process progressed without an existing capitalist base able to generate an organic local modernization and industrialization, only producing a unilateral fetishization of western/american modernity. Therefore, the contemporaneity of this unbalanced Korean modernity during the postwar era points to a debate concerning the definition of what Korean culture was in the 1950s, one that begins by problematizing Koreans collective desires and a west-oriented universalism that centred on America. According to Frow, the concept of coevalness or contemporaneity in time and space, came from the interactive sharedness of the observed and the observer culture. He writes that, Coevalness is assumed to be grounded in the shared intersubjective time that precedes all more culturally specific experiences of time, and it is this that opens the way for truly dialectical confrontation. The word coevalness is equivalent to the German Gleichzeitigkeit, and is meant to include the senses both of co-occurrence in physical time (synchronicity) and of co-occurrence in typological or epochal time. (Frow, 1997, 9) In this sense, postwar Korean cultural circumstances were placed in an odd predicament in terms of sharing contemporaneity with America, since American reconstituted the rhetorical displacement of postcolonial sense of embodiment onto Koreans. In the gaze of the domesticated postwar Koreans, after experiencing the control of USAMGIK and Korean War, America was an object of reverence and an invincible other whose cultural pervasiveness reinforced the Americanization of Korean society. By remapping the role of Americanization in modern Korean history, many Korean scholars have criticized the imprudent tendency to import American culture and a premature westoriented mindset into popular consciousness, arguing that the circumstances of postwar

212 198 Koreans were mere fantasy since they were situated in quasi-western conditions while under the umbrella of the U.S. Army. Korean literary critic Kim Hyeon s well-known criticism Literature of Terrorism (1971) treats 1950s Korean literature s paradoxical circumstances and explains how postwar Korean novelists searched for a new way of storytelling through ideology and experimentalism, a search that ultimately ended in failure in two ways. First, he points to the generational problem of using vernacular language since postwar novelists who had experienced these two sociopolitical upheavals in Korean society Liberation and Korean War were born during the Japanese colonial era when their official mother tongue was the Japanese language. The discrepancy between using unfamiliar native mother tongue (Korean) in writing and the habit of engaging only with Japanese literary language ( 文章語 ) dissociated their historical consciousness from proper expression after the liberation era. Consequently, he argues, the postwar novelists embrace of the nation s abrupt liberation and Korean War eventually caused emotional exaltation in expression and produced illogical responses to the new political conditions surrounding the post-liberation period and the Korean War. Secondly, Kim posits that direct impact of Western and American cultural as a catalyst for a shift toward a West-oriented modernity, acted against traditional values. According to Kim, the unconditional import and dissemination of American culture, including the mass publication of American literature in the 1950s, gave postwar novelists an absence of historical consciousness, expressed by their disdain for traditions and local values and an inclination toward western literary theories. As a result, Kim argues that 1950s Korean literature and this generation as a whole is unique in offering a space where the postwar desire for something new and contempt for the past can take place. He describes the 1950s moral tone in postwar Korean literature as a terrorism of logic, elaborating that the historical consciousness of this postwar generation of novelists could not bear their responsibility to the past, eventually resulting in delusion and skepticism, while remaining superficially influenced by western/ American culture. The pervasive social atmosphere of loss and absence, illogical identification with American culture and the symptoms of dislocation that stem from nostalgic sentiments were embodied in postwar Korean consciousness after the stationing of American troops. The military presence of Yongsan Garrison in the center of Seoul, Itaewon, and the squalid

213 199 camptown called Kijichon grew around U.S. installations where prostitution, a high rate of alcohol consumption and foreign violations were ubiquitous. This dehumanizing local melting pot became known as Little America, full of various foreigners accommodations, schools, shopping, brothels and leisure facilities that nourished anti-military sentiment among Koreans while diffusing Americanization through the latest in popular music, fashion and commercial goods. In this respect, the proliferation of popular culture in the 1950s occupied a denigrated status in historical studies that have focused primarily on the side effects of Americanization and U.S. military base ghetto culture and especially on prostitute towns, Kijichon (literally meaning military camp town, but often synonymous with communities of sex workers in Korean) and local sex workers, who were given the highly deprecating name Yanggongju (literally meaning western princess). 233 Following the national liberation and Korean War, over one million Korean women such as refugees, war orphans and widows served as sex workers for the U.S. Army. However, prostitution targeting U.S. soldiers in South Korea, where permanent U.S. troops were stationed in 1955, was regulated by a tacit agreement between the American Army and the Korean government, as Moon (1997) has argued, in order to advance the friendly relations of both countries and to keep the U.S. Soldiers, who fight so hard for the freedom of the South Korean people, happy (Moon, 1997: 2). Consequently, much of the postwar literature embraces the theme of the relations between American soldiers and local sex workers in terms of changing moral standards and the introduction of western commercialism around American camptowns. For example, novelist Oh Youngsoo described a teenaged prostitute s life after the Korean War in Anna s Testament (Annaui Yuseo, 1960). The protagonist, Anna, writes a suicide note dramatizing postwar Korean circumstances in its monologue of a young orphan girl experiencing severe poverty and exposure to the frenzied postwar life: I became an orphan due to the War(s). I was starved and didn t have clothes to cover my body. When I was in hunger, even a brick seems like a lump of meat. As a grownup girl, I didn t have a piece of rag to cover my body, so I 233 For a specific description and report on the relationship between American GI soldiers and military prostitutes in South Korea, see articles by Bruce Cummings in Sandra Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, eds., Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: The New Press, 1992).

214 200 became a hooker named Anna. Just like selling blood for a bowl of rice, I bartered my body for food until I was 28 years old. If the sin of prostitution has to lay on someone who has struggled for a living, then it is not my burden to take. (Oh Youngsoo, p. 330) To recall all those who struggled for survival in postwar Korea, the simultaneous and linked public insecurity and mass anxiety were represented in popular culture by depicting the frailty of life itself, a topic easily thematized in the female body and particularly the bodies of local sex providers. As the objects of sexual liaisons with American soldiers, the Yanggongju (western princess) or Yanggalbo (west-oriented whore) became subjects of mass disdain and symbols of mourning for the nation s catastrophic circumstances. As many feminist critics have argued, 234 the oppressive social mood and the connections between patriarchy and militarism in the postwar era were allegorized in the female body. 235 The subject of military prostitution apparently symbolized the ambivalent postwar Korean feelings of loss and recovery by portraying the body of female subjectivity in a metaphoric victimization. This conjunction of the female subjectivity in the denegraded military space and the interiority of Americanization in postwar Korea are represented in The Flower in Hell (1958), directed by Shin Sang-Ok. The film depicts postwar Koreans heavy reliance on American military base capitalism, their recursive postcolonial relations with this quasi-occupier and the position of the Yanggongju as a translator and spy who has an ambiguous and parasitic relationship with both local Koreans and U.S. soldiers. Through this remarkable filmic representation of postwar Korea, we can cast several inquiries, such as: what happened when the American Army became permanently stationed after the Korean War? What mutual mirroring processes took place through the cultural exchanges between American Army bases and South Korea? And how, after experiencing colonial 234 For more information on militarized modernity and gendered citizenship in South Korea, See Katharine Moon (1997) Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-South Korea Relations, New York: Columbia University Press; and Seungsook Moon (2005) Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea, Durham: Duke University Press. 235 For more information on the Yanggongju and military prostitution, see Hyun Sook Kim (1998), Yanggongju as an Allegory of the Nation: The Representation of Working class Women in Popular and Radical Text in, Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, (eds.) Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi. Routledge: New York.

215 201 occupation, post-liberation and the Korean War, did the structure of Korean modernity displace, interact with and respond to Americanization and westernized modernity, either implicitly or explicitly? The emblematic representations of American GIs and their relationships with Yanggongju in The Flower in Hell summoned cold war anxieties and complex postwar subjects ambivalence toward the triangular relations of alliance and betrayal between local Koreans and the ubiquitous American soldiers with whom they had to coexist, mediating this relation through representations of the soldiers and Yanggongju. Film critic Kim So Young reads the story of The Flower in Hell as a postwar Korean cinematic echo of Americanized modernity, 236 that casts a distinction between new/american/western and old/korean/traditional values. In the film s visual relations, the contaminated female body of the Yanggongju radically transforms the visual memory of the postwar era by positioning the spectator in the film and actual audience within postcolonial discourses. From the establishing shot, showing Sungnyemun (Namdaemun), a Seoul landmark, Dongsik, who came to Seoul searching for his old brother Yeongsik is immediately the target of a pickpocket. From the start of film, Shin shows the bitterness of postwar metropolitan life, shown in contrast to the innocence of this young rural man. The main plot development consists of Dongsik s rites of passage as he experiences camptown, a phantasmal space of American modernity in Seoul, in contrast to key figures of wretched American camptown workers. The film s reflection on American military camptown as a discursive space of postcoloniality is expressed by two highly stereotyped protagonist groups: the first, a camp town pimp, Yeongsik (Kim Hak) and his girlfriend Yanggongju Sonya (Choi Eun-Hee), who doesn t have any moral opposition to selling her body to foreign soldiers; and the second, made up of a farmer, Dongsik (Jo Hae-Won), who came to Seoul looking for his old brother Yeongsik, and Judy (Kang Sun-Hee), who reluctantly engages in prostitution but wishes to escape her degrading situation. Both Sonya, who sells sex as a commodity, and Yeongsik, who infiltrates the American Army base to engage in black market entrepreneurship, represent a new type of postwar subjectivity that persistently deconstructs traditional morals and stages the negativity of westernized 236 Kim So Young (2000) Phantoms of Modernity: Fantastic Korean Films, Seedbook Publisher, p 138

216 202 modernity. Dongsik represents a contrasting narrative framework as a self-determined subject by articulating western capitalism with traditional values (such as family, brotherhood, embracing deficit he even proposes to Judy in the final scene and brings her to his hometown). By bifurcating the characters in this way, Shin sought to critique an idealized American modernity while blurring the conceptual duality of male dominance between the local and the foreign by proposing a hybridized subject like Judy whose body is contaminated by American soldiers but is eventually brought back to traditional agrarian society with Dongsik. Interestingly, it is the Yanggongju, embodied as an emblematic adaptation of the femme fatales of a Noir film, who infiltrated the bases and shrewdly mediated between local Koreans and American GIs through her seductiveness and bilinguality more like a polyglot form of English and who is eventually brutally murdered for her betrayal of the male/imperial order. 237 Confronting traditional morals in conflict with western modalities (she tried to seduce her husband s younger brother, Dongsik, which results in an imbroglio of incestuous tension), Sonya masquerades like a spy in order to exploit the available American commodities in a way reminiscent of colonial women s ambivalent performances as Home Front women during the Total War era. Thus, the film symbolizes these multi-layered senses of the postcolonial situatedness of postwar subjects by appropriating the Yanggongju identity marginalized in Korean society. The most significant example is seen in the cross-edited sequence (Figure 5-3) depicting the performance of an enticing vaudeville singer while the Yanggongju tempt GIs to give local pimps and hustlers the chance to steal the Americans PX goods. This brilliant scene shows the reconstituted fantasy for male audience and/or Americanism as a sustaining Korean relation to American GIs. This sequence uses a multi-layered narrative articulation to express the contradictory relations of various subjects in postwar Korea. 237 Jeong-Hee Choi s novel, G eudupnun Nangman (Endless Romance), published in 1958, also ended up in the protagonist Lee Charae s suicide to resolve her ontological dilemma between the marriage of an American soldier and her guilt for the Korean man who was supposed to marry her. In the ruins of the Korean War, under the premise that 80 % of Korean career women are western princesses, Charae finally succeeded in marrying American soldier, Carey George, and gave a birth son named Tory. However, a visit from her fiancé, Baegon, who was thought to be dead on the battlefield, shocked her into committing suicide. In this novel, the vicissitudes of socio-political circumstances during the period from the nation s liberation to the post-korean War era and the problematic subjectivity Yanggongju and their relationship with American GIs were clearly described.

217 203 While two fully westernized performances of easy listening and big band-style Mambo tunes are played under the dim lights by local musicians, dancers wearing scintillating tasseled costumes that reveal their bodies display and mimic the matrices of the western imaginary. <Figure 5-3> Sequences of Jiokhwa (The flower in hell, 1958), directed by Shin Sang-Ok, representing multi-layered postwar relationship between Koreans (prostitutes, dancers and music entertainers) and inter-racial American soldiers. Courtesy of Education Broadcasting System (EBS) Sequence captured and edited by the author. Here, the female body is doubly exploited in the film, both enticing American soldiers fascination with the exotic woman of color and supporting Koreans misconduct when they expropriate American GI goods for survival. The mimicry of the West is apparent in all of the costumes, choreography and vocal performances, but these are ironically appropriated to manipulate the western camp show spectators, American soldiers who are in a superior position as part of the dominant patriarchal/postcolonial order. Betraying the western occupier through their mimicry of western cultural performances, the film emotionally conspires with this dangerous scheme. The female body is made a spectacle in this sequence as the camera tilts up and down to finally fetishize the genitals of the Korean dancer in a full close-up shot. This shot enacts a symbolic mortification for Korean audiences, reflecting that the desire for America requires Koreans (Korean masculinity) mortification of local women into promiscuous objects. Returning to the inter-

218 204 racial relationship with an American soldier, the body of the Yanggongju is exposed as a metaphor for the transitional subject moving toward a westernized modernity by constantly evoking American symbolism juxtaposed with a postcolonial ambivalence of mimicry and exploitation toward this secular mimesis of American GI culture, while she serves postwar Korean modernity as both aggressor and victim. This metaphoric female body provides an alternative reading of the collaborative relationship and populist aesthetic sensibility of Americanization in postwar Korea. Returning to the premise of the construction of a postwar identity inscribed on a contaminated female body (Yanggongju), the intertwined male gazes of both Korean audiences and the foreign spectators of the camp show reflect a postcolonial imagination that provokes the fears and anxieties of postwar Korean male sovereignty before the display of the sexualized local female body. Jean Walton (1995), influenced by Freudian and Lacanian structures, proposed a feminist psychoanalytic theorization of the relation of inter-raciality looking by exploring subtle sexual references to black men and women, in which men seem to have a privileged relation to the phallus (the dominating order, the Law) while (castrated) women (without penis) are depicted as a threat to men. 238 In this sense, psychoanalysis implicitly asserts that women should not challenge the dominant phallocentric society and economy. The female body is constructed to be the phallus for men. In Walton s analysis, black men (who own the penis) within racist America, like castrated women, must also be subordinated to white men and remain vulnerable to punishment daring to behave as though they possess the penis (Walton 1995:783). These reflections are useful in understanding postwar Korea and its relations with American Army base culture. The local female body was allusively sacrificed to the empires, becoming the domain of the colonizers in symbolic exchange for the fulfillment of acquiring modernity and/or for survival in a colonial society where males were dominant. The postwar landscape around the military ghetto and Kijichon powerfully recalls both the Japanese sex slaves (also known as Comfort Woman) who served for Japanese military soldiers sexual fulfillment during the Total War era, and reminds of the paradoxical coupling with modern girls and home front women s activities that constituted an 238 See Jean Walton (1995) Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse: Founding Narratives of Feminism. Critical Inquiry 21(4):

219 205 overlapping trauma in between pre-and post-colonial memory. If the adaptation and appropriation of America as an object of desire is deployed to accomplish a local modernization, then the quasi-colonial circumstances of American military stationing produces a complex set of anxieties and problems of mass identity linked to the politics of representation and stereotypical attitudes toward postwar life and Americanization among postcolonial male and female subjects. My focus is thus to trace the formations of postwar Americanized modernity and the cultural relations between U.S. Army bases and South Koreans. By looking at a specific site, the Americanized popular music scene and the contexts and narratives of Korean popular songs in the 1950s, I would like to delve into public opinion regarding America and Americanization as these are depicted in popular music and filmic representations of popular music performance in the 1950s. 2. Sentiment of Changing Partners and Voicing the Americanized Modern: The Socio-political Conditions of Postwar Popular Music in Korea We were waltzing together, To a dreamy melody When they called out, change partners And you waltzed away from me Now my arms feel so empty, As I gaze around the floor And I'll keep on changing partners Till I hold you once more Changing Partners, Patti Page, Changing Partners, a popular American song featuring music by Larry Coleman and lyrics by Joe Darion, became one of the most requested American songs in South Korea after the Korean War. 240 Published by Capitol Records (no. 2657) in 1953, Patti Page s Changing Partners metaphorically reflects postwar Korean consciousness of their transient circumstances by narrating the emotional transition from Japanese colonizer to 239 (2nd verse) Though we danced for one moment and too soon we had to part/in that wonderful moment something happened to my heart/ So I ll keep changing partners till you re in my arms and then/oh, my darlin I will never change partners again. (3rd verse) So I ll keep changing partners till you re in my arms and then/ Oh, my darlin I will never change partners again/ Oh, my darlin I will never change partners again/ Never again, never again, never again. 240 Due to its consistent popularity, the song was also remade in Korean performed by Jeong Miwon in 1968.

220 206 American military occupier. In the song lyrics, the subject of changing partners is captured in a dreamy melody that circulates until the Other of the bolded they allows postwar Koreans to imagine a colonial present and detachment from the past. As if the enervated postcolonial subject stands in the hollow space as a spectator to their own postwar circumstance ( as I gaze around the floor ), and finally becomes recognizable to be embraced by America as a new occupier in the imaginary, the song lyrics conveys more than the postwar anxiety to Koreans ( my arms feel so empty ) experiencing feelings of loss and absence. However, the narrativization of the time between wars was evaporated in the transition of history since the narrative of changing partners serves as a counterpoint to the postwar Korean situation and encountering America as a new colonizer. Following the Korean War, America interwove Cold War logics into public discourses. American cultural regulations imposed on South Korea controlled everything from training local intellectuals and elites 241 to reorganizing Koreans everyday lives through policy and direct censorship, since the Korean peninsula had great geopolitical importance in East Asia as a bulwark against Communism. By imbuing postwar Korean society with new value systems and western fantasies, America tried to play a pivotal role in reconstructing Korean society through westernized modernity. The idea of westernized modernity in the periphery is often conceptualized as a historical and geographical phenomenon facilitated by the global conditions in the postwar era (Chakrabarty, 2000). 242 Postcolonial perspectives emphasize the importance of the inequality of relationships within the world system in order to understand the diffusion of western knowledge across national borders, and they are thus generally focused on analyzing how western knowledge develops in light of colonial encounters or imperial 241 According to Hapdongyeongam, the statistics on the numbers students studying abroad in 1950s reveals that they were mainly focused on America. The total number of students studying abroad were 4,703 and 4,193 were studying in America (France 138, West Germany 113, China 69, Italy 27, England 20). Hapdongyeongam (1960), Hapdongtongsinsa publisher, p Chakrabarty emphasizes the importance of specific contexts while formulating concepts and theories, but he still addresses the importance of the burden of European thought and history on modernity. He says that, The phenomenon of political modernity, namely the rule by modern institution of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise, is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe One simply cannot think of political modernity without the concept that found a climatic form in the course of the European Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000). Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 4.

221 207 exchange with the colonies, their characteristics and cultures in terms of mimicry and hybridity (Said 1978; Spivak 1988; Bhabha 1994; Appadurai 1998; Ghandi 1998). This approach offers a broader cultural and historical schema within which to understand and analyze westernization and Americanization. Chen argues that the structure of westoriented knowledge system in East Asia is as follows: 243 Since the Second World War, the flow of cultural influences has for the most part been in one direction only from America to East Asia. Intellectual life offers an even starker illustration than the entertainment industry. US academic texts have travelled to, are actively read and taught in, East Asian Universities. Intellectual trends have largely reproduced fashions on American campuses. The reverse has never been the case. 244 (Chen, pp ) Chow problemitizes the third world intellectuals engaged in the production and distribution of the west-oriented knowledge in the North American Academy. She proposes that those engaged in local scholarship within institutions of higher learning in the United States, focused on the women and minorities, have to be aware of their own historical context to make the voices of the oppressed heard, rather than remaining mere knowledge brokers, (Chow 1993). Understanding the intellectual sources of these structures of knowledge and the ethnic hierarchies they create is of considerable importance in the struggle for subjective self-determination in postcolonial situations. Yet it is also crucial to look at the specific struggles of the colonized during the postwar era in order to rethink the cognitive origins of western modernity and how America and the West were conceived within the framework of this intercultural moment. In this respect, culture 243 The problem of intellectual structures vis-à-vis colonial regimes of knowledge production have also been taken up by scholars such as Myungkoo Kang, in his There is no South Korea in South Korean Cultural Studies. Kang examines the place of famous western theories in Korean academic work, such as Ulrich Beck s notion of the risk society and Baudrillard s theoretical concepts and postcolonial theories, by emphasizing the urgency of localizing methodology to better analyze local history and peripheral culture. He further argues on intellectual structure of coloniality that western theories and concepts were merely appropriated by peripheral academics as supplementary references to give their research authenticity. However, without sufficient further development or deliberation, western ideas have been used to analyze the Korean local context, in a further coloniality of Western theory as the referential ubiquity of the West, (Naoki and Solomon, 2006) 244 Kuan-Hsing Chen (2001) America in East Asia, New Left Review Vol.12, pp

222 208 as a tool of imperialism was harnessed as a powerful means of conveying ideology, pushing toward simultaneous modernization and discontinuity from the traditions of the colonized society in the postcolonial era. Often converting their own values into either nationalism, anti-communism or political propaganda, Koreans in the postcolonial period experienced symptomatic processes of the chronic dilemma of being between empires by desiring westernization/americanization. <Figure 5-4> Victory record members, clockwise from top left, Postwar Korean popular singers Do Sung-A, Ya In-Cho (founder of Doremi record company and recording technician), Hyun-In, Baek Young-Ho and Baek Seol-Hee (1954.2) Photo Courtesy of Choi Si-Yeon (personal collection). The popular music scene in particular embraced these expressions of the instability and insecurity of this transition to Americanized modernity after the Korean War by mobilizing the powerful populist consciousness of Americanization. Since the new form of capitalism in postwar Korea coexisted alongside both the remains of colonial Japanese institutions and the dissemination of a sophisticated western modernity, an enormous scope of debate regarding Korean modernity emerged, largely framed to address the continuity and/or rupture with colonial modernity, the historical overlaps of its remains and the interstices of the colonial and postcolonial. Music genres like Boogie-woogie, Mambo and Cha-Cha-Cha emerged in the 1950s as a way to enjoy quintessential American culture, and many films and pulp novels were characterized by interactions with the ubiquitous American soldiers and U.S. Army base culture as a signifier of metropolitan experience and the consequences of engaging with a genuine westernized modernity. American military culture swiftly ensnared the attentions of postwar Koreans in extreme poverty as they came into contact with such luxury commodities as chocolates and corn powder soup from the PX (Post Exchange) outlets. The perceptual transformation toward a more Americanized

223 209 modernity in the postwar Korean imaginary therefore gave birth to an ambivalent attitude toward this formation within the colonial bases and the postcolonial/americanized superstructure by tracing a cultural fixation with the American way of life and value systems. We might do well to briefly delineate the historical narrative of postwar Korean circumstances. The liberation of Korea in 1945 was attained abruptly after 35 years of Japanese colonization with the help of the two big brother nations, the United States of America and the Soviet Union, who were key players in the Korean peninsula during this period. Because liberation was achieved with their assistance, internal conflicts encountered an unexpected setback: the Korean War and the internalization of the Cold war logics were empowered and supported by populism. By projecting America as an object of desire, 245 the ideological production of America as a savior of Koreans postwar life could easily influence the Koreans process of building a national identity during and after the Korean War. A physical dividing line, the 38th parallel, was established as both a physical boundary and a symbol of ideological separation in the Korean imaginary. The U.S. Army advanced into South Korea on September 8 th, 1945 and built the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) there, a crucial occurrence in the formation of Korean modernity. America clearly wanted to reinforce its liberal traction in South Korea by securing and reconstructing old Japanese colonial facilities and infrastructure. To restrain the spread of Communism from the Soviet Union s occupation of North Korea on the Korean peninsula, USAMGIK controlled South Korea and remained stationed there after the Korean War for the sake of constructing a protective barricade against Communism for South Korea. In this respect, America was regarded by Koreans as both a liberatory and an occupational force; as a democratic and imperialist state and as an advanced civilized and mammonist country (Hoe Eun 2007:227). 246 Therefore, the lives of postcolonial Koreans were situated in a contradiction, where Koreans repudiated Japanese colonial influences while accommodating Americanism by seeing the U.S. Army base as a mirror of desire. Unlike the institutionalization of imperial 245 Shunya Yoshimi (2003) America as desire and violence: Americanization in postwar Japan and Asia during the Cold war, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume4, Number 3, p Hoe Eun (2007), The Establishment and Activities of the Korean-American Association during the Era of the American Military Government, International Journal of Korean History, Vol.11, Dec 2007, Korea University Press, Seoul, pp

224 210 nationhood and the cultural assimilation policies deployed by Korea s former colonizer, which required coercive subordination, the U.S. Army base smoothly immersed itself in postwar Korea using the allure of the American value system and its cultural resources. A vast range of cultural resources ranging from anti-communist propaganda posters and American radio broadcasting to literary magazines, popular music, and the advent of many jazz bands emulating American hit numbers and vaudeville-style camp shows became weapons in what has recently come to be called the Cultural Cold War in East Asia, especially in Korea after the postwar era, which was the site of crucial military conflict involving major cold war (Armstrong 2003). (Figure 5-5) Special celebration show for the foundation of Hyundae Grandshow in 1958 at Gukdo Theatre (left). Back-up Korean performers for the USO camp show at the American Air force in Gyeongnam province in Photos Courtesy of Choi Si-Yeon (personal collection). The popular music scene in this era played a key role in representing the ambiguous desires and profound postcolonial ambivalence towards westernized/americanized modernity by utilizing flamboyant western instruments and mimicking western vocal styles to engage with the hopelessness of the American utopia during this transitional era. Interestingly, many popular musicians during the Japanese colonial period were involved in refashioning traditional compositional styles and accommodating various American pop music genres by translating western tunes into a local context, which flowered into an unexpected cultural efflorescence of popular music during the late 1950s. However, the majority of the local musicians engaged in performing on the Eighth United States Army stage were exclusively employed for the amusement and recreation of U.S. military soldiers, while the local popular music scene of the 1950s still remained in neutral, still

225 211 reappropriating the elegiac tunes of Enka-style songs and trying to forge crossover westernstyle popular songs within this old paradigm. Local adaptations of American popular music genres complacently connected the influx of tropes of Americanized modernity from U.S. military ghetto culture, reinforcing the narrative of a special bond with America since they (Korea and America) shed blood in battle together and mixed blood and sex through the Western princess and Amerasian offspring. Trafficking with an Americanized modernity after the Korean War played an extremely influential role in the cultural regeneration and reorganization of Korea in the 1950s, but confining historical conversations to this topic cannot fully explain the formation of Americanized modernity and the negative perspectives of Americanization related to military camp towns and GI ghettos. If new or emergent cultural tendencies acquire social recognition as official culture, they require systematic facilities as well as integration into the cultural discourse of a society. Until the early 1950s, cultural discourses in Korea were mainly controlled through governmental hegemony to build up anti- Communist systems after the Korean interim government under USAMGIK. Thus, although Rhee Syngman s 247 government held its postcoloniality and pre-american dependency under the surveillance of the astute political system of USAMGIK, it also retained a strong autonomy and controlled cultural activity to use governmental ideology to make anti-communist subjects, stabilizing their hegemony by adopting slogans of democracy and nationalism. By proposing two intelligible national discourses, national partition (Bundan in Korean) and anti-communism, the Rhee government hosted an intermediary connection to the formation of an Americanized modernity by developing a 247 Syngman Rhee was the first president of South Korea (July 20, 1948 May 3, 1960). He was educated in the US, holding a degree from George Washington, Harvard, and he acquired Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University in During the Japanese occupation era, he was elected as President of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea in exile in Shanghai. Highly influenced by anti-communist views and McCarthyism, the Rhee government took the lead in several massacres, including the most notorious fratricidal tragedy in Korean history, the so-called Jeju April 3 massacre. It broke out following nationwide campaigns to root out communists in South Korea. Jeju Island was where the communist influence was still stronger than in other provinces of South Korea, so it was targeted by the South Korean Provisional government and its right wing party, under U.S. guidance. The massacre was conducted by accusing the local people of being communists or of supporting them at random. Estimates of deaths among the island s locals range from approximately 30,000 to 80,000. For further information, see Bruce Cumings (1998), The Question of American Responsibility for the Suppression of the Chejudo Uprising, Presented at the 50th Anniversary Conference of the April 3, 1948 Chejudo Rebellion Tokyo, March 14, 1998.

226 212 master narrative into which the emergence of a genuine modernity could be organized. The emergence of a new form of postcolonial subjectivity was accordingly associated with discourses of Americanism and Americanization as a form of recolonizing agency. The narratives of popular songs after the Korean War coalesced around the trope of a populist concept of Americanism that sensitized Korean audiences to a new form of modernizing subjectivity not as spectators of the modern but as performative subjects of the modern while at the same time negotiating the tensions arising from the status quo at a time when South Korea was redefining itself as a nation. Thus it is key to elucidate how urban linkages (the military ghetto, Itaewon) became not only socio-cultural milieus through which to rethink the postcolonial situation and reshape various cosmopolitan identities after Korea s liberation from Japanese colonization but also to create a discursive framework for thinking through westernized cultural formations and the articulation of these identities in order to reproduce new senses of the Americanized modernity experienced by postwar Koreans. With a particular emphasis on exploring the experience of Americanized modernity, I will explore Itaewon, an intermediary space where the imaginary modern was implanted into the consciousness of Koreans. Specifically, I argue that the triangular intersections of identity, modernity, and desire can be located in the representation of Korean popular music around the U.S. military ghetto. The adaptation of American popular music in the Korean music scene reflected contradictory narratives in terms of the material, technical and psychological conditions of postwar Koreans. Adopting Althusser s thesis of overdetermination shows how postwar Korean popular music instantiates postcolonial melancholia in musical form since Koreans appropriation of American popular music genres were pseudo-commodified in terms of the song titles and lyrics that resonated with American musical genre, while the music content remained in the form of colonial Yuhangga or elegiac Ryūkōka tunes. The term postwar melancholia is thus used as a metaphor to describe an intermingled sentiment of desiring an American modernity (thinking America as a place that evokes nostalgia but that never exists as it is imagined) and postcolonial inability to mimick an authentic Americanism, resulting in a fetishization of America in the interior of the Korean imaginary. Since postwar Korean popular music combined sounds sampled from a Japanese colonial musical heritage alongside Korean musicians appropriations of

227 213 sophisticated compositional techniques from the U.S. military subculture, the lyrics and style of the music reflected a re-elaboration of colonial memories colliding with the imaginary articulations of Americanized modernity that took place in the American military ghetto, Itaewon. 3. Americanized Soundscape in Postwar Korea 3.1. AFKN and the Formation of the U.S. Military Landscape in Postwar Korea Jazz, Jazz is the symbol of freedom, isn t it? Please tune the dial on the AFKN! Jazz! Who had created that kind of great pleasure? God may bless him as if he is a dove. I wish to run the street of Pyeongyang City 248, Spreading Jazz as Benny Goodman did in Russia. Kim Won-Il, Odumui Chukjae 249 The period from the Korean War until the 1960s was a transitory one, that saw a corporeal manifestation of westernized modernity and Americanization. Because of the complexity of circumstances at the time, there was a pervasive atmosphere of homelessness and loss under the Cold War mentality following the Korean War, and Korea and Koreans were subjectified not as a former Japanese colony but in the traumatic site of an on-going Cold War logic. It is often said that the postwar Korean culture is basically American. Itaewon, the so-called little America of Seoul, has been considered an intersectional space between Korean and American social networks because the bilateral relationship with the U.S. Army had a profound impact on postwar Korean society. This Americanized postcolonial space metaphorically sutured colonial memories in the Korean consciousness as well as acting as a showcase for a visible Western modernity that the majority of Koreans had never seen other than as it was manifest in the landscape of Itaewon. As a symptom of this dislocation, the rapid urbanization and modernization following the liberation and Korean War was initiated with the U.S. Military base at its center, 248 Pyeongyang is the capital of North Korea. 249 Kim Won-Il, Odumui Chukjae (the rite of the darkness), Hyeondae Munhak, November 1966, p.321. Quoted in Kang Hyeon-Dew (1991) Media Culture in Korea, Seoul National University Press, p.43.

228 214 functioning as a catalyst for Americanization. Naturally, American army ghettos formed an intoxicating state of unreality as the main entry point for the influx of American culture and PX products that defined the modern environment, forging a cultural identification that was not fully grounded in tradition and the cultural memories of Koreans. American G.I. culture had a sub-cultural aspect, designating a broad range of literary and artistic practices for postwar Koreans after its introduction in the 1950s and creating a melting pot of various races, classes and genders. The American Yong-San Garrison was located in the center of Seoul and was the main pathway to accommodating Americanism. As a cultural site that acted not as a repository of accumulated memories but as a shifting marker of dissociation from the past, Itaewon was gradually defined as a discursive space where everything is possible except the Korean, not only for American soldiers but for the young Korean generation that was familiar with AFKN (American Forces Korean Network) radio programs and Hollywood Films. The USAMGIK set up basic broadcasting facilities after the liberation, recycling any remaining Japanese broadcasting infrastructure to build an advanced American broadcasting system in South Korea. AFKN radio launched in October 1950, during the first year of the Korean War, and broadcast its first television program in AFKN-TV had been broadcasting for 40 years as an information and entertainment medium for 55,000 United States military personnel, civilian employees, and their dependents. However, since its signal reached all of Korea through a sophisticated cable and microwave system, it became one of the most popular entertainment media, particularly among younger Koreans (Rim, 1997). The radio s dissemination of the newest American popular music and current hit songs in postwar Korea functioned as a postwar narrative of western vanity and modernity that gave Koreans a sense of coevalness with the imperial nation. Thus, postcolonial Korean subjects came to desire a westernized modernity that simultaneously marked a cosmopolitan opening up to the wider world by consuming American popular culture, either from the surplus bandwidth of AFKN radio station or through the gaudy landscape of American military ghettos, while reproducing the memories and war trauma in between two colonial experiences and the Korean War during the compressed modernization process of the postwar period. The formation of a radio audience in this era needs to be redefined, not as simply an abstract assemblage of western popular music

229 215 connoisseurs with a shared habitus but in a manner that takes into account how this instigates a ritualized transformation of people s relationships to space and time (Berland, 1993). 250 AFKN fabricated the shifting relationships between the colonizer and the colonized by refiguring conceptions of modernity and the structures of empire that one needs to survive in the postwar moment. Postcolonial desire was effectively imbued within the subconscious of the colonized through these American cultural disseminations, the physical visibility of the ubiquitous Americans to civilians, and the shared ethos of the Changing Partner, which transformed the westernized local landscape built around Itaewon. The discourse of westernized modernization was efficiently interwoven with propaganda through American cultural incursions via the U.S. military ghettos, where narratives of Americanization were gradually embedded in the conscious of Koreans Military Ghetto Culture and the Diffusion of Americanism A vivid black and white photograph depicting the vicissitudes of postwar Korean socio-politics history was rediscovered in the drawer of a photojournalist in In an image taken by Chun-Gil Kim, who worked for the Associated Press communication from 1953 until 1987, there is a very rare picture of Korean singer at the grand show on the Eighth United States Army base, where most of the audience is made up of American soldiers. In this photo, the unabashed gaze of the glamorous female singer is turned towards the American soldiers, while she performs an English song entitled Shoe Shine Boy with cheerful big band jazzy vocalizations. 251 The vampy Korean female jazz singer, Dan-ma Park, appears much like the woman depicted in the film Flower in Hell. Park was a famous Enka singer during the Japanese colonial occupation era, who transformed her body and 250 In this paper, she argues that radio not only has unique capacities to map out the audience s symbolic and social lives, but also acts as a form of psychic mediation connecting people s feelings about community, territory and memory. 251 Yoshimi pointed out that in late 1940s various popular songs included sexualized images of the ruined and burnt out Ginza district of Tokyo where the American central command head quarters was located. Hit songs like Tokyono Hana Uri Musume (Tokyo Flower Girl, 1946), Ginza Kankan Musume (Ginza KanKan Girl, 1949) and Tokyo Shoeshine Boy (1951) all describe the direct connection between Ginza and American soldiers. See Shunya Yoshimi (2003), America as desire and violence: Americanization in the postwar Japan and Asia in the Cold War, Inter- Asian cultural studies 4(3), pp

230 216 was acclaimed for her tantalizing westernized gestures and sophisticated mimicry of western vocalization styles after this showcase at the Eighth United States Army base performance. The mutual exchange of the gazes of the U.S. military spectators and the performers allusively emblematize postwar Korea s relation to America. Taking into consideration that Koreans were engaged in a steady recovery from the devastating aftermath of the Korean War, the singer s appearance was physically made over, made more westernized. Only the dancers awkward smiles remind us of their faint reluctance before these American soldiers, in contrast to the embellished and extravagant costumes. <Figure 5-6> Danma Park s Grandshow Performance. Courtesy of Nunbit Publisher, C. Kim. (1993) Foreign News from Seoul, Nunbit Publisher, pp Courtesy of Kim 252 Shoe Shine, Shoe Shine Boy, Shoe Shine, Shoe Shine Boy Shoe Shoe Shoe Shoe Shoe Shine Boy Hello! Shoe Shine! Polish your shoes! Polish your shoes! Even though you re being stingy for your unemployment If you are not even afford to polish shoes All the pretty posh girls say No No No Good to you Written by Lee, Seo-Gu, Composed by Son, Mok-In Performed by Dan-Ma Park, 1954, Star Records 252 For further photographs of Grandshows in American military show during 1950s, see appendix 7

231 217 This was how Dan-ma Park performed in her weekend night cabaret as a jazz singer in the U.S. camp show, mouthing the words of show tunes and jazz standards as sung by legendary western female vocalists. It was splendid and absurd, while being comical and moving. Dan-ma Park, who debuted at the age of eighteen singing elegiac Enka-tuned popular songs during the Japanese occupation era, here gestures to American soldiers while belting out the English lyrics as if she understood them. The above snapshot visualizes the subtle doubleness of a flaccid colonial subjectivity under these consecutive colonialisms in postwar Korean society. The image becomes a metaphor of the commingled hegemony of a multi-layered colonialism between empires and of the contradictory sensitivity of postwar Koreans towards the new empire after Japanese occupation. A colonial subjectivity haunted by seductive American popular culture was subjugated by the masculinised American occupation, mediated by trading the concealed feminine coloniality of Koreans. Kim has argued that there is an uncertain possibility of hybridity in postwar Korea, saying, many popular Korean novel and cultural forms fixes at the center of its allegory the fallen (raped) Korean woman whose vulnerability mirrors the nation s own effeminacy in contrast to Western masculinity (embodied by the wealthy, militarily powerful agents/soldiers who bring modernity and capitalist culture to Koreans). 253 A tacit consent to this negotiated hegemony was forced through the assimilation of American vanity and capitalism through the shared American military culture. This picture spectacularly captures the imaginary topography of postwar Koreans whose invisible desires clandestinely trafficked with America, a site of ambiguous interplay in postwar Korean society. As Henri Lefebvre describes, place is not mere land area, it is a projection onto a field of all aspects, elements and moments of social practice, (Levebre 1991:8). The soundscape of the military ghetto in the late 1950s, where Americanized popular music acted to disseminate Americanization, was introduced and diffused outward from around the Yongsan Garrison Eighth United States Army base in Seoul. By mimicking various trendy cultural commodities coming out of the American military ghetto, the postwar soundscape reflected the formation of a new subjectivity influenced by American/western culture, one that had previously consumed American/western modernity as a counterpoint 253 Hyun Sook Kim, Ibid., p. 184.

232 218 to the grip of Japanese imperialism during the Japanese occupation era. The inter-racial colonial experiences between two empires influenced the consciousness of postwar Koreans, forming an inseparable relationship with both empires in terms of both the inculcation of new subjectivities and the reinforcement of Americanization after the Korean War. Itaewon ( 梨泰院 ) obtained its name during the Joseon Dynasty because it was originally formed as a way station in the southern Namsan Mountain. During the Japanese occupation era, Itaewon was reorganized as a Japanese residential district under the Japanese street name, Suidou Chou Nichome ( 水道町二丁目 ). After the liberation and Korean War, the postwar Korean landscape had been incinerated by indiscriminate bombing and had to be reorganized, since there were not many areas where comfort facilities could be provided for American soldiers. The U.S. forces started to utilize the Yongsan area by building Yongsan Garrison, and Itaewon was consequently reorganized as a space of extraterritorial sovereignty in Seoul, renamed little America. <Figure 5-7> Map of the Itaewon area and the Eighth United States Army Base in the late 1950s. In Kim Wonmo s Daeseouljeongdo (1959) with English translation attached and rephotographed by the author. For a specific map of military ghetto and Garrison area of the Eighth United States Army Base, see appendix 8 This notion of a place intended for the recreation and amusement of the American soldiers spread almost simultaneously to other cities where the U.S. military (The Eighth United States Army regiment, 7th Air Force regiment and U.S. Naval Forces in South Korea) was stationed in Dongducheon, Uijeongbu, Daegu and Paju. After the Korean War,

233 219 the military ghetto became inseparable from the urban nightscapes and visible landscapes of American military in postwar Korea filled with shops, rowdy bars and brothels since it was built around military facilities throughout South Korea. Refined disco clubs and American-style restaurants catering only to foreigners and American soldiers were built in the late 1950s, and residential apartments for American soldiers were constructed at the same time. Due to the Rhee government s urban redevelopment projects of the mid-1950s, Itaewon was drastically reorganized for the pleasure of American or western residents, giving postwar Koreans postcolonial aspirations toward Americanism. The topography of Itaewon shows a double relationship to an Americanized urban landscape and the ghetto area, which is defined by the transgression of the borders between internal and external space as represented on its map (Figure 5-7). In Seoul, the Eighth United States Army Base was centrally located, and the space of military ghetto, Itaewon and American soldiers recreational sites such as clubs, bars and brothels were situated in a periphery, giving this topography a disjunction, doubleness and marginalization in the Korean imaginary. In the late 1953, local musicians playing a repertoire ranging from classical music to arrangements of popular songs and ballads, so-called light music, gathered in Jongno to organize the association for Korean light music to fulfill the demand for cabaret dance hall musicians. Later, they played in the Eighth United States Army Camptown. Performing on the stages of American GI clubs, local light music performers in the Eighth United States Army service clubs earned for 4 dollars per night for their labor. For a better treatment to the performers, commender of the Eighth United States Army and local executives assembled the show groups by grading their performance as A ($6.60), B ($5.40) and C ($4.20). Consequently, various new American popular music genres were introduced into postwar Korean society through the clubs and pubs of the military ghetto. Korean musicians labeled themselves as GURAKBU, after the Japanese phonetical pronunciation of club in English, and they accommodated Americanized popular music, making these genres standard in the local Korean popular music market in late 1950s. Cultural accommodation and adaptations of American popular music genres became essential for postwar subjects in terms of their desire for and mimicry of American modernity. Korean popular musical forms actively syncretized American popular music genres, while Korean traditional folk

234 220 (Shin Minyo), and the Japanese Enka style trot genre 254 were still dominant in the local market. 255 Composers and singers who used to serve the Japanese colonizer gradually gathered to play at Yong-San Garrison in order to please the American soldiers. The (Korean) local bands have to be organized properly into three parts: chorus line, singer and instrumentalist. Rhythm, melody and music patterns have to be harmonized impeccably. The English pronunciation of the singers must be accurate. The expression of singers should be stylish and elegant. Singers must have great showmanship. The show has to be fully exciting for the American audience. (Il-Gan Sports Daily newspaper, 1964) Local bands also needed to pass strict auditions to play on the American Army Base, as per the regulations outlined in the newspaper. In accordance with the needs of local musicians on the American Army Base, Korean entertainment entrepreneurs such as Universal, A-Ju, Sam-Jin and Dong-Young systematically arose to provide local musicians after The clubs on the American Army base were dichotomized into separate districts by music genre, to be reserved for use by U.S. soldiers hierarchically and racially (for White enlisted men and Black enlisted men). Country, Swing Jazz and Standard Popular music were categorized as Anglo-American, whereas Rock and Roll and Soul were for the Afro-American soldiers. 256 Cabaret culture, stemming for the social craze for the tango, mambo and rumba dance music genres, also emerged in Korean society and became a nation-wide trend after the war. Western-style social gatherings (Sa-Gyo 私交 in Korean) were considered to be high-class by the general public, and these integrated ideals of privatization and democracy that challenged the gender norms and sexual mores of Korean society in the late 1950s. The consumption of American popular music became a euphemism for adjusting to the ideas of 254 The name of Trot (Korean pronunciation as Teuroteu) is derived from the dance music genre foxtrot. Arguably, the music genre is influenced by Japanese Ryūkōka and enka style music; however it doesn t have distinctive musical form rather it embraces general mixture of western and Japanese musical style with a lyric of Korean sentiments. 255 Arguably, The Boy in the Yellow Shirt, sung by Han Myeongsook in 1961, was the first example of a genuine western musical genre reproduced in Korea. Country-Western style codes and melodies were apparently far from the beats favoured during the Japanese occupation era. 256 Along with the racial acceptability of Koreans in terms of racial hierarchies based on American standards for discrimination by biological differences, the ideas of racial stratification and their stereotypes took root in the American Army Bases of postwar Korea.

235 221 liberalism and pluralism among the Korean intelligentsia. The first debates on Americanism in the Korean intellectual sphere took place in a literary periodical called Sasanggye, and these discussed how the ideas of democracy, civilization and liberalism that came to Korea through the American presence after the long colonial occupation opened up discourses around the concepts of impartiality, humanity and cosmopolitanism by implying that Korea had achieved a gradual modernization alongside its new Americanism. Kim Ha- Tae argued that Americanism was present in everyday life, declaring that, we need to learn the core meaning of Americanism. Genuine Americanism comes from the belief to human since the (American s) belief of creativity, dignity and freedom of human being motivated them to move forward. 257 These social transformations in the reception and mobilization of Americanism and American popular culture were accompanied by the problems surrounding the localization and appropriation of Americanized popular music genres in the local music scene, changing local values and the supposition of Americanization as mandatory in the process for modernization. The discursive rendering of the self and other as universality and interiority is made explicit in the postwar popular music scene. However, the consumption of western ready-made commodities and culture was confined to those who could afford it. This divergence in the socio-economic ability to accommodate westernized culture confined it to only the highbrow bourgeoisie living in the metropolitan or to the American occupiers themselves. Madame Freedom (Jayubuin, 1956), directed by Han, shows the psychoanalytic rupture of an audience observing an exact mimicry of an American music performance by local musicians. Madam Freedom was the first melodramatic film produced in Korea, based on a serial newspaper novel by Jung Bi Seok. The major plotline of the film concerns the relationship of Jang (performed by Park Am), a poor college professor who becomes attracted to his typist while his wife Oh (performed by Kim Jungnim), designated as the problematic subjectivity Madam Freedom, flirts with the university student next door and goes out to a dance ball with her husband s friend. The sequence captured above shows the moment when Oh first comes to the dance hall and is shocked by her alienation by the Americanized spectacle of debauchery. In a long full shot of the dance floor, the exhilarating female vaudeville dancer is exposing her body and making exaggeratingly western gestures while Oh, in traditional Korean costume 257 Kim Ha-Tae (1959), Americanism in Korea, Sasanggye, vol , p. 425.

236 222 shown with a bust shot by constrast, stares at the dance floor and watches three men and two women changing partners without hesitation, implying a postwar promiscuity and changing sex morals. <Figure 5-8> Sequence of Madame Freedom (Jayu Buin, 1956, Directed by Hyeung-Mo Han) which played the key role in the culture of postwar social gathering, cabaret culture and free romance. Courtesy of the Korean Film Archive. Sequence captured and edited by the author. What is interesting in this sequence is Oh s envious gaze as the object of the postcolonial audience s gaze takes in the vaudeville dancer s extravagant performance, stirring Oh s own engagement with American fantasy. After the performance, Madam Oh is asked to dance by her husband s friend, and she simultaneously grins affirmatively and says, I don t know if I can dance. But The new ways of dancing in a ballroom created freer experiences of time, which Foucault designates heterotopias: the heterotopias begin to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. 258 As Martha Vicinus suggests, Melodrama is best understood as a combination of 258 Michel Foucault (1967), Of Other Spaces. Translated by Jay Moskowiec. Available online at

237 223 archetypal, mythic and time-specific responses to particular cultural and historical conditions. 259 The performativity of Madam Freedom intervenes in the symbolic order of spectator identification by portraying the re-appropriation practices of an Americanism that affects the imaginary of postwar Koreans. While postwar films and literature end up reinvigorating monogamist values by punishing the woman who violates traditional forms of morality such as The Hand of Destiny (1954), Flower in Hell (1958) and Endless Romance (1958), Madam Oh betrayed traditional values, morals and beliefs and sets off the process of destroying the monogamous system. In this sense, post-korean War circumstances mediated by westernized popular songs and their embodied cultural tensions propose a contradictory sensibility to Koreans who considered themselves almost westernized but not quite subjects. The majority of Koreans had never before experienced the desire for high-class Cabaret culture or genuine American cultural experiences. It is a key to remember that the colonial Koreans access to the highbrow popular culture was often denied and liminal cultural opportunities were offered. Therefore, popular music as a medium became vital in order to rearticulate an interstitial space between the colonizer/bourgeois and the colonized/proletarian. Popular music as a structure of feeling became the most efficiently accessible culture in the everyday life of postwar Koreans after losing the majority of their national infrastructure as a result of the Korean War. Unlike literature and film, which have been more widely discussed in the academic field, popular music is a straightforward means of mimicking and transplanting American modernity. Popular music acts as a postwar narrative, conveying both the construction and preservation of a society s memory. Predictable rhetorical, literal and historical studies articulate a shared sense of the history only from the viewpoint of the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie. However, popular music after the Korean War era may give us a better idea of the sensibilities of the mass postcolonial subject and a hint of their changing identities vis-à-vis their double colonial experiences, elements which haven t been accessed by literary and filmic studies of this era. Therefore, it is significant to consider that postcolonial Koreans conditions of possibility were often refused in literacy, and only a few cultural opportunities were proffered as surrogates for 259 Martha Vicinus (1981), Helpless and Unfriended: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Melodrama. New Literary History 13.1 (Autumn 1981) p. 128.

238 now. 260 Singing exclusively for the American GIs from 1954 to 1958, the Kim sisters show 224 other forms of individual autonomy. Music becomes vital at the point at which linguistic and semantic indeterminacy / polyphony arises amidst the protracted battle between the colonizer and the colonized (Gilroy, 1993). A peculiarity of popular music that differentiates it from other media lies in the way in which the experience of music is subject to time. Postwar Korean popular music actively appropriated American songs, a representation of the shared feeling/collective memory of Americanized modernity for Koreans. Composers and musicians yearned for a loved one, displacing these sentiments by imagining America as an exotic place in such constructions as America Chinatown and Arizona Cowboy, while making theme songs for films by mimicking Western tunes. In an opening musical scene of Cheongchun Sanggokseon (Hyperbola of Youth 1956), the legendary composer, Park Si-Choon is playing guitar and fiddler while Kim Sisters, who gaining popularity performing at American military base shows, wears a nurse costume and sings a cover version of Eddie Fisher s I need you how postwar Korean singers on the stages of American Army show survived. The offspring of the famous Kim Hae-Song (composer and singer) and Lee Nan-Young (singer), 261 the Kim sisters, composed of three female vocalists Sook-ja, Mi-a and Ai-ja Kim, had their debut at the ages of six, seven and eight, respectively, shortly after the nation s liberation. The eldest, Sook-ja, later recollected the moment: 262 We didn t speak English, we couldn t, we didn t even know where America was We had to memorize. So, she (mother) would learn a song first, then she will teach us this song that she got, I don t know from where, but the name of the first song we sang was Old Buttermilk Sky. It s a country western song. We didn t even know there was country western, but we knew that it was an American song. So, we would memorize it, we d sing it for the 260 Eddie Fisher is an American pop singer in 1950s who had many hit numbers including Wish you were here, I m walking behind you, and I need you now. He was drafted in the U.S. Army in 1950 and served a year in Korea during Korean War. 261 Kim Hae-song (Korean; ) is a classical music conductor and popular music composer killed by the North Koreans during the Korean War. Lee Nan-Young (Korean, ) is legendary popular singer during Japanese occupation era 262 An Interview with Sook-ja Kim, An Oral History Conducted by Myoung-ja Lee Kwon, February April 1996, Las Vegas Women in Gaming and Entertainment Oral History Project, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 1997, pp. 2-3.

239 225 GIs, and all the GIs loved it, so, what happened was, they say, more, more, more! We hadn t learned another song. So, we came on again, we sang the same song over and over again. But, they didn t care as long as we sang American songs. But that s how we started, to help our mother, to make it a little bit easier on her As a matter of fact, we started in 1954 in Korea. Between 1954 to 1958, we sang for the GI troops all the time. That s how we got to eat. In plain language, that s how we survived. <Figure 5-9> Kim Sisters performing on an American stage (Jan ), Photo by Robert W. Kelly, Courtesy of LIFE magazine. Interestingly, they wear western costumes surrounded by Japanese folding screens under Chinese lanterns. By phonetically memorizing Hoagy Carmichael s English lyrics, these young girls sang American songs for survival without even knowing their meaning. They were later picked up by an American agent who contracted them into a show called the China Doll Revies at the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas. The Kim sisters were hugely successful in America as a minority girl vocal group, performing on the Ed Sullivan Show regularily after 1959 and even appearing in LIFE magazines (Feb.22,1960, see Figure 5-9). One of the reasons they were so conspicuous in the American show business market during the Rat

240 226 Pack-era was that they all could play dozens of instruments with a rich harmonies. As Sook-ja puts it, My mother said they (Americans) have the Maguire Sisters, which we copied in Korea, all their songs. They called us the Korean Maguire Sisters. And the Andrews Sisters, we copied them. So, my mother says, those girls do not play instruments. Just to sing, you will not become successful in America So, I want you to learn the tenor sax, I want Ai-ja to learn alto sax, I want Mia to learn drums. 263 The Kim Sisters racial and cultural subversion of mainstream American popular music shows how postwar musicians appropriated Americanism for survival and displayed themselves as a trope of the symbiotic relationship between America and Korea by orientalising themselves while training on instruments to perform what American female vocal bands couldn t. The parallels with American military ghetto culture and American popular songs are fairly obvious. American popular songs gained their popularity 264 with avid younger listeners from urban communities who gathered in tea-rooms, bars and social clubs. American popular song becomes a technology of preserving memories, an active symbol to convey Americanism rather than merely its container for youngsters. Borrowing the concept of cultural memory proposed by Marita Sturken in her book Tangled Memory, it is essential to reconsider popular music as a reflection of mass sensibilities in terms of collective memory. One can posit popular song as a kind of collective memory that is shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet is entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural meaning (Sturken, 1997: 3). Postwar popular music has an ongoing interaction with American popular music in terms of collective memory, what Jonathan Boyarin describes as the creative collaboration between present consciousness and its implicit shaping of consciousness, its selection of the contours that experience on expression of the past (Boyarin, 1994). In this sense, composers and musicians of postwar 263 An Interview with Sook-ja Kim, Ibid., pp According to Korea: Its Land, People and Culture of All Ages(1963:577), Koreans favorite of American popular song is as follows by the number of requests to the Korean Broadcasting System and HLKA from ; Que Sera Sera, The Midnight Blues, Sail Along, Silvery Moon, I ll Be Home, Crazy Love, Autumn Leaves, Changing Partners, Banana Boat Song, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing and Three Coins in the Fountain.

241 227 popular song deal in multi-faceted and contradictory narratives and share ambivalent responses to the two colonial experiences while consuming Americanism. Then how do the narratives of popular song lyrics interpret Americanism? Furthermore, how do the narratives of local popular songs and their performers/composers interact with each other? The majority of popular song genres associated with the dance boom were the Mambo, the Cha-Cha 265 after 1950s and the Twist and Rockabilly in the early 1960s. Combined with the social fad of Mambo, many popular songs commodified the genre by writing the genre name in the song title, in songs such as Arirang Mambo, Doraji Mambo, Nilliri Mambo, and Yangsando Mambo, combining these frequently used words with the older Korean popular music genres and tunes from Shinminyo. Many of the songs using the term Mambo are not Mambo tunes; they only adopt the name to reference the genre s popularity. Kim Youngjoon recollects the Mambo craze in 1950s, saying that: It was Mambo; it makes Madam Freedom shake her ass in the novel. After the armistice, Mambo gained a tremendous popularity and it reached its peak with Cherry Pink Mambo by Perez Prado Orchestra. 266 This song was overplayed in every corner of Seoul and considered as an emblem of liberal literature. This song generated not only the social dance craze, but also in fashion with the Mambo trouser and consequently ignited the music scene with the Mambo genre. (Kim, 2004) 267 Movie and radio broadcast drama theme songs became another popular format in the postwar popular music scene of the 1950s. Lyricist Ban Ya-Weol and composer Park Si-Choon collaborated on many movie theme songs, such as those for Namsungnumbeoweon (Man Number 1) and T alchilhyeongje (Seven sisters), while radio broadcasting drama theme songs like Cheongsil Hongsil (Blue thread, Red thread, lyrics by Cho Namsa, song by Son Seokwoo), performed by Song Mindo in 1956, received a 265 Yoon Il-Lo s Seuleui Bamgeori (Street of Seoul by night) adopted authentic Cha-Cha dance rhythm by a syncopation of the forth beat with the front leading of percussion and guiro. 266 The original title of the song is Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White. Perez Prado is a Cuban-Mexican composer, commonly known as the King of Mambo. He is best known for the famous Mambo No Kim Youngjoon (2004) Hanguk Gayosa Iyagi (The Story of Korean Popular Music History), Seoul: Areum Publishers.

242 228 massive amount of public attention in accordance with the popularity of the dramas themselves. Most of the popular songs consumed in the local market still reflected the compositional modalities of Japanese Enka songs and Shinminyo, while the influx of Americanized and foreign popular music genres from U.S. military culture Jazz, Tango, Cha Cha, Blues were articulated with local or traditional music genres. Thus, the localized concerns of music production and consumption in postwar Korea were embedded in representations of the socio-cultural imaginary of Koreans, which shows distinctive features of their accommodation of various music genres through Americanism. This multicultural aspect of postwar Korean popular music is characterized by examples of the appropriation and hybridization of musical forms, as well as by multilingual expressions that provide a powerful mode of address for a postcolonial culture in a localized context of double consciousness alongside the American military ghetto. As Du Bois describes it, double consciousness is the term for an individual mentality whose identity is divided into two separate contradictory identities (Du Bois, 1989). Postwar Koreans experience of their double relationship with two colonizers cultural adaptations makes the individual and the social sites where the convergence and divergence of modern consciousness take place in this contradictory reality. In this sense, Du Boisian double consciousness proffers varying politics of identity location. As Cooppan argues vis-à-vis the Du Bois theory of double consciousness, sometimes a local culture restores, reconnects and remembers in order to lay a different kind of claim to all kinds of territories, both inner and outer (Cooppan, 2005), so postwar memory in popular music takes the form of hybrid stylistic exercises that function as a subjective mode for colonial subalterns. Postwar collective memories conveyed through popular music and its appropriations imply not merely the exchange of meaning or information but a resonance in which to discern Koreans divergent, separated and yet authentic self-identity. In this respect, popular songs from the 1950s enveloped a structure of feeling, forming the aural dimension of collective memories on Americanism and Americanized modernity in postwar Korea. The fetishization of Americanism, which was endemic to postwar Korean popular music, betrays a transitional process anchored to the military ghetto. This fetish involves adapting musical styles, genres and modalities from an American thingness hybridized with prior music genres such as Shinminyo and Enka. Songs with English titles

243 229 such as Lucky Morning, America Chinatown, and Arizona Cowboy were evidence of how postwar Koreans mimicked what they could never really be through the spectres of Americanization. 4. Americanized Modernity in Korean Popular Music in the 1950s: Fetishization of Americanism and the Commodification of Music Genres Given the process of expanding Americanized modernity after two war(s) World War II and Korean War it is crucial to delve into the genealogy of Americanized modernity as it relates to the formation of Korean popular music in terms of colonial structures and its capitalist logic in order to comprehend the doubleness of the cultural interchanges that differentiates the Korean experience from other colonized countries under European occupation. The Americanized modernization process was initiated by urban colonial intellectuals during the Japanese occupation. After an initial germination of westernized modernity during the 1930s, the youngsters, the so-called Modern Boy and Modern Girl, dynamically mimicked a bodily modern by adopting various ways of gesturing, facial expressions and modes of fashion on an individual level. The Modern Boy and Modern Girl aesthetic had a taste for western/american music and fashions, challenging ethnic nationalism, cultural relativism and the concept of modernity in Korean society. <Figure 5-10> A satirical representation of mobomoga s tiresome westernized configuration, caricatured by Seukjoo Ahn, 268 Byeolgeongon, July Courtesy of Chosun Daily (left) Modern 268 For further reading regarding Ahn Seokjoo s comics in colonial Korea, See Myungjik Shin (2003) Modern Boy Strolls around Gyeongseong (Modanboy Gyeongseongeul Geonilda), Hyunsilmunhwa Yeungu Publisher.

244 230 girls singing western and Japanese songs while playing a phonograph in colonial Korea. Courtesy of Chosun Daily newspaper, when women can propagate. Illustrated by Seukjoo Ahn ( ) Following the formation of a gramophone culture in East Asia, most of companies that had weathered the fierce competition of the early years of the music industry from 1910 to 1930 in mainland China promptly initiated the launch of local manufacturing facilities and transnational distribution centers for distributing gramophone records throughout Asia, Latin America and Africa (Jones, 2001). The emergence of Japanese phonograph companies like NITTO, in competition with transnational phonograph companies, and the popular circulation of reprinted records in 1927 fundamentally altered the circumstances surrounding the production and consumption of popular music in East Asia. 269 In 1928, transnational record companies were introduced to colonial Korea, such as Columbia, Victor, Polydor and Japanese Je-chook (Hwang, 1989), and these had a significant impact on the cultural formations surrounding technologies of music listening during the Japanese colonial era, although the repertoire of records from the early years of the Japanese colonial period did not consist entirely of popular songs. 270 the beginning of the phonographic era in colonial Korea, the majority of phonograph records issued were of traditional song styles like Japga (Miscellaneous songs), Pansori (a traditional Korean operatic style of music), Danga (short rehearsal songs sung before Pansori) and any folk songs that the transnational record entrepreneurs thought might be profitable. In 1932, the popularity of Hwangseongeui Jeok (Ruins of Hwangseong), considered to be the first recorded popular song in Korea, led to the release of a large number of popular song recordings. Nonetheless, traditional ethnic music continued to be At 269 The first encounter with the gramophone produced some haphazard symptoms of the rupture between pre-modern and modern. The cultural impact of sound technology remained mired rumours and Korean folk superstitions. For example, people believed superstitions regarding phonograph sounds, for example the myth that there was a decapitated child s head inside of the gramophone, or that if one s voice is recorded his or her life span would be shortened and so on. 270 If popular songs are defined broadly as songs of the people which have its own artistic characteristics and are transmitted through mass media, then this includes japga (literally Miscellaneous songs ), Pansori (a traditional Korean operatic style of music), danga (short rehearsal songs sung before Pansori), folk songs, gasa, yuhaengga (literally Popular songs ), Sinminyo (new folk songs), manyo (humorous songs), and jazz songs. There is a need, however, to distinguish between those songs, which were enjoyed previously and then later recorded on phonograph records and those songs where lyricists and composers wrote songs specifically for phonographs. The former are called traditional songs, while the latter are called popular songs in the narrow sense. Popular songs in this thesis refer to this narrow sense of the term.

245 231 recorded and consumed by Koreans until their liberation from Japanese occupation. The record circulation system during the Japanese occupation era was characterized by processes of constraining the available repertoire and a hybridized localization of traditional and modern music genres. Meanwhile, an influx of western music genres, such as Jazz crossbred with Americanized music according to Japanese tastes, came to Korea as a modern popular music form. Here, Jazz broadly designates western music styles from big band Jazz and Blues to Tango, as opposed to Yuhangga and melancholy elegiac ballads called Enka. It was instantly hybridized with other traditional music genres in Korea, resonating with Koreans collective sensibilities under the Japanese occupation. The Japanese versions of American genres, however, generally ignored the standard sixteen-measure chord progression and blue-notes characteristic of authentic American blues, instead latching on to a peculiar melancholy mood (Yano, 2002). In the Total War period after 1937, along with films, jingoistic propaganda and posters, popular music became one of the most efficient militaristic surveillance apparatuses imposed upon colonial Koreans for the purpose of mobilizing colonial subjects for imperialistic ends by demanding Koreans selfsacrifice and imperial identification until the end of the colonial period. These songs (military popular songs labeled as Gunga 軍歌 ) tended to focus less on the defeat to the imaginary enemy and more on the spiritual strength of the Japanese people themselves (Dower, 1993). Many Korean popular songs during the Japanese colonial period began to use borrowed scales, vocal techniques and other musical elements from Japanese-filtered American music genres, which the Japanese embraced from the west/america as a kind of cultural modernity. The ready-made western cultural commodities available during the Japanese occupation era were selected according to Japanese tastes, a process that mirrored colonial Koreans sense of inferiority in being pre-modern and making the colonized feel ontologically unstable in this transition. Therefore, the colonial distinction of cultural modernity was detached from traditional pre-modern Korea, bearing connotations of opportunistic fragments accompanied by utopian rhetoric that were irresistible yet coercive in terms of their colonial origins and which generated an ambivalent set of sensibilities with regard to recognizing the colonial self (Gaonkar, 1999:1). Unlike the

246 232 highly visible Japanese colonial institutions, the invisibility of popular songs functioned in terms of an aural modernity/collective memory, and this instantly permeated colonial Korea alongside new modes of fashion, shifting lifestyles and the first seeds of an imaginary cosmopolitanism. This disorienting transition from the traditional to the modern in popular music was dynamically mediated by the advent of a transnational record market system (capitalist system) and the Modern Boy and Modern Girl colonial consumerist ethos (consumer culture). The colonial subjectivity that bodily adapted to the colonial ethos of the Japanese experienced a filtered westernized modernity under Japanese occupation and tried to find a new self-identity and subjectivity dissociated from the dysfunctional nation-state and mutilated traditions of the colonial regime. The vacillations of cultural identity were thus embodied not only in the colonial socio-political (societal) modernization of the mind through modern education and mass entertainment but also by the diffusion of western culture and individual perceptions of western modernity. Modernism is not merely an expression of socio-economic modernization, but the means by which the intelligentsia takes charge of the interstices of different historical temporalities (Néstor, 1995). Individual modernization and the desire for westernized/americanized modernity under Japanese colonial circumstances were confined to the level of a subculture, however, since they were motivated by the urban middle class bourgeois inhabiting metropolitan Gyeongseong (Seoul). As we look at the cultural trajectory of the post-liberation and Korean War era in Korean popular music history, this transitional period from the colonial to the postcolonial is heavily influenced by the Japanese colonial era in the way that sentimental bonds are forged between colonizers and colonized. Therefore, the second postwar era, after the Korean War, is crucial in Korean popular music history in terms of how the concept of individual modernization was transformed to generate a broader collective consciousness of Americanized modernity in the postwar Korean imaginary. In this respect, reading popular song lyrics symptomatically in relation to socio-cultural contexts such as the stationing of the American military, force us to look at its consequences, including urbanization (western style building construction around military ghetto), industrialization (change of phonograph format, AFKN broadcasting, the advent of television) and the dissemination of American values (democracy, individualism, privatization). These themes are significant since the

247 233 texts betray a symptomatic fetishization of an Americanization linked to the urban landscape and military ghetto culture. The taste for America/Americanism as exoticism in popular music demonstrates the collective desire of the postcolonial subjects for an Americanized modernity while also indicating what Koreans thought this (Americanized/westernized) modernity to be. The influence of Americanism in the postwar popular music scene is unambiguously illustrated in popular song lyrics that include superfluous English vocabulary that acts as a marker of Americanized popular song, such as Lucky Morning (1956, performed by Park Jaeran), Arizona Cowboy (1955, performed by Myeong Gukhwan), and America Chinatown (1953, performed by Baek Nyenseol). Although they gaudily use English in their lyrics, these songs are not similar to genuine American popular songs in terms of their rhythm, musical scale and compositional style. This fetishization of Americanism through popular song lyrics extended these kinds of practices in the postcolonial adaptation of American popular music genres by commodifying the music genre itself. What is life? I don t know but let s just drink and play /My Youth never came back after it get withered / so, let s just drink! Pouring some liquor here! / Let s dance until the end of dawn / Boogie woogie Boogie woogie! Guitar Boogie, sung by Yoon Illo, 1957 Either lose control yourself in expensive brandy or cheap Makgeolli/ 271 everyone is same as we are all getting old in times/ The difference lies only whether you have lots of money or not/ Let s singing Mambo, Your Mambo, My Mambo, and Korean Mambo! Korean Mambo, sung by Kim Jeonggu, 1958 Let s play, Let s have some fun / we cannot have fun after we get old/ our flowery dance became a bloody chrysanthemum / Once the moon get full, soon the flower will get fade / Hurrah! Cha Cha Cha / Whoopee! Cha Cha Cha / Flowers blossom and spring came! / We cannot but play all day long! Noraegarak Cha Cha Cha (Song Rhythm Cha Cha Cha), Sung by Hwang Jeung-Ja, s song lyrics thematizing desire or a craving for status can be read as a psychological release from the extreme melancholia concomitant with the colonial experience and Korean War. On the other hand, the dissemination of western-oriented 271 Makgeolli is traditional Korean alcoholic beverage, also known as Korean rice wine.

248 234 social ideals such as privatization, individualism, consumerism and dilettantism derived from the American value system, and these were embodied in a universalized cultural atmosphere in postwar Korea designating what postwar the ethos was, enabling Korean to perceive themselves within the same framework of America. In this sense, the postwar nihilism in Guitar Boogie, Korean Mambo and Song Rhythm Cha Cha Cha emphasized corporeal sensations by insinuating that there is no possible resolution to the crisis of postwar subjectivity. Embodied narratives in popular song lyrics of the 1950s are marked by sentiments of melancholy or loss and aesthetics of escapism and alienation. Postwar Korean popular songs encapsulate a certain consciousness of dislocation characteristic of postwar popular songs in the 1950s. The narratives of these songs obliquely demonstrate the link between the compulsion toward westernized/americanized modernity accompanying the American military presence during the postwar era and the discrepancy between postcolonial subjectivity and Americanized musical forms, which are mostly far different from the traditional Korean music genres and are articulated with them. Various music genres, such as Blues, Mambo, Cha Cha and Tango were actively accommodated by local musicians and lyricists followed by local phonograph companies promoting American musical styles combined with local sentiments. However, the compositional style of popular music gradually changed alongside this adaptation of American music in the 1950s. Lee Youngmee describes how the melody of Daejeon Blues is still in the Enka/Trot style, but its rhythm is executed in elastic triple time, while Guitar Boogie retains the traditional five scale compositional style but with a rhythm adapted to that of the Boogie Woogie genre, and Song Rhythm Cha Cha Cha combines the Shinminyo (new folk song) genre with an emulation of the Cha Cha rhythm (Lee, 1998:129). Rethinking Fredric Jameson s nostalgia for the present, 272 postcolonial subjectivity was ironically situated in the politics of a Japanese-filtered western modernity that itself reflected Americanized modernity. In contrast to Filipinos Americanization, where, according to Appadurai American nostalgia feeds on Filipino desire represented as 272 Quoted in Arjun Appadurai, (1996) Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy: Modernity at Large, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, pp

249 235 a hypercompetent reproduction, 273 postwar Koreans in the 1950s were still entrapped within this Japanese filtered Americanized modernity in spite of the arrival of American military bases and the possibility of direct access to an Americanized modernity. Postwar Korean popular music thus mimics the external forms of America, gesturing toward its musical genres by using English vocabulary, commodifying American genres and fetishizing Americanism by appropriating the spaces of the U.S. military ghetto. Thus, the Korean popular music scene in the 1950s was a transitional period, one that allows us to grasp the in-betweens where the cultural boundaries between two empires blur and overlap. Narratives of Korean popular songs were constantly consuming and dreaming of the imaginary surface of western/american mores while forever returning to the colonial structure that inflected its inception. In the early 1960s, however, the interaction between American and Korean cultures generated a more Americanized popular music. The Korean popular music players trained in the American G.I. camp shows began to produce more Americanized popular songs, maintaining their emotional and symbolic ties with America. The great success of The Boy in the Yellow Shirt, performed by low-voiced female singer Han Myung-Sook, who debuted on the stage of the Eighth United States Army division base to great acclaim, became a stepping stone for Americanized popular song. Emanating the essence of hillbilly country music, the single allowed more local composers and singers to perform in U.S. Army base camp shows. Musicians who later became prominent in the mainstream Korean popular music scene such as Hyun-mi, Choi Hi-Joon, Petty Kim, Lee Geum-Hee, Wicky Lee and Shin Jung-Hyeon (considered the father of Korean rock) got their start in American military camp shows. Their vocalizations simulated American styles using jazzy vibrations instead of the more melancholy and nasal Enka sound. Unlike the singers of the Japanese colonial era who tried to emulate crooners mellow and elegiac feminized voice, singers in the 1960s performed in a considerably more accurately western vocal key Appadurai, Ibid., p Remarkably, traces of the five traditional scales remained. The Boy in the Yellow Shirt was filled with Country-style hillbilly with husky jazzy vocalizations but still used the traditional five scales, so the song does not sound entirely like a 5-scale Trot. Minor key easy listening music, such as Cho-woo (translates as First rain ) sung by Petty Kim (1966) used the harmonic minor scale but still kept the convention of Trot using variations on mi-do-si-ra-si or si-do-re-pa-mi, since

250 236 I like that boy in the yellow shirt /even though he is very blunt / I don t know why I like him but I do / Even though he is not handsome man but seems like sincere and gentle The Boy in the Yellow Shirt, Han, Myung-Sook, 1961 My baby is old miss / she is very hysteric / If I late for the date / she doesn t even talk to me / what shall I do? / My baby is old miss / she is very stubborn / If I talk to some young lady / she ask me like a detective / Oh, help me! My baby is Old Miss, Choi, Hee-Joon, 1961 Following the success of The Boy in the Yellow Shirt, this song spread to Japan, Taiwan and South Asia, and even famous French Chanson singer Yvette Giraud, famed for her song L ame des Poetes, and Japanese singer Hamamura Michiko reissued the song in their own languages (Park 2009). The lyrics of the early 1960s were relatively optimistic, describing comical heterosexual love affairs unlikely in the more moody and nihilistic lyrics of the 1950s. The topography of Americanized popular culture was closely related to the military ghetto where the ubiquitous U.S. presence and the heterogeneous geographic space of the military ghetto influenced the formation of an Americanized Korean modernity. By embracing the extreme subcultural aspects of America (violence, sexual assault, prostitution and the black market) and its ideological discourses, the radical mixture of the popular cultural scene and cultural representations of both mainstream Korean popular music and the military camp show provide a larger social context for understanding the differing hegemonic relationships among musicians, performers and the music texts themselves that embodied the essential omnipresence of America. Thus, the postwar popular music scene bore the mark of its plural origins and was a palimpsest of multiple practices between empires where Japanese colonial remains and the postcolonial liveliness of Americanization were superimposed. Korean fantasies of Americanization through a fetishization of American culture were the key component of an Americanized postwar cultural modernity. Undoubtedly, Korean popular songs in this era echoed an exotic predilection for an imaginary Americanized utopia (in songs like San Francisco, Arizona Cowboy and the variation of main characteristics of minor Trot key are structured as fa-mi-do-si-ra or fa-mido-si-ra-si.

251 237 American Chinatown ) and a lyrical attachment to the English language syncretized with American pop music genres. Using snippets of foreign language, such as the ostentatious appellation of American cities and Westernized lifestyles in music texts, consolidated the mass desire for Americanization in accordance with urbanization and modernization after the Korean War. The fantasy based on the desire to be Americanized presupposes an entirely self-contained and autonomous disposition characterized as the postcolonial consciousness of the narcissistic ego. According to Brennan, colonial modernity is characterized by the objectification of another in support of one s narcissistic fantasy (Brennan, 1993). This imaginary fixing also bears a relation to the symbolic order by fetishizing Americanism in the Korean postcolonial imaginary and in taking possession of the symbolic satisfaction of being a recognizable other. <Figure 5-11> Album cover designs in 1950s. All albums above using English title of the songs reflecting the prevalence of English usage. Clockwise from top left: American Chinatown by Baek Nyeon-Seol, Guitar Boogie by Yoon Il-Hae, Lucky Morning by Park Jaeran, Man No.1 by Park Gyeong-Won, The Boy in the Yellow Shirt, reissued cover version by Yvette Giraud, Playing the Guitar for me by Son In-Ho. Bhabha emphasizes that colonial mimicry represents the desire for a reformed and recognizable Other, as the subject of difference (Bhabha 1994: 86). In other words, the discourse of mimicry must continually reproduce the inter-subjective slippage, excess,

252 238 difference, and trafficking with Americanism. In its construction of a modern national identity, Korean culture generated opportunities for the thinning of colonial/racial boundaries, creating the possibility of more inclusive selves while fetishizing an Americanism marked by the multilingual musical vocabulary that allowed subjects to cross colonial lines by listening to, mimicking and emulating American cultural texts. It cannot be described as simply a negation of the warped reality of colonial circumstances or as an impure desire for assimilation. The main problem of cultural transformation related to the Americanization thesis lies in an increasing number of questions raised by this intermingling of colonial cultural identities. The incessant need for self-recognition in a postcolonial situation begs further investigation into the question of cultural identity and Asian/Western cultural discrepancies. Postwar Korea was defined by both the presence and absence of a colonizer, making this relation the privileged signifier for new conceptions of Korean identity. It belongs to what Edward Said called an imaginative geography and history, which helps the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the difference between what is close to it and what is far away (Said, 1985:55). Korean pop music from the 1950s to the early 1960s was created through a process of appropriating and localizing American popular music. Appropriation is often seen as a betrayal of traditional values in favour of the colonizer s; this distortion of codes and harmonies of popular music in the non-west was not free from criticism since it implied some local creative insufficiency and insinuated that postcolonial musicians gain agency by mimicking American music styles. However, this postcolonial mimicry has an ambiguous presence in the cultural politics of adopting a postcolonial stance. On one level, colonial rulers explicitly aimed to civilize their subjects and to mold them in an imaginary Europeanness; the colonized who imitate their colonizer were in this sense part of the colonial plan. But postcolonial mimesis, with its covert obsession with America, also threatens this dominant scheme of cultural forms, often becoming excessive or uncontrollable by unsettling the boundaries and relations of authority between Americans and Koreans that the postcolonial order depended on. Mimicry in terms of the appropriation of popular music scenes raised a problem that in some ways was always different from the original and authentic that the postcolonial administrator intended. It is considered a subservient exploitation of postcolonial subjects through their own performativity to

253 239 infiltrate the mainstream American culture. Korean popular music in this era wasn t merely a masked yellow version of American musical appropriation; it generated specific local aesthetics while fetishizing the sensibility of Americanism. 5. Conclusion: On the Ambivalence of Americanized Modernity Change life! Change Society! These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space New social relationships call for a new space. 275 Henri Lefebvre (1991) Itaewon, the military ghetto, became a cultural milieu to reterritorialize postwar Korean society symbolically as the imaginary emblem of Americanization. Reconstructed for the pleasure of the U.S. military, postwar Korean subjects confronted the implicit memory of the colonial experience and its infrastructure while this was inevitably intermixed with the desire for an Americanized modernity, desire that was ossified and resurfaced in the space of the military ghetto through the appropriation and consumption of Americanism. In this respect, the postwar military ghetto was the space where the preservation of an inscribed colonial trauma and the immanent concept of Americanized modernity collided through U.S. military culture. New types of popular music resonated with postwar Korean sentiments and an Americanized mass desire emerged in the military ghetto, supported by newly introduced facilities like AFKN and the local broadcasting station. The narratives of postwar popular songs recount postcolonial ambivalent desire while revisiting the symptoms of the implicit memories of Japanese colonial remains, which eventually collided with Americanized modernization. The AFKN s dissemination of American popular music, which was untranslatable to the majority of Koreans, and its circulation of current and past American popular music repertoires connected two postcolonial narratives: the subversive idea of the traditional value system mediated through American culture and the fetishization of Americanism, which simultaneously represents and summons the ambivalent sensibility towards Americanization within these two consecutive colonial experiences. In this process, the act of radio listening and consuming American/Americanized popular music, derived from the military ghetto, 275 Henri Lefebvre (1991) The Production of Space, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, p. 59.

254 240 become a repository for memories about the postcolonial experience and for the desire to consume an imaginary Americanized modernity. The topos, as the production of local narratives and images circulating within the cultural sphere of capital development (Belton, 2004), became the cultural site of these memories and desires when they are projected onto geographical space. In postwar Korean circumstances, the topos becomes a narrativization of Americanized modernity and of an imaginary geography in the postcolonial un/conscious. The American military ghetto is considered to be an intersectional space since bilateral relations with America had a profound impact on postwar Korean society. The narratives of postwar popular music still metaphorically suture the duality of postcolonial Korean sub/consciousness and act as a visible expression and repression of Americanized modernity. In this respect, the context of the Korean pop music scene in the 1950s showed specifically Korean musical characteristics in the process of accommodating American popular music genres. Korean popular music therefore reproduced hybridities in-between different racial and geographic colonizers popular cultures, between the Japanese and the American. It was a magnetic field where the cross-fertilization of Korean traditional folk and Japanese-style Enka resonated with American popular music genres in the militarized space of the ghetto where ambivalent desire and colonial appropriation coexisted.

255 241 Conclusion: Popular Memory and Its Repetition Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present. Homi Bhabha (1994:63) To praise oblivion is not to revile memory; even less is it to neglect remembrance, but rather to recognize the work of oblivion in the first one and to spot it in the second. Memory and oblivion in some way have the same relationship as life and death Marc Augé (2004:14) In 2008, a journalist 276 unexpectedly tracked down colonial singer Lee Erisu after the star s lengthy disappearance from show business. In covering the unwritten implicit memory of colonial era, the Korean media gave heavy reporting to the melodramatic life of this 98-year-old lady, who was found, highly disoriented, in a sanitorium in Gyeonggido province near Seoul. She was the one of the first singers to make what can genuinely be described as popular song in colonial Korea with the release of Hwangseongeui Jeok ( Ruins of Hwangseong, lyrics by Wang Pyeong, composed by Jeon Surin, Victor Record, A) in In spite of her mental state, many journalists visited the hospital in hopes of interviewing her to resuscitate her memory who only can integrate the fidelity of colonial life and ephemeral fame as a popular singer during the Japanese colonial period, although she remembered nothing of this time. Her relationship to the colonial period was detached, falling into complete oblivion, and her personal reminiscences were forever lost to the ravages of age. As a testimonial performer, surviving witness and narrator of colonial life, she could no longer convey her memories to us. 276 Jeong Hong-Taek, a popular music archivist, tried to interview her on October 21 st, Hanggukilbo Daily Newspaper. Available online at [ 277 According to Lee Junhee, there is no evidence that a phonograph of Hwangseongui Jeok was recorded around , as many Korean newspapers claim. The song was issued in October, See Lee (2008), A woman left for searching love behind the Hwangseongyeteo Ohmynews, available online at [ =N0000&BLCK_NO=3&CMPT_CD=M0006&NEW_GB=].

256 242 Born in 1910 when Korea was annexed to Japanese colonial rule, Lee (Lee Eum- Jeon) recorded various popular songs issued on both the Columbia and Victor record labels, such as Merieui Norae (Song of Mary), Rain Gang (Rhine River), Hwangseungui Jeok (Ruins of Hwangseong), and Goyohan Jangan (Tranquil C hangan). At the same time, she was recording phonographs in Japan including Tsukinoyukue (Traces of Moonlight) and Adanasake (Transient Heart, a version of Goyohan Jangan) under the pseudonym Lee Arisu ( 李アリス ). <Figure 6> Portraits of colonial singer Lee Erisu (in 2008, left, and in 1932, middle), the most famous Korean celebrity during the Japanese colonial occupation era. She suddenly disappeared from the show business in 1932 after a series of gossip stories in many magazines about her scandalous affairs with a married man (right, 1931, Chogwang). In 2009, she was found in a psychiatric hospital near Seoul after being forgotten for more than a half century. Choi Chang-Ho, a North Korean popular music critic, recollected her of legendary recital in 1933 that she could barely sing because she was choked with the sobbing that seized her in third verse of the song 278 at the interlude stage in Danseung theatre. Lee intermittently stopped her performance, then returned to the stage and barely finished her song. After the performance, Korean audiences acclaimed the performance of this elegiac song with its half singing half weeping, and rumours of the performance gathered a tremendous Korean audience that following her every time she performed. Eventually, the Bureau of Educational Affairs prohibited her performance of the song because it instigated national mourning for the metaphoric ruined country and evoked 278 Complete third verse: I will go away endlessly/ wherever I can go/ over the mountain, across the river/ without any route/ Alas! Hiding my excruciating thoughts deep inside of my heart/ I will float away, so farewell my ruined old place

257 243 anti-japanese patriotism. 279 In 1932, at the pinnacle of her reputation in both Korea and in Japan, Lee suddenly disappeared from the stage and tried to commit a suicide with a married man with whom she was in love. 280 After the scandalous affront to social mores, Lee abandoned her career as a singer after recording her last phonograph album, G gotgaksi Seuleum (Sorrow of a Bride), in The act of singing, by sharing emotions with audiences despite the impossibility of expressing the entirety of their colonial circumstances and confessing to her sorrows as a veiled form of witnessing history and preserving memory, articulated a certain type of agency in the formation of a cultural history in Korea. The sudden rediscovery of her presence instantly invoked public interest vis-à-vis ways of conveying the fidelity of colonial life as a site of cultural memory through the vivid narratives of this legendary female singer. However, until she died of senescence in April of 2009, she remained silent. Her voiceless presence, amnesia and the paradoxical vestiges of her phonographs remain a symbolic question that casts the problem of Korean knowledge production regarding the country s opaque cultural history, highlighting the imperfectible oral history as a form of commemorative mourning and the very instability of individual memory as a system of cultural embodiment. This, then, provides the key questions regarding Korean cultural history: where are we to look for cultural histories we haven t known, and how can we identify/justify the cultural history when what we used to know (as a hegemonic trend of designating 1930s to 1950s as a cultural retreat or as a cultural dark ages ) is contested by what we don t want (a new archive) to be discovered? As Igarashi (Igarashi 2000) argues, the bodily / corporeal re-membering the past of the Japanese, through analyzing various postwar Japanese popular cultural representations that expressed the national memory of losing the war and the trauma of defeat during the postwar period, Korean popular culture constantly resuscitated its repetitive narratives of the repressed Koreans self-configuration towards empires. It was often represented as a form of pathological melancholia and a passionate attachment to Americanism as a continual coloniality that resulted from the failure of any successful 279 See, Choi Chang-Ho (2000) Minjok Sunangieui Daejunggayosa (Korean Popular Music History during National suffering), Ilwolseogak Publisher, pp She tried to commit a suicide again in May of 1935 after struggling with problems with her husband, an event that was also covered in many magazines such as Chogwang (Figure 40) and Daedonga.

258 244 acceptance of loss (normal mourning of the loss of nation/sovereignty) throughout the lineal process from the colonial to the postcolonial era. The Korean traditional notion of Han ( 恨 ) is an overarching cultural concept that we might use to consider the repetition of popular music narratives as a reflection of the national ethos. Often described as a unique psychological symptom to Koreans, Han implies the illness, cultural patterns and social beliefs that are usually represented in Korean Shamanism, traditional P ansori (Korean theatrical operetta) and symbolic descriptions of the chronological national tragedy (Japanese encroachment; Iljaechimnyak to the national partition; Bundan). Heartstrings of Han (Haneui Jeongseo in Korean) are culturally indescribable term that vaguely designates the state of collective feelings of unresolved resentment or a strong sense of grudge and sorrows of Koreans (Kim and Rhi 1976) which often appeared as a functional notion to portray Koreans typical phenomenological representation of depression and melancholia in this era. 281 However, as a form of national commemoration or collective sentiment, Han only explains the selective attachment to shaping collective memories that exclusively accompanied vernacular values, local customs, and the unchanging state of collective resentment and mourning. Thus, the rhetoric of Han as a sentiment of loss and rehabilitation, can easily be mobilized as a representational of rural/traditional community and collective ethos as agency for ideologically consolidating the nation-state through vernacularizing, localizing, and victimizing Korean nationhood. Thus, Han is a limiting term to outline the broad range of popular music production and consumption in this era. Given these problems; (1) the fragility of public and individual memory as oral archives, which has limiting possibility to convey the cultural context of Korean cultural history and (2) the difficulty to define Korean collective sentiments, detaching from the traditional idiosyncratic Han, a close examination on the archival remains of popular music products and its reflections on the large spatial and temporal structure within empires needs to be speculated on the formation of Korean popular music. In this respect, as a study in 281 Chung Pang (1998) described Han as a passive, chronic regret and resentment syndrome, with or without a sensation of obstruction by a lump in the epigastric and respiratory regions. Kim and Rhi (1976) described that Han also includes expressions of dysphoric affect, such as self-pity, commonly associated with disappointments and unfulfilled aspirations, which resulted Hwabyeong(an anger syndrome) and Shingyeongswaeyak(similar to neurasthenia) (Kleinman 1982)

259 245 cultural memory, this dissertation has focused on addressing (1) the embedded structures of Japanese colonialism in Korean popular songs, and (2) the impact of how Americanization and the invention of modern life were circulated as discourses in the Korean colonial and postcolonial periods by excavating and addressing various extant popular songs that have thus far remained unexamined. By articulating various colonial and postcolonial debates on popular songs and accounts of the audience s reception to this music in periodicals, journals, music sheets and extant phonograph records, I have investigated the cultural formation of Korean popular music in relation to colonial modernity, collective mentality as coloniality and Americanization by recontextualizing popular music as a narrative of collective memories and trauma. By looking at the cultural representations of modern Korean popular music from this period, when local modernity was taking shape, I address how historicity is produced in the space between cultural memory and its engagement with the historical events of this era, of colonial occupation, the Korean War and subsequent American military stationing. These events were not isolated or segmented but connected, and they negotiated and overlapped with one another in the historical tensions, fissures and energies present in cultural activities. As Marx has said, the lingering of the past is a burden in defining the present. 282 In interweaving the two colonial situations of Korean cultural modernity through the lens of narratives of Korean popular music, which took form between the colonial control of the Japanese Empire and the American military government, this research project reveals the colonial continuity and cultural discontinuity in representations and experiences in the sphere of Korean popular culture where these commingled with the advent of new music genres, colonial and postcolonial regimes, urbanization, modernization and the introduction of modern western technologies. In this respect, my research elucidates the ways in which practices of the consumption and production of modern Korean popular music and its cultural 282 He wrote that, Men [and women] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Karl Marx (1967) The 18 th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, New York: International Publishers, p.15. Quoted in Dirlik Arif (1997), The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Boulder: Westview Press, p. 220.

260 246 representations were entwined with the structure of Korean cultural modernity and collective mentality. By juxtaposing the perpetuation of the hegemonic constructions of coloniality against formations of local identity as negotiations and confrontations with this colonial subjugation, displacement and domination, this account of the collective memories of Koreans explores the links between modern perception and the imagined narratives of western modernity, while interrogating how structures of colonial/postcolonial knowledge urban development, commercialization and modernization are expressed in the narrative forms of popular music. The narratives of popular music from this era thus open up a productive space in which to formulate a more intimate relation with cultural modernity and more specifically the historicity of colonial/postcolonial mentality in terms of collective memories dealing with colonial/western/americanized modernity. The narratives of popular music express the colonial experiences of Koreans during the Japanese occupation, actively embracing Koreans collective sentiments and mass perceptions of the colonial landscape by accommodating the concept of westernization and American modernity filtered through Japanese mediation. Located in the interior of the Japanese colonial imaginary, colonial Koreans mentalities, as these are reflected in the submissive narratives of Korean popular songs, were forcibly situated within their rhetorical assimilation into the imperial body by the political regime that mobilized Koreans for Japanese militarism and imposed imperial discourses of becoming an imperial subject. Meanwhile, colonial narratives and their popular representations in postwar culture also reproduced symptoms of colonial continuity, such as the reappropriation of the Home Front ethos in song lyrics during the Korean War or the resurgence of postwar Nambang fantasy, a Total War discourse expressed by the consumption of exotic music genres and the popularity of Tango and Rumba in the post-liberation era. During the postliberation era and the 1950s, when the U.S. military controlled Korea, the symbolic presence of postwar popular musicians wearing Chikadabi and dressed in western suits highlights the degree to which Koreans were disoriented in this space between two empires. Cultural memories, as they are expressed in Korean popular music during this period, do not represent a unitary consciousness toward these historical events; rather, they appear to play with conventional ideas and fixed identities within the specificity of the colonial regime by conveying a feeling that some symptomatic unknown is arising out of

261 247 an ongoing yet bygone event. In this respect, tracing the historical transformation and formations of memory in the un/consciousness of Koreans was my primary goal in writing this genealogy of modern Korean popular music. To clarify this colonial continuity and postcolonial negotiation in recognizing ideas of Americanization and of westernized modernity in representations of popular music narratives, this dissertation has made an intervention in two historical moments. The first cluster was dedicated to focusing on the embedded structures of Japanese colonialism and the invention of modern quotidian life through novel noises, newly introduced aural technologies and the Korean audience s reception to new popular songs. The ambivalent imperial subjects under Japanese colonial surveillance longed for modern experiences while they galvanized themselves to escape from the imaginary boundaries between the burden of a doubly implanted coloniality and traditional values, which historically demarcating colonial Korean mentality as the inner/interior against outer/exterior, and defined an us against an other. Embedded in the colonial indoctrination of Japanese ideologies while at the same time self-censoring against assimilation to this Japanese imperialism, the colonial Koreans engaged in the production and consumption of popular music actively tried to accommodate western modernity and modern technologies like the gramophone, radio, vaudeville show and new western music genres that altered their ways of listening. These complex colonial interactions between the Japanese Empire and its colonial subjects were challenged and counteracted by a fantasy of western modernity, an unexpected cultural chemistry that accompanied the influx of western/american culture. The colonial regimes regulating Koreans sovereignty and cultural independence, such as the discourses of the Imperial body, prohibition of vernacular language and enforced coevality of cultural practices with those of the Empire, were coterminous with an Imperial experience that easily subsumed the logics of the modernization process into the colonial body. Therefore, to engage these issues further, I have elucidated how the infusion of colonial discipline and cultural engagements with this regime according to the Total War ethos and logics of colonial cultural assimilation through bilingualism, colonial censorship, and the prohibition of local cultural activities effected the production and consumption of Korean popular music.

262 248 The second cluster focused mainly on the persistent mentality of an embedded colonial submission in the narratives of Korean popular songs following the introduction of the American military government in 1945 through the Korean Wars until early 1960s. Popular music reflected both a fascination and revulsion with colonial modernity, offering alternative ideas about the formation of cultural modernity in the periphery, which Gaonkar wisely divides into societal modernization and cultural modernity. Therefore, the discourses on popular music after the postwar era not only provide ambivalent epistemologies positioned in the distinction between the colonizers and the colonized but also represents a covalent collective memory, contradictory sentiments towards Americanized modernity, and a fetishization of the idea of Americanism among Koreans. In sum, this dissertation has analyzed how popular music expressed contradictory narratives not only about the appropriation of Americanized modernity but also as a strategy for concealing and forgetting Japanese colonial memories. By considering the postcolonial interstices in time and space between two empires through popular songs, I have demonstrated how narratives of exotic popular music genres were implicated in discourses on the Japanese Empire s Southern territories, called Nambang ( 南方 ), as well as how these were ironically interwoven to reinforce Japanese militarism and consequently harnessed to resuscitate western fantasies while sustaining the continuing colonial submission under the U.S. military government during the postliberation era. Furthermore, the coexistence of Japanese and western/american popular music genres during the postwar era mirrored the simultaneity of Koreans consciousness and cultural memory of the two empires and their mutual engagement in adaptations of popular music genres such as the appropriation of elegiac Enka tunes (Fox Trot) and the adoption of blues and jazz standards from the American military subculture. Popular music narratives can be read as post-traumatic symptoms of the colonial era, tracing the contours of an ontological process of colonial continuity and cultural discontinuity enacted as an un/conscious narrativization of the way in which postcolonial subjectivity remained continuously subordinated to the colonizer while negotiating a localized modernity. In the context of contemporary Cultural Studies, the idea of a westernized modernity in East Asia is usually conceptualized as resulting from historical and geographical phenomena conditioned by the postwar and Cold War era and by international

263 249 relations and industrial development in particular. Stretching these issues further in my own research and beyond its limitations, I wish to scrutinize in further research on cultural modernity through popular music in relation to emerging local capitalisms, the advent of Television and the dispatch of local soldiers to the Vietnam War and Korean Army camp show in 1960s, an efficient vessel for delineating postwar narratives in an East Asian context. Popular music in postwar Korea during the 1960s provided fertile grounds for the dissemination and enculturation of Americanism during the Cold War era via consumer culture, the advent of LP records and the proliferation of local phonograph industry. The direct mimicry of genres and their appropriation from the U.S. military army stage and Koreans reciprocal engagement with American popular music in local music production and consumption during the 1960s amplified the nation s postcolonial cultural formations in terms of musical authenticity, remasculinization of nation-state, a speedy westernized urbanization and Americanization. Growing infatuated with American modernity by affirming it as a genuine modernity, Koreans were exposed again to a doubly appropriated modernity under the militarized regime of Park Chung-Hee, who normalized relations with the nation s former colonizer, Japan, in order to inaugurate an economic reformation movement called Semaeul Undong (new community movement) and Vietnam War participation that acted as a modernization process and reflected the desire for an Americanized modernity.

264 250 <Appendix 1> Representations of 1930s Colonial Korea through American gaze in Siam to Korea (1931), A traveltalk documentary about Korea. FitzPartick Picture, Narrated by James A. FitzPatrick. Courtesy of the Travel Film Archive, Patrick Montgomery Narration: We arrived in part of Seoul, the cheap city where the unofficial reception committee is composed of other curious gathering. All those anxious are to see us as we are to see them. The white rope gentleman with the funny hat is main attraction (third picture). This fellow is the typical example of the native Korean. He bows as the demeanour of Japan but he firmly declaims to admit the superiority of Japan intellectual and moral culture over his own. <Appendix 2> First advertisement for radio sets for home use, Chosun Ilbo Daily Newspaper ( , left). Number of registered radios and their distribution rate in colonial Korea (Kim Yong-Hee 2002)

265 251 <Appendix 3> Military popular song narrating feminized colonial subject (Chronologically reorganized by the author) Title Genre Lyrist Composer Singer Company A man s spirit (Namaui uiki) Man of the rear (Chonghuuinam) The wish of the rear (Chonghuuigiwon) Song of a nurse serving in war (Jonggunganhobuuinorae) Good News of Victory (Seungjeonui kwebo) Mother of Volunteer soldier (Jiwonbyeongui Omoni) Spring Postcard (Shinchunyeopseo) White lotus, Red lotus (Baeknyeon Hongnyeon) You and me (Geudaewa na) Husband in the head of an army (Jinduui nampyeon) Son of Nation (Jogukui Adeul) Wife of Volunteer soldier (Jiwonbyeongui Anae) Wife of the peninsular (Bandoui Anae) Class of Patriotism (Agukban) Son s Letter written in blood (Adeului Hyeolseo) Letter from Mokdan River (Mokdangang Pyeonji) Lulluby of the Rear (Chonghuui Jajangga) Song of Reforming Nation (Gukmingeroga) Moonlight of South (Namgukui Dalbam) Last minute of my son (Adeului Choehu) Handwriting of my son (Adeului Piljeok) Letter of Sympathy (Wuimunpyeonji) song on patriotism song on the situation song on the situation song on the situation song on the situation Song on patriotism popular song new popular song popular song popular song song on the nation song on the nation popular song popular song popular song popular song popular song New Popular song popular song popular song new popular song new popular song anonymous Choi Namseon Lee Hayun Kim eok Lee Hayun Jo Myeongam Jo Myeongam anonymous Lee Myeongsang Son Mokin Lee Myeonsang Jeong Jingyu Kim Yonghwan Label number Year, Month Polydor Im Dongho Victor KS Park Sehwan, Jeong Chanju Columbia 40793A Kim Anra Columbia 40794A Park Sehwan, Jeong Chanju Columbia 40794B Koga Masao Jang Sejeong Okeh Kim Haesong Lee Nanyeong Okeh Lee Gasil Koga Masao Lee Haeyeon Columbia Jo Myeongam Kim Dain Kim Haesong Park Sichun Nam Insu, Jang Sejeong Park Hyangrim Okeh Okeh anonymous anonymous Jin Bangnam Taepyeong anonymous anonymous Jin Bangnam Taepyeong Jo Myeongam Jo Myeongam Jo Myeongam Jo Myeongam Jo Myeongam anonymous Jo Myeongam Cheo Nyeorim Jo Myeongam Jo Myeongam Kim Haesong Jan Sejeong Okeh Kim Haesong Kim Jeonggu Okeh Park Sichun Baek Nyeonseol Okeh Park Sichun Lee Hwaja Okeh Kim Haesong anonymous Park Hyangrim Nam Insu, Jang Sejeong Okeh Okeh Park Sichun Nam Insu Okeh anonymous Ha Dongchun Taepyeong Lee Bongryong Nam Bangchun Lee Hwaja Okeh Baek Nyeonseol Okeh

266 252 Title Genre Lyrist Composer Singer Company Sister of Korea(Joseonui Nunum) popular song Kim Dain Lee Jaeho Boyhood (sonyeoncho) popular song Kim Dain Lee Jaeho Mother and son s reunion(mojasangbong) Military Post(Gunsaupyeon) Wife of the suicide squad (Gyeolsadaeui Anae) Lady s consolidation (Agasiui wuimun) Happy Farewell (Hangbokan ibyeol) Oath of a hero (Yeolsaui Mangseo) Yeongdong Lady (Yeongdong agasi) Real Love (Chamsarang) Sending consolatory troupe (Bonaenun Wuimundan) Diary from the hospital (Byeongwonseon Ilgi) Incarnation of Spring Days(Bomnalui Hwasin) Pride of peony (Moknanui jarang) Farewell to my parent (Bumo Ibyeol) Mother s wish (Omoniui Giwon) We re the Imperial Soldier (Urinun jeguk gunin) Letter from son (Adeului Sosik) House of the volunteers (Jiwonbyeongui Jib) popular song new popular song popular song popular song new popular song new popular song new popular song new popular song new popular song new popular song new popular song new popular song popular song song on a universal conscription song on a universal conscription new popular song popular song Jo Myeongam Lee Gasil Jo Myeongam Jo Myeongam Noshiro Hachihiro Lee Unjeong Jin Bangnam Jin Bangnam Baek Nyeonseol Lee Gyunam Label number Year, Month Taepyeong Taepyeong Okeh Columbia 40900A Park Sichun Lee Hwaja Okeh Lee Bongryong Jang Sejeong Okeh Lee Gasil Han Sanggi Go Unbong Columbia 40905A Lee Gasil Lee Gasil Koga Masao Son Mokin Lee Gyunam Lee Haeyeon Columbia 40905B Columbia 40908B Lee Gasil Son Mokin Ok Jamhwa Columbia 40909B Ham Gyeongjin Ham Gyeongjin Son Mokin Han Sanggi Lee Haeyeon Nam Haeseong Columbia 40911A Columbia 40911B Lee Gasil Son Mokin Ok Jamhwa Columbia Ham Gyeongjin Jo Myeongam Kamiki Keisaku Kim Jeongui Han Gyeongjin Jo Myeongam Son Mokin Kim Haesong Jeon Gihyeon Kim Yonghwan Kim Yeongchun Baek Nyeonseol Cha Hongryeon Choi Changeun Columbia 40913B Okeh Taepyeong Taepyeong Han Sanggi Ok Jamhwa Columbia Park Sichun Jang Sejeong Okeh

267 253 <Appendix 4> Social Movement after the liberation in Korea (Lee & Cho 1997:61) Liberation day USAMGK era Korean War era Post Korean War Seoul Busan Daegu Gyeonggi Gangwon Chungcheong Gyeongsang Jeonla Jeju _ 0.3 Hamgyeong Pyeongan _ Hwanghae The United States Japan 0.9 _ China 1.5 _ Other sum <Appendix 5> Original song sheet of G otmacha The original song sheet of Ggotmacha (Flowery Wagon, 1939, Taepyeong Record) which was reissued after the revision of lyric, Joseon Hyundae Gayojip (1980), Courtesy of Yanbien University in China

268 254 <Appendix 6> Music Sheets of Gohyangmalli (Nostalgia for my Hometown, 1946) and Gwigukseon (Homecoming Cruise, 1948) Melancholic remnants of Asia-Pacific War mentality after postwar in Korea, Hyun-In, Musical Notes, Yooho (lyric), Pak, Si-Chun (Composition), Lucky Record, 1946 Overstated representation of Nationalism after liberation in Korea, Inkwon Lee, Musical Notes, Son nowon (lyric), Lee, Jaeho (Composition), Lucky Record, 1948

269 255 <Appendix 7> Local musicians performing for American soldiers in 1950s Kim Sister s Grandshow Performance. (up) Park Dan-ma s Grandshow band performance Kim Chon-Kil (1993) Foreign News from Seoul, Courtesy of Kim

270 256 <Appendix 8> Map of Downtown Seoul and the Eighth United States Army Compound Map of Itaewon and the Ghetto area around the U.S. 8 th Army Base located in Yongsan Garrison, Seoul. This map was sold for $0.25 to American soldiers stationed in Korea in the early 1960s for touristic purposes. Courtesy of Bill Smothers personal collection