. . . or “my boyfriend is a traveling musician” — a popular song from 1938 by 박향림 (Pak Hyang-lim) (1921-1946) (Click here to hear the song). Before there was k-pop and the “Korean Wave”, Korean popular music has always been around in one form or another. One common form was (is) “Trot” music and Pak Hyang-lim was a very popular singer during the colonial period who unfortunately died shortly after giving birth.
For another example of her singing the blues (항구의 블루스), try this link as well.
{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
Heh, and here I thought that the Korean language was banned in 1938, and Koreans were tortured just for speaking it.
Yawn! Oh, Shak. Boringly sarcastic. As if you don’t know about the “cultural policy” from 1920 onwards.
I wonder if, in any other cases of colonization, the colonizer banned the language of the colonized. I doubt any Aboriginal language was ever legally “banned” in Australia per se, but of course by privileging the colonizing language in public discourse (using English as a legal language, and the language of commerce), they didn’t need to, did they?
I would love to see some stats on number of Jap settlers in Korea 1900-1945 who took the time to learn Korean (Seriously curious; no sarcasm intended. Anyone got any data?).
Man, don’t start that troll crap up in here or I will start deleting.
The rest of you guys listen to the “oppa” tune; it’s got an arrangement that reminds me of a “Merry Melodies” soundtrack.
Elgin: not trolling. Just letting Shak know that his crap will be met with a response.
The link to another example’s not working, at least for me.
Try the link now. The site that does not like Firefox though the .aif file works in Safari. The original site: “ignorams.egloos.com/2286531″ has more information on the singer as well that is worth reading.
R. Elgin,
If you are referring to me, by no means am I attempting to troll. I merely point out that Korean language songs, and indeed the Korean language itself, was permissible under Japanese rule.
If you decide that is a forbidden topic, then I will refrain from mentioning it.
Shak,
Was the Korean language permissible in public school during the later half of the Japanese colonial period?
WangKon936,
AFAIK, During class time it depended on the policy of the individual school, the head master, and the parents. There was not a singular rule for all the schools at the time – it depended on the individual school.
Some schools insisted on official Japanese during class time, and often this was insisted on by parents. Why? Because parents wanted their kids to be financially successful by speaking the language of the Japanese empire of which Korea was a part. Whatever English madness there is in Korea now started out with Japanese madness.
Anyway, the point is that talk of Korean language being banned is totally untrue.
This was always one of my favorite Korean songs. I even had it set as my ringtone ^_^
That’s interesting shak. I have these pesky 80 year old Koreans who swore to me that they were forced to speak Japanese in their schools and their parents were not the driving force of this. Actually, according to them, it was quite the contrary.
I very much doubt that Korea was a modernizing wunderland under Japanese rule that you and gbevers describe it to be. As you know, Korea was annexed by Japan, meaning that it legally was not a country anymore. It was not allied to it as Korea is allied to the U.S. today. It was not a nominal tributary state as it was for centuries to China. Korea was even its own political country under Mongol domination.
Since it was annexed, there was a lack of checks and balances to what Japan could do in Korea. To be fair, Japan was in a harsh world in the first half of the 20th century. But to be equally fair, much of that harshness was also created by Japan. To invade and control (not annex mind you) Manchuria was one thing, but to invade and try to conquer China was certainly another. It was like a snake who swallowed something it couldn’t digest. Thus, Japan invaded European colonial holdings to increase their resource base. However, when the U.S. ended oil shipments due to Japan’s well documented brutality in China, the U.S. became a target as well. So the python who couldn’t digest what was already in its stomach tried to swallow an elephant and ended up loosing in epic fashion.
So how does this relate to Korea and the supposed modernization of Korea? The fact of the matter is that Japan didn’t do what it did in Korea (good and bad) out of the kindness or darkness of its heart. They did it to support their national efforts, which in this case was related to their war efforts against 1) China 2) England, France and the Netherlands and finally 3) U.S.A. It was a brutal time and a brutal age. Enlightened rule and individual rights took a back seat to getting shit done via dictator style. Things were not easy in this regards in Japan, given that Korea was a legal appendage to Japan, they were, how shall we say, less easy in Korea. So, since Korea was but an appendage to Japan because it was annexed, if you were a military dictator wouldn’t you want that entire area to speak Japanese? It would make things easier. Would you care what the Koreans think about the matter? Absolutely not. You don’t even care about what the Japanese general population thinks, just as long as they go along the program (hence the whole propping up of the long standing myth of the Japanese emperor being a god, but anyway). If the pesky Koreans are hard to rule (as they were in the first decade of annexation) what better solution than to make them Japanese? Right? You see, you have to think in terms of military dictator because that was in fact what Japan’s form of government was. I mean, come on, let’s not fool ourselves here, right? Again, the Japanese didn’t do anything out of the kindness of their hearts, nor should they have. And it was a brutal time. Japan’s wars in China and particularly against the U.S. didn’t go very well. The Japanese were brutal in war. They were eventually brutal with their own people. What more for a former country and a group of people that didn’t have their own representation? They were brutal with them too. Again, let’s not fool ourselves here.
Elgin,
Sorry for highjacking your thread.
Another fine example of the “trot,” this time with a kiwi bent to it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shP1IRGigbo
Hey WangKon, I think I’ll just start calling you 형from this point on. Heh heh heh. Oh, and I never once made fun of your spelling or grammar errors, unlike some other crazies out here. I hope ya’ll are doing alot of 반성.
WangKon936,
When I was in Korea I met an old lady that spoke Japanese and grew up under the Japanese administration. At the time I had conventional views, so I suggested to her that life under Japanese rule must of been very harsh. She rebuffed me and said that the Japanese that she knew were very nice, including a Japanese teacher.
Another Korean, and old man, I met in Sydney. He spoke Japanese fluently with a slight Korean accent. He had lived in Osaka and had volunteered with the army in WW2. He said he didn’t resent Japanese but thought that he was entitled to veterans pension from the Japanese government (eligibility that he lost along with his Japanese citizenship after Japan was defeat). As far as I know, most of the people with the harshest opinions of Japan were either too young to remember or were not even born at the time.
The point is that Korea under Japanese rule had a civil society, and Japanese officials and teachers would have been held accountable for abuses of normal people. Anyway, there is some documentation out there, I think, about the schools policy and how it was left up to the headmaster of each school. It is too late to search out the information now, and even were you to see it, it would not change your opinion one iota.
Is the idea that Koreans would want to learn the common language of the Japanese empire, of which Korea was part, that far-fetched? The simple fact is that Koreans have a sharp eye for what can profit themselves, and the demand for Japanese language learning came from Koreans themselves.
You have interesting points, but I disagree and it doesn’t have anything to do with my opinion not being able to be changed. My opinion does change and can be changed.
In any case, we’ve highjacked this thread long enough and I believe we should postpone this conversation at a more relevant and opportune time. That’s my opinion and I hope that’s your opinion too.
Agreed. Sorry, Elgin.
You know, maybe it is because I was never a student in the Korean educational system but I never felt any need to demonize the Japanese. My paternal grandfather was a fairly well-to-do man, a banker before and after the occupation, and from the looks of those old B&W photos, someone who immensely enjoyed dance-parties. My maternal grandmother was born in Japan, Japanese was her native tongue. She has to learn Korean as a second language when she arrived in Korea at the age of 19 to be married. She never spoke badly about the Japanese either.
There is this book called “Tree of Heaven” about a romance between a Japanese army officer and a Chinese woman set during WWII. I’ll let Amazon describe the book:
A hauntingly beautiful love story of two people trapped by the circumstances of war during Japan’s invasion and occupation of China in the 1930s. Binstock draws a sensitive portrait of a Japanese scholar, Kuroda, who has enlisted in the army because his father, a former officer, shames him into doing so. Much to Kuroda’s dismay, he finds himself actually enjoying the fighting. However, when his subordinates prove to be inhumane in their treatment of Chinese women, he re-evaluates what it means to be at war. He prevents the rape of Li, a Chinese doctor’s daughter; it is this rescue that begins the short-lived but emotional bonding of two enemies that challenges readers’ senses. The author is skillful in structuring the narrative from both Kuroda’s and Li’s points of view. His delving into matters of the human psyche, particularly as it pertains to stereotypes, reminds readers how easy it is to justify the subjugation of people based on difference. Although the characters’ introspection may be tedious to some YAs, those interested in Chinese or Japanese cultures might have the sensibility and patience to reap the rewards of this marvelous tale.
#8,
According to Korean government statistics, 80% of Koreans were illiterate in 1945. Clearly, the number of Koreans who were made to use Japanese in school made up a small fraction of the whole population, regardless of the individual schools’ policies.
“The simple fact is that Koreans have a sharp eye for what can profit themselves, and the demand for Japanese language learning came from Koreans themselves.”
Few Koreans bothered to learn Japanese, actually. The Japanese government’s language policies were a failure. You simply can’t expect people to forget their own culture out of nationalistic sentiment for a colonial empire.
When did you go to Korea shak? I recall when I first came across your blog, I think a year or a year 1/2 ago, reading that you never had been to Korea.
Also, from my experience, it’s mainly city folk who were treated somewhat decently, stray out and there are stories of parents hiding their daughters and valuables in cellars when soldiers came around.
Shak, I’m probably wasting my breath as there’s a lot of Western documented sources (my preference is British history texts) on the language issue, and if you waive these aside for your interpretation, I don’t see why my words would be considered. However, I knew a retired surgeon in Seoul, a smart man who was sent for education in Japan, and later Harvard, went back to Korea to teach and run a hospital. What he said on the subject was that you wouldn’t have people forcing you to learn the language, just that if you wanted a good job there were no real options. Headmasters for schools were always Japanese, sometimes just a military bloke. They taught in Japanese only, and texts were only Japanese, which is understandable as it was usually the main source of Western sciences.
There used to be schools started by Christian missionaries but were also taken over. Any ‘high class’ job, like one in medicine or engineering, was done in Japanese so it was impossible to get by without knowing Japanese. Korea, regardless of circumstance, was part of Japan, there was no plan of teaching in a second language.
Teachers were never held accountable for abuse, that’s incredibly ridiculous, the profession was considered in higher esteem than law enforcement, unlike these days, and beatings came if you messed up. A classmate lost total vision in one eye and nothing happened to the teacher. Most common mess up was language difficulties. Of course, there was no standard for beatings…it was up to the teacher.
Dry, you must have misread. I have been to Korea. However, I have stated that I have never been an English teacher in any country.
I would be interested to see the texts on the language issue that you are talking about. However, I would point out that teaching in the Japanese language (as opposed to teaching the Japanese language) would be pointless because most Koreans would not be able to follow the lessons. In higher education, Japanese was used, as you point out, not to sideline the Korean language but because the Korean language did not have the vocabularly at that time for modern concepts. In this sense we are talking about people that were forced by the situation to learn Japanese, rather than Japanese people forcing Japanese language on them. In this sense Japanese people were also forced to learn European languages to modernize.
Interested, eh? You make it sound as if it’s uncommon for it to be mentioned, when the language issue is mentioned even in Britannica. It’s like asking me to name texts which show oxygen molecules exist in water.
It’s more a contextual issue of the same view. However, your extension of logic is far-fetched; the Japanese people itself did not have to learn European languages, scholars learned the language and transcribed the texts. The same could be done with Korean, and it already had been done for subjects in mathematics and chemistry, translating from Japanese was a trivial matter which started even before the occupation in an attempt to modernize. Teaching in Japanese was thus unnecessary, and economically more costly, and while it wasn’t forced in the sense that soldiers were waltzing around beating people up if they couldn’t hold a conversation in Japanese, there is no doubt that the language was imposed on the populace as a barrier which could not be passed otherwise in order to progress in society.
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