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358 16 Broadcasting in Korea, 1924–1937: Colonial Modernity and Cultural Hegemony MICHAEL E. ROBINSON In February of 1927, under the call sign JODK, the newly established Kyôngsông Broadcast Corporation (KBC) began regular programming in Korea. By the end of the colonial period, an estimated 305,000 radio permits had been granted for use in private homes, tea rooms, restaurants, public markets, schools, and village meeting halls, and KBC had brought every nook and cranny of the colony within range of its network of stations and relay facilities for exchanging programming with Japan, Manchukuo, and China.1 In the twentieth century, no other colony was tied to its metropole with such an extensive communications net (Fanon 1965, chap. 2).2 Standard nationalist histories of the colonial period, if they mention radio at all, interpret the phenomenon as another part of the extensive Japanese information control system that served its propaganda and cultural assimilation programs.3 This was, of course, true. All communications in the colony were tightly controlled at the center, and Japanese officials recognized immediately the potential of broadcasting to further the long-range goals of spreading Japanese language use and cultural values. In the mid1930s , the Japanese intensified their information controls and cultural assimilation campaigns under the banner of naisen ittai (Japan and Korea as one body). Radio played an important role in naisen ittai and the later Movement to Create Imperial Citizens (kòminka). After 1937, KBC became an increasingly important vehicle for transmitting sanitized war news from Tokyo throughout the colony. Indeed, the domestic Japan Broadcasting Corporation (Nihon Hòsò Kyòkai, or NHK) played an equally important propaganda role; while it did not have to negotiate between two languages as in Korea, its programming became similarly dominated by central censors by 1941. Upon closer inspection, however, the story of colonial radio is much more ambiguous. While closely controlled at the center, the problems of creating and expanding colonial radio required the Government General of Korea (GGK) to make some significant cultural policy concessions. Most notably, Japanese authorities were confronted with the necessity of creating a second, all-Korean-language system in order to disseminate receivers and create a mass audience. Moreover, financing the system required a broad fee-paying audience. And as the experience of the first six years of broadcast (1927–1933) demonstrated, this could be done only if Koreans were attracted to buying and using radios. Thus, within six years of the inception of colonial broadcasts, the initial mixed-language channel was supplemented by the addition of an all-Korean-language channel, and sales of radios soared. While still tightly controlled by Ministry of Communication officials, the existence of all-Korean radio created a cultural space within the diverse information, educational, economic, and pure entertainment programming forming the public airwaves—a space that contradicted the cultural/political logic (if there was one) of assimilation. From 1933 until the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941 and the imposition of severe censorship (Korean-language broadcasting ceased entirely in 1944), Korean radio stimulated a revival of traditional music genres, created new forms of dramatic arts, introduced Western classical music and jazz, fed its audience’s insatiable appetite for modern, popular song (yuhaengga), and became a vehicle for Korean vernacular standardization. Indeed, Korean radio became an important productive force in the creation of a modern, popular culture in colonial Korea; and while this culture was a product of Japanese colonial political, cultural, and economic ascendancy, it also played a role in subverting Japanese cultural hegemony. This essay will attempt to recast the story of Korean radio as a part of a dynamic colonial cultural hegemony. It is not simply the story of the creation of another Japanese-dominated, modern institution foisted upon the agencyless Korean people in order to serve its domination. Radio should be seen as part of a more complicated colonial hegemony constructed of both physical coercion and cultural/political attraction. Japanese cultural hegemony worked so well because it provided limited spaces for Korean cultural autonomy (Robinson 1994, 54–73).4 In the end, allowing a space for cultural autonomy acted to both sustain and subvert the ultimate goals of Japanese cultural assimilation. I avoid calling radio a “space of resistance” because this implies that Korean-language broadcasting directly contested Japanese cultural assimilation; it did not. Korean radio did, however, construct culture and in doing so resisted by creating and maintaining Korean art forms with 359 Broadcasting in Korea, 1924–1937 [18...

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