From Korea to Japan: A Transnational Perspective on South Korea's Important Intangible Cultural Properties and Zainichi Korean Artists

In 1962, the South Korean government promulgated the Cultural Property Protection Law (CPPL, Munhwajae pohopŏp) in order to preserve Korean heritage cultures that were at risk of disappearance in the postcolonial and post-Korean War social milieu. The CPPL was modeled after a similar law in Japan, Bunkazai hogoho, enacted in 1950. With this legal stipulation, numerous Korean musics and dances were designated as Important Intangible Cultural Properties (IICP) of the nation, to be transmitted by "living national treasures" who were appointed as holders of particular genres and styles of Korean performing arts. This paper explores the transnational aspects of and input into the institution and application of IICP in the past and present century. I am particularly interested in how the Korean musics and dances designated and practiced as IICPs have been shaped by national and transnational subjects who have crossed the traditional boundary of the nation-state border. Cultural symbols attributed as heritage arts of a nation can be transnationally constructed and reinforced.

Introduction

In 1962, the South Korean government promulgated the Cultural Property Protection Law (CPPL, Munhwajae pohopŏp) in order to preserve elements of Korean cultural heritage that were at risk of disappearance in the postcolonial and post-Korean-War social milieu. The CPPL, born out of South Korean nationalism, was an adaptation of a similar law in Japan, Bunkazai hogoho, enacted in 1950 for the conservation of its own heritage culture. With this legal stipulation in South Korea, numerous Korean music and dance traditions were designated as Important Intangible Cultural Properties (IICP, Chungyo muhyŏng munhwajae) of the nation, to be transmitted by living national treasures (in'gan munhwajae), that is, individuals designated as the holders of particular genres and styles in areas of Korean performing arts such as drama, music, dance, theatre, ritual, and martial arts (yenŭng chongmok) as well as of food and craft techniques (kinŭng chongmok)(Howard, 2006:6; Maliangkay, 2017:35). These cultural items are protected under this law because they are viewed as "carrying the great historic, artistic or academic values" (Atkins, 2010:163).

Despite hot debate on the potential impacts of the CPPL over time in terms of the institutionalization and ritualization of ethnic heritage into a select canon—including in the areas of music and dance—the CPPL has inevitably been potent in protecting and promoting tangible and intangible cultural properties of Korea against the nation's inexorable move toward modern economic, and technological advancement through the second half of the twentieth century (Maliangkay, 2012, 2017). The living national treasures appointed by the Office of Cultural Properties (Munhwajae kwalliguk) as the masters of particular IICPs have thus been empowered to represent and teach the arts in which they specialize such that those arts are sustained and transmitted to Korea's future generations in their original forms.

On one hand, the regulation valued fidelity to traditions based on the recommendations of academics and folklore specialists (Cultural Properties Committee—CPC, Munhwajae wiwŏnhoe) rather than promoting artistic innovation or individual creativity (Howard, 2006; Atkins, 2010:164). On the other hand, the living national treasures and their students were not completely passive in their performance and practice of these IICPs. Within the frame of perpetuating particular IICPs in accordance with CPC-established rules and prescriptions in terms of the transmission of these cultural forms to the next generation, the musicians and dancers of particular IICPs have reacted with creativity in the face of considerable social change in South Korea since the enactment of the CPPL and have adapted their arts to a contemporary world (Maliangkay, 2017:15).

This study explores the adaptation of traditional Korean performance genres in the context of transnational migration¹ and how some diasporic Korean musicians and dancers have built their teaching and performance careers as specialists in specific cultural practices. I especially focus on Zainichi Koreans (Korean residents in Japan) who associate themselves with South Korea and its IICPs. As students of living national treasures, these Koreans have not only established their name across Korea and Japan by maintaining or building new connections through their engagement with South Korean IICPs but have also received artistic, cultural, psychological, and practical support through these connections and used them to facilitate their artistic and migrant lives.

In this paper, "Zainichi Korean" is used as a collective term to refer to diasporic Koreans in Japan. This term encompasses people with a wide range of migration backgrounds and relationships with Korean culture. Behind it lies a complex community whose members evince diverse state, national, cultural, racial, and ethnic associations developed over the different stages of Korean migration to Japan, political bifurcation of the Korean peninsula, and generational gaps that have led to a wide range of relationships that individual Zainichi form with their country of origin or ancestral homeland. Moreover, Koreans in Japan, whether associated with earlier or more recent waves of forced or voluntary migration, can never be free from the undertones of their ethnicity as a people formerly colonized by Japan. Drawing on ethnographic research I conducted in the winters in 2017 and 2018 in Osaka and Kyoto, I present how and why some Zainichi Korean musicians and dancers have been engaged with traditional Korean music and dance in Japan and discuss in what ways South Korean IICPs are integrated into the construction of Zainichi Korean identity.

If some of the salient features of cultural diasporas are flexibility and creativity in constructing identity and culture through the synthesization of pre- and postmigration experiences (Hall, 1994; Um, 2004), ideologically South Korea's IICPs may not embrace the sort of flexibility migrants draw on, since upon designation each IICP is ascribed particular form and content to which its practitioners must conform in their performance and transmission. Even so, diasporic Koreans' engagement with IICPs proves that such nationally iconized performance genres provide them with psychological or artistic fulfillment and/or symbolic or social power in the context of migration, beyond the traditionally drawn nation-state boundary tied with those genres and how they are practiced in their native context. That said, how do different groups of Korean expatriates in Japan attribute significance to their practice of South Korean IICPs? And how do they embed themselves in South Korea as well as in their transnational communities in associating themselves with national heritage arts promoted as South Korean national icons? I suggest that within the officially imposed frame of national heritage arts, musicians and dancers inscribe them with new meanings in the process of adapting them as transnational cultural activities. This study also concerns the dialectics of national and transnational aspects of Korean performance arts which were made to be signs of national identity in South Korea. I argue that shaping national identity can be a two-way process in that something perceived as emblematic of a nation has also been shaped with transnational input and consciousness in direct or indirect ways. Gi-Wook Shin states, "Nation is a product of social and historical construction, especially as the result of contentious politics, both within and without, in historically embedded and structurally contingent contexts … I view the formation of nation embedded in particular social relations and history" (Shin, 2006:8; emphasis in original). My intention is thus to tease out the particular social and historical relations in which the IICP system and its items have been embedded in the past and continue to be today in Korea and Japan. The formation of national performance arts has occurred not only within the nation-state boundary but also synchronically and diachronically through various social interactions resulting from human mobility and cultural exchange at the transnational level (Maliangkay, 2007).

During the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945), millions of Koreans were displaced to Japan as students, military servicemen, and low-paid laborers. When World War II ended and Korea was liberated from Japan, more than two million Koreans returned to their homeland while about 650,000 remained in Japan (Ryang, 1997). With Korea's subsequent political partitioning, the Zainichi Korean community was also split into two camps associated with one or the other of the regimes on the Korean peninsula. When the South Korean government established official diplomatic relations with Japan in 1965, those Zainichi Koreans allied with the democratic side of Korea applied for and acquired South Korean citizenship and upon so doing were granted permanent residence status in Japan (for the citizenship complexity of Koreans in Japan, see Ryang, 1997; Chapman, 2008; Bell, 2018; Koo, 2019). The Koreans who migrated to Japan before the 1950s and their descendants—in one ideological camp or the other—are referred to as "oldcomers" (oltŭk'ŏmŏ); "newcomers" (nyuk'ŏmŏ) designates those who arrived in Japan as South Korean nationals since 1965. A more visible group is those South Koreans who, since the late 1980s when the South Korean government eased restrictions on overseas travel, migrated to Japan as temporary workers or international students and/or to marry "oldcomers" (Chapman, 2008; Ryang and Lie, 2009). Broadly speaking, each Korean group in Japan identifies itself with one of three broad sociocultural organizations representing the three different imagined communities (Anderson, 1983). Ch'ongnyŏn (Chaeilbon chosŏnin ch'ongnyŏnhaphoe; General Association of Korean Residents in Japan) represents "oldcomer" Koreans who allied themselves with North Korea; Mindan (Chaeilbon taehanmin'guk mindan; Association of Overseas Koreans of South Korea) is the association with which "oldcomer" South Koreans identify; and the membership of Haninhoe (Chaeilbon han'gugin yŏnhaphoe) is mostly made up of "newcomers," who were born in South Korea and moved to Japan initially as South Korean nationalities. With Zainichi Koreans' diverse migration and settlement backgrounds as a people of colonial displacement, post-war migration, and long- or shortterm transnational migration, the sense and expression of identity among individuals can vary greatly. Moreover, transcendence or overlapping engagement with different imagined communities is not rare among Zainichi Koreans today.

Khachig Tölölyan broadly defines contemporary diaspora as encompassing "immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exile community, overseas community, [and] ethnic community," highlighting the semantic expansion of the term, once specifically tied with ethnic dispersion such as that of Jews, Greeks, and Armenians (Tölölyan, 1991:4–5). Regarding the conceptual complexity of diaspora, James Clifford points out the difficulty in defining the term, which he refers to as "a traveling term," politically and historically shaped with a great deal of ambivalence (Clifford, 1994:302). Clifford points out the constructiveness of diasporas, which can "reject, replace, or marginalize" their experiences as they "construc[t] homes away from home," as conscious and reflexive of both roots and routes and empowered by their movements (Clifford, 1994:302, Clifford, 1997:250). He argues "contemporary diasporic practices cannot be reduced to epiphenomena of the nation-state or of global capitalism. While defined and constrained by these structures, they also exceed and criticize them: old and new diasporas offer resources for emergent 'postcolonialisms'" (Clifford, 1994:302). Moreover, it is hard to typify individual experiences of dislocation, grounded as they are in the introspective, psychological, emotional, and intuitive processes involved in human movement and settlement, while a great deal of discrepancy accompanies the politics of diasporas as they juggle between their roots and routes to varying degrees (Gilroy, 1993; Hall, 1994; Clifford, 1997).

Not all Zainichi Koreans conform to a single migrant profile. Some, over time as third- and even fourth-generation Korean migrants, have become fully assimilated into Japanese society; others have always maintained strong ties with Korea even if their (or their ancestors') migration dates back to the first or second half of the twentieth century. While a large number of Zainichi Koreans broadly display the characteristics of transmigration, they "forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement … [thus] current-day immigrants construct and reconstitute their simultaneous embeddedness in more than one society" (Schiller et al., 1995:48). This confirms Steven Vertovec's argument that "the dispersed diasporas of old have become today's 'transnational communities' sustained by a range of modes of social organization, mobility and communication" (Vertovec, 2009:5; see also Guarnizo and Smith, 1998).

Many earlier studies examining function and semiosis in traditional performance arts in a multinational and multiracial context of migration have argued that ethnic music and dance have been instrumental in marking, reinforcing, and constructing one's ethnic boundaries in the face of social hegemony or other ethnic groups (Baily, 1994; Stokes, 1994; Hosokawa, 2000; Lau, 2001). Yet modes of expression and sense of identity can greatly vary among individuals and groups of migrants, especially in a case like Korean migration to Japan, where there is the historical complexity of colonialism and partition. Moreover, as racial differences between Koreans and Japanese are not obvious, national origin may only be perceived if announced by means of ethnically distinctive cultural signs; for this reason, and because Korea was formerly colonized by Japan, not every Zainichi Korean was brought up to cultivate or be mindful of their ethnic heritage (Lim, 2013).

Keeping in mind this historical, ethnic, and national complexity inherent in the Zainichi Korean community, I first delineate the transnational dynamics observed with the movement of Korean music and dance within and between Korea and Japan during the Japanese colonial period. Scholarship exploring this aspect of Korean performing arts has not been vast, particularly in respect to the transnational input and production of ethnically distinctive Korean arts in the first half of the twentieth century, to later become part of iconic national heritage in postcolonial South Korea. By collating existing scholarship describing a range of Korean performing arts produced in Korea and Japan as well as biographical information available on the Korean and Japanese artists who contributed to those arts' transnational production, I assemble a broad picture of cultural crossover and transnational movement to lend insight into the postcolonial and post-war construction of Korean music and dance in Korea and Japan (e.g., see Kong, 2001; Van Zile, 2001, 2011; Atkins, 2007, 2010; Maliangkay, 2007; De Ferranti, 2009, 2013; Howard, 2012). Then I discuss how the social context for practicing Korean music and dance in Japan changed after the war as old and new waves of migrants became engaged with the cultures of the two distinctive Koreas while vigorously instrumentalizing them in the construction and expression of Zainichi Korean identities. Lastly, I feature the stories of three Zainichi Korean performers living in Kyoto or Osaka and how and why they became engaged with IICPs.

Transnational Dynamics of Korean Music and Dance during the Japanese Colonial Period

If the CPPL was enacted in 1962 as a modern legislative system to protect aspects of Korean heritage, spurred by postcolonial anxiety and nationalism and yet ironically imitating a system devised to perpetuate the former colonizer's own traditions and heritage, the preservation and promotion of Korean cultural properties can be traced much further back in Korea, to the early period of the Chosŏn Dynasty (see Maliangkay, 2017:23–24). However, throughout Chosŏn (1392–1910) and the first two decades of the twentieth century, governmental protection—under both Korea's own government and the Japanese colonial administration—had mostly focused on tangible items, movable and immovable, which were seen to be valuable assets in Korea either to perpetuate the power of the royal family and/or elite identity during the dynastic era, or later to realize Japan's political and economic ambition over its colony (Maliangkay, 2017:33). While it was only with the enactment of the CCPL in 1962 that the Korean government made the protection and promotion of Korean performing arts official policy, the explicit expression of national identity through these arts had emerged well before, through grassroots social movements during the Japanese colonial period (Howard, 2006; Atkins, 2010; Maliangkay, 2017).

Amid intersecting colonial gazes from both perspectives—of the colonized and the colonizer—Korean and Japanese intellectuals alike became interested in Korean folk and courtly traditions, though for very different reasons. In reaction to the Japanese government's repression of Korean identity through the first half of the twentieth century, Korean intellectuals persistently led cultural movements promoting ethnic heritage and folklore to recover and lift Korean pride (see, e.g., Howard, 2006; Shin, 2006:47). Meanwhile, Japanese intellectuals developed an ethnographic interest in the colony, many visiting Korea to investigate Korean court, elite, and folk cultural traditions. The Japanese public, for its part, developed an exotic view of Korea by beginning to consume "Koreana"—Korean cultural commodities such as music and dance—and travelling to Korea (Atkins, 2010). As early as 1921, Tanabe Hisao (1883–1984), a Japanese musicologist, visited Korea to research Korean court music, publishing his fieldwork reports in Japan (De Ferranti, 2013). According to Keith Howard (2012:121), foreign scholar E. Taylor Atkins's claim that Tanabe "acted as a saviour for a cultural resource his countrymen had enfeebled" was controversial among South Korean scholars.

Howard (2012:121–122) states, "It is known that in 1918, the Court Music Department, unable to continue funding its activities, appealed to its equivalent in Tokyo for support. When Tanabe visited Seoul in 1921, a year before Kim [Ch'ŏnhŭng] entered the scholarship programme, he found only one ritual still performed, the Rite to Royal Ancestors." Tanabe, who highly valued Korean court music and dance, argued that the tradition must be maintained even though Korean court no longer existed and that the Japanese government should take seriously its responsibility to financially support and preserve it (Howard, 2012). Whether or not Tanabe's efforts helped ensure the sustenance of Korean court ritual music and dance, his encouragement of the Japanese government to financially assist the Korean Court Music Department so that Korean students could enroll in the scholarship program and carry on the traditions deserves credit. Korean students such as Kim Ch'ŏnhŭng (1909–2007), who later studied under scholarship at the Korean Court Music Department, became a major figure in Korean court music and dance traditions in postcolonial Korea. Kim was eventually appointed as a holder of Chongmyo cheryeak (the Rite to Royal Ancestors, IICP No. 1) as well as of Ch'ŏyongmu (Ch'ŏyong Dance or Court Mask Dance, IICP No. 39).

In contrast, Hugh De Ferranti (2013) illustrates the transnational production of Korean court music and dance in Japan, incorporated into the production in Kyoto in 1924 of the Miyako-odori (lit. Dance of the Capital City; one of four spring shows given in Kyoto's geisha districts). Several Korean court musicians and dancers travelled to Kyoto to perform centuries-old music and dances that had prevailed at the royal court through the Chosŏn Dynasty. However, much of the Korean courtly banquet music and dances were changed from their original versions to appeal to and amuse ordinary Japanese and Korean audiences. It is reluctant to find out Korean court music and dances were heavily secularized and appropriated in the production of entertainment and spectacle as part of Japanese geisha (female professional entertainers specializing in music and dance) performances while De Ferranti's study points to Korean court music and dance being staged for transnational audiences as early as 1924.

In the realm of folk music, Roald Maliangkay (2007) calls attention to how interactions between Japan and Korea, especially in the areas of media, recording, and popular music before the late 1930s, brought changes to the conceptualization and sound production of traditional Korean musics such as minyo (folksongs), p'ansori (solo narrative singing), and sanjo (solo instrumental music), all of which were later designated as IICPs in postcolonial South Korea.

In its last decade of colonial administration over Korea, Japan intensified its assimilation policy (Hwangminhwa chŏngch'aek or Hwangguk sinminhwa chŏngch'aek) by making Koreans use the Japanese language and adopt Japanese names while suppressing vivid displays of Korean cultural markers. These cultural constraints encouraged Korean folk musicians and dancers to seek alternative venues where they could continue to perform. Ironically, the Koreaphilia² that emerged in Japan around this time instigated Korean performing artists to go to Japan to perform for Japanese audiences as well as the Zainichi Korean community, which in the Kansai region was large due to an influx of Koreans as industrial workers in the 1920s and 1930s. Meanwhile, a number of Korean artists resident in Japan and learning and performing Western-style musics and dances—the symbols of cultural modernity and imperial superiority at the time—became conscious of their own heritage and began to incorporate its aspects into their work, thus distinguishing them from the majority of performers who focused on foreign and European traditions.

While it is apparent that Korean music and dance performances were given in Japan by visiting artists and that there was a certain level of interest among Japanese in these, as demonstrated by advertisements for these performances in the Japanese press (De Ferranti, 2009:247), there is a degree of uncertainty as to what exactly was performed by these visiting artists and who they were. De Ferranti speculates that their performance repertoires, especially during the interwar era (1918–1939), might not always have reflected "Korean music and dance," even though, as he stated, "performances of court and ritual music, as well as showcase programs of traditional song and dance, sometimes performed by kisaeng (or gisaeng, Korean professional female entertainers), did take place" (De Ferranti, 2009:247). Yet, the most prominent coverage was given to Korean performers and troupes who were able to combine both traditional and modern repertoire as well as develop their own artistic style hybridizing Korean and foreign cultural elements. The most representative figures at the time were Korean dancers Ch'oe Sŭnghŭi and Pae Kuja (De Ferranti, 2009:247).

Dance ethnologist Judy Van Zile discusses Korean dancer Ch'oe Sŭnghŭi (1911–1969), an iconic, visibly Korean figure in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century who was publicly acclaimed by dance fans and intellectuals. She initially moved to Japan fascinated by Japan's modern dance, which she saw performed in Korea. She studied under Ishii Baku (1886–1962), a renowned Japanese modern dancer, and later worked for Ishii's company as a professional dancer. With her teacher's support, Ch'oe began to learn Korean dance while in Japan, alongside modern dance (Van Zile, 2001, 2011; Atkins, 2010), and gradually incorporated traditional Korean dance elements into her performance. With these fusion dances representing both Japan and Korea, she toured the United States and Europe. Ch'oe actively performed and ran her own dance companies in Japan and Korea until moving to North Korea in 1946, following her husband, An Mak, a leftist literary critic. There she continued to work as a leading artist, often travelling to China and Russia. Following An's political execution in the late 1950s, Ch'oe gradually disappeared from North Korea's performance scene (Van Zile, 2001, 2011; Atkins, 2010). Since Ch'oe's dances were recognized as fusing characteristics of modern and Korean dance, hers was a clear example of how Korean national dance, in this case that of North Korea, was created out of an amalgamation of both Korean and foreign elements.

Pae Kuja (1905–2003), another Korean dancer active in Japan in the 1920s, was often contrasted with Ch'oe Sŭnghŭi in terms of career focus and trajectory. Pae was trained in Korean dance in Korea and also studied ballet and modern dance in Europe (Van Zile, 2001:221). In Japan, she formed her own dance troupe (Pae Kuja Chosen Gekidan), which featured a program mixing Korean genres with songs and vaudeville sketches in Japanese (De Ferranti, 2013). After returning to Korea in 1930, Pae toured Japan and Manchuria several times while gradually concentrating her company's theatrical productions in Korea (Yu, 1995).

In Japan, Ch'oe Sŭnghŭi studied Korean dance with Han Sŏngjun (1874–1942), a well-known p'ansori kosu (drummer) and dancer who choreographed a number of Korean folk dances during the Japanese colonial period (Van Zile, 2001:189; Van Zile, 2011:175–176). Han Sŏngjun, with his knowledge of both Korean court and folk dances, resided in Japan for a time, where he taught Korean dance and music. In 1937, Han established Chosŏn ŭmangmuyong yŏn'guhoe (Chosŏn Music and Dance Association) in Korea in order to promote performers from the provinces of Kyŏnggi and Ch'ungch'ŏng (Kwŏn, 2013a), and his association toured Japan several times in the late 1930s and 1940s. Many of his troupe members specialized in Korean music and dance for which they were later designated in South Korea as IICP holders.

Han has been particularly credited with contemporizing and secularizing Korean folk dances originally performed as part of religious or village rituals and festivities for the appreciation of urban audiences. Versions of Han's dance choreographies, such as salp'uri (a solo dance for spiritual cleansing), sŭngmu (Buddhist monk dance), hangmu or hakch'um (crane dance), t'aep'yŏngmu (t'aep'yŏng dance or Dance of Peace), and hallyangmu (male flirtatious dance), were later designated as IICPs, and his students, including Kim Ch'ŏnhŭng, Kim Ponam, Yi Kangsŏn, Chang Hongsim, Han Yŏngsuk, Kang Sŏnyŏng, Yi Maebang, Chŏng Yinbang, Chin Subang, and Kim Samhwa, were appointed as the masters of these dances (Kim, 1995). It is worth speculating on both the national and transnational spectrum of his dances, since Han may have been aware as early as the 1930s of concepts and styles of modern dance through his students. Two of these were Ch'oe Sŭnghŭi and Cho T'aegwŏn (1907–1976), both of whom studied with Ishii Baku prior to meeting Han in Japan and later became founding figures of shinmuyong (new dance) in Korea, for which they combined Han's Korean folk dances with modern dance they learned in Japan (Chŏng and Kim, 2010). Han even received an award from the Modern Japan Company in recognition of his contribution to contemporary dance in Japan (Kim, 1995).

In his posthumously published autobiography (2015), Cho T'aegwŏn wrote that An Kiok (1894–1974), a famous kayagŭm player, toured Japan as a member of Han Sŏngjun's Chosŏn ŭmangmuyong yŏng'uhoe. In 1940, An created his own performance troupe, Hanyang ch'anggŭktan (Hanyang Music and Theatre Troupe), with his student Chŏng Namhŭi (1905–1988), also an acclaimed kayagŭm player and a p'ansori singer who often played the leading role in ch'anggŭk (an opera version of p'ansori) with his own troupe or those of his contemporaries. In the early 1940s, An Kiok and Chŏng Namhŭi produced performances in Japan of ch'anggŭk Ch'unhyangjŏn (the Story of Ch'unhyang), one of the five core works in the p'ansori repertoire. At the time, Hanyang ch'anggŭktan visited Kyushu and Kansai (Osaka in particular) to entertain Koreans residing in those areas (Cho, 2015). Like Ch'oe Sŭnghŭi, An and Chŏng moved to North Korea, in 1946 and 1950, respectively, where they contributed significantly to the formation and development of North Korean national music; some of their former students in South Korea were later appointed as national treasures of kayagŭm sanjo and kayagŭm pyŏngch'ang (singing while playing kayagŭm), IICP No. 23 (see for example Kwŏn, 2013b, for Kim Yundŏk, a student of Chŏng's).

I was not able to gather information on the exact music An and Chŏng presented in Japan, other than their production of ch'anggŭk Ch'unhyangjŏn, whose vocal and incidental music would have been accompanied with an elaborate Korean music ensemble consisting of a range of melodic and percussion instruments. It is highly plausible that Korean musical forms such as kayagŭm sanjo, kayagŭm pyŏngch'ang, and p'ansori singing, which An and Chŏng had been known for, were performed in Japan as well as Korea. This not only suggests that those arts later designated as IICPs in the 1960s were more than likely accessible by transnational audiences as early as the 1930s but also provides an example of how transnational interest in Korean performing arts provided Korean musicians and dancers with an outlet for their performances at a time when the expression of Korean cultural identity was suppressed in Korea itself.

Besides live performances, Korean folk music also circulated widely in Japan as a musical commodity. In his book Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945, Atkins describes how Korean folksongs such as "Arirang" and "Toraji T'aryŏng" (or simply "Toraji") were popular in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. Between 1931 and 1943, over fifty versions of "Arirang" were issued by Japanese record companies, interpreted in Japanese by Japanese singers (Atkins, 2007:647; Atkins, 2010). Moreover, in Osaka, several record labels—Okeh, Chieron, Nitto, and Taihei—focused on Korean music. These labels produced SP discs of both Japanese and Korean music, the Korean ones featuring popular songs including shin minyo (newly composed minyo in the style of traditional Korean folksongs) and yuhaengga (lit., trendy songs) as well as well-known Korean minyo and p'ansori. Until the late 1930s, most Korean music was recorded in Japan and widely available to both Korean and Japanese buyers (De Ferranti, 2009:248).

Japanese interest in Korean folk arts is also observed in works produced by Japanese artists incorporating Korean folklore and performance genres. Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–1977), a progressive Japanese artist who led the interwar left-wing avant-garde theater movement (Lewis, 2016), produced a theatrical Japanese version of Ch'unhyangjŏn in 1938 and staged it across Japan and Korea (Seo, 2013). In preparing for this reenactment of the storyline, set in late seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Korea, Murayama visited Korea many times and investigated ch'anggŭk Ch'unhyangjŏn's historical development and performance in Korea. He visited antique and secondhand shops to buy costumes and props and also obtained some from a Korean theatre company that had previously produced Ch'unhyangjŏn (Seo, 2013:195). Murayama even went to Chŏlla Province several times to visit Namwŏn, the main town where the story of Ch'unhyang was set (Kong, 2001). For his production of Ch'unhyangjŏn in Japan, Murayama hired An Yŏngil, an ethnic Korean, as assistant director, consulted with Korea-based director Yu Ch'ijin (1905–1974) and folklorist Song Sŏkha (1904–1948), and collaborated with Zainichi Koreans who had been involved in theatrical productions in Japan (Seo, 2013:201). The work was premiered in March 1938, first in Tokyo and then in Osaka and Kyoto. For sound Murayama relied on recorded music played from albums he bought in Korea (Seo, 2013:194–201).

It is hard to assess to what extent it was Japan's fascination with Korea that led to the long-term implantation of Korean performing arts in Japan, or in what way it enabled Zainichi Koreans to connect with their homeland to remedy their sense of loss and nostalgia as a displaced people with a history of colonialism and war. Interestingly, inspired by Murayama's Japanese theatrical production of Ch'unhyangjŏn in 1938, Takagi Toroku (1904–2006), a Japanese composer, composed a Western classical opera version of the work in 1940, with Japanese as the primary language and for a Japanese cast. The first version was lost in 1945 to a bomb that damaged Takagi's house, and so in 1946 he recomposed it, this time commissioned by Zainichi Koreans keen to see Ch'unhyangjŏn staged in Japan. In 1948, Takagi completed his opera and premiered it in Tokyo. Although nearly the entire cast was Japanese, he assigned the leading male role of Yi Mongnyong to Kim Yŏnggil, a Korean tenor active in Japan. By incorporating Korean folksong melodies—specifically "Arirang,""Toraji," and "Yangsando"—into the opera he infused it with cultural markers of Korea. He also included Korean instruments such as changgo (or changgu; hourglass-shaped drum) and puk (barrel drum) (Kong, 2001). While employing such vivid sonic markers to convey Korean identity, for the libretto Takagi Toroku adopted Murayama Tomoyoshi's Japanese script, which made slight modifications to the original Korean story. Takagi further deviated from Murayama's script by making Ch'unhyang die to emphasize the aspect of tragedy that is typical of productions of Romantic opera. The opera was performed in Tokyo November 20–27, 1948, to a full house of both Japanese and Koreans for the entire run. It was also broadcast live on NHK Radio on November 25 (Kong, 2001).

Takagi's opera Ch'unhyangjŏn was produced with the support of about 18,000 Zainichi Koreans, who funded him for two years so that he could complete it (Kong, 2001). This demonstrates that there was an appetite among Zainichi Koreans for Korean performance arts to represent their community. According to Kong Ŭna, most of these sponsors eventually allied with North Korea. The opera did not achieve subsequent renown among South Korean scholars and musicians and was never re-enacted again in Japan for broad Korean audiences (Kong, 2001).

Japanese productions of Ch'unhyangjŏn were early examples of cultural crossover enabled through transnational collaboration and combining a range of Korean folk performing arts materials with Western classical music or Japanese theatrical traditions. Thus distinctive Korean folklore, performance genres and/or repertoires that were perceived as the most emblematic of the Korean nation and of Korea's old heritage were at the interface of national and transnational subjectivities, production, and exchange of arts across nation-state boundaries in the first half of the twentieth century.

Korean Music and Dance in Pre- and Post-war Kansai in Japan

De Ferranti, in his seminal article on Korean and Okinawan musicians in Osaka and Kobe (what he calls "Greater Osaka") during the interwar period, states that in Greater Osaka—Japan's second largest industrial and commercial hub—migrants from Korea and Okinawa, comprising the two largest minority groups displaced from Japanese colonies, were involved in the broader musical life of the metropolis in diverse ways, "as professional performers, and as producers and consumers of recordings" (De Ferranti, 2009:235). If in Tokyo, Japan's largest city, the city's diverse foreign migrant performers focused heavily on Western-derived classical and popular music, in Greater Osaka they focused more on their home countries' own performing arts—though the nature and range of those arts greatly varied among diasporic individuals and communities (De Ferranti, 2009). The size of the Korean community in Osaka and, more broadly, the Kansai area was always far greater than of that in Tokyo or elsewhere Japan, a situation that continues to hold today.

From as early as the interwar period, Korean music and dance were instrumentalized for the maintenance and construction of Korean identity against the Japanese government's assimilation policy and the social alienation largely imposed on ethnic minorities in Japan. In Greater Osaka music and dance was part of Korean migrant lives both at home and as part of community activities (De Ferranti, 2009:246). People sang and danced to the beat of the changgo, while mudang (shamans) occasionally enacted rituals in Korean enclaves. However, information on Koreans who made their living from Korean music or dance in Japan has been extremely scarce: "No interviewees have described organisations for teaching and performing Korean traditional music comparable to the Okinawan …, nor [mentioned] a single acquaintance who played a Korean traditional instrument other than the changgo drum, or who was skilled in a [Korean] 'classical'dance or song tradition" (De Ferranti, 2009:246–247). On the other hand, not a few Japanborn Koreans were engaged in the emerging Japanese popular music industry as singers (and perhaps as producers) (De Ferranti, 2009:246–247).

It is hard to provide a full picture as to the extent to which Zainichi Koreans maintained their connection with Korea during the colonial period, either as consumers or participants in the production and circulation of distinctively Korean music and dance before the end of WWII. However, in post-WWII Japan, when Zainichi Koreans split into two camps allying with North or South Korea, thus associating themselves with distinctive strands of Korean music and dance and manifesting their North or South Korean identity, it becomes clearer that the nationally promoted performing arts were bridging their lives between the diaspora and their homeland.

With robust financial aid from North Korea beginning in the mid-1950s, Ch'ongnyŏn was able to establish hundreds of Korean schools in Japan (Ryang, 1997:2–3). In these schools musics and dances constructed by North Korea as national emblems (Chosŏn or chuch'e ŭmak muyong)were taught and performed. After the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea in 1965, Zainichi Koreans siding with South Korea gradually came to support those musics and dances promoted as national emblems in the South (kugak or gugak). However, unlike today, accessing South Korean cultural resources remotely from Japan was not easy, and this hindered the systematic teaching and transmission of a variety of traditional Korean musics and dances in Japan. In the meantime, North Korean styles of musics and dances, taught in Ch'ongnyŏn schools, were increasingly visible.

According to Hikari Yamamoto (2016), who was born and raised in Osaka and learned various traditional Korean dances and musics growing up, the conditions for learning kugak in and around Osaka has gradually improved over time as the number of kugak institutions has increased with the supply of teachers professionally trained in Korea or Japan. As of 2016, just in Osaka, at least 12 private performing arts institutions focused on traditional music and dance associated with South Korea. Of these, eight were dedicated to dance (Han'guk muyong) and four others specialized in strings (e.g., kayagŭm) and/or percussion instruments (p'ungmul), with quite a bit of overlap between these programs. Among the Korean music and dance instructors based in Osaka and Kyoto, at least five are associated with South Korean IICPs.

Nevertheless, the adaptation and practice of traditional Korean music and dance in Japan should not be reduced to epiphenomena of the nationstate (Clifford, 1994:302) but rather and more importantly should be seen as a constructive gesture in terms of searching for meaning in being a diaspora beyond the confines of the nation-state. As Youngmi Lim (2013), a Zainichi Korean scholar herself, states that Zainichi Koreans' interest in traditional Korean music and dance can be traced to as early as the late 1960s, when a social movement developed among younger-generation Zainichi Koreans that criticized older-generation Koreans' acceptance of a colonial view over themselves as racially inferior people and fractioning of the Zainichi Korean community into two following partition in the Korean Peninsula. While these Zainichi activists instrumentalized traditional Korean performing arts—puch'aech'um (fan dance) and nongak (farmer's band music, more widely referred as p'ungmul) in particular—to raise cultural pride and consciousness by implementing them into Korean heritage education classes offered in Japanese and Korean schools (Lim, 2013), some Zainichi Koreans fascinated by Korean performing arts ended up travelling to South Korea in order to learn it in the native context and from the authentic teachers (Lim, 2013). Back in Japan, these Zainichi Koreans were viewed as having acquired authentic knowledge which empowered them as Korean cultural authorities in Japan. Gradually Zainichi Korean artists' connection with South Korea and its IICPs came to be taken as proof of their association with an artistic lineage, a concept highly emphasized in Japan for its own performance traditions.

The Stories of Three Zainichi Korean Performers

In this section, I introduce three Zainichi Korean artists based in the Kansai region and explore how they signify their engagement with South Korean IICPs. All three—Kim Ilchi, Kim Hŭiok, and An Sŏngmin—have worked as Korean performing arts teachers in the Kansai area since the late 1980s. Each studied their art with living national treasures in South Korea and their assistant teachers (chŏnsu chogyo), traveling back and forth between South Korea and Japan extensively for years, and all recently became graduates (isuja). While all three highlighted the significant role their teachers have played in their artistic lives, each manifested a slightly different background, vision, and ambition in practicing the art they specialize in as Zainichi Koreans.

Kim Ilchi

Kim Ilchi runs her studio, the Kim Ilchi Arts Center for Traditional Korean Dance (Kimilchi han'guk chŏnt'ong yesurwŏn), in Kyoto. Born in South Korea, Kim Ilchi moved to Japan in her late teens in 1985 with her mother, herself a Zainichi Korean born in Japan and who had returned to Korea in the early 1950s. Kim Ilchi had been trained in a variety of dance styles in Korea since the age of seven. After two years' break she began to dance again in Japan with Zainichi Korean community dance groups. Kim states that until the late 1980s, she performed mostly creative dances without a firm idea of herself as a representative of authentic Korean dance. One day after a performance, a young Zainichi Korean approached Kim and thanked her for enlightening her with the beauty of traditional Korean dance, which she had never seen before. This prompted Kim Ilchi to think about her responsibility as a dancer representing Korean culture to both Zainichi and Japanese audiences. In 1989, she visited South Korea in search of teachers who could teach her authentic versions of traditional Korean dances. She became a disciple of Yim Ijo (1950–2013), an assistant teacher of the famous dance master Yi Maebang (1927–2015), a living national treasure for both sŭngmu (IICP No. 27), and salp'uri (IICP No. 97). Studying with Yim until his death in 2013, Kim Ilchi learned her teacher's sŭngmu, salp'uri, and halyangmu, and in 2017 she also became an isuja of Ch'ŏyongmu,a ceremonial court dance, registered with UNESCO in 2009 as one of world's Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

She continues to perform around Japan and South Korea the dances she mastered under Yim Ijo, and since 2017 has endeavored to cultivate the Ch'ŏyong dance in Japan by bringing in teachers from Korea almost every month. Although student interest in this dignified style court dance is not as strong as for sŭngmu and salp'uri, which are perceived as more expressive and feminine, she strives to make it widely performed and known in Japan to deepen her audiences and students' understanding of Korean dance. Kim Ilchi firmly stated (personal communication, January 8, 2018):

As a first-generation Zainichi Korean born and raised in South Korea until my late teens, I am different. I hold strong pride in Korean culture and I want to share it with as many people as I can in Japan. For Japanese audiences and those who learn Korean dance, I want them to know that Korean tradition is as great as Japan's; for those Zainichi Korean audiences and students who are not too sure of what traditional Korean culture is, I want to help them learn about it through me and my students' traditional dance. In order to do this, I need to learn more about it myself and do better with the dance I have learned in Korea and created in Japan.

Fig 1.

A table set up at the Ana Ground Plaza Hotel in Kyoto, Japan, for the recital celebrating Kim Ilchi's winning of the President's Award for her sŭngmu at one of South Korea's national-level performing arts competitions, Koksŏng t'ongil chŏn'guk chongap yesultaejŏn (Koksŏng National Performing Arts Competition), on January 9th, 2018. Photo by author.

It seems that Kim Ilchi's passion for Ch'oyong dance, in particular, has to do with her teaching and performing ground, Kyoto, where the Japanese imperial court resided for more than a millennium until it moved to Tokyo in 1869, and where much ancient Japanese heritage has been preserved. Although Korean court music and dance did not take root in Kyoto after they were recreated as part of the Miyako-odori program in 1924, today Kim Ilchi's endeavor to establish Ch'oyong dance in Kyoto may be better received there than in other places in Japan because of congruence with Kyoto's numerous Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, palaces, and gardens, many of which are listed collectively by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

KimHŭiok

Like Kim Ilchi, Kim Hŭiok is a first-generation Korean migrant in Japan who trained in traditional Korean dance before migrating in the mid-1980s. After graduating from university as a Korean dance major, she joined a professional dance troupe run by her teacher, Yi Myŏngja, an assistant teacher specializing in Kang Sŏnyŏng-nyu (Kang Sŏnyŏng-style) t'aep'yŏngmu (IICP No. 92). In her early thirties, she moved to Japan, leaving her career as a Korean dancer. Only after settling down in Osaka and marrying a Zainichi Korean did she pick up Korean dance again, teaching students and teachers through afterschool Korean cultural programs in Japanese public schools in Osaka (minjok hakkŭp). Seeing teachers who were mostly self-taught in Korean arts via imported audiovisual materials and students being taught without clear cultural principles, Kim Hŭiok decided to make it her mission to use her own experience to contribute to education in Korean dance. As a Korean dance instructor, she taught students as part of cultural programs organized by Korean organizations such as Mindan and Haninhoe, and has run her own studio for more than 20 years in Tsuruhashi Koreatown in Osaka. However, even though she had been professionally trained in ranges of Korean dances including t'aep'yŏngmu in South Korea, at the time she had not considered getting her license as an isuja of a Korean dance. Kang Sŏnyŏng-nyu t'aep'yŏngmu was designated as an IICP only in 1988, after Kim left for Japan. It was only in the last decade, after a parent wondered why she was not an isuja, that she decided to go back to her teachers, Yi Myŏngja and Kang Sŏnyŏng, and complete her training in t'aep'yŏngmu as their disciple. Upon becoming an isuja, Kang appointed her as director of the transmission branch for t'aep'yŏngmu in Osaka. In this way, students who study t'aep'yŏngmu with Kim in Osaka, especially those who hold South Korean nationality as Zainichi Koreans, are entitled to take graduate exams in South Korea and become isuja themselves.

It took five years of bonding and re-training under her teachers, and a big commitment in time and travel, for Kim to become a t'aep'yŏngmu isuja a few years ago. Kim values the program for the opportunity it granted her to solidify her bond with her teachers and see her knowledge of Korean dance mature. Kim states, "Over the five years of training, I not only learned their dance but also their inp'um [good nature, humility, generosity] as an artist and teacher, and I also offer this to my students" (Kim Hŭiok, personal communication, January 9, 2018). Like Kim Ilchi, Kim Hŭiok aims to establish her dance as part of Zainichi Korean culture in Japan. However, she is firm in her conviction that she wants to transmit them as she has

Fig 2.

Kim Hŭiok Dance Studio, Tsuruhashi, Osaka, Japan. Photo by author.

learned them from her teachers, and in so doing help her students and community learn Korean dances and become as competent as those who study them in South Korea.

An Sŏngmin

An Sŏngmin was born and raised in Osaka as a third-generation Zainichi Korean. Since 2001, she studied p'ansori (Korean narrative song drama) with Nam Haesŏng, a holder of p'ansori Sugungga (Song of the Underwater Palace), one of five p'ansori songs designated together as IICP No. 5 in 1964. An's encounter with Korean arts was quite different from Kim Ilchi's and Kim Hŭiok's. As a university student in the mid-1980s, An learned about Korean language and culture, which had not interested her much up until then. It was at the Korean cultural club that she first encountered p'ansori played on cassette. Although it was to be another sixteen years before she actually started learning this folk narrative art in Korea, since 2001 An Sŏngmin has studied it with her teacher, Nam, on visits two or three times a year. An said she found the sound of p'ansori very powerful when she first experienced it, but also very foreign in terms of both its literal and musical languages. A Korean language instructor at universities in the Osaka area, An gives live two-hour p'ansori concerts every three months. As suggested by her teacher, she sometimes sings short p'ansori excerpts in Japanese, but for her regular concert series, she tries to deliver Sugungga in its entirety in the original form she learned from her teacher.

In performing p'ansori regularly in Japan, An wants to offer younger-generation Zainichi Koreans a chance to see their own identity reflected. An states, "With my singing, I want to provoke the question of identity in the minds of young Zainichi Koreans who have not seriously contemplated it, a question that I myself struggled with more than three decades ago. I think being Zainichi Korean, one does not have to be confused or feel one has to take sides between their Koreanness and Japaneseness. Being bicultural can be enriching, but one has to know and admit who they are. I want them to be prompted to reflect on who they are when they experience my p'ansori, which is doubly foreign to Zainichi Koreans as both Korean and old traditional culture" (An Sŏngmin, personal communication, January 13, 2018). An Sŏngmin expressed her relationship with traditional Korean culture from an activist standpoint in wanting to broaden the cultural and social horizons of third- and fourth-generation Zainichi

Fig 3.

Poster of An Sŏngmin's recital of Hŭngboga wanch'ang (Entire Extended Version of Song of Hŭngbo), Osaka, Japan.

Koreans by showing them an alternative or unusual life path, one that she herself has taken as a Zainichi Korean specializing in traditional Korean music.

An Sŏngmin demonstrates quite a different motivation and philosophy in her study and performance of p'ansori in Japan from those of Kim Ilchi and Kim Hŭiok toward their arts. An recognizes that at first p'ansori might seem foreign to her Zainichi Korean and Japanese audiences. However, through her performances of this unusual Korean art in Japan, she wants to draw attention to identity issues that she feels Zainich Korean youths need to think about and resolve. On one level, An's approach to her traditional art is a continuation of her involvement in the activist movement that was influential for her during her university years. On another level, as an apprentice of p'ansori master Nam Haesŏng, she also values the art her teacher taught her and works to root it in Japan through her regular performances of original-form p'ansori in Osaka as well as elsewhere in Japan.

Conclusion

On one hand, Korean culture can be reduced to a homogenized projection of an undifferentiated "Korea" when a variety of individual Koreans present themselves as distinct from the hegemonic group or other ethnicities in Japan. However, when looking deeper into Korean identity, these individual Koreans evince numerous differences as subjects of particular nation-states, liberal artists or conservative practitioners, performers, teachers, social activists, and transnational agents crafting their own artistic style. Likewise, despite individual commitments, specializations, and engagements with a range of different IICPs, motivations for their involvement vary, just as these migrant artists' visions of what they want to do with their heritage arts also differ. Amidst this variety and complexity, South Korea's IICPs have been a vehicle for these Zainichi Korean artists to construct and demarcate who they are, both for themselves or counterposed against other ethnic minorities and/or their Japanese peers.

Thanks to technological advancements over the past and present century, migrants' ability to maintain or establish connections to ethnic homelands is now much easier than in the past, when they had to face insurmountable physical and social distance from home and survive in a new social context. Studies on transnational community were initially framed by immigrant studies in the USA, where researchers argued that immigrants would gradually abandon ethnically distinctive cultural customs and homeland ties in their quest for socioeconomic mobility in a new land. However, over the last several decades scholars have increasingly recognized the persistent ties maintained by immigrants engaged in transnational social networks linking home and diaspora or participating in social and cultural exchanges between their old and new homes. This basic revision in migrant studies reflects the vast range of migrants who shuttle between multiple nation-states and simultaneously embed themselves in them. As Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller articulate (2004), "[t]he lives of increasing numbers of individuals can no longer be understood by looking only at what goes on within national boundaries … because migrants are often embedded in multi-layered, multi-sited transnational social fields, encompassing those who move and those who stay behind" (p. 1003). Consequently, "the nation-state container view of society does not capture, adequately or automatically, the complex interconnectedness of [contemporary] reality" (Levitt and Schiller, 2004:1006).

Korean music and dance during the colonial period were repressed in their native context, and yet national as well as transnational individuals enabled it to be sustained amidst colonial hardship and to reinstate Korean national identity in postcolonial Korea, particularly as a sign of South Korea as a nation. Today growing transnational agency has increased the possibility of migrants bridging home and diaspora or creating a new home by proactively embedding themselves in both national and transnational socio-cultural fields—as do the Zainichi artists discussed here with South Korean IICPs. Given this, South Korea's IICP system, which embodies South Korean nationalism and state identity, also delineates how national culture is just transnational as much historically and socially. It has been individually re-signified and reinterpreted in a time of transnationalism and globalization, even if its transnational aspects remain nuanced and are often overshadowed by nationalist discourses.