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The Pillow Book in the Japanese Colonial Era: Focusing on the Description of Chûtotkyôikukubuntokuho (中等敎育國文讀本)

KIM Hyosook 1

1세종대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Chûtôkyôikukubuntokuhon (中等敎育國文讀本) is a Japanese textbook for secondary education published by the Government-General of Korea since 1930. A unique feature of this textbook is that it contains many Japanese literary works, unlike the previous textbooks. Furthermore, the content is often re-quoted from texts published in Japan at that time, not from the original texts of the Japanese literary works. Volume 8 of the Chûtôkyôikukubuntokuhon contains part of The Pillow Book (枕草子), a Japanese classic essay, and criticisms of it. The original text of this chapter is a book by Motoomi Kaneko called The Pillow Book Commentary (枕草子評釈). However, this part of the Chûtôkyôikukubuntokuhon is not from the original text, but from the Chûtôkokugotokuhon (中等國語讀本) textbook published in Japan at that time. This can be seen from the fact that the contents of the two texts are very similar, from words to sentence selection. However, despite the fact that the two texts are very similar overall, some texts published by the Government-General of Korea were omitted. For example, the Heian-era waka poems about the scene where men and women exchanged love in front of “Kami” (god, 神) were omitted. This is because the meaning of “Kami” in Heian period literary works is different from the word “Kami” that the Japanese Empire seeks in colonial Korea. The GovernmentGeneral of Korea has cited many Japanese classical literary works in textbooks to show Japan’s superiority. However, when the worldview of classical literary works conflicted with the worldview that the Japanese Empire wanted to plant in colonial Korea, some scenes in literary works were deleted.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.