2018, Vol., No.26

Journal of Manchurian Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.33

pISSN : 1738-3668
https://journal.kci.go.kr/manchuria

In this paper, I analyzed the gaps between strategic and actual mechanisms of colonial propaganda with a focus on changes in Manchuria representation. I analyzed the Manchurian pioneer narrative at the end of Japanese colonial period and the narrative of repatriation to Manchuria in the liberation period to trace variations between ‘power driving propaganda aimed at structural oppressive’ and ‘power driving substantive reality’. In the Son of Earth, a Manchurian pioneer narrative, an agricultural progressive narrative creates a new society through massive social engineering, a project combined with national government. In the text, modifications of nature and human beings are more distinguishable and highly manipulatable, with the focus moving increasing on productivity. Taken outright, according to the nationalist utopia discourse of the Son of Earth, the benefits of progress were all the results of social engineering, which excludes the Boy Grows Up, the Manchurian return narrative, from such official discourse. Boy Grows Up describes the live of a fragile boy who grows up in a way that provides him with the means to live on his own and with faculties of ethical discernment. In this way, the mutual assistance of ordinary people emerging as the core of the narrative allows us to identify desires for new subjectivities and communities discernable from ‘top-down progressive planning dynamics’. Thus, the Manchurian return narrative reveals gaps between the social engineering project and colonial realities, as well as gaps between the aims of pioneering narratives and diasporic reality by allowing for a postmodern colonial memories to probe inside colonial propaganda.

This article analyzes three children’s plays of the Man Son Daily, which presumably appeared after the Sino-Japanese War. Toward the end of Japanese rule, children’s plays of Manchukuo Korean people shared several features, one of which was a storyline in which the main characters had often lost one or both parents. In this backdrop, families were often depicted as destitute, which often magnified images of poverty. In colonial cultures, the loss of one’s parents often symbolizes the loss of sovereignty. The protagonist’s poor and pitiable image mirrors the miserable lives Korean children suffered during the colonial period. On the other hand, protagonists with cheerful and courageous personalities ultimately overcome their misfortunes to rise heroes-possible evidence of an optimistic worldview. Children’s plays during this period also depicted several class-based problems, such as those between bourgeoisie and proletariats in capitalist societies, in patriarchal system, and with exploitation under colonial rule. Classism thus characterized Korean Children’s plays in Manchuria. In the later years of Japan’s colonial period, the most obvious feature of Korean children’s play was the growing tendency to metaphorically interpret their plots and themes through Christian consciousness. The Manchuria Korean children’s plays present new worlds founded on national liberation and freedom from colonial rule.

The purpose of this article is to research the aspect of tour performance of comfort group in Manchukuo during the period of wartime from the view of gender politics. Various comfort group played the role to visit and entertain Korean immigrants in Manchukuo at that time in collective and organizational way together with the travelling troupe. Chosun musical troupe by culture elite, Lee Cheol had an important influence to the existence type of comfort group in Manchukuo, they entertained Korean men in Manchukuo who fulfilled the task of construction and war under the name of encouragement and entertainment as a moving cultural apparatus. This was the process where Korean men in Manchukuo were called and imagined as pioneer warrior which combined pioneers/soldiers of Japanese empire through the frame of entertainment by the cultural power. Here, the sings such as ‘race, immigration, hometown, homesickness’ created by flexible entertainment created the sense that they are people of Manchukuo, and the concurrency of time. In addition, moving comfort group newly formed the marginal masculinity of immigrant society in Manchukuo as a bearer of racial performance representing male while it was reflected to the body of refugee, who are non-elite class in Manchukuo.