This article is written to examine the causes and conditions of the occurrence and prevalence of the Japanese new folk songs Oryokkobushi, and Hakutosanbushi, which were widely sung in Joseon, Japan, and Manchuria from the 1920s to 1945.
Along with Oryokkobushi, these two folk songs included lyrics that celebrated ‘unity’ and led to a shift in popular media with records, books, dances, and pictured postcards. The impact of these songs suggests that colonial culture and politics originate from the artistic nature of fascism, which internalizes imagined geographies of an empire and, in the case of Japan, deepens the Japanese expansionist spirit. To justify its invasion of bordering states and violent colonial control and ruling, Japan feminized and militarized the Korea-Manchuria border (including Mt. Baekdu and the Apgok River). Historical data provides a medium to investigate Japan’s aesthetic focus and imperial devices objectively. In this regard, this article first explores Oryokkobushi’s dissipation from Manchuria to Japan and Joseon as a popularized national pastime. Second, it investigates the intrinsic nature and characteristics of colonialism and foreign consumption of Oryokkobushi that made Japan’s music, dances, songs, and publications appealing. Third, this research then attends to Oryokkobushi as a cultural commodity whose reception relies heavily on contrasting Joseon and Japanese subjectivities. Namely, while the Japanese celebrated the Empire’s power, its policies in the colonies, and its efforts to enlighten the illiterate Joseon people, the elite artists and writers in Joseon enjoyed these songs as foreign cultural entertainment. Fourth, the research analyzes of postcards and their role as war propaganda and colonial/ militaristic praise of the Empire. And fifth, this work addresses the feminization and militarization of the Korea-Manchuria border and the creation of Hakutosanbushi as a corollary or additional folksong to the Oryokkobushi. At its height in popularity, picture post-cards and the Hakutosanbushi epitomize the propaganda on the ‘Five Races under One Union’ of the Manchurian nation-state, a song sang during the sudden air attack on Pearl Harbor that precipitated U.S. participation in the Pacific War.