제국의 취향, 전시되는 ‘아리랑’ ―식민지 ‘아리랑 엽서’의 성격과 의미

Abstract

The national song, “Arirang” is a sort of invented tradition. Various versions of Arirang, which had been produced and distributed in full swing since modern times, were popular repertoires in terms of both resistance and entertainment places. It was a movie Arirang by Na Wun-gyu that had a decisive effect on such a dualistic situation, and through which “Arirang”quickly arose as a national signifier as well as an icon of decolonization. However, the Japanese colonial authority, which had collected and conducted consistently research into folk songs including “Arirang” since the early period of their colonial rule, prohibited the singing of “Arirang” or controlled and/or utilized “Arirang” as a means of enlightening and promoting their colonial policy. Unlike the institutional policy of the colonial authority, the cultural capital of Japan promoted “Arirang as a taste”of othernization while enjoying colonial culture through the production and consumption of the popular song “Arirang” on the mainland of Japan and the publication of “Arirang” through photographic postcards. Of course,“Arirang” in photographic postcards and picture postcards spoke for the eye of the empire toward the colony beyond the “reality” of chosun as indicated by “chosun style objects” contained in those postcards. Their racial/cultural discrimination is revealed obviously in the settings of time and space and the selection of characters that are portrayed strongly with uncivilized features involving pre-modernity, stagnancy, and insanitation. They exhibited farming villages and mountain villages where pre-modernistic conventions and regulations ruled, peddlers who look so alienated from modern transportation and labor dependent on such transportation, loggers, women suffering from hard work, and gisaeng (entertainment girls) as a symbol of grief and sexual objects. This paper looked into how “chosun style objects” represented as above through a photographic postcard, Arirang Taryeong(ballard) and a picture postcard Arirang Emotion, were given an othernization and monopolized again in a form attuned to the eye and rule of the empire, specifically through aesthetic/lingual description such as the selection and placement of images and the illustration of the mixing of the languages of Japan and chosun. Along with that, the paper also considered the way of appearance of the same objects on other photographic postcards and the significance of poems and songs displayed on the postcards. Then, the paper was able to confirm that the removal of “inauspiciousness”, which is subsequently unique with Aarirang”, namely, resistance was connected ultimately to the full mobilization of the ruled (chosun people) to the construction of a “new system” of the empire. In other words, the ruled were gradually consumed as the typical targets for mobilization and as replenishers in the context of nationalistic (imperialistic) identification. In that regard, to the Japanese colonial rule, the monopolization of chosun culture was close to a malignant taste that means “something that deviated from essence, something that escaped from cultural truth, and something ‘that was derailed after falling off’.”