일제말기 김영팔의 만주활동과 연극 <김동한>의 협화적 기획

Abstract

This paper aims to uncover Kim Young-Pal, the playwright’s activities in the late Japanese occupation period, who had completely vanished from the public sight since 1932. Kim Young-Pal’s activities around the 1940s could be substantially reconstructed through the Manchuria-Chosun Daily News that was published in Xinjing (新京), the capital of Manchukuo, since he was actively involved in Korean society in Manchuria during that time. He worked at the Xinjing Broadcasting Company and served as the head of the culture division in the Xinjing Jilin Branch (新京鷄林分會)of the Concordia Association. He adopted a Japanese name ‘光山永八’ in 1940. In celebration of the 2600th year of the Japanese imperial calendar, the Manchuria-Chosun Daily News ran a prize contest to write a drama on Kim Dong-Han, an anti-communist activist. The winning play, Kim Dong-Han was performed by the culture division of the Xinjing Jilin Branch of the Concordia Association and Kim Young-Pal was the director. The play was immersed in the propagandized cultural policy and the ideologies of ‘anti-communism’ and ‘harmony between Korean, Japanese, and Chinese’ which was also alluded in the name ‘Concordia Association’ in which Kim partook. Moreover, tt did not communicate to the audience successfully. This paper tries to explain the reasons why play as propaganda was apt to fail, by looking at the entire process of how the play was made and accepted, from the preparation process when the pro-Japanese ideology was put upfront, then, to the writing, actual performance, and the controversies afterwards. I also inferred from the circumstantial evidences and the newspaper articles of the Manchuria-Chosun Daily News that the playwright who had been known as Kim Wu-Seok might actually be Kim Young-Pal himself. This research may provide substantial resource for the activities of Kim Young-Pal in the late Japanese occupation period that had been missing until now. It may also enable the present readers to verify how the ‘harmonization’ project of the Xinjing Branch of the Concordia Association, in which Kim Young-Pal took part, influenced the Korean society in Manchuria by maneuvering people’s mind through the means of appeasement.