Conference Agenda

Organized by the Global East Asian Music Study Group.

The cluster of overlapping and interrelated military conflicts and wars that took place in East Asia in the mid-twentieth century, including the Chinese Civil War (1927−1949), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1936−1945), the Pacific War (1941−1945), and the Korean War (1950−1953), profoundly shaped the histories of the nations and people of the region and beyond. The sounds of violence and grief, anger and despair intermingled with that of hope and prayer, resonated across geographies and created long-lasting echoes that continue to inform our memories of the events to this day. Yet the sonic memories generated and shared by the firsthand witness and later generations are complex, interwoven, and at times contradictory. Depending on one’s geographic, social, and/or political positions, certain sounds carry heavy historical and cultural significance, while other sounds remain obscure or inaudible.

The proposed roundtable will feature a series of short lightning talks to honor and represent the complexities of the sonic memories of “East Asia” in the middle of the twentieth century by putting them into a dialogue. The speakers will address manifestations and contemporary resonances of sonic memories of multiple overlapping wars from the region and its surrounding areas. The topics that make up the roundtable will include the sonic reimaginations of the war years in Taiwanese films and Japanese animation (David Wilson and Kunio Hara); the resonance of the war years in post-war and contemporary Japanese monster films (Elina G. Asato Hamilton); the recasting of wartime propaganda works in contemporary China (Gavin Lee and Suzanne Scherr); the intersection of war memories and discourse on masculinity in Korean popular songs (Heeseung Lee); and the parallels and contradictions among the testimonies of the Filipinx survivors of Japanese imperial occupations and Japanese survivors of atomic bombs (Anna B. Gatdula).

By placing these sonic memories in dialogue, the roundtable examines how individuals and groups from different countries re-remembered and re-invented the sound of war through the dissemination and exchanges of sounds, technologies, and ideas within the region and across the continent and the ocean. It probes how the sonic memories of war and the ongoing reminders of war through musical creations have profoundly shaped the identity of each nation, its people, collectively and individually.