Conference Agenda

Japanese enka has long been regarded as a quintessentially national genre, emblematic of Japanese sentiment and identity. In contrast, Korean tŭrotŭ has been the subject of debate within postcolonial Korean society, often criticized for its perceived dependence on enka. Korean scholars have questioned whether tŭrotŭ derives primarily from enka or from indigenous Korean traditions—a debate that reflects efforts to decolonize music history. However, such nation-bound framings often reinforce a one-directional narrative of Japanese cultural influence on colonial Korea, thereby obscuring the complex transnational origins of both genres and overlooking the role of Korean performers in shaping Japan’s postwar popular music industry.

Building on Yano’s (2003) observation that the presence of Korean artists in the enka industry complicates the idea of enka as a purely Japanese genre, this paper argues that both enka and tŭrotŭ emerged through mutual influence and transnational entanglements, rather than a one-directional flow from Japan to Korea. One such figure is Sugawara Suzuko (1927–), a major postwar enka star known as the “Queen of Elegy Enka.” Sugawara’s 1951 recording of “Renrakusen no Uta (Farewell, Ferry)” —originally released in colonial Korea in 1937 by Chang Sejŏng—exemplifies the cross-border transmission of longing and colonial memory. Chang’s original song laments the Kanpu Ferry Line, which carried Koreans to the Japanese mainland under imperial rule. While the ferry symbolized hope and connection for Japanese citizens, for Koreans it represented forced migration and profound loss. What does it mean for a colonial-era Korean song to have been re-recorded in 1950s Japan? This re-recording became a popular hit precisely as enka was being redefined as a national genre, distinct from the broader prewar category of ryūkōka (popular music).

Drawing on archival research and musical analysis, this paper extends Dower’s (1999) notion of “imperial democracy” into the musical domain, arguing that enka’s postwar nationalization operated through sonic practices—such as re-recording, affective vocality, and genre reclassification—that selectively erased imperial memory while recoding it as Japanese nostalgia. Ultimately, this paper challenges nation-centered historiographies and repositions enka and t’ŭrot’ŭ as inter-Asian cultural productions shaped through circulation and shared affective regimes (Rao 2023).

This paper examines how musicians from North and South Korea have articulated gestures of reconciliation through the circulation of composed Arirang across the divided peninsula. Recognized by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2012, Arirang embodies the Korean affect of han and historically carried collective sentiments under Japanese colonial rule. Since the Korean War, the song has been continually adapted and reinterpreted on both sides. Rather than treating Northern and Southern musical practices separately or framing them within ideological binaries (Keith Howard 2020, Peter Moody 2025, Kyunghwa Lim 2025), this study highlights works that cross borders, including performances in the opposing regime, transnational exchanges, and inter-Korean collaborations.

Three case studies illuminate these dynamics. First, Arirang Fantasy (1976) by North Korean composer Choi Sung-hwan premiered in Japan under Korean conductor Kim Hong-jae, was later staged in South Korea, and gained international visibility when conducted by Lorin Maazel with the New York Philharmonic in Pyongyang. Second, Arirang Alone (1989) by South Korean composer Handol was sung at the request of North Korean authorities during Cho Yong-pil’s 2005 Pyongyang concert and later performed by a North Korean art troupe in South Korea during the 2018 Winter Olympics. Third, the 2019 “Arirang Medley” collaboration between South Korean haegeum performer Jeong Gyeo-woon and North Korean so-haegeum performer Bang Dal-hwa explores convergences and divergences in traditional instrumental practice.

Drawing on score analysis, performance reviews, and interviews, the paper traces how Arirang has been continually reimagined across ideological divides. Taken together, I argue that these cases demonstrate that Arirang operates not only as a shared cultural memory that carries the pain of division but also as a medium of empathetic listening—one that invites gestures of unity by challenging boundaries between tradition and modernity, nationalism and transnationalism. Despite heightened political tension and the ongoing division of nearly eighty years, the transborder trajectories of Arirang exemplify what Arjun Appadurai calls a “deterritorialized cultural flow,” generating new affective communities across and beyond the peninsula. Ultimately, this study contributes to broader discussions on borders, folk/contemporary music in divided Korea, and intercultural creativity beyond ideology.

With the dismantling of the Korean court under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), Korea's courtesans known as kisaeng were stripped of state patronage and forcibly reconstituted as wage-earning musical entertainers in a rapidly industrializing colonial economy. While many kisaeng leveraged their new labor regime by waging strikes and rearticulating themselves from a hereditary class to a revolutionary proletariat, colonial intellectuals held that both the labor and the music of kisaeng were incompatible with the imperatives of national liberation and social revolution.

This paper asks why, even as kisaeng increasingly occupied the position of waged cultural laborers, the artist-intellectual left excluded their labor and popular musical forms from their vision of proletarian culture. Marxist and other socialist discourses of the time cast the commodified musical entertainment labor of the kisaeng as a sinister symptom of life’s mechanization under colonial capitalism, and the popular lament songs performed by kisaeng as especially antithetical to the project of historical progress as envisioned by the proletarian arts movement, the cultural arm of colonial Marxists. I suggest that the history of the kisaeng and their cultural labor exposes a critical limit to the humanist imaginations of Marxists in colonial Korea. This history contributes to Marxist music studies and to scholarship on gendered cultural labor under capitalism.