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| Traditional Japanese dresses and Japanese store signs are a common sight in this undated file photo of a Seoul avenue during the Japanese occupation (1910-1945). Korea Times file |
By Baek Byung-yeul
Cultural contents tend to mirror the time they are produced in.
Ahead of the 69th anniversary of Korean independence from Japanese occupation (1910-1945), which falls on Aug. 15, an international conference on the nation's cultural transformation during the colonial rule was held in Seoul on July 11.
The event, organized by Seoul's Ewha Womans University in cooperation with Yale University, retraced the films, literature, dance, photos and art during the turbulent phase in the country's history.
With 15 scholars from Korea, the U.S., Japan and Canada, the discussions dealt with Korean literature, paintings, films and newspapers during the colonial era.
Kim Sun-uk, President of Ewha Womans University said the talk has noticeable meaning on Friday, saying, "With this conference as a momentum, I hope Ewha Womans University can continuously have this kind of academic interchange with Yale."
The conference was sponsored by the Ewha Institute for the Humanities (EIH) and America's Yale University's Council on East Asian Studies (CEAS).
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| Kim Sun-uk, President of Ewha Womans University, speaks during an international conference on Korea's culture under Japanese rule at the Ewha Womans University in Seoul on July 11. / Courtesy of Ewha Womans University |
"And I am happy that this kind of conference can be held here at Ewha, which cultivated slew of female leaders of the country during the Japanese occupation," she added.
Among 15 speakers of the two-day conference, Aaron Gerow, professor in Japanese cinema at the Yale University showed his unique perspective on Korean films during the colonial era as compared with early African-American cinema.
"Compared with Japanese cinemas of that period, which were well-made, very stylized and very slick, some of the Korean examples might seem less well-made and less modernized," the professor said.
But he said that the seemingly shoddy structure of Korean films may actually have been done intentionally, adding that some of Korean films remind him of works of Oscar Micheaux, a pioneer Afro-American film director, who made films resisting racism.
"Maybe Micheaux's films in the 1920s, for instance, look like badly made films. But I think that's the wrong way of looking at the films. In fact, they are not badly made, they are just made differently."
Like Micheaux's works, he said films like "Military Train" (1938) or "Volunteer" (1941) are examples, "showing some cracks of the colonial situation" though they are pro-Japanese government sponsored films.
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| "Dancers" by pioneering female painter Na Hye-sok (1896-1948) |
He said the conference was useful to his research. "As I am not a specialist of Korean cinema, I approached this talk as a student, and I learned quite a lot. I definitely hope that I can use some of this knowledge in my research. As I have always wanted to move a little bit more into topics of Korea, it really encourages me to do that," Gerow said.
Janet Pool, who teaches Korean literature and history at the University of Toronto in Canada, also drew the audiences' interest with her rare research on newspapers of photos of the time.
Analyzing photos published by the Japanese government running "Maeil Sinbo" newspaper, she said she could get to know that "the editors harnessed their newspaper to exercise the colonial power, using mass printing of photographic images."
Spearheaded by Eunice Kim, vice president in the Office of International Affairs at Ewha and John Treat, Yale's professor emeritus of East Asian Languages and Literatures, who is teaching at Ewha this year, the inaugural conference was kicked off as part of two universities' academic cooperative measure.
