Miss Dong Bai： In order to ＂resist the Japanese pirates＂, the Korean government banned this song.

In the last episode of the Korean TV series "Secret Forest", Huang Shimu, a prosecutor who was relegated to Nanhai because of anti-corruption, was recalled by an old song called "Miss Dong Bai" ().

In 1964, the Korean film "Miss Dong Bai" was released. The hero of the film is a college student from Seoul, the capital of South Korea (now called "Seoul"). After going to the countryside, he met the heroine "Miss Dong Bai". They fell in love, but they had to be separated. It is a tragic love story.

This song "Miss Dong Bai" appeared in the TV series "Secret Forest" is the theme song of the same name, composed by Bai Yinghu and written by Hanshan Island, and sung by singer Mi-ja Lee, who was known as the "Queen of Foxtrot Dance" at that time. With the great success of the film, this song swept South Korea.

Korean singer Mi-ja Lee (left) and the cover of Miss Dong Bai (right)

However, only four years later, this hit love song became a typical banned song in Korea at that time because of its "Japanese color". Its tune was wrong and its lyrics were wrong, which was a "funeral" with spiritual opium. How did Miss Dong Bai, a popular Korean song, suddenly become "Japanese" and why was it regarded as a spiritual opium by the then Korean government?

Korean films in the 1960s

In the 1960s, the United States in the Cold War praised Rostow’s thought of development aid, the purpose of which was to provide economic aid to underdeveloped areas, so that local people could feel the superiority of capitalism and fight against the communist camp. In 1961, park chung-hee launched the "May 16th" military coup to overthrow the Yin Pushan regime and began the rule of the Third Republic for 18 years. After taking office, park chung-hee actively opposed the Communist Party and showed his kindness to the United States. The United States provided economic assistance to South Korea on the premise of the cooperation of the Korean government, "in order to guide South Korea to develop in politics, economy and society in a more secure way." (See Foreign Relations of the United States, Vol ⅹ, Document 221: 227) The two sides hit it off.

In 1962, Lyndon Johnson, then vice president of the United States, presented TV sets to Korean villagers.

While receiving American economic aid, the park chung-hee administration began the first five-year plan of economic reform, and the gross domestic product (GDP) of South Korea was greatly increased, and the national enjoyment consumption expenditure increased accordingly. From 1961 to 1968, the number of movies per capita in Korea increased sixfold.

In the early days of the Third Republic, American and South Korean films divided the Korean film market. American movies have a great influence on Korean young people, but due to language and cultural differences, most Koreans still tend to watch Korean movies. Under the influence of American movies, Korean movies show two trends: one is a traditional Korean movie like Miss Dong Bai, which mostly tells love tragedy stories from a female perspective; The other is Korean movies influenced by American youth movies. Taking Barefoot Youth, which was released in the same year as Miss Dong Bai, as an example, the story takes the hero from a poor background as the perspective, and shows western etiquette and American culture by describing the communication process between the hero and the heroine from a noble background.

Posters of the 1964 film Barefoot Youth (left) and Miss Dong Bai (right)

Jean baudrillard, a French sociologist, often uses the word "simulacra" when discussing the mass media, and thinks that the process of social modernization is the process that "simulacra and simulated things replace the real and original things because of large-scale typology". From the perspective of "simulacra", it may be considered that Barefoot Youth is in the first stage of this sequence, that is, "imitation".

Japan, which embraced American culture earlier than South Korea, completed the imitation of American films, especially American youth films, ten years earlier than South Korea. South Korea, which embraces American culture rapidly, directly borrows the shooting method and story structure of Japanese Hollywood-style youth films. In this way, Korean young people are infected by American culture by watching Korean imitation American movies that imitate Japanese movies.

The United States guided Korean culture through economic assistance, and at the same time established the status of American culture in Korea. American culture has become a new weapon for Korean young people to resist and overthrow the old cultural authority.

"Japanese-colored" winter cypress

In the 1920s and 1930s, songs popular in Japan began to be imported into the Korean peninsula. The performance of the song is close to the pentatonic scale in traditional Chinese culture, and it adopts the mode of removing the fourth and seventh tones, and there is little "Suo" sound in western music, which is quickly accepted by South Korea, where the language is all sticky, and is called ""by South Korea. "Foxtrot" is taken from the second half of English foxtrot, and it is still a variant of Japanese songs in essence. The lyrics are mainly lyrical and mostly bitter. In 1968, Miss Dongbai, which was judged as a typical Japanese color, chose this genre.

The so-called "Japanese color" is a derogatory term for Japanese culture on the Korean peninsula after the end of World War II. Japan’s comprehensive colonial rule on the Korean peninsula lasted for 36 years, which had a profound cultural influence. "Decolonization" is the general direction of the cultural policy of all regimes on the Korean Peninsula after Japan surrendered, but this cultural policy has not been well implemented due to the Korean War and the turbulent political situation. The grass-roots people in South Korea and the active cultural circles in the early days of the Third Republic are still hard to avoid the influence of Japanese culture in terms of aesthetic purport and creative style.

Park chung-hee also hoped to "decolonize". After he took office, he set up the Broadcasting Ethics Committee and the Korean Arts and Culture Ethics Committee. In 1965, the Broadcasting Ethics Committee enacted the Broadcasting Law, and banned songs that were considered to disturb public order, damage public order and good customs, and contained unsound ideas. At the same time, the Korean Art and Culture Ethics Committee began to manage the production of audio products. This year, more than 100 songs disappeared from the public’s ears for reasons such as "the lyricist went north", "pirated works", "ugly", "vulgar" and "abandoned". The main reason why this batch of songs was banned was that the lyricist went north to North Korea to vote for the Communist Party.

Miss Dong Bai, who played the same song and went to the fourth and seventh levels, escaped the first day of junior high school and did not escape the fifteenth. In the same year of the first ban, South Korea formally established diplomatic relations with Japan with the help of the United States, which aroused strong opposition among the people. College students with the highest anti-Japanese sentiment marched in the streets, and the shock continued. After the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Japan, the relationship gradually deteriorated. In 1968, 114 songs were banned, most of which were "Japanese" foxtrot dances like Miss Dongbei.

The broadcast of songs ban by that ethics committee in 1965 and 1968 did not make young Koreans nervous. At that time, the admission rate of Korean universities was as high as 10%. Influenced by the traditional Confucian culture, in the early days of the Third Republic, young people generally held the attitude of "everything is inferior, only reading is high", intending to transform the country according to their own taste preferences and consciously resist the cultural people who grew up in the colonial environment.

Taking music as an example, due to the profound influence of American culture, in the chain of cultural contempt in the early days of the Third Republic, western classical music was at the top, followed by American pop music, American arrangement and Korean lyrics, and finally the "foxtrot dance" like Miss Dong Bai. Banning "Japanese color" is not only a political victory of anti-Japanese behavior, but also a clean-up of low-end culture. The high tolerance attitude of social elites towards the ban on music makes it possible for park chung-hee’s "positive" energy to glow further.

Park chung-hee’s Positive Energy

In his autobiography "Country, Revolution and Me", park chung-hee stated that "my lifelong wish is to create an independent South Korea based on simple, hardworking, honest and honest civilians. In a word, I hope to be born, grow up and work among civilians, and end my life with the approval of civilians. " As the master of absolute power in Korea at that time, park chung-hee tried to inject the positive energy he advocated into the hearts of every Korean citizen.

Park chung-hee’s family portrait in 1961, with park geun-hye in the middle.

From 1968 to June 1975, the Korean Art and Culture Ethics Committee issued "Countermeasures for Purification of Public Performances", and 759 songs were banned by the broadcasting ethics Committee and the Korean Art and Culture Ethics Committee. The reasons for the ban were divided into twelve items, namely: 1. Piracy; 2. The lyricists voted together; 3, dark color; 4. The singing style is vulgar; 5. The lyrics are vulgar; 6. The lyrics are decadent; 7. Vulgar and decadent; 8, nothingness, frustration, weakening confidence; 9. Low taste; 10 is not perfect; 11. Naive; 12. Don’t keep pace with the times.

In 1965, The Dancer’s Innocence () was written by Jin Rong and composed by Jin Fuhai, with a sad tune. It expressed the longing for the sweetheart from the perspective of a dancer and felt that the female life was sad. It was once widely sung among college students and once became the record sales champion in the history of Korean ballads. In 1975, it was banned because of "vulgar lyrics", because there were scenes in the lyrics in which dancers claimed to be held in their arms by men who met for the first time. In addition, the words "I want to meet" and "I want to do" in the lyrics are considered to contain sexual desire, so I put on the hat of "vulgar lyrics" and became a forbidden song.

Essay songs "Couple Quarrel" () and "Third-class Life" () describing the life in the city were judged to be "vulgar and decadent" because they described but not as those know it who have been poor together, which was not in line with the great situation of the country witnessing the "miracle of the Hanjiang River" and became forbidden songs. Orphan () and Abba Goose (), which reflect the wanderers’ lamentation about their lives, are considered to be inconsistent with the reality of high economic growth in South Korea, and are judged as "nihility, discouragement and weakening confidence" and become forbidden songs.

In addition to banning "bad songs", the Third Republic of park chung-hee also launched a "sound ballad" campaign to transmit positive energy. Since 1962, the government has chosen the theme, and various TV stations and radio stations have cooperated with the government to launch "sound ballads". For example, in 1964, the government called on citizens to walk for fitness, and the East Asia Broadcasting Bureau of the radio station launched the song "We Walk" ().

Sound ballads selected by Busan municipal government (left); Healthy Ballad "New Countryside"

Healthy songs, together with forbidden songs, deprive people of their freedom of choice. In 1971, with park chung-hee’s sixth election as President of South Korea, a sound ballad movement was launched throughout South Korea. In the same year, the first Korea Sound Ballad Competition Conference was held; In 1972, he held a "symposium to explore the direction of improving the popularity of ballads"; In March of the same year, the Ministry of Culture called for the launch of the campaign of "improving ballads and making the people sing together". In the countryside, loudspeakers are widely used to broadcast sound songs selected by the government, such as "New Countryside" in the early morning and evening, and Busan and other places will even broadcast sound songs to Japan across the sea.

In addition to songs, park chung-hee’s positive energy social purification action is also reflected in the correction of social behavior. In 1970, the Third Republic promulgated the Law on the Prohibition of Custom Offenders. Men were forbidden to wear long hair and women were forbidden to wear miniskirts and other revealing clothes, and a curfew was imposed from midnight to 4 am. Since May 1973, the streets have been cleaned up, and pedestrians who occupy the driveway, pedestrians who walk outside the crosswalk, people who throw cigarette butts everywhere, people who make trouble in the street after drinking, and guardians of children under six who play in the driveway have been punished …

During the period of the Third Republic, the rapid economic development brought by the "miracle of the Hanjiang River" persuaded Korean nationals to give high tolerance or even laissez-faire to the highly centralized autocratic political system. park chung-hee’s social purification activities were not considered as a deprivation of constitutional empowerment, and this high tolerance in turn gave support to the Third Republic.

The "Countermeasures for Purifying Public Performances" and the "Improving Ballads" campaign formulated in park chung-hee period did not come to an end until the end of Quan Dou Huan’s Fifth Republic. Before the opening of the Seoul Olympic Games in September, 1988, 186 songs, including Miss Dong Bai, were banned by the Korean Art, Culture and Ethics Committee, but the content review of literary works did not end immediately with the democratization process in Korea. It was not until 1996 that the prior censorship of cultural works was abolished because it violated the Korean Constitution.

Park chung-hee’s positive energy influence is far-reaching. His military dictatorship, under the banner of "purification" and "positive energy propaganda", actually eliminated the "noise" outside the political dominant discourse. It is also not allowed to express the social injustice in a highly artistic way under the rapid economic development, and the "story carved on the winter cypress flower" has become an "unspeakable story".

references

Lee Sang-Dawn, Big brother, little brother: the American influence on Korean culture in the Lyndon B. Johnson years, Lexington Books,2002；

Hotan is beautiful,’ パンソリからのへにぉぉらのぉぉぉぉぉぉぉぉぉぉぉ

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