Friday, January 10th, 2014 Introducing Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese 'Comfort Women'.

Description

Hearts of Pine focuses on the selves and social lives that these three women cultivated through song. During four decades of post-war public secrecy about the comfort women system, song served for these women as both a private and a public means of coping with their trauma-each used song in a different way to reckon with their experiences and to forge a new sense of self. In the 1990s a nationalist movement arose in South Korea to seek redress from the Japanese government and to tend to the previously-shunned comfort women survivors in their old age. Suddenly these women, and many others like them, found themselves pulled from the margins of society and thrust into the very center of the public cultural spotlight. Appearing on television and radio as well as at political events and protest rallies, the “comfort women grandmothers” collectively functioned as an emblem of the horrors Japan inflicted on long “enslaved” Korea-a Korea that had now overcome Japanese domination. But while the women were to stand forward as symbols of Korea’s triumph over metaphorical enslavement, they were largely swallowed up by an archetypal, faceless “comfort woman victim” in the public cultural imaginary. Yet in the face of the selective interests and forces of the public cultural imagination, and directly into the media spotlights of South Korean public culture itself, all three of these women continued to use song as a means of expressing the particularity of their experiences publicly.

Hearts of Pine paints intimate and tenderly crafted portraits of three off-beat old women in a South Korean old age home, who made routine appearances on national television and radio. In so doing, this lecture addresses basic questions about the power of music vis-à-vis other forms of social expression, illuminates the history of Korean music in the twentieth century, and tells a new history of the “comfort women” system and postwar South Korean public culture.

Joshua D. Pilzer is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the anthropology of music in modern Korea and Japan, women’s musical worlds, and the relationships between music, survival, memory, traumatic experience, marginalization, public culture, mass media, social practice and identity. He is particularly interested in the analysis of everyday musical practice as a life resource. His introduces his 2012 book in this presentation. Since 2011, he has been doing fieldwork for his second book, an ethnography of song and speech among Korean survivors of the atomic bombing of Japan. He has published articles in Ethnomusicology, Dongyang Umak Yeonggu, and ,The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).