Read A History of Korea Online
Authors: Professor Kyung Moon Hwang
Tags: #Education & Reference, #History, #Ancient, #Early Civilization, #Asia, #Korea, #World, #Civilization & Culture
A History of Korea (89 page)
A final author who embodied this charged world of 1970s literature was Pak Ky
ngni, a towering figure who combined Pak Wans’s prioritization of the female voice with Hwang Sgyng’s attention to the Korean underclass within Cho Chngnae’s sweeping historical flow. Though she was already well established, it was through the serialized unveiling of her masterpiece,
Land
(T’oji), in the 1970s that Pak Kyngni—coincidentally, Kim Chiha’s mother-in-law—came to be perhaps the nation’s representative literary voice. An epic at once sprawling and intimate,
Land
traces a family over several generations as its members, and the community around them, adjust to dramatic developments on the south coast of the peninsula from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. In using this family’s story as an allegory for the turbulent experience of modern Korea itself, Pak calls attention to the mighty accumulation of quotidian changes through a focus on the lives and perspectives of the main female characters. While not set in the author’s contemporary times,
Land
epitomized the scratchy realm of literary production in the 1970s, when almost everything, whether intended or not, alluded to the ominous restlessness of the times.
MASS CULTURE UNDER THE YUSIN
During the darkest periods of the Yusin experience, beginning around 1974, free expression became suppressed to an extent that would be unfathomable to younger South Koreans today, and in fact was not far removed from the conditions up in North Korea. Indeed the Emergency Measures issued by the Park regime criminalized all manner of actions, and by the time Emergency Measure Number 9 came around in the spring of 1975, the government proclaimed a power to arrest people summarily for any expression or behavior deemed anti-state. The atmosphere of intimidation also stemmed from the regime’s mobilization measures to prevent any potential outbursts of anti-government sentiment in broadcasting, films, music, and publishing. But these areas also reflected the expanding connections of social life and access to information through the dissemination of technological advances. Television viewing, for example, became widespread, and while government censorship kept programming fairly tame, television’s capacity to act as a mirror of society kept it a potentially subversive element.
The start of South Korea’s television age
In 1969 just over 200,000 television sets were in operation in South Korea. Ten years later, the number was almost 6 million, meaning that in the 1970s the number of televisions in use increased nearly thirty-fold, from penetrating 6 percent of households to nearly four in five. Amidst the political strife, the Yusin period opened the age of television in South Korea and witnessed the emergence of familiar patterns of television broadcasting and viewing that remain today. In this decade, for example, the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) went from being a government broadcaster to a public television corporation much like the British Broadcasting Corporation, and another company,
MBC, founded in 1969, became a private national network and competitive alternative to KBS.
In terms of programming, however, broadcasters faced definite limits from the Yusin censors. Furthermore, in this age of black and white TV (color would come in the 1980s), the government restricted not only television’s content but also its style, issuing a decree in the mid-1970s, for example, prohibiting the appearance of male personalities with long hair. Programming was mostly limited to censored news, soap operas, variety shows, educational programs, sports, and foreign, especially American, shows. Even the amount of broadcasting itself was curtailed, shutting down in the afternoon and late-night. (Indeed twenty-four-hour programming was only introduced in the new millennium.) Still, television had a major impact in the 1970s, especially with soap operas that hooked large audiences and became a cultural phenomenon. These programs came under heavy fire from social critics for their alleged portrayal of frivolous, decadent, and immoral lifestyles, but clearly, at a certain level, these shows provided a much-need escape from the atmosphere of political tension.
Not everything, though, could be so tightly controlled as to prevent any injection of untidy politics. A shocking example of this came on August 15, 1974. As often was the case for the national holiday celebrating liberation from Japanese colonial rule (August 15, 1945), the anniversary was to be marked by a major occasion, this time the formal opening of the first subway line in Seoul. The day started, as usual, with a public address by the president to an assembled audience in a public hall, carried live on television. Very few people could have foreseen what happened next: as Park Chung Hee was delivering his speech, a man came running down the aisle firing a gun in the direction of the stage. The assassin, ostensibly aiming for Park, missed him and instead hit the first lady, Yuk Yngsu. After she was carried away to the hospital (where she died) and the commotion died down a bit, an equally remarkable thing happened: Park continued with his speech! Perhaps nothing better captured Park and the spookiness of Yusin—as anyone with a television could see.
The government crackdown also aroused dissent in mass culture that otherwise might not have formed. One example of this came in popular music, which had earlier become a ubiquitous entertainment medium and powerful cultural element. In the 1970s, the Koreans’ innate affinity for socialization through music turned some popular songs into expressions of anti-government sentiment. The ballad “Morning Dew,” released in 1971 by the singer Yang Hee-Un, for example, resonated with its lyrical tribute to inner strength and determination in the face of hardship. Young people caught in the constraints of the dictatorship found in this message a stirring call to resistance, and when the Yusin regime caught onto this possibility and banned the work, “Morning Dew” only grew in popularity and eventually became the anthemic “movement song” for a generation. The ballad’s composer, folk singer Kim Min-ki, became a champion of the anti-Yusin artists’ movement and continued to churn out protest music.
The realm of publishing also grew into a potent voice of opposition in the 1970s. In addition to
Sasanggye
, the magazine that published “Five Bandits,” other intellectual journals, political organs, and newspapers served as forums for provocative analysis and criticism of Yusin society. Among literary journals with an activist bent, most notable was perhaps
Creation and Criticism
(
Ch’angjak kwa pip’yng
), a publication begun by academic Paik Nak-chung with modest aims in the 1960s but which, by the 1970s, had become an indispensable player in the social discourse. While continuing to remain wary of censors,
Creation and Criticism
published seminal works of literature, literary scholarship, and social commentary, and hence became an arbiter of not only great literature but also of political debate. Finally, the maturation of the “Hangul generation”—the first South Koreans raised in the postcolonial practice of disseminating information printed primarily in the Korean alphabet, or
Hangul
—also contributed greatly to the growth of publication activity.
