ABSTRACT
This study illuminates not only Imperial Japan’s strategic orchestration of language education in colonized Korea (1910–1945) but also the long-lasting psychological impacts of such an imperialization policy on the colonized. To that end, this study analyzes two cultural representations of the process through which the Japanese language came to be established as ‘the national language’ (kokugo) in colonized Korea: (1) My Precious Granddaughter (1942), a bilingual ‘paper theater’ (kamishibai) in Korean and Japanese, which is a form of propaganda entertainment collaboratively produced by the Tokyo-based National Association for Educational Paper Theater and the Government-General of Korea; and (2) ‘The Song of Clementine’ (1979), an autobiographical account in Japanese by Kim Sijong (b. 1929), a renowned Korean poet who has been residing in Japan for over 70 years since 1949. These two cultural representations together constitute a two-sided mirror of the same historical occurrence, while revealing the potency of mind engineering methods utilized to persuade and transform the colonized subjects in Korea into imperial subjects whose loyalties lie with the Japanese emperor. More specifically, this study focuses on the figure of a child (approximately a first or second grader)—a fictive character in My Precious Granddaughter and a younger self recalled in ‘The Song of Clementine’—as a fertile site of mind engineering. By delineating the similarities and the differences in the way each child figure responds to the pressure (both physical and psychological) and the rewards of linguistic assimilation, not to mention the differing consequences of being assimilated, this comparative analysis elucidates the potency of mind engineering tactics via Japanese language lessons through an in-depth analysis of the narratological structure and its logic, together with a rhetorical investigation of the affective language employed therein.
