Efficient Japanese Propaganda or Maybe Not?

Radio, as part of modernization, started a new type of entertainment promoting modern music, and western adaptations of radio dramas (overall, a new popular culture). As Michael Robinson mentions, this was often seen as vulgar or offensive to conservatory people because it did not fit the traditional Korean culture. They thought this was actually a degradation of their morals, and in order to avoid this, more scholarly programs should be broadcasted. However, this was not entirely possible, especially during the early period when there was only one radio station in Korea (mostly dominated by programs in Japanese). 

Another issue that appeared with the introduction of radio in Korea, was the Japanese control for promoting Imperial ideas. M. Robinson starts his article my mentioning that the “Japanese officials recognized immediately the potential of broadcasting to further the language goals of spreading Japanese-language use and Japanese culture values”. However, I don’t completely agree with this. From the author’s description of how the radio developed in Korea, we can see that all the Japanese officials tried to do was to censor and control what was broadcasted to the Koreans. They tried to take as much Korean content as possible and replace it with something Japanese. In my opinion this rather shows that the Japanese noticed the potential of the radio in spreading Korean culture (and probably nationalistic ideas) so they tried to stop that by replacing a great deal of it with Japanese shows. If the Japanese really wanted to spread Japanese culture they should have tried to increase the number of Korean listeners and after that to make Japanese values appealing to the Koreans. This could have been achieved in various. For example the movie Radio Dayz shows one way: make a show which Koreans would enjoy and introduce some subliminal messages (of course this didn’t work out as planned in the movie, but in real life it could have been done). 

Another point that makes me believe that Robinson’s idea is not correct is the statistics he presents. The number of Koreans that were initially listening to the radio was around 13%-15%, and assuming that those numbers were taken at that time (to be accurate), than the Japanese must have been aware of this as well. Moreover, if you want to send a propaganda message you must make sure that the message reaches the target audience. Therefore, since the Japanese officials were fine with the low number of Korean listeners, I must only guess that their purpose was to deny to the Koreans the possibility of using the radio to send nationalistic messages. 

Moreover, if their true intention was to send a propaganda message to the Koreans they should have made radio more available (and affordable); maybe they could sponsor it and make sure that the average Korean has access to it. Since they chose a noncommercial radio, and since they didn’t try to help the station when it had financial problems I can only assume that they were not aware of the potential power that radio can have in spreading Japanese culture among the Koreans. The number of Korean listeners started to increase only after they released a second station with more Korean programs and this time not because the Japanese wanted more Korean listeners to listen to their message, but because the first station needed more listeners in order to avoid bankruptcy. 

Overall, the author says that the Japanese used the radio well in manipulating the masses, but I think this is not true, or at least not during the first or second decade of radio use.