[Radio Days] Korean radio stations

The film, Radio Days, talks about the first radio station in Seoul during the colonial period.  It says in the reading that the radio was another aspect of the extensive information control system that served Japan’s propaganda and cultural assimilation programs. (52, Robinson). Radio was indeed one of the communications that helped Korea become modernized by introducing Western classical music and jazz, but it was hard for Korean radio to express Korean traditional culture under the tight central control of Japan. When Kyoungseong station in the film attempts to produce a live serial radio play, “Flames of Love,” the Japanese authority does not give them freedom to produce it but firmly instructs them what to play and what not to play. As the play becomes increasingly popular again, they again interrupt and try to completely shut the Korean radio off because they knew the potential of broadcasting. What the Japanese authority wanted was to spread Japanese cultural values through all communications. However, even under this strict censorship, Korean radio created new forms of dramatic arts, like what the team of “Flames of Love” have achieved in the film, and this served as a vehicle for standardizing the Korean vernacular. I was truly amazed to see the determination of Korean people who used a radio in subverting Japanese cultural hegemony and their ultimate goals of Japanese cultural assimilation. The last two films we have watched, “Blue Swallow” and “YMCA,” share some common traits in the sense that they showed the incompetence of Korea during the time and the Korean activists’ struggle for freedom.  There were only a few people trying to fight for independence in those films, whereas there were a great number of people who showed a sense of resistance by flaming the fire in Radio Days. The hundreds of people made their voice heard in that last moment.