Radio for the Sake of Drama and Culture

I was halfway through Kang Kyong-ae’s novel From Wonso Pond when I watched Radio Dayz. The primary radio show the movie appears to revolve around is about the fictional love triangle between Myeong-wol the gisaeng, the male lead, and Marie the jazz singer. This love triangle reminds me a lot of the love triangle in From Wonso Pond which also involves one man and two women. Even the economic statuses can be a similarity for the women in the novel and film: Sonbi identifies herself as a country girl while Okchom sees herself as a city girl, and Marie expressed her disapproval of Myeong-wol because she was from the country. But we can be thankful that at least Sonbi does not cling onto the man like a desperate housewife.

I appreciate how my classmates are still pointing out the clash between the Japanese and Koreans in yet another film set in the colonial period. But I don’t want to get into that subject now because I felt as though that was a minor plot of the story, though it is nevertheless important. Rather, what the film really got me absorbed into was the on-air story the radio host was putting all his time and energy into. The story never went as the host wanted it to because each time an episode was aired, the voice actors and supporting cast changed the direction of the story so the script needed to be constantly modified to provide a solution to each sudden cliff-hanger. That feeling you get when you’re at a cliff-hanger and you expect the actors to sit down around a round table and discuss in the movie was the same feeling I got when I was at the end of another chapter of From Wonso Pond. If we look at the radio industry of colonial Korea in terms of its entertainment quality and how it was distributed, I don’t see how you could say that its motive was to resist imperial assimilation. Not in the slightest. As Michael Robinson said in the introductory section of his chapter on broadcasting in colonial Korea (Chapter 2), Korean-language broadcasting constructed culture, and any hint of resistance to assimilation was unintentional. The creation of Korean art forms through media could have caused stronger nationalistic sentiments which aroused movements against imperialism but, to reiterate, that was not the purpose of such a creation.