Hearts of pine : songs in the lives of three Korean survivors of the Japanese "comfort women" / Joshua D. Pilzer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pilzer, Joshua D.

Contributor:

Oxford Scholarship Online.

Rosengarten Family Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Songs, Korean--History and criticism.

Songs, Korean.

Women singers--Korea.

Women singers.

Music--Social aspects--Korea.

Music.

Comfort women--Japan--History.

Comfort women.

Comfort women--Korea--History.

History.

Music--Social aspects.

Korea.

Japan.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

polychrome

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, [2012]

System Details:

text file

Summary:

In the wake of the wartime experience of sexual slavery for the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War (1930-45), Korean survivors lived under great pressure not to speak about what had happened to them. These sexual slaves were known as 'comfort women, ' and this book brings us into the lives of three of them. Many of these women reckoned with their experiences and forged senses of self within the opacity of song, which allowed them to express themselves precisely without explicitly divulging their pasts. In the process, they created identities and social worlds from available cultural materials. As they sang, each woman became a certain kind of collector, composer, and performer. In the 1990s a movement arose in South Korea to seek redress from the Japanese government and to tend to the survivors in their old age. Suddenly the women found themselves pulled from the margins of society and thrust into the very center of the public cultural spotlight. But the women continued to sing. They sang songs that told the unwritten histories of their lives, that displayed the identities that they had carved out of a lifetime of struggle and hardship, and that helped them forge and maintain relationships with others. And they sang - often in the most public places - about things that remained unspoken. This book, based on eight years of intermittent fieldwork with survivors in South Korea, is an exercise in listening to three women and their songs across the twentieth century and in their present-day lives.

Contents:

Beginnings

Pak Duri

Mun Pilgi

Bae Chunhui.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Rosengarten Family Fund.

Other Format:

Print version: Pilzer, Joshua D. Hearts of pine.

ISBN:

9780199877249

0199877246

OCLC:

773920902

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.