Abstract
In the worst of times, the best of tunes. Or so might say singer Kim Hae-song (1910–195?), whose 1938 hit recording “Flowery Seoul” (“Kkot sŏul”) arguably offered more than a mere tongue-in-cheek retort to Fujiyama Ichirō’s (1911–1993) own 1936 “Tokyo Rhapsody” (“Tōkyō rapusodi”) by crooning in the Korean language over Koga Masao's (1904–1978) original composition. While both vocalists posture competitively with regard to the modern merits of their respective metropolises, the dark timbre of geopolitics dampens the otherwise playful interaction between these two popular songs, one by an imperial Japanese citizen, the other a colonial Korean subject. This article traces interwar popular music's regional, linguistic, and affective transposability to consider how the exceptional textual and melodic identity between Kim's and Fujiyama's respective city songs belies a more fundamental interpellation of Korean subjects into the transregional logic of Japanese Empire.
