紀要論文

紀要論文

text

阪大音楽学報. 2020, 16・17, p. 85-143

日本語

text

2020-09-30

This essay is based on content analysis of shōka song textbooks that were published by the South Manchuria Association for Education (1924-1937) for Japanese schools in Northeast China, former region of Manchuria, as well as on questionnaires and interviews conducted by the present author with former Japanese school children in Manchuria. These textbooks were published for Japanese children in South Manchuria, the former Kwantung Leased Territory in southern Liao-dong and South Manchuria Railway Zone. This essay’s aim is to illuminate cultural discourses surrounding these shōka song textbooks at the time when, following the aftermath of World War I, the idea of “world peace” was sought politically by the League of Nations. Thus by going beyond criticism of colonial hegemony, this essay reveals the perspectives of the shōka song textbook editors and learners who lived in the Kwantung Leased Territory during 1920-1945. Manchuria’s song textbooks, “Manshu Shoka-shu” (満洲唱歌集), were published after a joint editorial work undertaken by the two governmental departments: the Japanese language department (国語科) and the shōka department (唱歌科). Shōka song education in Manchuria was, first and foremost, a child-centered education. The song lyrics of the “Manshu Shoka” sang about the cultures and lives of Japanese people in Manchuria, while the song melodies were composed in accordance with the linguistic articulacy of spoken Japanese. The chief editors of the song textbooks were education specialists known as the Kyoikujissaika (教育実際家), who contributed to creating the state-of-the-art Arts Education system of this time. Each Japanese communy of Manchuria followed the Japanese public policy, which had carried the slogans of social equality and benevolence. Against this historical background, the “Manshu Shoka” songs depicted the lives of such Japanese communities, and a sense of intimacy shared between Japanese people in Manchuria at this time. In other words, “Manshu Shoka” songs played the key role in illuminating such sense of social and cultural connectedness that had exited in such Japanese communities. The songs are, thus, important historical records, which embody the memories held by-and which reveal the lives of-the Japanese settlers in pre-World War II Manchuria. In the present day, these songs continue to reveal the tremendous destructions of war that followed, and what Japan’s defeat of World War II had come to mean for the lives of such ordinary Japanese people. Having said that, however, the “Manshu Shoka” songs were the products of the political climate and education ideology of prewar Japan: there is an explicit contradiction between the ethos of “ethnic cooperation” as had been put forward by the textbook editors, and the inherent intention of the Japanese authorities to take control over Japanese societies in Manchuria. On the other hand, the Manchurian textbook industry at this time, made use of the “new education” system that had come to be attenuated in mainland Japan. From the perspectives of educating a child’s sensitivity, the newly composed “Manshu Shoka” songs for children were categorised as part of the colonial education, precisely because their “home”, about which they sang, pointed to none other than Manchuria. These contradictions relate to the divided discourses surrounding the “Manshu Shoka” songs. In other words, the “Manshu Shoka” songs reveal the historical dynamics in which, on one hand, function as the key records of Japanese people’s everyday lives in Manchuria, while on the other, the songs’ political purpose to occupy Manchurian societies, through attempting to plant in children’s minds the disturbing ideas of racial hierarchies.

10.18910/98479

98479

教科書からみた満洲の唱歌教育 : 「外地」における新教育の理想と現実

平尾, 佳子

大阪大学文学部・大学院文学研究科音楽学研究室

日本語

2020-09-30

阪大音楽学報

16・17

85

143

https://hdl.handle.net/11094/98479

10.18910/98479

https://doi.org/10.18910/98479