Arirang for national anthem
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By Nam Sang-so
Retired Lt. Gen. Edward L. Rowny, now 93 years old and almost blind, served as an assistant to Gen. Douglas MacArthur on the Incheon Landing in 1950. Rowny, also a former chief U.S. negotiator in arms reduction, rolled out of Incheon International Airport in his wheelchair on June 23, blowing the Arirang song on his old harmonica.
Arirang, Arirang, Arariyo
Walking over the Arirang Hill
But if you leave me behind
You’ll have sore feet, my dear
Even before you reach a mile
The lyrics are the first verse of a Korean folk song perhaps most widely sung on the Korean Peninsula. The song has been registered on the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity program by UNESCO.
Many South Koreans sing their national anthem, the patriotic song, only slightly moving their lips up and down but when they hear Arirang music, everyone sings stirringly from their heart, for no particular reason. We actually don’t know what "Arirang” really means but when Korean people began to sing the sad tune they express their sorrow and grief.
While a ceremony was being held in 1926 for the completion of a new government building for the Japanese Governor-General of Korea Occupation, a small movie house in Seoul was showing a silent-movie ``Arirang” produced by Na Un-kyu. The protagonist in the film bombed a newly-built Japanese railroad bridge in Korea. The hero was then caught and tortured by the Japanese police.
Just before the end of the movie when the Korean hero who was tied with a rope and dragged torturously over the Arirang Hill, a nursery rhyme singer Lee Jeong-suk sang Arirang standing by the screen. Greatly moved, the audience stood up and sang the song in unison, some sobbing and others shedding tears. When the chorus and movie ended, the movie house went wild with excitement and they remained there for a while.
Then the silent-movie was screened across the Korean Peninsula and the song became soothing music for the Koreans, then under colonial rule and who had failed in the March 1, 1919 Independence Movement.
Similarly, there is another movie that features Arirang, with some Korean ``han” or bitterness, but filled with joy, titled “Seopyeonje.” It’s a pansori musical drama film that was directed by Im Kwon-taek in 1993. Pansori is a genre of Korean traditional vocal and percussion music performed by a singer and a drummer. The film was critically acclaimed, both in Korea and abroad.
The scenes of the last five minutes are set in the middle of a sloping field. They are warm, emotional and so beautiful that audiences didn’t leave the movie house after the theater house lights were turned on. It is known that the film is one of the masterpieces in the history of Korean cinema; a team of pansori vocalists consisting of an elderly singer wearing white traditional Korean clothes, his daughter who also wore a white short jacket, and knee length black skirt holding a travel bag in one hand, and his son beating his small drum, rhythmically danced around singing Jindo Arirang so merrily that they forgot their past suffering in learning Arirang and achieved greatness in the singing of pansori music.
Now, South and North Koreans are attempting again to resume talks in Seoul. If the northerners came, after treating them with haute cuisine, the Seoul side should invite them to a movie house and screen Seopyeonje. The loud speakers facing the North and the South in the DMZ might change their propaganda broadcast to playing Arirang songs; Jindo Arirang, Jeongseon Arirang, or Miryang Arirang.
Why not? The song is loved and sung by all Koreans on both sides of the barbed wire fences and the music will surely become the national anthem of a unified Korea.
The writer is a Japanese-English-Korean translator. His email address is sangsonam@gmail.com.