The Nipponophone Company and Record Consumption in Colonial Korea

Abstract

This paper is a history of the Korean record industry in the 1910s and 20s, focusing on the record company Nihon Chikuonki Shōkai (Nitchiku hereafter). As the first record company in the Japanese empire and the only one which operated a Korean branch until the middle of the 1920s, Nitchiku provides a gateway for understanding the formative period of the Korean record industry. In this paper, I pay special attention to the fact that Nitchiku was a foreign-funded and foreignmanaged company and explore how it was able to take root in its markets by studying the company’s localization strategies, which I call “image politics.” I challenge the common perception that Nitchiku was an independent company and thereby demonstrate that it had special connections with major record companies in Europe and the U.S. even before its transition to Nippon Columbia. I also argue that consumers targeted by Nitchiku in the Korean market were not limited to Koreans, but also included multicultural groups residing in colonial Korea, especially Japanese. Such a business approach helped expose Korean record consumers to the global sound culture of the era, mediated through records. In doing so, I hope to illuminate how colonial Korea was intricately interconnected and interdependent with Japan in the circumstances engendered by Japanese imperialism as well as the capitalism of the era.

Keywords

• Nipponophone Company
• foreign-funded and foreign-managed company
• image politics
• early 20th century