Journey to the northeast: producing Chinese folk performances with the Japanese media industry amid empire expansion

Abstract This paper investigates the intersection of the Japanese gramophone industry and Chinese folk storytelling performances during the Second Sino-Japanese War, centering on a 1941 recording project conducted in Japanese-occupied Chōsen. While the project aimed to promote East Asian cultural synthesis in line with Japan’s expansionist agenda, it also captured marginalized local subgenres that had been overlooked even by Chinese companies. The article explores the political motivations behind the project, shaped by the shifting propaganda objectives of the Japanese colonial authorities and their complex interactions with private gramophone companies, Chinese performers, and local audiences. Moving beyond the conventional colonial narrative focused on Japan’s formal colonies, it instead examines Japan’s engagement with the would-be colonized Huabei Plain through a bottom-up lens. The paper argues that cultural production under Japanese imperial expansion was marked by contingency and disorganization, especially in regions not yet formally colonized. Ultimately, this reveals the fractures within Japan’s colonial vision – a result chaotically shaped by the inconsistencies of imperial cultural policy, the disadvantaged position of private gramophone companies under wartime constraints, the ambiguous collaboration of Chinese performers, and the resilience of local cultural connoisseurship.