Arirang

The story

"Arirang" is a Korean folk song that exists in about 3,600 variations of 60 different versions, all sharing a refrain built on the word "arirang", which has no precise meaning in Korean. It is thought to be more than 600 years old. The usual view, held by Professor Keith Howard and by the Academy of Korean Studies, is that it began as a folk song of the mountains of Jeongseon in Gangwon Province; its first mention is in a manuscript of 1756, and some people of Jeongseon trace it back to the Goryeo era. A local legend ties it to two lovers who met while picking camellia blossoms near the water of Auraji: in one telling the young man could not cross the high water and the two sang of their sorrow, in another he drowned trying. Scholars have offered many explanations of the name, among them "my beloved one" (Shin Yong-ha), "long hill" (Yang Ju-dong) and a link with Lady Aryeong, wife of the first king of Silla.

One account holds that the song spread to Seoul and the rest of Korea when workers from Gangwon were sent to rebuild Gyeongbok Palace under the Prince Regent Heungseon; some trace the words of its refrain to the cries of their families as the officials took them away. The scholar Hwang Hyeon's record, the Maecheonyarok, suggests the song was widespread by then. The first known recording was made in 1896 by the American ethnologist Alice C. Fletcher, who recorded three Korean singers at her home in Washington, D.C.; who they were (students at Howard University from noble families, or Korean workers) is uncertain. The recording is in the Library of Congress.

Under Japanese rule, singing patriotic songs, Korea's national anthem among them, became a crime, and "Arirang" became an unofficial anthem of resistance. Protesters sang it during the March First Movement of 1919, and mountain guerrillas fighting the occupiers sang it too. Many versions written in these years speak of injustice, the hardship of labourers and guerrilla war, and several were banned in the 1930s for "disturbance of public order". The best-known words first appeared in Na Woon-gyu's silent film Arirang (1926), now lost, which by various accounts told of a Korean student driven mad by imprisonment and torture under the Japanese; it is considered the first Korean nationalist film. Its theme, "Bonjo Arirang" (Standard Arirang) from Seoul, became the most famous version, beside "Jeongseon Arirang", generally held to be the original, "Jindo Arirang" from South Jeolla and "Miryang Arirang" from South Gyeongsang.

Korean emigrants took the song to Japan from the 1910s, and between 1931 and 1943 more than 50 Japanese versions were released, in pop, jazz and mambo. The Okinawan version keeps more of its folk character. Yonaha Hirotoshi, who as a boy had heard it sung by Korean women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army ("comfort women"), built an Arirang monument in Miyakojima in 2008.

After the division of Korea the song is sung in both North and South and serves as a symbol of the unity of the two states. At the opening of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, athletes of both Koreas entered together under the Korean Unification Flag to "Arirang". The U.S. Army's 7th Infantry Division, stationed in South Korea from 1950 to 1971, took it as its march in May 1956 with the permission of President Syngman Rhee. China added it to its national list of intangible cultural heritage in 2011, and in 2023 the ethnic Korean singer Cui Liling published a variation on Heaven Lake for the 70th anniversary of Yanbian's Korean autonomous region. South Korea (2012) and North Korea (2014) each had it inscribed on UNESCO's list of the intangible cultural heritage, and in 2015 South Korea's Cultural Heritage Administration listed it as an important intangible cultural asset.

What it says

The words vary from version to version, but most dwell on sorrow, separation, reunion and love, often with someone crossing a mountain pass called Arirang and leaving a loved one behind. Under Japanese rule new verses turned the same refrain to injustice, the labourers' hardship and the guerrillas' fight.

The words