Singer-songwriter Tomoe Sawa was the first person officially allowed to sing a song in Japanese in South Korea after the end of World War II. In November 1998, a historic concert took place at a theater in Gwangju, southwestern South Korea, after the Kim Dae-jung administration began lifting a ban on Japanese pop culture in place since 1945.
At the concert, Sawa sang the words "Watashi no kokoro wa kosui desu. Dozo koide oidenasai" ("My heart is a lake. Please come and row the boat out").
"As I started singing slowly, the sound of Japanese words echoed throughout the hall like ripples on the surface of a lake," Sawa says. She sang an original song titled "Kokoro" (which translates as "Heart"), for which she had put music to a Korean poem translated by her grandfather and scholar, Kim So-ung, who translated Korean poetry into Japanese with the aim of delivering the spirit of deculturated people under Japanese colonial rule. After some 60 years, Sawa found the poem in one of Kim's books.
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