The 1930s Japanese Colonial Studies of Korean Musok

Record summary

Japanese colonial scholars and Korean intellectuals produced surveys of musok, the broad Korean shamanic and ritual complex, during the 1930s and early 1940s. These works recorded mudang, kut ceremonies, household spirits, illness narratives, and exorcistic procedures, while often framing them as survivals, superstition, or obstacles to modernization. The corpus matters because it preserves named ritual categories and regional observations for comparison with demonological accounts. Its evidentiary value is uneven: some texts are descriptive, others ideological, and many were mediated through interpreters or administrative agendas.