Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song (original) (raw)
Related papers
Recreating traditional music in postwar Japan: a prehistory of enka
Japan Forum, 2014
This article examines how enka evolved from the earlier genre of kayo ̄kyoku, looking at the musical markers of Japaneseness and considering issues of authenticity and originality in those earlier genres. The careers of composers Koga Masao and Hattori Ryo ̄ichi and singers Misora Hibari and Kasagi Shizuko show the development of a hybrid style of popular song both before and after the Pacific War, which would by the 1960s evolve into enka. As its core audience has aged, enka has become increasingly rigid and concerned with nostalgia for a ‘pure’ Japanese past, even though the music itself is quite distant from traditional musical forms. Analysis of three movie musicals from the late 1940s and early 1950s, Ginza kankan girl, Carmen comes home and Janken girls, also demonstrates the performance practices of popular music at the time, and the complex relationship between popular music and national identity.
PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR USE IN ANY WAY WITHOUT AUTHOR'S PERMISSION Popular music is no longer the sole domain of the younger generations. Instead, as Bennett (2012) shows, it matters greatly to older people, as a cultural resource through which to negotiate personal and collective identities as they age. With its predominantly older producers, performers and consumers, the realm of the popular music genre of enka within Japan’s rapidly aging society presents a highly relevant field for studies of musical meaning for older people. Existing academic and popular discourse on enka has focused on understanding the genre in terms of Japanese tradition and culture. But how should we interpret this nationalistic musical discourse in relation to the ageing practices and discourse of enka’s producers and consumers? What does this manner of musical engagement mean to them? I investigate these questions via a multi-sited ethnography of the musical engagements of older Japanese. Firstly, I will conduct participant-observation and interviews of older enka consumers regularly singing together at karaoke bars and cafes, as well as members of fan clubs. I will then apply the same approach in analysing the recording and promotional activities of recording companies and artist management agencies. Paying attention to the material, social, discursive and affective environments of these sites (or genba) of enka production, mediation and consumption, I will examine how the older identities and lived experiences of producers, performers and consumers inform these interactive modes of musical engagement, in a way that creates a musical imagery of enka that references a rhetoric of national tradition.
Home, Militarism and Nostalgia in Japanese Popular Song from 1937 to 1945
Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies
The article focuses on the representation of wartime Japan as a home (and home country) by analysing contemporary popular songs. Within this frame I show examples of how the Japanese state managed to influence the Japanese people through propaganda songs in order to gain the people’s moral support for the war effort. My essay aims further at drawing a picture of Japan’s musical world from the latter half of the 1930s to the end of World War II, as a detailed consideration of popular music and its surroundings always allows us to interpret much more than expected at first view. In addition, I consider the mass media as a supporter of Japan’s ideological aims. The history of radio and record companies is firmly interwoven with the efforts of the Japanese state to manipulate people during the war years. The contribution from artists must also be considered an important part of this mosaic.
Beyond Nostalgia and the Prison of English: Positioning Japan in a Global History of Emotions
Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, 2021
This article interrogates the history of emotions at a pivotal moment in its growth as a discipline. It does so by bringing into conversation the ways in which scholars in Japan have approached ›nostalgia‹ (and emotions more broadly) as an object of study with concepts, theories, and methods prioritised by a predominantly Eurocentric field. It argues that Anglocentric notions of nostalgia as conceptual frameworks often neglect the particularisms that underlie the way that the Japanese language communicates and operationalizes cultural norms and codes of feeling. It also examines the aisthetic work of musicologist Tsugami Eisuke to help understand historical and psychological distinctions between ›nostalgia‹ and Japanese ideas of temporal ›longing‹, working towards a global history of emotions that meaningfully embraces multilateral and multi-lingual interaction. This article thus argues for a more nuanced way of discussing nostalgia cross-culturally, transcending dominant approaches in the field which are often grounded in a specifically Euro-Western experience but claim universal reach.
To date, most female portrayals and performances in the Japanese popular music genre of enka have been understood in terms of the homogenous ideal of the subservient, outdated image of “the traditional Japanese woman.” Yet, two of enka’s most important female singers, the “queen of enka” Misora Hibari and “the girl destined to carry enka’s star” Fuji Keiko, possess starkly contrasting images in the public imagi- nation—something that tends to question the adequacy of homogenous understandings of enka’s femininity, based allegedly on Japanese tradition. In this paper, I examine the careers of Hibari and Fuji with a focus on the conditions of musical production and promotion, utilizing biographical accounts and critiques of these two singers. Through this analysis, I argue that dominant representations of female “subservience,” “outdatedness” and of the “Japanese-ness” in enka emerged out of contingent decisions that particular musical producers and singers made within the context of the Japanese music industry in the 1960s and 1970s. The argument offers a more recent historical origin for the stereotypical femininity of enka, highlighting the dialectical relationship between individual-level musical praxis and certain Japanese social discourses in those decades. These complex forces condemned Fuji in her late career to obscurity, while ultimately securing Hibari’s status as a national symbol of perseverance.
2015
To date, most female portrayals and performances in the Japanese popular music genre of enka have been understood in terms of the homogenous ideal of the subservient, outdated image of “the traditional Japanese woman.” Yet, two of enka’s most important female singers, the queen of enka” Misora Hibari and “the girl destined to carry enka’s star” Fuji Keiko, possess starkly contrasting images in the public imagination — something that tends to question the adequacy of homogenous understandings of enka’s femininity, based allegedly on Japanese tradition. In this paper, I examine the careers of Hibari and Fuji with a focus on the conditions of musical production and promotion, utilizing biographical accounts and critiques of these two singers. Through this analysis, I argue that dominant representations of female “subservience”, “outdatedness” and of the “Japanese-ness” in enka emerged out of contingent decisions that particular musical producers and singers made within the context of the Japanese music industry in the 1960s and 1970s. The argument offers a more recent historical origin for the stereotypical femininity of enka, highlighting the dialectical relationship between individual-level musical praxis and certain Japanese social discourses in those decades. These complex forces condemned Fuji in her late career to obscurity, while ultimately securing Hibari’s status as a national symbol of perseverance.
Tradition in Question: Exploring Heritage and Exoticism in Japanese Sound Culture
"A mirror is being broken and in each shattered piece different faces are reflected. No longer can you view your image in a single mirror. And a shattered mirror cannot be resembled." 1 It is difficult to talk about contemporary cultures, their traditions and heritage while living in the age of post-globalization. Every culture has in one way or the other adopted different aspects of other cultures, and by slightly transforming them, made them part of their own heritage. Each culture used to have their unique individual face which could be seen as a mirror, but by adopting different aspects of other civilizations they broke that mirror which now reflects different adaptations, so we cannot see the original face of that culture anymore. Japan is one of the best examples for such a phenomenon, since this country already has ages worth of history of adopting cultural elements from other Asian countries and the west, transforming foreign ideas and making them part of their own unique heritage. At the same time, because of their unique philosophy of life and approach to culture, Japan fell under the scope of the western exoticism and orientalism. Orientalism could be described as a western intention to dominate over Asian cultures. Exoticism is a false representation of foreign culture, the creation of stereotypes and seeing a different civilization as the other. These two aspects encourage the popularity of Japanese culture and simultaneously the misrepresentation of their values result in misconceptions and myths created over the years.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz / ISBN 978-3-447-11642-8, 2021
Table of contents and extended English-language summary of my PhD thesis. The dissertation presents a diachronic perspective on intermedial convergence and interplay between literature and popular music in modern Japan. It strives to illuminate the multi-faceted ways in which pop music has influenced the shape of post-war Japanese literature, both as an ensemble of texts and as a cultural institution. Rather than assuming a unidirectional pattern of intermedial reception and focusing only on literary texts in the narrow sense, the resulting genealogical narrative examines a variety of textual and audio-visual artefacts at the crossroads between literature and pop music: novels and short stories, journalistic texts, poems, song lyrics, films, and material objects, such as physical media. I show that literature has been shaped by music, but also how it has influenced pop music and its associated media in turn. Examined authors include Ishihara Shintarō 石原慎太郎, Itsuki Hiroyuki 五木寛之, Matsumoto Takashi 松本隆, and Machida Kō 町田康.