Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents

Tokyo Boogie-Woogie

Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents

HIROMU NAGAHARA

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2017

Copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Cover art: © Junichi Tsuneoka, Studio Stubborn Sideburn

Cover design: Tim Jones

978-0-674-97169-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

978-0-674-97841-6 (EPUB)

978-0-674-97839-3 (MOBI)

978-0-674-97840-9 (PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Nagahara, Hiromu, author.

Title: Tokyo boogie-woogie : Japan’s pop era and its discontents / Hiromu Nagahara.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016044092

Subjects: LCSH: Popular music—Japan—History and criticism. | Popular music—Social aspects—Japan—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC ML3501 .N18 2017 | DDC 781.630952—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016044092

Contents

Introduction: The Popular Song Era

1

The Invention of Popular Song

2

The State as Critic and Consumer

3

The Long War on Popular Song

4

Boogie-Woogie Democracy

5

The End of Popular Song and of Critique

Conclusion: The Television Age and Beyond

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Introduction: The Popular Song Era

Tokyo March, Tokyo Dance, Tokyo Rhapsody, and Tokyo Boogie-Woogie—all of these are titles of songs produced by Japan’s recording industry between the late 1920s and the late 1940s. On a first hearing, these songs seemingly have little in common with each other, aside from the obvious reference to Japan’s capital city. Tokyo Dance (Tokyo ondo, 1933) sits on one end of the musical spectrum as a song in the mold of traditional dance music for the summer Bon festival, while Tokyo Boogie-Woogie (Tokyo bugiugi, 1947), as the title suggests, sits on the other end as a powerful symbol of Americanization after World War II. The other two songs, Tokyo March (Tokyo kōshinkyoku, 1929) and Tokyo Rhapsody (Tokyo rapusodī, 1936), further muddy the water by being so thoroughly syncretic, containing musical elements that could be easily identified as either Western, as in the instrumentation for both songs, or Japanese. Taken together, they not only defy attempts at drawing a simplistic narrative of a clear, linear transformation of Japanese popular music into a something more Western, they also seem to resist any categorization that would place them within a common musical culture, even though they were produced by the same industry.

It is this industry, however, that presents some of the most convincing evidence that these diverse songs about Tokyo should in fact be considered as belonging to the same musical genre. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Japan’s recording companies produced these and other songs that they simply called popular songs. Ryūkōka, the Japanese term for this genre, was a neologism that was created by combining the Chinese ideograms for ryūkō (popular, fashionable) with uta (song). Quite literally, the recording companies meant for their products to be recognized as songs that were popular, just as soon as the phonograph records rolled off of the production lines in their factories. The name of the genre did not connote any particular musical style but instead came to be a catch-all term that encompassed a diverse range of songs, including those that were produced in the style of American jazz as well as those that self-consciously incorporated native musical idioms.

At first glance, it may seem obvious to associate these popular songs with our own, present-day understandings of similar-sounding terms like pop music or popular music. After all, these terms have also come to refer to a broad range of musical cultures that have been produced around the world since the middle decades of the twentieth century. Those familiar with contemporary East Asian culture might also suspect that what is being discussed here is simply an early iteration of a musical genre known as J-Pop (short for Japan Pop), which has come to gain not only national but global popularity since its emergence in the late 1980s, along with its regional cousins like K-Pop (Korea Pop) and C-Pop (China Pop). Despite such contemporary and global resonances, however, this book looks at modern Japanese popular songs as a historically bounded phenomenon—that is, as something that really only existed in Japan in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Such specificity is due, in part, to the fact this particular historical period corresponds to the years during which the term ryūkōka was used in common Japanese parlance. While the same combination of Chinese characters was already in use earlier in the Meiji and Taishō periods, it had a different pronunciation (hayariuta) which in turn implied a subtle but important difference in meaning. In particular, hayariuta was not associated with any particular industry but simply referred to songs of whatever origin that were perceived to be in vogue at a given moment. Strikingly, ryūkōka had fallen almost completely out of use as a catch-all term that referred to contemporary hit songs by 1970, replaced as it was by another term, kayōkyoku (ballad songs).¹ As a result, ryūkōka took on an increasingly antiquated, nostalgic connotation during the subsequent decades, effectively fixing its association to songs that were produced in Japan primarily between the 1920s and the 1950s.

The historically bounded life span of ryūkōka helps to highlight the specific ways in which the contemporary listeners associated these songs with the dramatic historical forces that were seen to be transforming not just Japan’s musical culture but society as a whole. From the outset, most Japanese seemed to take it for granted that the popular songs somehow authentically represented the realities of their own society, or, as many simply called it, the times (sesō), despite—or, more often than not precisely because of—the fact that the entire genre was the invention of the recording companies through and through. This assumption was best captured by the adage that was repeated during this period: As the world goes, so go the songs; as the songs go, so goes the world (Uta wa yo ni tsure, yo wa uta ni tsure). As banal as this sentiment may be, almost no Japanese interested in popular songs seemed to be immune from it.

Between the late 1920s and 1960s, an impressive array of musicians, intellectuals, government officials and other members of Japan’s cultural elite not only debated the merits, or lack thereof, of popular songs, but also made attempts at managing and countering the broader set of societal problems that were associated with the songs. This was true from the very outset of the genre’s emergence in the late 1920s. Produced by record companies that were largely funded by Western capital and disseminated through channels such as cinema, radio, and cafés, popular songs quickly came to be recognized as the audible symbols of what contemporaries called modan (modern)—a term that gained currency in the late 1920s as an adjective to denote all that was seen to be part of Japan’s mass-oriented, speed-driven urban modernity. As such, the popular song genre was immediately associated with contemporary trends such as the perceived Americanization and eroticization of Japanese culture—trends that found critics across the political spectrum and were captured by another, more sensational, contemporary phrase, ero guro nansensu (erotic, grotesque, nonsense).² In this way, numerous songs came to be identified, with varying degrees of plausibility, with countless contemporary cultural, social, and political phenomena, be it mass consumption, wartime nationalism, occupation-era poverty, or—as is perhaps true even today—the allegedly ever-degenerating juvenile mores.

What ultimately proved to be far more revealing about the historical realities of mid-twentieth-century Japan, however, were the ways in which the debates over popular songs were carried out—that is, the language and rhetoric that were employed, the attitudes and affects exhibited by the critics in discussing music, as well as the political and intellectual alliances that were formed against the songs. In particular, both the language of popular song critique and the underlying attitudes it revealed remained remarkably consistent from the emergence of the genre in the late 1920s to the time of its ultimate demise in the 1960s. The most common accusations leveled against these songs were that they were decidedly vulgar (teizoku) and lowbrow (teikyū). Just as it was assumed that popular songs naturally reflected the times, it was also taken for granted by the Japanese elites who debated these songs that they were inherently and, for some of them, irredeemably déclassé. Nor was this assumption limited to the shrillest critics of the genre; even those who personally enjoyed some of these songs more often than not spoke of the need to elevate not only the quality of the entire genre but also the tastes of the broader, listening public as well.

The consistent and overwhelmingly elitist nature of popular song critique initially seems to run against the grain of what we have come to understand as Japan’s first mass media revolution, which took place precisely in the decades this book considers to be Japan’s Popular Song Era. Popular songs emerged simultaneously with other equally new forms of media, such as mass circulation magazines, radio, and sound film, all of which connected a vastly expanded proportion of Japan’s population to the widening web of media products as readers, listeners, and viewers. This new media-consuming public in turn came to play a key role in Japan’s ultimate transformation from what was a society deeply cognizant of the social and cultural divisions within itself during the chaotic decades preceding World War II to one whose inhabitants were beginning to believe that it was, in fact, made up of nothing but the middle class by the 1970s. In this transformation, those whom observers identified as Japan’s masses (taishū) emerged not only as the chief consumers of mass media and mass culture but also as the protagonists of the broader social change that was seemingly upending existing cultural norms and hierarchies.

The history of the popular song genre has tended to emphasize the genre’s emergence as part of this process of massification and the growth of shared lifeways among the Japanese—it is a story of the inevitable, if gradual, diffusion of common musical culture among an increasing audience.³ The story of modern Japanese popular songs is, at least in part, that of a mass consumer culture that not only survived but thrived throughout what some historians have come to identify as Japan’s transwar era.⁴ And yet, at the same time, the history of popular song critique reveals that these songs emerged not simply in the context of the rise of mass media and mass society but, more accurately, at the intersection of forces that encouraged the standardization of culture and everyday life in modern Japan and those that persistently reinscribed hierarchy and difference on the newly emerging mass society.

The ongoing contention between these two sets of forces is precisely what this book seeks to highlight as one of the most enduring and consequential dynamics that shaped twentieth-century Japanese culture. Considering modern Japan’s cultural politics in terms of the Popular Song Era not only enables us to examine it across some of the most tumultuous decades of the twentieth century, but also brings some of the most important historical dynamics that have shaped it into view. In particular, it highlights the ways in which the assumption of hierarchies, the desire for a democratized culture, and the interplay between these two competing inclinations among Japan’s elites consistently undergirded many of the most consequential sets of ideas and forces that guided the ways in which people produced, consumed, and critiqued culture throughout the century.

Such dynamics include the ongoing tension between Western aesthetic notions and conventions that had been adopted since the Meiji period and the ongoing attempt at creating authentically Japanese culture in response. They also include the process by which Japan’s empire and the long period of war that led to its destruction were deeply influential in shaping the popular culture of those periods, and, in the post-World War II period, the centrality of Japan’s relationship with America, not only as an external military presence but also, as was increasingly the case after Japan regained its independence in 1952, as something that was experienced within as the object of consumption and desire.⁵ Even as contestations over developments like Westernization, wartime mobilization, and Americanization made their influences felt across various cultural expressions, the story of the popular song genre points to the importance of the ongoing preoccupation with hierarchy among Japan’s cultural elites in the same phenomena. Many of these developments revolved around the tension between the sense, starting in the 1920s, that Japan was being transformed into mass society and an equally strong perception that the same society was still deeply divided by social and cultural hierarchies.

Establishing Music in Modern Japan

However, it would be a mistake to assume that these phenomena were simply a matter of class-based divisions or that the cultural politics surrounding this tension was limited to the Shōwa era (1926–1989). On the contrary, the history of musical culture in modern Japan is especially instructive in revealing how many of the foundations for the politics that was provoked by the emergence of popular songs in the late 1920s had in fact been laid at the outset of Japan’s experience of modernity in the late nineteenth century. In his masterful essay on the domestic origins of the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and Japan’s subsequent transformation into a modern, industrial society, the historian Thomas C. Smith points to the cultural flattening that was brought about by the Meiji Restoration: "Success in [post-Restoration Japan] had very little to do with traditional skills and tastes and much to do with double-entry bookkeeping, commercial law, English conversation, German music, French painting, and Scotch whiskey.… In respect to such things all classes of Japanese, during the first generation or two after 1868, were born cultural equals. One could not learn of these things at home any more than one could learn there a foreign language or the calculus. Such subjects were taught only in the schools, and the schools were open to everyone."⁶ As first glance, this is a striking image of cultural democratization, coming as it does at the end of an essay in which Smith emphasizes the aristocratic nature of Japan’s transformation under the Meiji state by pointing out that the dramatic overthrow of the Tokugawa regime, along with its centuries-old status system, was primarily driven by none other than the members of the ruling samurai class, who ultimately chose to abolish their own legally privileged status in order to forge a modern nation-state.

And yet Smith’s caveat regarding the chronologically limited nature of the flattening proves to be of particular importance, as various hierarchies did in fact (re)emerge in Japan’s cultural landscape precisely in the decades after the emergence of the first generation or two after 1868. The most striking example of this was the rise of a plethora of professionalized artistic and intellectual circles that came to be recognized as the elite practitioners and gatekeepers in various fields. Recognized by the common suffix -dan (dais or platform), these circles related to music (gakudan), visual arts (gadan), literature (bundan), and, even more generally, critique (rondan). Schooled in the Western canons and associated with the key cultural institutions of the post-Restoration state such as the university, members of these establishments constituted the self-appointed guardians of aesthetic and intellectual hierarchy in modern Japan.

What characteristics, then, defined the nature of the newly emerging cultural hierarchies? The case of the creation of Japan’s music establishment reveals two particularly important types of hierarchy that were already at play in the immediate wake of the Meiji Restoration. The first, and perhaps the more obvious, was the gradually accelerating drive toward adopting Western standards not only in areas such as military organization, economy, and politics, but also more broadly in the realms of culture and everyday life—a drive that would eventually be encapsulated by the term bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment), which was attributed to Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), the pioneering introducer of Western intellectual tradition to the Japanese audience. The notion that music formed a significant part of a Western-centric civilization was apparently impressed on the minds of some members of the Meiji state’s governing elite within a few years of the Restoration. A noteworthy example of this was the famous Iwakura Embassy in 1871, which took half of the leadership of the post-Restoration government along with fifty students on a multiyear, globe-circumnavigating journey through the United States and Europe. In particular, the records compiled by Kume Kunitake (1839–1931), the embassy’s official historian, contain a sustained discussion on music based on the embassy’s visit to Boston, Massachusetts, in June 1872. There Kume and others attended a multiday musical event entitled The World’s Peace Jubilee and International Music Festival, which was held in celebration of the conclusion of both the American Civil War as well as the more recent Franco-Prussian War.⁷ The event itself took place in a temporary Coliseum built for the occasion in the Back Bay district of Boston. On its first day, the event was devoted to American-themed music, including the singing of The Star-Spangled Banner by a twenty-thousand-strong choir. Each of the other days was devoted to a specific European nation, including Great Britain, Germany, France, and Austria.⁸

While Kume was apparently struck by the beauty of much of what he heard, he was far more impressed by the power that the music seemingly had on his fellow audience in inspiring their patriotism: A piece was played which was about an American, captured in the War of Independence, whose patriotism hardened and who never yielded. The American audience, upon hearing this, could not stop applauding. They clapped and stamped their feet, demanding encore after encore, and it was some time before the hall settled down.⁹ This led him to turn his attention to the broader implications of such an effect: Although the countries of the world differ in size, each is dedicated to its way of life, and if a nation achieves independence, a spirit of patriotism inevitably wells up [in their hearts]. It is rather like loving oneself and one’s home [above other places].… Therefore, the patriotic mind naturally gives rise to humane feelings and becomes a source of loyalty. When the people of Europe and America talk about civilization, it is based on patriotism. Any person who forgets himself, abandons his house, turns his back on his home village and despises his own country is not only ignorant of Confucian principles but has also failed to grasp Western civilization. Here Kume not only points to music’s efficacy in inspiring patriotic sentiment among the audience, but does so in relation to civilizational hierarchy that key members of the embassy were becoming keenly aware of as their journey progressed—a hierarchy within which, in Fukuzawa Yukichi’s formulation, the Western nations set the standards of civilization and enlightenment and Japan occupied the status of a semideveloped country (hankai).¹⁰

The sense that music was somehow necessarily part of a civilized society was apparently already shared by other members of the Meiji state, as seen in the fact that a government decree made in 1872 not only created mass compulsory education for the first time in Japanese history but also included music as part of the national curriculum. At the same time, the fact that no formal action was taken in regard to music education for another seven years, until Izawa Shūji (1851–1917), the head of Tokyo Higher Normal School, was appointed as the head of the Music Investigation Committee by the Education Ministry in 1879, also suggests that there was not an inconsiderable amount of confusion as to precisely what kind of music ought to be promoted by the state.¹¹

In fact, for others among the Meiji elite music was in itself an apparently deeply problematic phenomenon. This is especially evident in the English-language autobiography of Kikkawa Chōkichi (1860–1915), who was one of the first Japanese graduates of Harvard College. Born as the second son of the daimyo of Iwakuni domain, Kikkawa joined the Iwakura Embassy and, like many other students on the journey, he stayed in the United States to pursue further education, attending Rice Grammar School and Chauncy Hall School before graduating from Harvard in 1883. As Kikkawa recalled, he and his Japanese colleagues actively pursued their studies on a wide range of topics while in the United States, with one exception: There was also singing at the school, but I, with others of my countrymen who attend the school, obtained excuse on the ground that we had all we could do in pursuing other studies. But in reality, we had in those days the old Japanese notion that singing was vulgar. It might be said en passant that I never learnt dancing, for I had the same sort of feeling on that subject.¹²

View of the Great Coliseum built for the World’s Peace Jubilee and International Musical Festival (courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., LC-DIG-pga-02283).

Part of Kikkawa’s aversion to music may have simply stemmed from the foreignness of Western musical culture. In fact, the Western elites’ seeming penchant for dancing endlessly at stately balls drew particularly barbed reactions from the earliest Japanese visitors to the West, including from none other than Fukuzawa Yukichi, who noted that early on [in my visits], I found it exceedingly difficult to suppress my laughter at the site of men and women jumping around the room in a strange manner.¹³ In the case of dancing, many objections seemingly stemmed from the visitors’ discomfort with what they perceived to be the casual and indecorous intermingling of the sexes in West. Kikkawa’s reference to the old Japanese notion, however, hints at another cultural hierarchy that was at play in the creation of Japan’s music establishment, namely the existing elite bias against music, in general, as a form of vulgar entertainment. This was in part the product of the strong association of a variety of entertainment forms and aesthetic pursuits with specific status groups under the Tokugawa regime.¹⁴ Within this context, all forms of music, with the exception of those sponsored either by the imperial court (gagaku) or the shogunate (nohgaku), were more or less associated with commoner culture as forms of entertainment (yūgei).¹⁵ While it is important not to overstate the samurai aversion to commoner culture, it is nonetheless worth noting that such bias clearly emerged in the experience of high-ranking samurai like Kikkawa, even in contexts where he was presumably eager to learn as much as he could as an officially sponsored student abroad.

The contrasting experiences of Kume and Kikkawa point to the fact that the Meiji elites’ encounters with Western music were mediated by considerations for hierarchies both old and new. Perhaps not surprisingly, both types of hierarchy were brought to bear in the development of the Meiji state’s official policies regarding music, especially in the realm of education. Shortly after Iwakura Embassy’s visit to the United States, Izawa Shūji, who would eventually lead the Education Ministry’s investigation into implementing music education, was also sent to Massachusetts, where he encountered the latest American methods in music education. In 1884 Izawa and his Education Ministry colleagues published the first songbook designed to be used in elementary schools, moving gradually toward the implementation of music within the national educational curriculum.

Within this process, one can see how both the samurai disdain of commoner music (zokkyoku) and the growing identification of Western cultural practices as part of the civilizational norm clearly shaped the contours of the kind of music that was going to be promoted by the state. Izawa himself described such music in a letter to his American collaborator, Luther Whiting Mason (1818–1896), in this way: our aim is not the total adoption of European or American music but the making of a new Japanese music.… Those pieces imported from foreign lands must more or less [be] naturalized. The songs must be of necessity of the Native Words. I know not of any case where the songs were sung from a foreign tongue except in some bigoted mission schools.¹⁶ While Izawa couches his policy in terms of the protection of Japanese culture, what this meant in effect was that the heart of state music education would be based on Western music, which would be naturalized by Japanese textual overlay.

For Izawa, there was no question that native Japanese musical culture, as it existed, was unsuitable to serve as the basis for the creation of what he called national music (kokugaku). In particular, the music that was actually popular among the vast majority of