Organizer: Michael Bourdaghs, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair: Brett de Bary, Cornell University
Discussant: Miriam R. Silverberg, University of California, Los Angeles
In American studies of Japan, its popular music is frequently overlooked or dismissed as being derivative. In contrast, Japanese scholars such as Tsurumi Shunsuke have long realized the importance of popular songs, but their analyses have too often celebrated the music as an expression of popular (i.e., resisting) consciousness without considering the status these songs have as commodities and sites of ideological reproduction. But the recent rise of cultural studies promises an opening for approaches to this music that treat it with the seriousness it deserves, that celebrate its anti-elitist qualities even as they remain attentive to its active participation in the economic and ideological structures that sustain modern society.
Each of the papers in this panel takes up an important topic in modern Japanese popular music: the early postwar songs of Misora Hibari, the ‘60s and ‘70s folk and rock movements, the seductive hit songs of Chage and Aska in the early ‘90s, and the spread of (ostensibly) Japanese music throughout Asia in recent years. While the papers exploit possibilities that have opened up under cultural studies, each also raises serious questions about how one should evaluate popular culture. What constitutes the "authenticity" that would ground resisting tendencies? What does the concept of national culture mean under late capitalism? What consistency can a single genre have in markedly different historical circumstances? Our goal is not simply to mine a previously untapped vein within Japan Studies, but to place into question the parameters of the study of popular culture.
Joanne Izbicki, Wake Forest University
In the earliest years after WWII, the plight of war orphans was a frequent theme in Japanese movies. The moral and social status of family members were reorganized in these films, which, in an inversion of filial piety, invested moral leadership in children who remoralized adults, mitigated or absolved war guilt, and reconstituted the Japanese family in a spirit of cooperative, egalitarian individualism.
In 1949 a new, twelve-year-old player on the movie stage began her film career in an orphan role and soon became a star known as Misora Hibari. In earlier orphan films children had pursued stability and dignity through manual labor, but singer Misora’s orphans recovered from loss and loneliness through talent, wholesome pleasure, and play. Hibari’s innocent cinematic characters, who entertained, gained public applause, and enjoyed considerable material success, supplanted the scrappy, delinquent orphans of earlier postwar movies who struggled for respect, earned modest livings, and developed character through physical labor.
Centering on Misora Hibari’s childhood films, this paper examines how, like other orphan films, her movies reconfigured the family and reenergized adults demoralized by war and defeat. Although she often played characters who crossed signifiers of class, age, and gender, Misora’s orphans ultimately affirmed a conservative social norm for individuals and families alike. Through Misora’s persona as a musical performer, the cinematic orphan moved from an active, turbulent confrontation with destitution and moral choices to an energetic but consistently innocent and uncomplicated victimhood resolved with relative ease and less troubled by reminders of war and defeat.
Kenneth Mark Anderson, Hosei University
My presentation concerns the early seventies rock band Happy Endo. Their first two albums, "Happy Endo" released in 1970, and "Hugai Roman" released in 1971, are widely considered the first two Japanese rock albums. The second album is frequently offered as one of the best Japanese rock albums ever released. Its members, including bass player Hosono Haruomi, later a founding member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, continued to have a major influence on Japanese popular music in subsequent decades. I will focus on the band’s critique of modernization and its reliance on the melodrama of the rock genre, the early seventies debate concerning the possibility of rock music in Japanese, and the fate of "New Music" as an attempt to transform the mode of production of Japanese pop music.
I suggest that the articulation of rock music in Japanese involved a process of translation which transformed the Japanese language itself. I also claim that it participates in the more general proliferation of electronic discourse networks generated since the WWII era. While I argue that both Happy Endo and the other "New Music" artists did succeed in fundamentally reshaping the Japanese music industry, I also claim that the discourse of the romantic artist and its associated imagery were quickly incorporated into a new mode of pop music production in which artistic authenticity served to legitimate codes of romantic love which enabled the very everyday life in the modern Japanese world which their work avowedly attempted to call into question.
Michael Bourdaghs, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper focuses on Japanese popular culture around the time of the bursting of the economic bubble in 1989, looking especially at Chage and Aska’s hit song "Say Yes," the top-selling single of 1991 and the theme song of the year’s most popular television drama, The 101st Proposal. I will examine the worldview presented in the song and drama, in particular through a comparison with the political analysis contained in Ishihara Shintaro and Morita Akio’s The Japan That Can Say No, the best-selling Japanese book of 1989. Produced in markedly different political and economic environments, it is hardly surprising that the pre-crash Say No and post-crash "Say Yes" display differences in tone and emphasis. Yet I will argue that they share an underlying message: each invokes the genre of melodrama in order to "propose" specific ideologies of marriage as imaginary solutions to very real economic and social crises. By situating "Say Yes" against its historical moment, I hope to uncover the ideological responses it makes to Japan’s problematic situation in the early 1990s. These ideological responses help explain the enormous popularity the song enjoyed among young Japanese—the "Say Yes" single sold some 2.8 million copies, while the album Tree that contained the song sold another 2.4 million copies. Moreover, I will explore ways in which the song itself can be worked against the grain of its dominant message to produce alternative meanings that undermine the simple yes/no proposition it seems to offer.
Leo Ching, Duke University
It is said that the global pop-music industry is dominated by American products, an "Americanization" that has made Michael Jackson and Madonna household names from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The globality of the American cultural machine notwithstanding, in the cultural landscape (or market places) of East and Southeast Asia, a steady presence of Japanese pop music—in terms of not only music, but also associated image-commodity—has emerged since the 1980s, a "Japanization" that pundits have lauded as the long-awaited "internationalization" of the Japanese culture industry. This regional manifestation is, of course, part of a general cultural logic of late-capitalism and the particular ideological imaginings—in terms of cultural affinity and racial similarity—shared by producers and consumers. Yet despite this apparent "opening," there exists a concomitant "secluding" and imploding of "Japanese-ness," a neo-nationalist discourse that aims to consolidate the "national" on the terrain of "transnational" popular culture. As Japanese pop music begins to "de-nationalize" itself—Japanese lyrics are easily substituted by Korean or Cantonese—Japanese pop music is witnessing a revival on television at home, especially in the form of nostalgia. This nostalgia is fundamentally different from earlier forms of national longing or imagining in that it is completely conscious of its retroactive impossibility and that self-parody itself has become a commodity, circulated and consumed at random. What this dialectics of "open seclusion" finally points to is the contradiction of conceptualizing "popular culture" in national terms under late-capitalism.