Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

The birth of contemporary Japanese popular music can be traced to one song, "Kachūsha no uta" (Kayusha's Song, 1914). This paper discusses the song, its immense popularity, and its influence on Japanese popular music, media, and Japanese society in the Taishō period.

Paper long abstract:

Various types of commercial popular music have existed in Japan for over one thousand years. The roots of contemporary Japanese popular music, however, can be traced to one song, "Kachūsha no uta" (Katyusha's Song, 1914). The song was composed for a stage adaption of Tolstoy's Resurrection, performed with the title Fukkatsu.

What makes "Kachūsha no uta" special is that it combined elements from both Western art music and Japanese popular music. As such, it was the first stylistically Western song that succeeded in eliciting a response among the Japanese public who had until then preferred originally Japanese genres of popular music. The choice of style by the composer Nakayama Shinpei (1887-1952) laid the foundations of contemporary Japanese popular music and remained the mainstream well until the mid-20th century. In this sense, we can discuss the song as the very first contemporary Japanese hit song.

"Kachūsha no uta's" significance, however, goes beyond its musical achievements. With its phenomenal popularity all over Japan, it also molded the ways that popular music itself became to be produced. As the first best-selling Japanese record it proved record companies that producing records of popular songs could result in good sales. This, on its own part, eventually fostered the establishment of a full-scale record industry for popular music in the beginning of the Shōwa period.

The song also marked the birth of hit singers and songs being associated with them - as opposed to the older songs with no concept of "creators" of music - as the performer-actress Matsui Sumako (1886-1919) became the first Japanese hit singer and national celebrity idolized across the country. Furthermore, the song foresaw the Taishō democracy as the very first popular song that managed to appeal to audiences from different social classes and particularly as a Western-style song "chosen" by the public instead of being imposed from above.

The song triggered many aspects that became fundamental qualities in Japanese popular song and popular music culture. These kinds of qualities make "Kachūsha no uta" an intriguing phenomenon both from musical and social viewpoints.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This study examines the historical development of sound cinema in Japan by focusing on the nation's contact and negotiation with the Western world. A film producer Kido Shiro's visit to Europe and the US will be discussed, along with the discourse analysis of Japan's early view of sound cinema.

Paper long abstract:

Cultural flow and negotiation beyond national and regional boundaries have become a major subject in contemporary media studies. East Asia, including Japan, is a prominent example, where popular culture, while produced, distributed and consumed at transnational scale, also raises complex issues regarding localization and appropriation.

Previous studies in this field suggest two important questions to be further discussed. Firstly, the role of the West in the development of East Asian popular culture. While the cultural hegemony of the West with a unidirectional influence on the East has been largely redressed, there still exists ambiguity about how the two regions negotiate at the juncture of cultural flow. Secondly, a need for a historical approach to theorize popular culture on a regional scale. Combining these two methodologies, Daisuke Miyao successfully investigated the influence of Hollywood style on Shochiku films in the 1920s.

In this paper, I will expand the scope suggested above into the early history of sound cinema in Japan in order to elucidate the way how the new technological advancement resulted from complex processes involving direct contacts with the West. As a case study, I will discuss an observation tour of Kido Shiro, the head of Shochiku Kamata Studio, around several Western countries (USSR, Germany, Italy, Spain and US) from 1928 to 1929. Using biographical sources, industrial archives, and journalism reports, I will analyse how this unusual probe into the Western film industry by a Japanese producer exerted influence on the making of the Japanese sound cinema. This will also be counter-examined by the contemporary discourses on sound cinema appearing in Japanese media in the late 1920s, when the new cinematic form was recognised both as a foreign import and a technical challenge to resolve.

This study will not only present a historical example of how popular culture can shape its form through inter-regional contact and negotiation, but also suggest a critical insight into the matter of overcoming 'parochial regionalism' that dichotomizes the East and the West, and finding a more creative process of appropriation ('provincialization' as Iwabuchi Koichi puts) in the current globalised media sphere.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the discursive history of Japanese City Pop to interrogate the intermedial processes at work in the construction of popular music genres. A corpus of musical intertexts is examined and related to the (extra-)musical qualities of media artefacts commonly associated with City Pop.

Paper long abstract:

Commonly said to embody the 'urbane' and 'refined' lifestyle of metropolitan Tokyo and to prefigure the transnational and consumerist characteristics of today's mainstream J-Pop, Japanese City Pop has undergone several recontextualizations since it first surfaced in the last quarter of the 20th century. I use City Pop as an example to interrogate the intermedial qualities of the processes at work in the emergence and sustenance of popular music genres. I first examine some common multi-semiotic (aural, visual and textual) characteristics of the musical products most commonly classified as City Pop, conceptualizing the genre as an example of intermedial translation. I then relate the results of this examination to select material from a small diachronic corpus of Japanese-language musical intertexts built from music history books, disc guides, liner notes, newspaper and music magazine articles published between 1977 and 2016, identifying actors in the discursive construction of City Pop as a genre and tracing changes in the musical and extra-musical qualities attributed to it. Our contemporary understanding of the term 'City Pop' and our perception of the artists and the multi-semiotic characteristics it points to are shown to have been strongly shaped by enthusiast press articles and popular musical histories written by a relatively small number of Japanese music journalists who integrated disparate and often contradictory artistic productions into a coherent genealogical narrative. My findings indicate the comparatively strong importance of etic text-based narratives over emic musical properties or short-term music industry marketing strategies in the construction of City Pop as a popular music genre, pointing to the fundamental primacy of language/writing in what Jens Schröter has termed "ontological intermediality."