Paper short abstract:

Many of Miyagi Michio's more than 700 compositions for koto and other hōgaku instruments draw on Western music to transform traditional Japanese music. His career as a performer and composer culminated in a trip to Europe in 1953 where he experienced European music in situ for the first time.

Paper long abstract:

Koto performer, composer and educator Miyagi Michio's more than 700 compositions for koto and other hōgaku instruments utilize Western music playing techniques, timbres, and compositional techniques and forms. The resulting works transformed traditional Japanese music. His career as a performer and composer culminated in a trip to Europe in 1953 where he experienced European music in situ for the first time.

Born in the foreign sector of Kobe in 1894, Miyagi was surrounded by Western music streaming from residences and public places. While studying koto and shamisen with a local master, he pursued knowledge of Western music through recordings, lessons on various Western instruments, and interactions with scholars and performers of Western music, both Japanese and visiting Europeans and Americans.

From his earliest compositions, Miyagi incorporated playing and compositional techniques derived from Western music in pursuit of his goal of modernizing koto music. Miyagi came of age during the Taisho era, by which time the full effects of the Ongaku Torishirabe Gakari's late nineteenth-century decision that only Western music would be taught in the schools had nurtured two generations of Western music consumers, creating an audience receptive to Miyagi's new hybrid compositions.

Miyagi held the first concert of his own compositions in Tokyo in 1919 to critical acclaim from Western-trained scholars and musicians. Through collaborations with influential musicians from both the Western and Japanese musical traditions, within a few years his works were embraced by musicians from both sides. Miyagi's collaboration in 1932 with French violinist Renee Chemet on a recording of "Haru no Umi" brought his work to the attention of a sizeable European audience, which led to further opportunities for him to meet many prominent musicians from Europe when they toured Japan.

In this paper I will discuss Miyagi's lifelong encounters with Western music and musicians, culminating with his one and only visit to Europe in 1953. I will explore how Miyagi's encounters with Western music in France and England influenced three of his compositions: "Rondon no Yoru no Ame," "Eihei no Kotai," and Nichiren.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Japanese Tango musicians in China's popular dancehalls between the 1920s and 1940s. The presentation places such migration dynamics under the political and historical lens of Japan's longing for and imaginations of 'the continents' at this time.

Paper long abstract:

Between the 1920s and 1940s, many Japanese Tango musicians migrated to work at China's cosmopolitan dancehalls. The international city of Shanghai, for instance, was considered by Japanese musicians as a musically 'authentic' place to work and to polish skills as musicians. This was seen as a great contrast to Japan at this time, where much of the 'foreign' musical knowledge was acquired through imitating recordings. Many Japanese musicians migrated to China's cosmopolitan cities to 'learn through working at the dancehalls': they also called such Chinese cities 'the places where one could make a fortune at a single stroke.' Influenced by the Japanese colonial imaginaries of China, Japan's fascination for the internationally renowned cosmopolitan cities of China has been discussed not only as an economically and artistically driven admiration, but as a form of Orientalism. Instead, this paper proposes that the Japanese fascination for the Chinese cities at this time had much wider historical meanings. Key contexts here are Japan's fascination for the 'continents', South America and China, and the mass Japanese immigration to South America that peaked between the 1920s and 1940s, promoted by the Japanese government's pro-emigration campaigns. In this political context Tango came to represent, among other genres, the sound of 'South America', strengthening many Japanese people's powerful longing for South America. By examining Japanese Tango musicians' performance activities in China through this lens, this presentation reveals the ways in which the Japan-China relations and Tango came to influence the Japanese emigration politics in the first half of the twentieth century.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how Japanese audience shaped the framework of jazz as cosmopolitan music through live music exchange in the post-occupation era, by tracing the routes of the various musicians to argue that the embodied cosmopolitanism on the stages paradoxically triggered conservative backlash.

Paper long abstract:

To discuss the transnational aspect of popular music, we must not ignore the influences of touring musicians. One of the most essential characteristics of popular music is its mobility. Besides the globalization of several songs, styles, recordings, movements or technologies, the musicians themselves have also traveled around the world. Especially, the development of aircrafts and international civil aviation after World War II enabled Western popular musicians to visit Asian countries easily and rapidly. In the early 50s, Pan American Airways' trans-pacific routes that combined American west coast, Hawaiian islands, and east Asian nations, opened up new opportunities for Western popular musicians to visit Asian and Polynesian countries. Furthermore,, the Western allied powers deployed their forces in West Pacific as barriers against communism. In the Cold War era, the US entertainers frequently flew around the pacific along this half-civil and half-military network. After Japan regained its state sovereignty at the Peace Treaty of San Francisco in 1952, Japanese concert promoters began to cooperate with the US agents to invite famous American musicians. Various musicians such as Gene Krupa, Xavier Cugat, Jazz at the Philharmonic, Louis Armstrong, Juan Canaro, Damia, Delta Rhythm Boys or Johnnie Ray visited post-occupation Japan. These concerts attracted a great number of people, and reached the first peak in 1964, the year of Tokyo Olympic games. As several previous studies have mentioned, even though they had different musical styles and regional identity, they were all accepted as "jazz" music in those days. In other words, the word "jazz" had represented cosmopolitanism in the post occupation era. One of the most remarkable changes in this period is the rise of the so-called "Black" or "colored" virtuoso performances. Japanese concertgoers praised their shows enthusiastically, and music critics exaggerated "Blackness" embodied on stage to examine the frenzy performances. By examining the usage of the word "funky"—before the invention of Funk music—this paper argues that these shows paradoxically mediated both Afro-Asian or cosmopolitan connections and Afro/Asian alienations within essentialist's discourses.