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- Convenors:
-
Aurel Baele
(KU Leuven)
Aya Hoshikawa
Send message to Convenors
- Chairs:
-
Aurel Baele
(KU Leuven)
Anita Drexler (Osaka University)
- Discussant:
-
Chiharu Chūjō
(Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Performing Arts
- Location:
- Lokaal 5.50
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel explores discursive spaces on gender wars in Japanese popular music from 1945 to 2022. Using interdisciplinary approaches from musicology, history, and media studies, the aim is to illustrate how various actors adapt to changing sociopolitical environments in times of crises.
Long Abstract:
Despite 80 years of relative peace since 1945, there has been a continuous struggle about gender in Japanese popular music. In these so-called gender wars, actors from the music industry adapted and (re-)imagined the notions of "what is" and "what ideally should be" in society. Media played a crucial role as they influenced the ways how such visions are presented in the past, present, and future.
This panel explores gender wars in various discursive spaces within Japanese popular music between 1945 and the present. Each of the four presentations offer a unique perspective during a time of crisis and touch upon specific questions related to gender. Moreover, they also reveal the transformations of the discursive space itself and its implications for popular music.
The first presentation discusses the role of media in disseminating specific notions about the female subjects in Japanese popular music during the years of occupation (1945-1952). It does through an analysis of advertisements in print media with regards to the mixed media landscape.
Continuing from the 1980s, the second presentation will show how musicians used the adaption of archaic masculinities as well as cross-gendered performances to tackle the crises of male self-representation caused by the emergence on nyū myūjikku (New Music) in the 1970s.
The third presentation focuses on the amateur female singer-songwriters in Japan and the assigned gendered roles they face in the current music scene, thereby exposing similar gender issues present the whole Japanese music sector.
The last presentation turns to the realm of VR spaces. The analysis of musical activities of users on VR platforms reveals a phenomenon of male users adopting gender-crossing performative strategies through their avatars which results in challenging existing gender relations and escaping social pressure.
Through this interdisciplinary approach of musicology, history and media studies, this panel aims to illustrate the role of various actors and the influence of media in the adaptation and usage of ideas on gender during changing sociopolitical environments. In doing so, it adds a novel perspective to gender in popular music within the fields of musicology, history, and media studies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 August, 2023, -Aurel Baele (KU Leuven)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation explores the role of gender in popular music in Japan's mixed media landscape during the years of occupation between 1945-1952. Through an analysis of advertisements for popular film theme songs, it illustrates how print media remained a crucial space to imagine gender.
Paper long abstract:
During the years of Occupation of Japan, individuals of Japan's music industry attempted create new hits in a devastated entertainment milieu. As spiraling inflation and scarce resources created difficult circumstances to sell music, the tie-up between record and film companies in the form of eiga shudaika, or film theme songs, proved to be highly successful to create hits. In this mixed media landscape, print media played a crucial role to advertise both these hits and the gender roles that these songs themselves contained.
This presentation explores what sort of ideas about the female subject film theme songs propagated through a mixed media approach. It is generally understood that radio was the main channel through which hits were disseminated as many households still possessed such a device. However, this presentation argues that print media were still a crucial format to spread such ideas about gender.
The presentation takes four theme songs as case studies divided between years 1945-1952 for comparison. This way it also reflects the gradual change from the fallout of the Second World War to a booming economy taking place in Japan's contemporary society.
In particular, it analyses the representation of female subjects in advertisements in contemporary print media such as music magazines, newspapers, popular entertainment magazines, and film magazines. These source materials still contain valuable textual and visual information about these female representations. Popular magazines such as Heibon frequently printed drawings based on scenes and stills of films and lyrics.
Women were prominently featured in these products of mixed media. More than in prewar sound films, female stars like Misora Hibari (Tokyo Kid, 1950) and Kasagi Shizuko (Ginza kankan musume,1949), Namiki Michiko (Ringo no uta, 1945) performed both on screen as behind the microphone.
This presentation thus aims to illustrate the role of print media as a discursive space for gender wars in the mixed media landscape of Occupied Japan. It then not only adds to the debate on gender in the fields of popular music studies, history of Modern Japan and media studies.
Aya Hoshikawa
Paper short abstract:
This presentation shows the challenges female singer-songwriters face in the context of fan-artist-relationships and expected gender roles in today's live music scene. It uses the method of participating observation and is based on the presenter's own experiences as a performing artist in Tokyo.
Paper long abstract:
The purpose of this presentation is to focus on the music scene in Japan as of 2022, particularly those who are called "SSW," and to identify the gendered roles that have been assigned to them.
"SSW" is an abbreviation for singer-songwriter. In Japan today, there are many amateur singer-songwriters, and this abbreviation "SSW" is often used by female singer-songwriters to refer to themselves, forming a musical genre. However, women SSWs often face problems in addition to their own musical expression. Female SSWs often have another problem besides their own musical expression: the relationship between female SSWs and their fans.
SSWs who perform at small live houses or on the street are able to be in relatively close contact with their fans. There are many advantages here, of course, but there are also disadvantages, of course. In other words, female SSWs often encounter situations in their musical activities where they are expected by their fans to play the role of a woman and have to live up to those expectations. Examples of this can be seen in various scenes, such as fan service at live houses and on the street, selling CDs and promidoes, and interacting with fans on social networking sites. As this presentation will reveal, female SSW often have middle-aged male fans. This is similar to the problem of idol culture in the underground scene in Japan, so it is possible to make comparisons with this situation.
In this presentation, the presenter, who herself is a female SSW in Tokyo, will discuss the gendered role of Japanese SSWs, taking into account her own experience as a female SSW. To begin with, popular music has been discussed together with various phenomena such as social class, race, gender, propaganda, and the capitalist system. If so, the presenter believes that the case of SSW should also be able to be examined through those social factors. This presentation aims to be a case study to reconsider the Japanese music scene.
Anita Drexler (Osaka University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines new types of soft masculinity that emerged within the 1970s-1980s singer-songwriter genre new music. Using performances of cross-gendered songs as a discursive space between artists, music critics & fans, I explore changes in male self-representation and ruptures they caused.
Paper long abstract:
During the mid-1970s, the success of the singer-songwriter genre nyū myūjikku (new music) has led to the manifestation of new types of masculinities within Japanese popular music. It was the ideal of a genteel, pensive kind of man - often, but not exclusively, associated with the buzzword "city boy" - a young, mostly college educated male enjoying life in the country's most vivid metropoles - that caught the hearts of fans in rural and urban areas alike.
Although music critics of the time had been fast to condemn this new archetype as soft (nanjaku) or effeminate (memeshii), it eventually became a widely accepted mode of cis-het male self-representation within parts of the Japanese music industry. However, the manifestation of this new kind of masculinity did cause ruptures that would only deepen over the next two decades.
In my presentation I will examine the strategies various popular musicians adopted in order to deal with this crisis of male self-representation. Using the examples of male artists such as Nagabuchi Tsuyoshi (*1956), Matsuyama Chiharu (*1955) and others, I will focus on three aspects in particular. Firstly, on how from the 1970s onwards, a considerable number songs using a cross-gendered performative technique - in which the male musicians would assume the role of female protagonists - became hits. Secondly on how these songs were received by music critics and fans. Thirdly, on how artists who performed such songs continued to represent themselves as cis-het males, oftentimes by either adopting hyper masculine behaviors rooted in working-class aesthetics or by taking distinctively conservative social positions.
While in recent years, some publications have shed a light on the gender construction of female artists associated with the influential nyū myūjikku movement, the role of male artists has remained widely unaddressed.
Through an intertextual analysis of lyrics, interviews and visual self-representation, this presentation aims to shed a light on how a playful disruption of gender roles within a highly commercialized category of popular music was negotiated by various actors.
Ken Kato
Paper short abstract:
This presentation will elucidate the possibilities of performance in virtual space and its social aspects through the musical practices of VR platform users, as well as deal with gender/sexuality conflicts through the avatars that wrap their bodies.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation will elucidate the possibilities of performance in virtual space and its social aspects through the musical practices of VR platform users, as well as deal with gender/sexuality conflicts through the avatars that wrap their bodies.
With the spread of inexpensive HMDs (head-mounted displays), VR technology has become much more accessible. In Japan, there are now nearly 20,000 VTubers (Virtual YouTubers), streamers who perform using 2D and 3D CGI virtual characters. They engage in creative activities such as gameplay, music production, and illustration on digital platforms such as YouTube, Niconico, bilibili, VRChat, and cluster.
The Covid-19 pandemic not only hit the world but also seriously impacted the Japanese music industry. Music venues were closed, and events were cancelled one after another. At the same time, however, this crisis became an opportunity to hold music events in virtual spaces: VR platform users are organizing large-scale concerts and music conventions on VR online platforms. Some of them have even built their own nightclubs on VR platforms or created huge music installation art on cyberspace. Interestingly is how they also try to shed their own masculinity by dressing up in avatar bodies, some in pursuit of "kawaii", thereby raising the question of gender/sexuality.
Through an analysis of the music activities of these VR users spatially, this presentation will novel about the friction and overcoming of gender in Japanese society there. It will also reveal how participants create and maintain their scenes with a focus on spatiality, locality, and identity.