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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the transformation of soundscapes in the 1920s and 1930s, with a focus on the case of Tokyo, by investigating the conception and reconception of ‘noise’ and ‘silence.’

Paper long abstract:

Due to the influx of modern cultures from the West as well as the influence of industrialization and capitalism, Tokyo in the 1920s and 1930s was a place where new urban cultures were created, displayed, and contested, and people experienced a new mode of sonic environment. This chapter particularly focuses on the transformation of soundscapes during this time, by investigating the conception and re-conception of ‘noise’ and ‘silence.’ In everyday life in the city, people experienced new types of sounds from mass media, such as cinema, telephone, gramophone, radio, and record music, to daily sounds, such as car honking, construction sounds, and noise from the neighborhood. Among these, some sounds were conceptualized and defined as ‘euphonic’ sounds while some were ‘cacophonic’ and ‘annoying sounds.’ Meanwhile, ‘silence’ was requested in selective public spaces, such as talkie cinema theaters and music halls. These new cultural and legal categorizations shaped new modes of listening. I seek to comprehend the desire(s) underlying these conceptualizations of sounds, questioning with respect to sensory experience, Japanese modernity, modern subject, and capitalism.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the aesthetic of urban noise in 1930s Gendai-geki sound films. Cinematic urban noise was an expression of 'modan raifu', at once national and transnational, whereby contextual matters of political, economic, societal, and foremost technological nature shaped these sounds.

Paper long abstract:

This paper critically examines the cinematic portrayal of urban noise (e.g. traffic noise, crowd noise in public spaces, harbor sounds, machine noise, residential noise) in 1930s Gendai-geki films. Noise was an abundant part of the modernization process – a product of early film sound technology, but also that of industrialization, mechanical innovation, and urban, everyday life. In Japan, the nationalistic strengthening of modern technological, sociological, and economic developments during the 1920s and 1930s were at the center of attention: as Mariam Silverberg observes, the modernization process of Japan was not a mere American imitation, but an intrinsic development on the observation of “modan raifu (modern life)” in the Japanese metropolitan city (1). This intrinsic modernization process was also partly expressed in early sound films, which were, as Johan Nordström puts it, an "urban phenomenon" (2). The frequent production, distribution, and exhibition of sound films in Japan came relatively late compared to Europe and America. This was not due to a lack of innovation or technology, but because of, as Hiroshi Komatsu argues, economic turbulences, societal life, technological norms and exhibitive traditions such as the use of the benshi (3). The Japanese sound film was emblematic of the tension between transnational traits and national particularities, whereby its acoustic aesthetics became the expression of such modern contemplations. The paper thus argues, by the example of the Gendai-geki genre (e.g. Kenji Mizoguchi’s Naniwa erejî, 1936), that urban noise in early Japanese sound films was an expression of Japanese modernities and the political, economic, societal and foremost technological nature of the respective decade.

Footnotes

(1) Miriam Silverberg, “Constructing the Japanese Ethnography of Modernity,” in The Journal of Asian Studies (Vol 51, No. 1, 1992), 33.

(2) Johan Nordström, “Sound and Intermediality in 1930s Japanese Cinema,” in The Japanese Cinema Book, eds., Alastair Phillips, Hideaki Fujiki (London: The British Film Institute, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 152.

(3) Hiroshi Komatsu, “The Foundation of Modernism: Japanese Cinema in the Year 1927,” in Film History (Vol 17, No. 2/3, 2005), 364-375.