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.