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Paper short abstract

This paper reexamines Tokyo-centered historiographies of postwar Japanese popular music by treating media-industrial centralization as a historical problem. Focusing on Osaka’s music cultures of the 1970s–80s, it reveals alternative conditions of production overlooked by dominant narratives.

Paper long abstract

This paper reframes Tokyo-centered narratives of postwar Japanese popular music by foregrounding the structural centralization of media industries in the capital. Existing histories have often treated Tokyo-based institutions—record companies, publishers, broadcasters, and distribution networks—as implicit norms, producing accounts that appear national while in fact reflecting highly concentrated media-industrial conditions. As a result, the institutional and spatial biases embedded in these narratives have remained largely unquestioned.

Rather than treating such concentration as a neutral background, this paper approaches media-industrial centralization itself as a historical problem. It argues that the dominance of Tokyo-based cultural industries shaped not only patterns of musical production, circulation, and promotion, but also the evaluative frameworks through which popular music has been assessed, canonized, and written into history. Tokyo-centered institutional arrangements thus came to define what has been recognized as historically significant within postwar Japanese popular music.

To examine the implications of this structure, the paper takes Osaka as an analytically productive case. From the late 1970s through the 1980s, Osaka sustained vibrant music cultures grounded in locally based infrastructures, including live venues, independent production and distribution networks, and regionally oriented cultural economies. In particular, practices associated with blues, folk, post-punk, and noise music often developed earlier or along different trajectories than their counterparts in Tokyo. These practices emerged under media-industrial conditions fundamentally different from those centered in the capital.

Rather than positioning Osaka as a peripheral or oppositional anomaly, this paper treats it as a case that clarifies the limits of Tokyo-centered historiography. By examining how Osaka-based musical practices have been situated within dominant historical narratives, the paper highlights the assumptions and evaluative criteria that have shaped postwar Japanese popular music history. The focus is not on recovering neglected scenes for inclusion into an existing canon, but on questioning the historiographical frameworks through which such canons have been constructed.

Through this reorientation, the paper contributes to Media Studies and Japanese Studies by showing how media-industrial centralization has shaped both cultural production and historical knowledge. It proposes a framework for reassessing postwar Japanese popular music that foregrounds institutional structure and spatial differentiation, moving beyond Tokyo-centered narratives.

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Paper short abstract

This historical paper examines the power dynamics and sociocultural connotations of the non-participants in the NHK Red and White Song Battle (kōhaku utagassen) in the 1970s, with a particular focus on the agency of music artists and their power relationships with the mass media and music industry.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the power dynamics and sociocultural connotations of the non-participatory phenomenon in the NHK Red and White Song Battle (kōhaku utagassen) in the 1970s with a particular focus on music artists. Often abbreviated as “Kōhaku,” the TV-radio program is an ongoing annual music special produced and broadcast live by Japan’s public broadcaster NHK and has achieved the highest-ever audience ratings among all regular programs in Japanese television history. Beginning around the 14th event in 1963, Kōhaku had gradually developed into a yearly national media event. Consequently, a music artist’s appearance on Kōhaku started to become a benchmark for measuring their popularity and career success, and their “Kōhaku experience” would even influence the level of their appearance fees when performing in local venues. On the other hand, an increasing number of newly debuted singers tended to view performing on Kōhaku as a prestigious honor and their major career goal. However, when it came to the 1970s, a group of singers that moved against the trend to voluntarily opt out of Kōhaku emerged. They deliberately distanced themselves from Kōhaku or even declined the offer from NHK to appear on the stage, despite the fact that they had major hits that year and thus being strong candidates for the grand show’s lineup. In the context of Kōhaku being institutionalized as a sociocultural ritual that took on the function of uniting the nation as a virtual community at the temporal threshold between the old year and the new, the invisuality, invisibility, inaudibility, and non-cooperativeness of those non-participants came to embody more than a mere absence. Rather, such non-participation constituted an antithesis of Kōhaku’s televised mainstreamness as well as a countervailing force against NHK’s mediated power and, by extension, the conservative discourse as well as the centralized narrative of homogeneity within Japanese society in the postwar Showa period. Through historical investigation, this paper explores not only the agency of those discontented or nonchalant singers but also the power relationships and behind-the-screen negotiations among the singers, NHK, commercial TV broadcasters, record companies, and talent agencies within the highly intricate and interactive network of Kōhaku.

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Paper short abstract

This paper reconsiders the reconfiguration Japan’s music industry of the immediate postwar years. It takes the NHK radio program Shirouto nodo jiman (The Layperson’s Singing Contest) and its contemporary derivatives by record companies as focal point.

Paper long abstract

This paper reconsiders the centrality of Tokyo in the reconfiguration Japan’s music industry during the immediate postwar years. In this period, radio is considered a crucial medium for the dissemination of hits while record companies were still recovering from the Second World War. As radio broadcasting was democratized under supervision of the Allied forces, the dominance of the capital was also, arguably, in question. To demonstrate that, the paper takes the NHK radio program Shirouto nodo jiman (The Layperson’s Singing Contest, often shortened to Nodo jiman) with its contemporary derivatives contests held by record companies nationwide, as focal point.

Nodo jiman was launched on 19 January 1946 and featured a selection of amateur contestants on a weekly basis who competed against each other by performing a freely chosen song. During the hard socio-economic conditions of the latter half of the 1940s, the show was highly popular among all layers the population – children, students, salarymen, shopkeepers, and housewives alike. Its success was a combination of the amateurish level of its participants and bringing local talent to the national level during a time of democratization under supervision of the Allied Forces. Moreover, several famous postwar artists, such as Misora Hibari and Sakurai Chōichirō, had participated in the contest.

In contrast, record companies were still reeling from the outfall of the war. American bombers had destroyed their factories and recording studios. In addition, the production of gramophones and records was still low as resources were expensive and most households still held on to radio sets which were more affordable. Nevertheless, such companies continued their business with hits by existing composers, lyricists, and performers. On the other hand, Nodo jiman proved an interesting format to recruit new talent and attract visibility as record companies also launched their own imitations of and collaborated with NHK.

This paper argues that such perspective allows a more nuanced view of the recording industry’s recovery in postwar Japan in relation to the changed media landscape without reducing record companies’ operations as profit based.

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Paper short abstract

This paper traces the history of French chanson in postwar Japan as a medium for gender-transgressive performance. Focusing on the Takarazuka Revue, Miwa Akihiro, and Simone Fukayuki, it examines how queer aesthetics and performance were central to the formation of Japanese popular song.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers a historical examination of French chanson in Japan, arguing that chanson functioned as a medium through which non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality became articulable within Japanese popular music culture. In Japan, chanson refers to French popular songs from the late 19th to early 20th century that circulated amid the rapid influx of music from Europe and the Americas. Like many yōgaku (Western music) genres, chanson entered Japan through processes of translation and adaptation, from its first introduction by the all-female Takarazuka Girls’ Revue. Their 1927 stage production “Mon Paris” marked a pivotal moment in which women’s cross-dressing performance framed Paris as a modern fantasy defined by cultivated luxury, erotic alterity, and urban sophistication.

Chanson reached new prominence during the postwar “Chanson Boom” of the 1950s and 1960s, when the genre came to be newly composed in Japanese. Central to this movement was Miwa Akihiro, widely recognized as the first openly gay singer-songwriter to achieve mainstream success in Japan. Miwa’s theatrical vocality, extravagant costuming, and androgynous beauty expanded chanson’s expressive possibilities within Japanese linguistic and cultural contexts, transforming it into a site where queer subjectivities were rendered visible and audible within the commercial entertainment industry.

By tracing a critical genealogy of chanson and its aesthetic conventions as reinterpreted in postwar Japan, this paper demonstrates that gender-transgressive performers were not peripheral but central to the development of popular song forms. Building on scholarship that examines Orientalist tropes in Western art music as a means of projecting societally disavowed desires onto a colonial Other, this paper proposes that French chanson was inversely mobilized as a vehicle through which Japanese singers materialized such desires onto a Western Other, thereby enabling alternative gender expressions within mainstream popular culture.

The paper concludes with a case study of contemporary chanson singer and drag queen Simone Fukayuki’s adaptation of Charles Aznavour’s “Les Faux” (1969), retitled “Itsuwari” (1994). Simone’s concept of “opulent lies” is theorized as a queer aesthetic of musical translation that embraces imitation and artifice, reconfiguring the “fake” not as derivative, but as a productive force in the history of Japanese popular song.