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Music education centred on socialist revolutionary songs in a Chinese school in postwar Yokohama shaped diasporic youth identities. Through collective and performative singing, Maoist repertoires fostered political belonging and communal ties among second and third generation Chinese in Japan.

Paper long abstract

Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, ideological divisions emerged within the Chinese diaspora in Japan between supporters of the PRC (Mainland-oriented groups) and supporters of the Republic of China (Taiwan-oriented groups). These tensions culminated in the 1952 schism of the Chinese School in Yokohama. In the aftermath of this split, the Mainland-oriented Chinese school introduced music education programmes centred on songs that praised socialist New China, such as ‘Labour Is the Most Honourable’ (Laodong Zui Guangrong), which were widely used in the PRC to inculcate socialist values among youth. With the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, this musical repertoire shifted further toward explicit veneration of Mao Zedong and Maoist ideology. For example, ‘Songs of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong’, which were melodic settings of passages from the Quotations of Chairman Mao, became central to music education and extracurricular singing activities. These songs mirrored those employed in mainland China as tools for ideological education, indicating a transnational circulation of revolutionary musical practices. Drawing on school newsletters and interviews with graduates of the mainland-oriented Chinese school in Yokohama, this paper examines how ‘New China’ songs functioned within music education and collective musical activities, and how they shaped the identities of Chinese youth living in Japan. Particular attention is paid to the school choir, whose members participated in Japan’s communist singing movement (utagoe undō), forming musical solidarities that initially transcended nationality and ethnicity. However, during the Cultural Revolution, the choir increasingly distanced themselves from Japanese communist movements and became more deeply aligned with the glorification of the Maoist regime. By focusing on second- and third-generation overseas Chinese, this study argues that singing practices associated with a distant ‘homeland’ played a crucial role in community formation and identity negotiation. The paper argues how music served as an educational tool, an ideological medium, and a means of articulating belonging within the complex sociopolitical context of postwar Japan.

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This paper analyses radio broadcasts and public performances to examine how the biwa and koto were utilised in distinct ideological roles during the Asia-Pacific War. Taking a comparative approach, it reveals how references and narratives were selectively constructed through music.

Paper long abstract

During the Asia-Pacific War, art and media functioned as a key medium through which ideologies were articulated and disseminated to and among the population of Japan and its colonial territories. Specifically, music served as a potent medium for affect and memory. The roles of instruments historically associated with Japan's ancient history have received less attention than military songs and Western-style compositions, which have been the main focus of current musicological studies. This paper aims to fill this research gap by analysing the biwa and koto as contemporary musical actors in wartime media and performances.

Focusing on radio broadcasts and public performances from the late 1930s to 1945, this paper adopts a comparative approach to analyse how these two instruments were framed and mobilised in distinct ideological roles. Drawing on broadcast programming, public performance records, contemporary commentary, and audio-visual resources, the paper explores how meanings were constructed not only through sound but through the implied contexts and narratives that these instruments carried, as well as the institutional contexts in which they appeared. The biwa, with its frequent associations with narrative performance and historical warfare storytelling, was positioned as a sound conduit to heroic individuals of the past and used to inspire ideas of heroic sacrifice, bravery, and national destiny. In contrast, the koto interacted more with moralised and gendered representations of daily life, operating more in relation to ideas of domesticity and aesthetic discipline.

Rather than treating the biwa and the koto as embodiments of an unchanging tradition, this research argues that they functioned as contemporary instruments whose meanings were actively and selectively shaped within wartime ideological frameworks. The paper also reflects on how these wartime structures continue to influence contemporary perceptions of the biwa and koto, contributing to enduring assumptions about their historical and cultural significance.

By foregrounding the biwa and the koto within wartime culture, this paper contributes to broader discussions of the use of media and art in modern Japanese ideology, highlighting the complex ways in which cultural experiences and understanding were moderated under conditions of wartime mobilisation.

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What happens if we read the cataclysmic historiography of Japan's lost decades, 1990s-2000s, as a period of prolific, compelling, radical, and revolutionary women artists, who played the interdisciplinary fields of performance, installation, and media with targeted social and political objectives.

Paper long abstract

What happens if we claim that the cataclysmic historiography of Japan's lost decades of the 1990s to 2000s is a period of prolific, powerful, evocative, compelling, impassioned, risky, radical, and revolutionary women artists, who played the interdisciplinary fields of performance, installation, and media with targeted social and political objectives and actions. The Kobe Earthquake, the financial meltdown and stagnation, loss of lifetime employment (for men), the Aum cult poisoning attack, and the trial concerning homosexuality, can be placed in contrast to the private and individual deepening of the women's movement along side the developing internet/media arena. This presentation will contextualize and describe the works of several women artists who are central to this expanded historiographic archive. These women created works that refused the categories and (largely economic and male) critical conversations on art-making practices and values. Counter to the labels of "quiet theatre," "recessionary," "junk," "cool," "flat," or "lost generation," these women exploded the time-space of theatrical materiality with their bodies, acts and media, which demanded their spectators' affective social engagement. Among others I consider the early works of Shiota Chiharu's video performance art, Kisaragi Koharu's performance plays, Yubiwa Hotel Shirotama Hitsujiya's performance art, and Kurosawa Mika's butoh-dance art. I describe how the "event-moment" surrounding each artwork intersects with the style, media, place, audience, and body politics of each artist. I argue for a performance studies archive that explodes the still-life of "lost decades," cutting through the corrosive layers of patterned narratives and, in contrast, animates a mutable, unstable even volatile expedition through the "lost and found" art works of these decades of experiment women artists. This presentation is part of the Performance Archive Project: Expanded Practices through a Cooperative International Performance Studies Archive.