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Music education and singing at a pro-PRC Chinese school in post-war Yokohama enabled diasporic youth to experience a distant ‘homeland’ through revolutionary songs. Singing became an embodied practice through which these songs were reinterpreted in local contexts, fostering solidarity and shaping an identity connected to the 'New China'.

Paper long abstract

Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) by the Communist government in 1949, political divisions within the Chinese community in Japan intensified between supporters of the PRC and supporters of the Nationalist government in Taiwan (Republic of China). In Yokohama these tensions culminated in the 1952 ‘School Incident’, which divided the Chinese school. In its aftermath, the pro-PRC school introduced music education centred on revolutionary and patriotic songs associated with the PRC. Drawing on school publications and interviews with former students, this paper examines music education and choir activities at the pro-PRC school from the 1950s to the 1960s. Students learned songs from the War of Resistance against Japan, such as the ‘Yellow River Cantata’ and ‘Solidarity Makes Strength’ alongside revolutionary songs such as ‘The East Is Red’ and ‘Socialism Is Good’. During the Cultural Revolution, songs praising Mao Zedong became increasingly prominent. The school’s Yellow River Choir also performed at Chinese community events, Japan-China friendship gatherings and events associated with Japan’s communist Utagoe (‘singing voice’) movement. This paper explores how these songs acquire particular meanings for Chinese youth growing up in post-war Japan. Former students recall singing as a means of experiencing a distant and rapidly changing ‘New China’ when direct contact with the PRC was limited. Songs of resistance and solidarity were reinterpreted through the community’s experience of the 1952 school incident, while participation in Utagoe movement further connected students with pro-China sections of Japanese society. For students from predominantly Cantonese-speaking families, singing in Mandarin also linked language with emotion, collective experience and an imagined homeland. This paper argues that singing was an embodied practice through which an identity connected to ‘New China’ as the ‘motherland’ was actively produced in post-war Yokohama.

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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.