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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.