Send message to Author

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 folk 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-participation in the NHK Red and White Song Battle (kōhaku utagassen) in the 1970s with a particular focus on folk 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 (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai/Japan Broadcasting Corporation) and has achieved the highest-ever audience ratings among all regular programs in Japanese television history. 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. Correspondingly, an increasing number of newly debuted singers tended to view performing on Kōhaku as a notable honor and their major career goal. However, when it came to the 1970s, a group of folk 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 TV, 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 non-cooperativeness of these non-participants based on their invisibility and invisuality came to embody more than a mere absence. Rather, such non-participation seemed to constitute an antithesis of Kōhaku’s Tokyo-centered mainstreamness as well as a countervailing force against NHK’s televised authority. Through historical investigation, this paper explores the motivation and agency of those discontented or indifferent singers, and furthermore the broader power relations between individual music artists and the hegemonic mediality of television, in the context of not only contemporary Japan’s popular music history but also the paradigm shifts within Japanese society from the “postwar society” to the “post-postwar society” in the mid-1970s.