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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.