Japanese Popular Music

"In 2013, online radio reached 45% of the US population but only 13% of the Japanese population (Arbitron 2013; RIAJ 2013). Why had the development of online radio and music streaming followed divergent trajectories in these two countries? Based on interviews with media executives, consumer surveys, and strategic analysis, this chapter posits that differences in the conception of traditional radio, as well as business practices, led to higher acceptance of online radio and music streaming in the US than in Japan. In the US, the existing culture of listening to radio as a passive music player, coupled with rapid diffusion of the smartphone, fueled the growth of services such as Pandora and Slacker. As recounted by Pandora founder Tim Westergren and Slacker vice president Jonathan Sasse, these two services operated under different conceptions of online radio—the former as a way to discover music of similar attributes, the other as a curated experience—which were reflected in their marketing and their methods for building playlists. In Japan, the diffusion of smartphones lagged that in the US, as they were initially not so attractive for either cell phone carriers, who found feature phones more profitable, or consumers, who already enjoyed high functionality on their feature phones. Radio was not as popular a medium in Japan as in the US, and music programs on radio were more focused on talk than in the US. The lack of statutory licenses for online radio and the reluctance of record companies to provide music to streaming services also hampered growth. The chapter is based on research in 2009–10, with a postscript on conditions in 2013.

A short conference paper that summarizes the findings and updates them can be seen at https://www.academia.edu/6879626/Online_Radio_How_Markets_in_Japan_and_the_US_Hear_Things_Differently .

A large portion of this thesis has been condensed and edited for the edited volume  Shōjo Across Media: Exploring "Girl" Practices in Contemporary Japan (https://www.palgrave.com/la/book/9783030014841), so I will no longer be providing PDF copies.
Please refer to chapter "From Shōjo to Bangya(ru): Women in Visual Kei."

Within this thesis, I investigate the expressions of gender, specifically masculinities, created and performed by band members in the contemporary Japanese musical subculture known as Visual Kei using a combination of anthropological (primarily participant observation and content analysis), cultural studies, and gender studies methodology. The main conclusion drawn from this analysis is that the expressions of gender within Visual Kei are specifically non-hegemonic, in that they either combat or deliberately ignore the patriarchal, heteronormative gender ideals (based heavily upon a strict gender binary situating “masculine” and “male” as positive and “feminine” and “female” as negative) that pervade and in many cases dominate the social situation of contemporary Japan.
The masculinities of the Visual Kei genre deserve particular academic attention due to the fact that the fandom for the genre is comprised primarily of young to middle-aged women, despite (or perhaps regardless of) the fact that the performers are almost singularly male in identification. Instead of interpreting this gendered composition as disempowering these fans, this thesis takes the stance that they are instead empowered through their safe, controlled consumption and perpetuation of specific expressions of gender, specifically forms of masculinity that combat or reject patriarchal gender norms. I further investigate how these masculinities relate to and are influenced by those created, encouraged, and perpetuated by other forms of contemporary Japanese woman-oriented media and culture (specifically: shōjo and Boys’ Love manga and dōjinshi, Johnny's idols, hosts, and general contemporary male beauty standards which are ostensibly, in a patriarchal society, meant to be “consumed” by women), many of which express or contain similarly non-hegemonic traits or imagery. Visual Kei should, I argue, always be analyzed within the context this specific, Japanese background, without which it surely would not have developed in the way that it has.

この修士論文では、文化人類学、文化研究、ジェンダー研究の方法を使用して、ヴィジュアル系という日本のサブカルチャーのバンドマンが創造・表現するジェンダー表現（主に男性性）に注目する。この研究から得た主な結論は、ヴィジュアル系の男性性が、現代日本に蔓延し、多くの場合支配的な、異性愛規範的かつ家父長制に基づいたジェンダー理想に対抗するか、無視するような、非覇権的志向性を持つということだ。このジェンダー理想は、男性や男らしいことを好意的に扱い、女性や女らしいことを否定的に扱う、厳しいジェンダー二元論に基づいている。
ヴィジュアル系は、パフォーマーが主に男性であるにも拘らず、ファンが主に少女と女性である。だからこそその男性性は学術的な注目に値する。この性差による傾向はファンの力を無効化にさせることではない。ファンたちは、非覇権的な男性性を安全に消費することで、むしろ社会的な力を獲得しているのである。さらに、このヴィジュアル系のジェンダー表現がどのように他の女性向けメディア（具体的に少女・ボイーズラブマンガ、男性アイドル、ホストと家父長制の社会に女性に消費されるべきである男性のファッション）の中で創造され、推奨され、長く支持されている男性性に影響を受けていることも調べる。このような女性向けメディアによる男性性も、色々な非覇権的なところを見せるからである。ヴィジュアル系はこの女性文化を背景に分析されるべきだ。この背景がなければ、ヴィジュアル系は現代のように発展しなかったであろう。

The Japanese folk music movement of the early 1970s has received considerable attention from scholars, largely because of its anti-war and counterculture characteristics. By contrast, the earlier college student-based folk boom, built around the performance of cover versions of acoustic songs by commercially-oriented American folk-pop groups such as the Kingston Trio and Peter Paul & Mary, has been relegated to a historical footnote. Yet as will be shown, this early 1960s folk boom with its aspirational longing for American college life and the promise of social harmony through collective vocal expression, was the foundation on which the 1970s movement was constructed. Using web-based sources, blogs, and oral interviews of the key musicians, this article explores the impact and influence of Japan's first folk boom on not only the early baby boom generation's musical preferences but their overall identity and values.

This chapter considers the posthumous duet as a performance medium in relation to the visual as well as aural. It considers the positive and negative rhetoric of ‘resurrection’, from a miraculous Christ-like second coming which encompasses a pleasurable nostalgia, to an uncomfortable morbidity associated with the gruesome exhumation of a corpse. This chapter summarises and challenges the positive and negative discourses of performing beyond the grave, with a focus on
performances on television – the more common incarnation of the posthumous duet. It begins by theorising the posthumous duet as sonic recontextualisation, explaining the overlapping modes of performance that reach beyond the binary categories of ‘live’ and ‘recorded’ (see Auslander, 2008; 2002). It continues with a short history of the posthumous duet before examining three case studies of televised posthumous duets from 2006 and 2007.

Revised and expanded version of a paper read at the 15th EAJS International Conference 2017 (Lisbon, Aug. 30 – Sept. 2, 2017) - Section 5, Panel S5b_15: Sound and music as medium. For the published version, see http://doc.rero.ch/record/329598.

Commonly said to embody the 'urbane' and 'refined' lifestyle of metropolitan Tokyo and to prefigure the transnational and consumerist characteristics of today's mainstream J-Pop, Japanese City Pop has undergone several recontextualizations since it first surfaced in the last quarter of the 20th century. I use City Pop as an example to interrogate the intermedial qualities of the processes at work in the emergence and sustenance of popular music genres. I first examine some common multi-semiotic (aural, visual and textual) characteristics of the musical products most commonly classified as City Pop, conceptualizing the genre as an example of intermedial translation. I then relate the results of this examination to select material from a small diachronic corpus of Japanese-language musical intertexts built from music history books, disc guides, and newspaper and music magazine articles published between 1977 and 2016. I identify actors in the discursive construction of City Pop as a genre and trace changes in the musical and extra-musical qualities attributed to it. Our contemporary understanding of the term 'City Pop' and our perception of the artists it points to are shown to have been strongly shaped by enthusiast press articles and popular musical histories written by a relatively small number of Japanese music journalists who integrated disparate and often contradictory artistic productions into a coherent genealogical narrative centered on the folk-rock band Happy End. My findings indicate the comparatively strong importance of etic text-based narratives over emic musical properties or short-term music industry marketing strategies in the construction of City Pop as a popular music genre, pointing to the fundamental primacy of language/writing in what Jens Schröter has termed 'ontological intermediality.'

Music videos are important cultural texts which offer an insight into the construction of meaning within a social context. This article aims to deconstruct some of these notions to see precisely how meaning is produced and mediated in relation to a text's cultural context. Taking the music video to W.W.D by Japanese idol group Dempagumi.inc (2012) as a case study, this article will analyse the narrative and identity that is constructed around the group.

The Occupation of Japan by Allied forces following World War II marked an unprecedented incursion of outside (soto) influence into Japanese affairs.  From the Meiji Restoration through WWII, the Japanese government had practiced censorship, especially of Western ideas, but General MacArthur’s “Press Code for Japan,” enforced by Occupation forces, codified appropriate topics of national discourse from a new, foreign angle.  This paper examines one facet of postwar music culture: the censorship of published ryūkōka, a style of popular song mixing Japanese and Western musical idioms.  Ryūkōka—popular in the decades before WWII but ostensibly forced out of public attention in favor of military tunes as Japan focused on the war effort—surged into popularity again after the war, and its publication was subject to Allied censorship following the new Press Code.  While this music was first subject to choices made by Japanese songwriters and performers about what kinds of topics should be “in” and “out,” the published music that consumers could purchase was subject to a second, foreign interpretation of appropriateness, and these two viewpoints, one from inside and one from outside, did not always agree.  Through an examination of censored materials in the Gordon W. Prange Collection, this paper explores the negotiation of these viewpoints and ideas about Japanese musical identity during the Occupation.

As a genre without the distraction of a melody but a well-defined beat, rap offers an opportunity to explore the rhythmic and musical aspects of a language, yet this area remains neglected in hip-hop studies. An interesting case is Japanese rap, which has completely different syntax, vocabulary, accent patterns, and phonemes from English. While rhymes and stress accents punctuate the rhythm in American rap, Japanese verbal arts have traditionally not emphasized rhyming, and the language lacks stress accents. A combination of interviews with rappers, transcription, and analysis supports this exploration of the problems that Japanese rappers initially faced in rhyming and rhythm, the solutions they have applied, and the innovations they have made. Japanese rappers capitalize on their rich vocabulary of Chinese, Japanese, and Western-sourced words to form rhymes, and the pitch accents of the Japanese language and the rhythms of certain moras to create a melodious flow. Language is thus a key factor in adapting a global genre and in the process by which imitation leads to innovation.

A conference paper based on this article won the Hewitt Panteleoni Prize from the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

City Pop is a loosely defined musical genre that first emerged in Japan in the late 1970s. Having undergone several recontextualizations and revivals in its country of origin, the genre has recently gained an international following among young Internet users. The most enthusiastic of City Pop’s new fans meet in social media groups and online forums; as of late 2020, a dozen fan communities on Facebook and Reddit have amassed a combined following of over 60,000 members.

At first sight, the community make-up, the aesthetic themes and the listening practices prevalent among City Pop fans appear to share some similarities with other recently emerged Internet-mediated music genres such as Vaporwave or Lo-fi Hip Hop. Yet we know little about this community. Who are these fans? How do they engage with the music, and with each other? Given the contested definition of City Pop in Japan proper, how do foreign fans characterize City Pop? What does the music mean to them, and how do they engage with Japanese culture?

As a first step towards answering these questions, we conducted an online survey among members of the largest Internet- based City Pop fan communities. In spite of their culturally and geographically diverse backgrounds, respondents (n = 575) share a clearly defined image of the genre that diverges in some aspects from common Japanese definitions of ‘City Pop’. Based on the results of the survey, we affirm that (1) the international City Pop community skews young and male but has strong transnational characteristics, (2) City Pop in this context is an Internet-based genre largely focused on online activities while allowing for a wide range of musical tastes and activities, and (3) the community overlaps with other international fandoms based on Japanese popular culture. Results also show that (4) City Pop is strongly identified with themes of nostalgia and escapism. Through City Pop’s reconceptualization as the soundtrack to an idealized 1980s Japan, these themes appear to find a more specific and clearly defined expression in this community than in adjacent Internet- based genres.

大都市・東京における「都会的」で「洗練」されたライフスタイルを具体的に表現し、こ んにち主流となっている J-POP のトランスナショナルで消費主義的な特色を先取りするも のとして、日本の「シティ・ポップ City Pop」は最初に登場した 20 世紀最後の四半期から 現在にかけ、様々な再文脈化を経験してきた。本稿ではこのシティ・ポップを、ポピュラー 音楽のジャンル概念が出現し存続していくプロセスにおける、間メディア的（intermedial） な本質を調査するための一例として用いる。まず、もっとも一般的にシティ・ポップとして 分類されている音楽製作物に共通する複数の記号的（聴覚、視覚、テキスト）特徴がジャン ルとして概念化されていく過程を、間メディア的変換の一例として考察する。そして、1977 年から 2016 年にかけて出版された音楽史の書籍、ディスク・ガイド、新聞、音楽雑誌の記 事によって構成される日本語の音楽関連の小規模なコーパスから資料をピックアップし、調 査結果と結びつけていく。その上で、本稿はシティ・ポップをジャンルとして言説的に構築 していった行為者を特定し、それらが音楽に、あるいは音楽以外の性質に与えていった変化 を追っていく。そして現在におけるわれわれの「シティ・ポップ」という用語に対する理解 や、この語が指し示すアーティスト認識が、比較的少数の日本人音楽ジャーナリストによる、 熱狂的でマニアックな雑誌記事やポピュラー音楽史によって大きく形作られてきたことを明 らかにする。このような人々の手によって、多種多様でしばしば正反対の特徴を持つ音楽作 品群は、フォーク・ロックバンドのはっぴいえんどを中心に据えた一貫性のある系譜的「語 り」へとまとめ上げられていったからである。以上の分析を踏まえ、本稿はイェンツ・シュ レーター Jens Schröter のいう「存在論的間メディア性」における言語／記述の根本的な優 位性を参照しつつ、ポピュラー音楽ジャンルとしての「シティ・ポップ」の構築において、 イーミック（文化内在的）な音楽的特性や短期的な音楽産業のマーケティング戦略よりも、 エティック（文化外在的）なテキストベースの「語り」の方が強い重要性を持つ、というこ とを示す。

"This article examines the songs that Japanese schoolchildren learned during World War II and their impact on children’s lives. These songs were filled with propaganda such as Japan’s superiority over other nations, the glory of dying for the country, and the joys of working in weapons factories. The study addresses questions such as: what values were these songs reinforcing? What behaviors were being encouraged? What legacy did they leave in the minds of the children who sang them, after the war had ended? Personal stories were obtained from individuals who attended elementary school during World War II. It is shown that the children who grew up during the war internalized the values promoted by these wartime songs and acted upon them as adults; they also passed it on to their own children.
"

In the mid-1960s, five Japanese women (the Chianti Five), in conjunction with a coterie of primarily male musicians, actors and artists, would combine the drive and energy of middle-class aspirational teenagers with the refined creativity of a new post-war Tokyo cultural elite, to produce what in retrospect can be called a Tokyo version of “Swinging London.” Taking a biographically-based narrative approach, the article examines how each of these five women, through their mutual friendship, artistic expression and connections with Japan’s most popular pop group, The Tigers, adapted and transformed the music, fashion and lifestyle revolution embodied by the UK movement to the Tokyo context. While not a purely comparative study, the exploration presented here uses as a reference, the main socio-cultural components of the UK’s movement to explore the extent to which the Japanese version had a comparable impact on mainstream domestic popular culture.

Since the mid-2000s, the focus of the Japanese hip-hop scene has shifted from pop-friendly groups like Rip Slyme to harder-edged rappers like Anarchy, Seeda, MSC, Shingo Nishinari, and Dengaryu. While this hardness has always existed in Japanese hip-hop, the severe contraction in the Japanese economy since the mid-2000s has provided an authenticity to hard-edged tales and made them more sympathetic to a larger swath of youth. This chapter introduces some of the expressions of marginalization that have intensified during this period - a shift to hardcore rap, focus on the local, involvement in social movements, neo-nationalism, and moral panics. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of the scene's history and its aesthetic considerations, which are part of the localization process.

15th EAJS International Conference 2017 (Lisbon, Aug. 30 – Sept. 2, 2017) - Section 5, Panel S5b_15: Sound and music as medium.

For the paper to this presentation, see https://www.academia.edu/34512419/Intermediality_and_the_discursive_construction_of_popular_music_genres_the_case_of_Japanese_City_Pop

This presentation examines the discursive history of Japanese City Pop to interrogate the intermedial processes at work in the construction of popular music genres. A corpus of musical intertexts is examined and related to the (extra-)musical qualities of media artefacts commonly associated with City Pop.

Vocaloids are virtual Japanese pop stars who exist as computer-generated voices and three-dimensional projections. Their animé aesthetic involves exaggerated and sexualised notions of childhood, girlhood and female sexuality. The digitisation of the female voice and the holographic representation of girls by men for the consumption of men is examined within the wider contexts of the infantilisation of society, the Japanification of global culture, and discourses of power, and control.

Producers using vocaloid software upload their songs to a hub which then become the vocaloid’s repertoire. Hatsune Miku is the genre’s biggest star. To her creator, she is ‘a symbolic event’ which allows users ‘to create any number of productions through her’. She is also depicted as an infantilised 16 year-old Japanese school girl who ‘dies’ onstage. Vocaloid singing voices have a deliberately artificial feel in which studio manipulation, autotuning, timbral adjustments and other synthesised effects are foregrounded. As holograms, young women are depicted as transparent, alien, distant and ‘other’. The programmable nature of vocaloid software and the robotisation of women perpetuates notions of infantilisation. Vocaloid culture, animé and manga are informed by a hetero-normative adolescent male aesthetic. Foucault points to ‘an ascending analysis of power’ which manifests in ‘infinitesimal mechanisms’ at the capillary edges of modern culture. I discuss Foucault’s ‘panopticon’ concept of power, and how it is normalised through conditioned, everyday experiences, and the cultural expression of vocaloids.

Meanwhile, many Japanese women choose to dress and act like young girls, ‘performing’ childhood in a ‘cute’ culture known as kawaii, of which vocaloids are symptomatic. I argue that while kawaii has its roots in societal oppression, it is in many ways subversive. Women are turning away from the harshness of Japanese schooling, the high expectations of middle class elders and uncertainty futures, towards a playful and spontaneous eternal present in which they are, to a large extent, productive as consumers. Their performance of vulnerability and helplessness renders them incapable of participating in adult life. In an infantilised world, children are simultaneously fetishised for their authentic child-like traits, whilst being rendered socially invisible by a society that no longer aspires to adult values that rely on generational differentiation. As such, childhood as a discrete and identifiable category is effaced. Vocaloids are just one notable manifestation of ‘Kidult’ culture and the infantilisation of Japanese, and increasingly global society.

Table of contents and extended English-language summary of my PhD thesis. The dissertation presents a diachronic perspective on intermedial convergence and interplay between literature and popular music in modern Japan. It strives to illuminate the multi-faceted ways in which pop music has influenced the shape of post-war Japanese literature, both as an ensemble of texts and as a cultural institution. Rather than assuming a unidirectional pattern of intermedial reception and focusing only on literary texts in the narrow sense, the resulting genealogical narrative examines a variety of textual and audio-visual artefacts at the crossroads between literature and pop music: novels and short stories, journalistic texts, poems, song lyrics, films, and material objects, such as physical media. I show that literature has been shaped by music, but also how it has influenced pop music and its associated media in turn. Examined authors include Ishihara Shintarō 石原慎太郎, Itsuki Hiroyuki 五木寛之, Matsumoto Takashi 松本隆, and Machida Kō 町田康.

"Based on ethnographic interviews, this paper examines how Japanese hip-hop DJs distinguish themselves in the global marketplace in ways that reflect on Japan’s two self-images: its impenetrable uniqueness and its adeptness at assimilating other cultures (cf. Ivy, Iwabuchi). Following the autoexoticist strategies of Takemitsu and Akiyoshi, DJ Krush and Shing02 draw on Japanese uniqueness by integrating Japanese instruments (e.g. shakuhachi, shamisen, taiko), genres (biwa narrative), and aesthetics (ma, imperfection) into their works; Evis Beats takes a more parodic approach. At the DMC World Championships, Japanese DJs including DJ Kentarō have competed on the basis of eclecticism and originality in assimilating multiple sound sources. While countering the stereotype of the Japanese as imitators, this emphasis on originality may place some contestants too far from prevailing trends, putting them at a disadvantage. Both strategies imply that Japanese artists experience anxieties regarding their authenticity, necessitating strategies to differentiate themselves."

Being an avid karaoke singer, I was intrigued to come across what are known in Japan as karaoke classrooms and kissas (a bar/café hybrid), during my periods of fieldwork in Tokyo and Osaka in 2013 and 2016. In my visits to these places, I watched (and participated in) how regulars at these karaoke venues, mostly working-class men and women between 60 to 80 years old, sang over the microphone, and chatted and laughed with each other over drinks. Their vivacity and enthusiasm were far removed from the doom and gloom that characterized many media and academic accounts of elderly life in Japan (Coulmas 2007). To these elderly karaoke participants, music and leisure serve as important cultural resources that allow them to build and maintain identities and lifestyles as they age (Bennett 2012; Koizumi 2013). In this thesis, I explore how and why regular participation in the spaces and activities of the karaoke classroom and kissa enable the elderly participants to attain sense of well-being and ikigai, the commitment and direction which makes life worth living (Mathews 1996). To capture the unique modes of engagement that influence the individual and social aspects of these participants’ karaoke participation, I mobilize the conceptual lenses of “musicking” as constructed by Small (1998) and “serious leisure” as elaborated by Stebbins (2015), in analyzing the data I obtained from the intensive ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2013 and 2016. By detailing the karaoke regulars’ attainment of senses of well-being and ikigai through “serious” musical engagement, I paint a livelier picture of elderly life in urban Japan, by not treating old age simply as a crisis to be solved, but rather a period of life that can be negotiated proactively.

As influências pop midiáticas do Japão e da Coreia do Sul há muito estão presentes na sociedade brasileira. Se num primeiro momento, os mangás, animês e seriados japoneses povoaram as bancas de jornais e programas televisivos brasileiros, num segundo momento é a vez dos elementos culturais da Coreia do Sul aportarem em terras brasileiras, com a música k-pop e os k-dramas, modificando os hábitos de consumo de um nicho dos jovens brasileiros e o imaginário previamente estabelecido em torno da cultura asiática em nosso país. Como parte de estratégias das relações exteriores destes países, a cultura pop “oriental” veio se fazendo cada vez mais presente no cotidiano brasileiro, dado seu trânsito exponencial nas antigas e novas mídias, e se fazendo devidamente sentida nos espaços urbanos das grandes metrópoles do nosso país. Esta tese tem por objetivo geral efetuar uma análise sobre o papel central dos eventos culturais/musicais relacionados ao pop japonês e sul-coreano na constituição de um sólido circuito de interesse em torno das expressões midiáticas do pop “asiático” no Brasil. A partir de um olhar radiográfico que gira em torno da tríade composta pelas convenções e eventos de fãs; os shows e espetáculos “ao vivo” de música pop “oriental”; e as festas noturnas e matinês realizadas nas cidades de São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro, me interessa perceber como se dá o “consumo da experiência” contemporânea com o pop japonês e sul-coreano nas ocasiões presenciais desses eventos culturais/musicais. A cartografia com inspiração etnográfica realizada entre 2014 e 2017 evidenciou como as relações interculturais acontecem nos espaços urbanos e virtuais, entre os fluxos globais e locais, e pelas quais podemos visualizar as diferentes forças e atores que impulsionam e regem atualmente a difusão do fenômeno da Japão Mania e da Onda Coreana em nosso país.

Chapter available in Music in Video Games: Studying Play (Routledge, 2014).

"The Temporary Avatar Zone: Pico-Pico Parties in Tokyo" examines the ways the aesthetics and experiential affordances of gaming can re-emerge as components of music cultures and how music can serve as a tool to invoke these components in the absence of the game. Drawing on fieldwork completed in Tokyo in 2004, it approaches these themes through an examination of the recordings and live performance environments of the Pico-Pico music scene. Close readings of recordings by the groups YMCK and Hazel Nuts Chocolate reveal Pico-Pico's unique approach to invoking the sonic environments of gaming and positioning listeners as avatar-like bodies occupying game space.

Hatsune Miku is a Japanese virtual idol born as avatar for the cutting-edge voice synthesizer Vocaloid. Since her debut in 2007, Miku became a hub for rhizomatic " produsage " , relying upon feedback operations amongst software, network and stage. While her massive multimedia repertoire, almost entirely generated by fans, is primarily composed of music videos and illustrations, it manifests in an array of commercial and noncommercial formats and pieces, from 2D graphics to 3D animation, from original or official works to derivative characters and contents. These circulate through 1) individually used applications, 2) contentsharing websites designed to enhance peer production (Niconico, PIAPRO), and 3) screenbased stage performances, e.g. Crypton or Niconico's holographic " live " concerts, the humanless (post-)opera The End, or lowbudget fan gigs. As a whole, Miku's coevolutive phenomenon raises important questions concerning alternative modes of authorship and spectatorship in our contemporary mediasphere.

Unpublished draft read at the conference "Environments: Landscapes and the Mind" (Goldsmiths University, London, June 19th 2015)

Matsumoto Takashi (b. 1949) is a Japanese lyricist, poet and novelist best known for his work with Happy End (はっぴいえんど), an influential rock band of the early 1970s. In this paper, I propose a close reading of the lyrical cityscape that Matsumoto crafted for the band's 1971 concept album Kazemachi roman ('Wind City Romance'), and an exploration of how this landscape inscribed itself into the tradition of spatialised representations of Japanese urban identity. Simultaneously romantic and sardonic, Kazemachi roman struck a chord with a generation of youths that in the wake of the failed student movement of the late 1960s had become largely depoliticised. The album blends surrealistic Japanese-language lyrics and American West-Coast rock to imagine a Tokyo that appears both nostalgic and modern: a fictional space of bucolic suburbs and bustling downtown city life that in reality had already been largely erased by the frantic pace of post-war city planning in the lead-up to the 1964 Olympic Games. This paper argues that Matsumoto employs a technique of projecting a panoramic collage of the past onto the landscape of the present to cope with the losses that homogenising modernity has inflicted on the urban environment. In doing so, he draws on a tradition of fantastic literature by Japanese interwar writers such as Miyazawa Kenji or Edogawa Ranpo, while distancing himself from the major trends in popular music lyrics of his age: the confessional poetry of the folk movement and the sentimentalist-nostalgic mode of the kayōkyoku genre. The result is a fantasist-nostalgic gaze that prefigures the post-modernist urbanism in the works of novelists such as Murakami Haruki.

OUP webpage: http://bit.ly/1PpNXq0
Amazon webpage: http://amzn.to/1LJF8rz
2017 John Whitney Hall Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies
Honorable Mention, 2016 Alan Merriam Prize, Society for Ethnomusicology

Despite widespread apprehension of nuclear power following the Fukushima disaster, Japan remains a difficult place to express antinuclear views: the media largely avoids presenting antinuclear positions, and the culture discourages people from voicing controversial opinions. In such an environment, music emerged quickly as a mode of oppositional expression, encapsulating the people’s anxieties.

Drawing from the author’s ethnography of the movement since 2011, musical analysis, and concepts from the social sciences, this book examines the ways in which music of social movements is shaped by the stature of the musician and the performance space. In contrast to American or British musicians who typically attract attention to causes, Japanese musicians are highly discouraged from engaging in politics, particularly the antinuclear movement. They adjust their political behavior depending on their position in the music industry, the space in which they are playing, and political conditions at the time. According to these parameters, they change the type of audience participation, political frame of the message, and technique of communicating the message.

Extending Lefebvre’s conception of space as perceived, conceived, and lived in, the book analyzes the interactions of music and musicians with citizens under the constraints and opportunities of the four spaces of political music performance—cyberspace, demonstrations, festivals, and recordings. Anonymity in cyberspace—more prevalent in Japan than many other countries—initially helped citizens to overcome fear and participate in the movement. The “sound demonstration,” featuring musicians on top of trucks rolling along ahead of protesters, has evolved in intent and in performance style according to political circumstances. Rappers changed from performing prepared songs to improvising calls and responses with protesters as the movement shifted from raising awareness to mobilizing citizens. The urban landscape and soundscape change the performance and reception of protests; activists plan, and musicians perform, accordingly. Political music festivals range between two types of communication approaches: informational, where arguments are presented, or experiential, where an immersive environment opens one’s mind to different points of view. On commercial recordings, which are industry-censored, major-label musicians rely on allegories, metaphors (both textual and musical), and metonyms; they purposefully mis-set and mispronounce words to express their antinuclear sentiments. These patterns of protest have been retained in subsequent movements in Japan, such as the movement against the Secrecy Law and Prime Minister Abe’s reinterpretation of the Peace Constitution.

This chapter explores the relationship between shōjo culture and the Japanese music subculture of Visual Kei—a flamboyant genre consumed primarily by women. It demonstrates links between Visual Kei and aesthetic trends in Japanese women’s/shōjo culture (particularly idealized masculinities), arguing that these wider socio-cultural developments should be involved in future analysis of these types of subcultural practices. Drawing from a combination of long-term ethnographic research and social media discourse analysis, this chapter places Visual Kei within academic literature on Japanese women and the media they consume, arguing that Visual Kei is inseparably entwined with wider shōjo/women’s culture. Through this, the chapter demonstrates an additional location for the shōjo within the complex contemporary Japanese popular music landscape.

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the role of Gunka (Japanese War Songs) during the Fifteen Years War. The focus will be in the relationship between the thematic, lyrics and the songs´ consumptions practices and the relation whit the historical context in which these songs were produced.
This research discusses the various uses of this type of songs by the military government and the population, during the war. While the first used them as an ideological instrument to induce support for the war, the population appropriated them as a mechanism of resistance and rejection to the war. In this process, the production and consumption of the song were vital, because through it one can understand how the ideology of war operated during the Fifteen Years War.

Keywords: Military Song, Gunka, Popular Music, Fifteen Year War, National Ideology

RESUMEN
El propósito de esta tesis es ofrecer un análisis del papel jugado por las canciones militares japonesas (gunka) durante la Guerra de los Quince Años (1931-1945), centrándose la relación existente entre la temática, la letra y su consumo con las condiciones históricas en las que se desarrollaron este tipo de canciones.
En la tesis se compara el papel jugado por las gunka durante este conflicto bélico. En primer lugar, se analiza su uso como un instrumento que las autoridades militares utilizaron para imponer su ideología y convencer a la población de apoyar la empresa bélica de Japón. En segundo, el uso que la población hizo de ellas para dar a conocer su propia cosmovisión sobre la guerra. Para lograrlo es necesario hacer énfasis en las prácticas de producción y consumo que acompañan a las canciones militares japonesas para entender la manera en la que operaba uno de los principales dispositivos ideológicos durante la Guerra de los Quince Años.

Palabras clave: Canciones militares, Gunka, Música popular, Guerra de los Quince Años, Ideología nacional.

During the second decade of the twenty-first century, the phenomenon of ‘kawaii metal’ has garnered significant attention in English-language mainstream press alongside more limited discussion in metal journalism. An ostensible fusion of metal and Japanese aidoru (idol) music, kawaii metal artists frequently juxtapose the traditional aesthetics of kawaii (cuteness) with those of metal, emphasising a combination of influences distinctly Eastern and Western. Prominent among kawaii metal artists, Babymetal have generated substantial press coverage in the Anglophone world. Despite emanating from the Japanese idol industry and singing almost exclusively in Japanese, touring the United States and Europe (producing live CDs and DVDs recorded in the US and UK) have made Babymetal one of the most visible Japanese bands in Anglo-America. This chapter explores Babymetal's fusion of idol and metal by analysing the lyrics for the band's first two albums, Babymetal (2014) and Metal Resistance (2016). Following an introduction to kawaii metal through the lens of Anglo-American press, the author elucidates Babymetal's origins as a sub-unit of the idol group Sakura Gakuin. With this background established, the author investigates the use of wordplay and themes relating to childishness and adolescence in the lyrics on Babymetal's debut album. Examining the lyrics of the band's second album illuminates a more thorough integration of idol and metal tropes, including more English-language lyrics, seemingly designed to align Babymetal with a more global metal audience, managing the interplay of Western and Eastern influences.

A presente monografia tem como tema as diferentes representações midiatícas na construção da identidade feminina ideal, a partir da análise do grupo pop AKB48. O principal objetivo deste trabalho é compreender de que formas diferentes representações de idols disseminadas pela mídia podem definir a identidade feminina. São tratados neste trabalho a importância da idol como produto cultural, o contexto em que essa identidade toma forma e o papel da mídia na disseminação da imagem feminina adolescente. Este trabalho também contextualiza temas que fazem parte do objetivo principal: gênero, sexualidade, imagem feminina, contexto histórico japonês e o culto à colegial. Analisaram-se diferentes representações midiáticas das idols do AKB48 – o clipe musical Heavy Rotation; o comercial da bala Aisu no Mi, da marca Ezaki Glico; e o vídeo game AKB1/149 Love Election – através da pesquisa bibliográfica, documental e da análise de imagem. A partir disso, descobriu-se que o que a idol representa na mídia afeta as possibilidades da identidade que assume na sua própria vida – perde-se o limiar entre virtual e real – e que sua imagem é comunicada como o ideal feminino adolescente, caracterizado pela submissão, objetificação e falta de autonomia.

History tends to memorialize the stars and leaders, yet both musical and social movements are also made possible by people who work in the background, organize, seed trends, and otherwise help make things happen. The Japanese rap pioneer and activist ECD, who passed away on January 24, 2018, was neither the earliest nor most commercially successful rapper, and he would have eschewed calling himself a leader of any protest group. Nonetheless, he was what Gramsci would have called an organic intellectual of the working class. The frankness of his music, writing, and performances touched his audiences at an affective level, connecting them to the movements in which he participated. This article looks back at his life, which embodied the worlds of hip-hop, contentious politics, and the working class. It also examines his songs, which not only convey a vivid account of his life, but also reflect his personal and political concerns as well as the ambience of street protests. ECD was a key figure in the development of the underground hip-hop scene, organizing events that allowed it to take root and be lifted into commercial viability. He was on the front lines of several Japanese social movements—anti-Iraq War, anti-nuclear power, anti-racist, pro-democracy, and anti-militarization. He wrote protest anthems, inspired Sprechchor, performed at protests, and helped to establish a new mode of participatory performance, which engaged protesters more fully. His sheer presence at demonstrations, constant and reliable, energized and reassured protesters. Part I describes his years as a hip-hop pioneer, and Part II portrays his role in Japanese social movements of this century.

This study examines the impact of mobile technologies and the internet on the way music is consumed and marketed in Japan , drawing from interviews of executives from the music, telecommunications, and internet industries; it also compares the behavior of Japanese and American consumers, as determined by surveys conducted in late 2006 and early 2007. Japanese telecommunication carriers created an environment friendly to the development of mobile phone applications by offering low commission rates and settlement systems to content companies and incentives to upgrade handsets to consumers. Japanese record companies were initially skeptical of mobile downloads, but mastertone and full-track downloads quickly became important promotional tools and significant revenue streams. While both Japanese and American students listened to music on the go and used multiple ringtones, Japanese students were less likely to own PCs and more likely to own 3G-enabled phones; they were thus more likely to discover new songs on mobile portal sites and use phones to listen to music than American students. However, American students were more likely to express their feelings about themselves and their friends through their ringtones than Japanese students, who were more likely to use vibration or silent mode. Hence, this study shows how both corporate policies and cultural factors can impact the way consumers use devices, ultimately affecting how music is heard and acquired.

To date, most female portrayals and performances in the Japanese popular music genre of enka have been understood in terms of the homogenous ideal of the subservient, outdated image of “the traditional Japanese woman.” Yet, two of enka’s most important female singers, the queen of enka” Misora Hibari and “the girl destined to carry enka’s star” Fuji Keiko, possess starkly contrasting images in the public imagination — something that tends to question the adequacy of homogenous understandings of enka’s femininity, based allegedly on Japanese tradition. In this paper, I examine the careers of Hibari and Fuji with a focus on the conditions of musical production and promotion, utilizing biographical accounts and critiques of these two singers. Through this analysis, I argue that dominant representations of female “subservience”, “outdatedness” and of the “Japanese-ness” in enka emerged out of contingent decisions that particular musical producers and singers made within the context of the Japanese music industry in the 1960s and 1970s. The argument offers a more recent historical origin for the stereotypical femininity of enka, highlighting the dialectical relationship between individual-level musical praxis and certain Japanese social discourses in those decades. These complex forces condemned Fuji in her late career to obscurity, while ultimately securing Hibari’s status as a national symbol of perseverance.

PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR USE IN ANY WAY WITHOUT AUTHOR'S PERMISSION

Popular music is no longer the sole domain of the younger generations. Instead, as Bennett (2012) shows, it matters greatly to older people, as a cultural resource through which to negotiate personal and collective identities as they age. With its predominantly older producers, performers and consumers, the realm of the popular music genre of enka within Japan’s rapidly aging society presents a highly relevant field for studies of musical meaning for older people. Existing academic and popular discourse on enka has focused on understanding the genre in terms of Japanese tradition and culture. But how should we interpret this nationalistic musical discourse in relation to the ageing practices and discourse of enka’s producers and consumers? What does this manner of musical engagement mean to them?

I investigate these questions via a multi-sited ethnography of the musical engagements of older Japanese. Firstly, I will conduct participant-observation and interviews of older enka consumers regularly singing together at karaoke bars and cafes, as well as members of fan clubs. I will then apply the same approach in analysing the recording and promotional activities of recording companies and artist management agencies. Paying attention to the material, social, discursive and affective environments of these sites (or genba) of enka production, mediation and consumption, I will examine how the older identities and lived experiences of producers, performers and consumers inform these interactive modes of musical engagement, in a way that creates a musical imagery of enka that references a rhetoric of national tradition.