Popular Music in Japan

Transformation Inspired by the West

Toru Mitsui

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501363870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la música

Popular music in Japan has been under the overwhelming influence of American, Latin American and European popular music remarkably since 1945, when Japan was defeated in World War II. Beginning with gunka and enka at the turn of the century, tracing the birth of hit songs in the record industry in the years preceding the War, and ranging to the adoption of Western genres after the War--the rise of Japanese folk and rock, domestic exoticism as a new trend and J-Pop-- Popular Music in Japan is a comprehensive discussion of the evolution of popular music in Japan. In eight revised and updated essays written in English by renowned Japanese scholar Toru Mitsui, this book tells the story of popular music in Japan since the late 19th century when Japan began positively embracing the West.

Transformation inspired by the West (1)

This title article in nine sections, weaving its way through the whole book, is a much enlarged version of the main part of the introduction to Made in Japan: Studies in Popular Music, edited by Tōru Mitsui and published by Routledge, pp. 1–13 (© 2014 Taylor & Francis).

At the time when the Japanese were ‘aroused from their 200-year sleep’

It is intriguing to find in All the Year Round, a British weekly literary magazine ‘conducted by Charles Dickens’ between 1859 and 1895, a reference to a teenage Japanese officer who was thrilled by the song “Pop Goes the Weasel”. He was in Washington, DC, in 1860, several years after this well-known and much-loved nursery rhyme had crossed the Atlantic. The anonymous writer with musical literacy remarks:

This air was regarded as the peculiar property of the youngest officer of the body, the third interpreter of the embassy, a lad seventeen years old, whose handsome and dignified appearance, winning manners, and affectionate disposition, made him an object of far greater interest than even the lofty envoys themselves. “Poppy goes the weasel” he always would have it, and seemed to think the extra syllable a capital invention of his own. (‘Music among the Japanese’ 1861: 150)

This very interesting article, ‘Music among the Japanese’, begins with an appeal: ‘Let us render partial justice to our often misappreciated Oriental friends, in respect of a faculty which has uniformly, and rather unfairly, been denied them. “They have no musical perceptions”, is the general verdict […]’ (ibid.: 149). Hence, the writer wanted to test the ‘musical capacities’ of the Japanese and ‘to discover, if possible, whether they were as utterly destitute of musical feeling as they had been pronounced to be’, when ‘the Japanese envoys and their seventy officers and attendants to the United States of America’ visited Washington. No information about the envoys is given by the writer, but it can be evidenced historically that those people were the members of the mission dispatched by the Togugawa shogunate to exchange ratifications of the Japan–US Friendship and Trade Treaty. They arrived in Washington in mid-May 1860, a year before this article was published, and stayed there for three and a half weeks. The seventeen-year-old officer mentioned above, Onojirō Tateishi, was sociable and full of curiosity, and became so popular in the cities he visited with other envoy members that the news media reported on what he did almost every day, and referred to him as ‘Tommy’. A photograph of him dressed up, complete with two swords, can be found at the Houghton Library in the Harvard Theatre Collection (see Mihara 2000 and Kanai 1979).

In the second half of the article, the writer describes his joy at hearing a ‘pure Japanese melody’. One medical student ‘beguiled himself by murmuring fragments of a new and unknown song’ while ‘poring over a pile of manuscripts’, and other students ‘presently joined in the chorus very excitedly, and worked it and themselves up with great energy’; ‘These students, it seemed, were musical as well as medical, in a very high degree’ (‘Music among the Japanese’ 1861: 151–2). The writer manages to have them sing the tune repeatedly so that he can write it down in staff notation, though it should be noted that the ending note of this tune is wrongly notated as the writer interprets the scale as minor. This observation is significant in itself as he asserts the song to be ‘the first Japanese song ever publicly heard outside their own land’. However, this song and ‘additional specimens of Japanese music’ heard by the writer didn’t apparently attract wider notice.

More interesting in retrospect is the first half of the article in which he describes how the mission members were enthralled by Western music:

[T]hey were by no means slow to repeat such melodies as they could catch and remember from the street bands of Washington, or the pianofortes of Willard’s Hotel, where they resided. There was not an under officer who had not his favourite tune; and as for the third class attendants, they were in perpetual league with those among their American acquaintance who would consent to instruct them in light and simple songs, words included as well as music. (Ibid.: 150)

Along with “Pop Goes the Weasel”, the other song mentioned is “Kemo, kimo”, which the Japanese officers sang ‘whenever they could find listeners, and often, indeed, among themselves alone, with a delicious abandon that betokened the heartiest enjoyment to be imagined’. “Pop Goes the Weasel” was introduced to Japan decades later and was popular for a period of time.

A similar Japanese fascination with Western music had already been witnessed six years before, in 1854, on the front deck of one of the battleships led by Commodore Perry at Edo Bay (now Tokyo Bay). Before the signing of the trade treaty between the US and the shogunate, who avoided armed intervention, the Japanese invited the Americans to a feast, and the Americans invited some Japanese dignitaries to a feast on a ship. A minstrel show was performed after dinner by a troupe that consisted of the black-faced players of a tambourine, a triangle, a banjo, a flute, a bone castanet and three guitars. It was at the time when Stephen Foster’s plantation songs were quite popular, and, actually, some of his songs, including “Massa’s in the Cold Ground” and “Camptown Races”, were performed there on the ship and at two other places. According to a note written at the occasion by an American crewman, the show performed on the front deck was well received by the Japanese, whose ascetic solemnity was soon dissipated: ‘they fought hard to stifle the laugh that rose to their throats because they are not accustomed to laugh with the mouth wide open as we do’ (Kasahara 2001: 111–12). Moreover, according to an observation made by a Japanese officer, one of Uraga’s police officers was enticed to dance himself when some of the black-faced players danced in the show (ibid.: 111). Minstrel shows were also performed in Yokohama and Hakodate for Japanese officers, and two pictures painted by a Japanese artist are now in the possession of Kanagawa Historical Museum in Yokohama (one of which depicts the whole black-faced troupe in uniform performing together). Even in the United States it may be difficult to find a painted picture of a minstrel show from the 1850s.

However, Japanese music veritably sounded displeasing to Western ears in general, as documented by many remarks regarding the Japanese secular music performed by a number of Japanese acrobatic troupes, which were immensely popular in American and European theatres (Mihara 1998). The remarks are cited in periodicals published mostly in 1867 and 1868. For example, the New York Times commented thus on Japanese singing in late January 1868: ‘The different acts were accompanied by what is called music […] by three ladies and one man. This hideous noise grates terribly upon the ear, and sounds more like a pack of hounds in full cry, or a bevy of Thomas cats at midnight’ (ibid.: 140). The New York Clipper, meanwhile, reported on an instrumental performance in March 1867: ‘Their music is execrable – it is a mixture of broken China, Japan ware, etc., and is made on instruments resembling a banjo on the square […] picked on with a broken stick; a fife, or something like it, [which] helps make up a horrible discord, and this is the sum total of their music.’ These comments may remind some readers of the entry for ‘music’ in the 1891 one-volume encyclopaedia Things Japanese, written by Basil Chamberlain, a British Japanologist and a Wagnerian. It begins with: ‘Music, if that beautiful word must be allowed to fall so low as to denote the strummings and squealings of Orientals, is supposed to have existed in Japan ever since mythological times’ (Chamberlain [1891] 1971: 330).

The remarkable interest in Western music was prominent at the time when the Japanese people were ‘aroused from their 200-year sleep’ which had been undisturbed in the nursery of isolationism since 1639. The interest was clearly one-sided, as is often with an interest one has in anything, and this one-sidedness would soon begin characterizing Japanese popular music, which would be typified to one degree or another by the hybridization of Western and indigenous music. In its hybridization, this popular music can be compared to Japanese ‘traditional’ music, consisting of Japanese classical and vernacular music (the stylized forms of which have been preserved), and also to ‘serious’ music, which has fundamentally been dominated by Western classical music. Around the time when Rudyard Kipling chanted ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’ in ‘The Ballad of East and West’ (1889), the twain was already meeting, notwithstanding this statement which has long generated its own momentum. The meeting, though one-sided, came about in Japan and in the form of popular music, and it has endured up to the present.

From this viewpoint, below is a survey of how popular music in Japan from the late 1860s to the early 2000s has undergone a sweeping transformation, which, in general, has been enjoyed domestically, rather than internationally.¹

Gunka

Because of the visit of the intimidating American fleet to Japan in 1853, military music was more significant to the Japanese in general than music performed for a limited number of Japanese officers. Many Japanese were exposed to music performed on land by a drum and fife band as well as by a brass band. At the first visit in 1853, a drum and fife band performed on the Kurihama beach such tunes as “Yankee Doodle”, “Hail Columbia” and “Star-Spangled Banner”, and in 1854, a military band performed “Hail Columbia” in Yokohama. Even a funeral march was performed when a funeral service was held for a deceased soldier (Kasahara 2001: 88–94).

As early as 1855, the year after Commodore Perry’s second visit, the shogunate formed a training institute for the navy in Nagasaki, dispatching about forty trainees. It was soon followed by other navy institutes in many parts of Japan. All the institutes were equipped with musical instruments in addition to weapons and military uniforms (for more about the Japanese military bands, see Nakamura 2003: 135–46). In the new era, the Meiji, civil activities were not the primary duties of the military bands, and a rush of orders to perform from all quarters compelled the Department of the Navy to promote the formation of civil brass bands in 1886. The first band formed in the next year was called Tokyo City Band, and they performed polkas, waltzes and marches at horse races, celebrations and garden parties. Before long, civil brass bands went on increasing not only in Tokyo, but in other major cities, resulting in a progressively marked difference in quality among the bands by around 1910. Moreover, the number of members often had to be reduced for financial reasons, with an emphasis upon melody instruments and percussions at the sacrifice of some harmony instruments. The small-scale bands – which usually consisted of a clarinet, a cornet, a trombone, a bass drum and a side drum – tended to cater for the general public without sharing much repertoire with military bands. They played military songs as well as civil songs without much harmony, which began to be called jinta (for more about jinta, see Horiuchi 1935).

It is arguably out of the propagation of military bands that “Miya-san” (Dear Prince) (also known as “Ton’yare-bushi” (Ton’yare Song)), the first widespread popular song in the new era, was born (c. 1868). It became popular just at the time of the Meiji Restoration, when the shogunate government was overthrown, and was said to have been sung by the soldiers of the anti-shogunate army on the side of the emperor (mikado) who marched to Edo (now Tokyo), the seat of the shogunate. As Keizō Horiuchi, an authority of gunka, who regarded it as the first gunka (martial song or military song), wrote in 1942: ‘The tune is based on a Japanese folksong scale, but it is a very lively marching one with a rhythm unknown to folksongs, which might have been influenced by a fife and drum corps’ (Horiuchi [1942] 1948: 38). This song was incorporated in Gilbert and Sullivan’s misconception-ridden operetta Mikado in 1885, by adjusting it to a Western musical frame (for further details, see Mitsui and Matsumoto 2005).

In the same year, 1885, appeared “Battō-tai” (Corps with Drawn Swords) in minor scale, which had until then been unknown to the Japanese. It was composed by Charles Leroux, a French officer who had taken on the job of teaching the Imperial Military Band a year before. While soon being incorporated into popular songs, it was arranged along with another minor-scale composition of his, which he titled “Fou-sō-ka” (Fusō Song), as an instrumental piece for military marching (for the details of the appearance of “Battō-tai”, see Horiuchi 1935: 59). It is even now played officially by the Self-Defence Army Band and police brass bands. In the following decade, newly composed gunka tended to become disengaged from traditional scales, typically represented by “Teki-wa Ikuman” (Enemy Amounting to Tens of Thousands). This song, acclaimed as a masterpiece of gunka by Horiuchi, used a pentatonic major scale (CDEGAC), reflecting the development of new songs composed for primary-school education by the new government, which were called shōka. It was written in 1891, three years before the beginning of the first Sino–Japanese War, the first international war in which Japan was involved.

Then, in 1900, shortly before the Russo–Japanese War began, the most famous Japanese piece of martial music, “Gunkan Kōshinkyoku” (Battleship March, more generally known as the “Gunkan March”), was composed by Tōkichi Setoguchi, a member of the Imperial Navy Band, to lyrics written three years earlier for another tune. This energizing march in major scale, with the tune lacking the seventh note, is still regularly performed by the Self-Defence Navy Band, although the bellicose lyrics are no longer sung. Out of all the songs produced during the Russo–Japanese War (1904–5), “Sen’yū” (Comrade in Arms) (1905) is noteworthy for the way it moved the public, in contrast to more high-spirited songs, with its sentimental lament over the death of a comrade on the battlefield in Manchuria. It is set to a plaintively swaying tune in the scale of EFABCE with the addition of the lower D in the closing phrase. This song was so popular that it remained on people’s lips until the post-war period.

The Anglo–Japanese Alliance necessitated Japan entering the First World War, but its participation was limited and did not encourage the active production of gunka. Its sudden increase in the 1930s was linked with the two incidents leading up to the Second Sino–Japanese War. A decade had passed since the formation of the national radio network and the decision by record companies to popularize intentionally produced songs through recording had begun. In their first years, the recording industry and the press fell in line with the national policy of whipping up war sentiment. Soon after the Manchurian Incident in September 1931 (in which a section of Japanese-owned railroad was dynamited by Japanese forces to provide a pretext for invasion), the Asahi, a leading newspaper, worked with Nippon Victor to release “Manshū Kōshinkyoku” (Manchuarian March) in January 1932. The song, in the folksong scale, valiantly sung by Tamaki Tokuyama with the accompaniment of Victor Orchestra, was then linked up in March with Manshū Kōshinkyoku, a part-talkie film produced by Shōchiku. It obviously followed the success of “Shingun” (Marching) in 1929, which was used as the theme song of a silent film, Shingun, featuring Shōchiku stars.

Just when “Manshū Kōshinkyoku” began to be disseminated, the Shanghai Incident (a short war between the armies of Japan and China) occurred in February 1932. Late in that February, three soldiers who had killed themselves using their own bombs to smash the enemy’s barbed-wire entanglements were hero-worshipped on the front pages of the press. It prompted the recording industry, the press and the film industry to seize upon this opportunity to compete with one another to cover the incident and gain a profit from doing so. The most successful release was “Bakudan San’yūshi” (Three Brave Bombers), a song in the scale of CDEGAC, composed and recorded by Toyama Military School Band with its chorus and released by Polydor in May 1932, in cooperation with two major newspapers in Tokyo and Osaka. The papers had initiated a contest to provide lyrics for the music, and the prize-winner was the famous poet, Hiroshi Yosano.

At the outbreak of the Second Sino–Japanese War in the summer of 1937, the same two newspapers, still savouring their success with the lyric-writing contest, launched another competition, this time for the lyrics of “Shingun-no Uta” (Marching Song), which was again composed by Toyama Military School Band in the invariable scale of ABCEFA. This song, the lyrics of which were chosen out of some 50,000 entries, was released by Nicchiku in October 1937 and proved quite popular. However, the song on its B side, “Roei-no Uta” (Encampment Song), touched the hearts of the public and was more enduring, as was the case with the old “Sen’yū”, with its sentimental monologue by a soldier on the battlefield set to a melancholic tune in the scale of EFABCE with the addition of D in the closing phrase, though sung to a lively beat.

Around the time that “Shingun-no Uta” came out, the War Cabinet responded to the gravity of the war by establishing the Intelligence Division, whose first assigned task was to launch a contest for a song they titled “Aikoku Kōshinkyoku” (Patriotic March). Clearly, the contest was modelled on those initiated by the press, but this time the competiton required the creation of both the words and music. The lyrics were reportedly chosen from more than 57,000 entries, but were drastically revised by seven judges, including well-known poets, and set to a tune by Setoguchi, the composer of the immortal “Gunkan March”, who won against nearly 10,000 entries. As the Intelligence Division declared in 1937 that the copyright of the song was in the public domain,² this heroic song was recorded by various recording companies and purportedly sold more than a million copies, and the government actively broadcast the song over the radio network. At the same time, it endorsed a short film Aikoku Kōshinkyoku, in which moving images of Mount Fuji, the Imperial Palace, cherry blossoms, a fleet, a mounted troop, a tank corps and so on are accompanied by a continuous singing of this song in unison.

Needless to say, the Intelligence Division took the initiative in encouraging the composition of more patriotic songs in parallel with the expansion of the war. Record companies released songs which were connected with one war after another, including “Mugi-to Heitai” (Wheats and Soldiers) (19...