Japanese Popular Music

Culture, Authenticity and Power

Carolyn Stevens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134179510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

Japanese popular culture has been steadily increasing in visibility both in Asia and beyond in recent years. This book examines Japanese popular music, exploring its historical development, technology, business and production aspects, audiences, and language and culture.

Based both on extensive textual and aural analysis, and on anthropological fieldwork, it provides a wealth of detail, finding differences as well as similarities between the Japanese and Western pop music scenes. Carolyn Stevens shows how Japanese popular music has responded over time to Japan's relationship to the West in the post-war era, gradually growing in independence from the political and cultural hegemonic presence of America. Similarly, the volume explores the ways in which the Japanese artist has grown in independence vis-à-vis his/her role in the production process, and examines in detail the increasingly important role of the jimusho, or the entertainment management agency, where many individual artists and music industry professionals make decisions about how the product is delivered to the public. It also discusses the connections to Japanese television, film, print and internet, thereby providing through pop music a key to understanding much of Japanese popular culture more widely.

1 Introduction

Popular music is the background noise of our everyday lives. “Popular music” has been defined as the “music that people value the most” (Blacking in Fujie 1989: 197) or music that is “accessible to a broader range of people,” most often through the mass media (Wade 2005: 45). The English word “popular” arises from the concept of “people”; to be truly “popular,” it cannot be exclusive; it stands for and comes from “an aggregation structured of multiple [types] of people” (Yamada 2003: 4). Popular music must be accessible, with no special training required to facilitate its appreciation and consumption. Economic class and social status will always have a part in defining audiences, but ideally popular music transcends many of these boundaries. Its existence is dependent on its integration with the mass media, which are explicitly aimed at a cross-class, multilayered public audience.

The meaning of popular music relies on a number of defining attributes including descriptive terms such as popularity (a term that includes sales figures, radio play, and critical versus general acclaim), a recognizable structure (“introduction,” “alternation between verses and chorus,” “verse progression,” and “conclusion” [Hennion 1990: 189–191]), and a sociohistorical context. With this in mind, we are reminded that popular music is not merely about sound. A large social collective of creative musicians, executive producers, distribution intermediaries, and interpretive audiences – in other words, human beings themselves –contribute to the definition of any kind of music. This book is about the people, the popular, in Japanese postwar music. Therefore, this book is filled with a variety of characters: musicians, managers, recording studio producers, record label executives, retailers, critics, and fans.

This book's aim is to define and analyze developments in Japanese popular music since 1945. Japan is the world's second largest music market (Condry 2004a: 345) with overall sales in 2002 of almost 4.6 billion yen (Ugaya 2005b: 165), and Japan has held this position in the international market since the late 1980s (Kimura 1991: 328). With these figures, it is not surprising that the Japanese popular music industry has captured the interest of foreign audiences, even those who are not well versed in the language or culture. What are its main characteristics, its primary modes of production, and its musical messages? This volume contains five connected yet self-contained essays that address these questions regarding Japan's cultural, social, and economic practice in the field of twentieth-century popular music. Due to the vast parameters of this market and the similarly large number of analytic issues that arise from it, I have necessarily narrowed my focus to three salient concepts, intertwined and interdependent: culture, authenticity, and power. In these essays, I explore their definitions, how they interact with each other, and what they mean for the artist, the producer, and the audience of Japanese popular music.

In the discussion of popular music, we include, implicitly, in our definitions varied but specific notions about production processes, consumption patterns, audience, taste, and value. Negus writes that when we talk about music, we are really talking about genre, a term that combines both the music and the audience under one rubric (1999: 27–28); in other words, music does not exist in a social vacuum.

Despite this contextualization, genre is as subjective as personal preference, and these tastes die-hard. Genre classification has long been a source of contention between scholars, critics, and fans of any nationality: take “rock,” for example. One of the gurus of Western rock and pop music analysis, Simon Frith, has argued that “rock is dead” since the 1980s: “[t]here are now just scattered ‘taste markets’ ” (1994: 240). Critics do not agree on a unified definition of rock that includes aesthetic content, the audience, and its consumption styles. This is not dissimilar to what has occurred in late postwar Japan. Condry offers Miyadai's concept of “islands of taste” as a way to describe the current scene, where “increasing diversification” in Japan's popular music market has led to specialized modes of consumption (2004b: 20). Japanese popular music contains a wide variety of artistic expressions, but I have focused on mainstream (in other words, widely recognized and distributed) popular music. Perhaps because of a clearer sense of demarcation, other important Japanese pop music genres, such as idol music, enka, jazz, hip-hop, and underground music such as “noise,” have been explored in depth by other scholars (e.g., Aoyagi 2005; Atkins 2001; Caspary and Manzenreiter 2003; Condry 2006; Yano 2002). Instead of specific genre, I look at music which has had a wide-ranging impact on Japanese audiences based on nonmusical criteria such as innovation, sales performances, media coverage, and longevity.

Methodology: writing about Japanese popular music

My interest in Japanese popular music stems from my experience in a number of roles: as an academic, trained in cultural anthropology and interested in music and its representations; as a consumer and a fan who lived in Japan for an extended period of time and enjoyed Japanese popular music; and lastly, as a participant and a somewhat unseasoned professional in the Japanese show business industry. Thus, my methodology is also multiple: textual analysis of written, visual, and aural materials; and participant/observer fieldwork – as a consumer, who integrated music into her daily life and interacted with other consumers in a social network, and as a producer, who applied her musical training and linguistic skills to a production process for financial gain. This book is a result of all these activities: reading, listening, experiencing, watching, participating, and writing.

The role of producer represents a rare opportunity for academic researchers; working directly in the music industry gave me insights into the way music was made and distributed in Japan. I started in 1992 as a casual contract employee of an entertainment agency in Tokyo where I contributed English language materials for promotion goods (such as concert tour posters and pamphlets); later I graduated to writing song lyrics. When I started working at the company in April 1992, I did not really know much about the Japanese world of entertainment; much of my exposure was limited to what I had seen on television (later, I learned, the most important disseminator of popular music to the Japanese public). By 1995, I had attended dozens of live concerts, was a voracious music magazine reader, had collected hundreds of Japanese CDs, and had two liner credits for songs in commercial release to my name, despite the fact that I was born, raised, and educated in the United States. Interestingly, about this time, I began to lose interest in US and UK popular music, which constituted the mainstay of my compact disc library, and began to listen to, almost exclusively, Japanese popular music.

What can an American-born “convert” add to our understanding of Japanese popular music? Witzleben's “Whose Ethnomusicology? Western Ethnomusicology and the Study of Asian Music” (1997) is useful in this discussion of popular music in a non-Western context. Many Western ethnomusicologists and anthropologists have framed non-Western cultural phenomena according to their own conceptual frameworks. There are, however, “extensive indigenous written traditions of talking about music: history, theory, aesthetics, and the relationship to musical traditions to cultural sensibilities and other art forms” (Witzleben 1997: 222), and this is equally true in the context of Japanese popular music. Many Japanese publications on popular music are authored by members of the Japanese Association for the Study of Popular Music (JASPM). JASPM was established in November 1990 in Tokyo. This academic organization is under the umbrella of the corresponding international association, and JASPM hosted the 9th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) in Kanazawa, Japan, in 1997, showcasing Japan's contributions to the global ethnomusicological academic community.¹

It is also important, however, to acknowledge the vigorous nonacademic musical publishing industry in Japan, aimed at general readers, in paperback and magazine formats; I have benefited from reading these publications as well, despite their label as “sales-oriented products” in contrast to “ ‘serious’ writing” about music (de Ferranti 2002: 199). Some of the writers in this field have academic qualifications; others do not, but I have included them for two reasons. First, because they are widely read by consumers, they have real influence; secondly, because the publication time lag is very short, the content is more up to date than academic books and journals.

Popular media writers are called ongaku hyôronka (or ongaku hihyôka) in Japanese, and accomplished music critics or commentators use a subtle blend of reporting, criticism, and social analysis. They are a small and elite group of freelance writers who often cross boundaries between print, visual, and audio media, serving as writers as well as experts who appear on television as radio shows.² Largely, these critics “introduce” music (e.g., new artists, or new work by established artists) to the public. Hyôronka tend to specialize by genre both within national boundaries and outside them – in Japanese rap or overseas reggae music, for example – creating a veneer of authority.

The status of hyôronka is often dictated by status of the publication with which they are associated. Some of the more respected music magazines in Japan include Myujikku Magajin (Music Magazine) and Rockin' On,³ but these two tend to focus on rock rather than on pop, reflecting the association of “serious” writing with “serious” music; pop stars tend to be featured in fan publications and/or weekly gossip publications about public figures, including politicians and actors. Even in elite publications, content is generally uniform, revolving around interviews with musicians, photo layouts, concert information, and tour and album reviews.

In recent years, the Japanese terms hyôronka and hihyôka have been gradually replaced by the English inspired loan word raitâ (“writer”). More closely aligned with the “industry,” these journalists work to promote contracted artists. Similarly, a new group with influence in the pop music media is the baiyâ (“buyer”) for large record franchise shops (Tower Records and HMV, e.g., which both have a strong presence in the urban sales market). “Buyers” are interviewed by raitâs as experts, and the larger and the more fashionable the location of the franchise, the more respected is the knowledge of the buyer. Their neutrality, however, is questionable due to their explicit relationship to the retailer (a Tower record buyer, in most cases, will recommend new artists with which their chain has retail contracts). At the same time, their affiliation with a multinational corporation also gives them a veneer of sophistication and credibility to the general public, and their ideas carry weight with journalists who interview them for pieces in magazines and newspapers.

There are always shadowy rumors of writers' relationships with record companies and Oricon, the Japanese equivalent to Billboard in the United States (established 1967 and incorporated in 1999). Not surprisingly, it is alleged that some writers receive kickbacks from these companies to portray the artist in a favorable light. Rigorous reviewing is usually eschewed for gentler “introductions” to the new work of established artists or to new artists breaking into the field. The extent of this corruption is unknown; despite these problems, the popular press cannot be completely ignored. Japanese pop music texts from ongaku hyôronka, raitâ, and baiyâ have influenced audiences' interpretations of trends, creating a mass “preferred reading” of pop music. These writers – more so than the academics – are the real “arbiters of taste,” shaping the public response to the mass media. In sum, I have tried to absorb the “preferred readings” from these nonacademic publications, noting the potential for conflict of interest where appropriate, but also being mindful of their very real role in shaping public reactions, using them as a kind “primary source.” Too few of the writings of Japanese lay writers as well as academic ethnomusicologists have been translated, and I hope this book accomplishes an introduction of their ideas to English-speaking readers.

“Every researcher is an insider in some respects and an outsider in others” (Witzleben 1997: 223). This quote brings to mind a fruitful collaboration with a Japanese ethnomusicologist in the 1990s when we undertook research on Japanese music television.⁴ My colleague, as a “native,” had decades of experience with the culture, and he joked often that I was the real “expert” in the field. He did not own a television, and thus had not watched music television since he left home as a university student. I, on the other hand, was a “nonnative amateur” but a ferocious TV addict, informing him of the latest developments with respect to SMAP and other high-profile J-pop acts on television. Together, we explored Japanese music television from both sides, past and present, inside and outside, an enlightening experience for both of us. Reprising Witzleben, we all benefit from the insights of both insiders and outsiders, Japanese and English sources and ideas, in the exploration of a field that is equally culturally diverse.

The interaction between culture, authenticity, and power

The field of postwar Japanese popular music has a rich and colorful landscape; to make sense of the dizzying array of artists, songs, and trends, I identify three key concepts – cultural identity, authenticity, and positional power – which interact with each other to explain how certain trends are created and promoted to the public.

Cultural identity in any context is evolving in the current age of globalization. Cultural identity in Japanese popular music can be perceived from a variety of standpoints – the French anime fan's perspective, for example, will differ from that of the Tokyo resident. Japanese cultural identity in popular music is defined as a created concept in response to external scrutiny. It is more often defined negatively rather than affirmatively (e.g., it is easier to say what it is not rather than what it is) and responds to changes in international relationships. Shared cultural preferences give rise to a framework of values, but this framework can, and does, change over time based on the changes in the power relations between those positions. I call an awareness of the relationships between these positions “positionality.” The consequences that arise from these relationships are acclimatized to global trends; as diplomatic, cultural, and financial positions change, so does the awareness of the relationships between these positions, which can be held by individuals, groups, corporations, or nations. One example of the recent shifts in positionality in Japanese cultural identity is what has been frequently termed kokusaika, or internationalization, resulting in new modes of cultural expression that encompass a variety of foreign symbols but are unmistakably “Japanese.”

Positionality can take its point of reference from a variety of sites. The everyday business activities of the Japanese popular music industry are also affected by shifts in the positions of any of the players involved, and the audience is always conscious of these roles. Changes in the aesthetics of the market – what's hot, what's not – are related to positions in the field of production (à la Bourdieu). In the domestic arena, the postwar Japanese popular music scene saw great internal changes in the roles of composer, producer, and artist, and their related images of “professionalism” versus “musicality” and again, “authenticity.” In the early postwar period, professionalism prevailed; the 1970s saw a conflation of these roles. As the market peaked in the mid-to-late 1990s, artists' needs and audience tastes were diversified enough to support a number of models: the old “professionalism,” the “amateur” who was self-produced, and the latest hybrid form, the “retired musician/new generation professional.” Each mode of production (which is constructed of social roles with various power relations) is associated with its own style and values, and projected image.

Audiences value cultural identity – whether Japanese or non-Japanese – for its authenticity. Japanese identity is “authentic” when it is distanced from the globalized culture of the industrialized urban centers. Perhaps precisely because of this, non-Japanese identity is “authentic” when it is associated with these urban centers and is often best expressed through the use of foreign languages. Once “authentic” expressions are established, to be accepted in a competitive market, an “authentic connection” between artist and audience must be established. This relationship is mediated by media technology, which has evolved over the past fifty years to include digital technology and satellite transmissions –all methods of producing and consuming that musicians in the early 1950s would have never dreamed of. While technology is thought to distance people from art in most contexts, in the Japanese pop music industry, it works to enhance notions of authenticity in the artist/audience relationship. Authenticity is a crucial concept to the construction of the definition of Japanese popular music; yet its meaning is hotly contested. According to Baudrillard, our postmodern world is so multilayered that there is no “authentic reality” anymore: everything is a reflected construction. Yet, even in the most postmodern society, we continue to use the word “authentic” to describe a positive aesthetic experience. Style, technology, and language all work to create an “authentic” musical experience, highly valued by the Japanese listener.

Chapter outline

An understanding of the mechanics of culture, authenticity, and power helps to make sense of many of the trends in Japanese popular music. Specifically, these themes are addressed in five content-based chapters summarized here.

Definitions

This chapter explores concepts of cultural identity or cultural awareness, in Japanese popular music, both on the part of native and nonnative listeners. This cultural awareness is dependent on a constructed “tradition” as a response to Westernization (or Americanization). Musical concepts particular to Japan are introduced, allowing a demarcation of the traditional spheres of “Japanese” music (and musicology) and “European” musicology, so that postwar Japanese popul...