(Japanese names are here rendered in their native style, surname first.)
Recently I watched part of the NHK drama Boogie-Woogie, an ongoing television serial dramatization of the life of Kasagi Shizuko, the celebrated “Queen of the Boogie” whose voice—enlivened with a Piaf-like vibrato that even at the height of exuberance conveys an inexplicably tragic quality—was part of the soundtrack of Japan’s immediate postwar. Cinema everywhere seems to be in decline, but this trend is especially acute in Japan. Hard to believe that Frank Capra—who shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor watched several Japanese wartime films at the behest of the US Department of War, including The Tale of Tank Commander Nishizumi from 1940—once declared: “We can’t beat this kind of thing. We make a film like that maybe once in a decade. We haven’t got the actors.”[1] Since at least the 1980s, however, Japan’s films have been almost invariably drowned in a well-nigh insufferable molasses of prissiness, self-pity, twee aesthetics, and saccharine sickliness. Boogie-Woogie was no different, unfortunately, and after about 30 minutes I gave up and shut the computer off.
I first discovered interwar Japanese popular music in 2010, purely by chance. What first captivated me was the voice production of many early Western-style Japanese singers like Tokuyama Tamaki, Yotsuya Fumiko, Namioka Sōichirō, Fujiyama Ichirō, et al—most of them were clearly classically-trained and very well at that. Although there was limited genre crossover in the West during this same period, it was nowhere near the extent and pervasiveness heard in Japan during the 1920s to mid-1930s.
In the late 1930s, a new generation of singers like Kasagi began to emerge, whose voice production was specifically based on their Western pop counterparts. This is immediately apparent in one of her first major recordings, Rappa to musume from 1939, which can be translated as “A Girl and her Horn”; a song she growled out in blackface at the time, which may explain why she was sometimes referred to as “Japan’s Billy Holiday.”[2] Her sheer intensity as she sings and scats through the closing verses—“In this street and that/everybody sings, everybody sings/this song, this song, this stylish song”—verges upon the visceral and defies the crackled veil of shellac even nearly 90 years on. (Saitō Hiroyoshi, her equally impassioned partner on trumpet,[3] went on in the postwar to become the principal of the Kansai Philharmonic Orchestra, later renamed the Osaka Philharmonic.)[4]
As I briefly watched Boogie-Woogie, my mind kept returning to the depiction of the immediate postwar in Fukusaku Kinji’s 1973 Battles Without Honor and Humanity; particularly, a scene at a black market, wherein a vendor’s nabe full of cooked rice is upturned and strewn on the filthy street, only to be desperately lunged at and devoured by various starving passersby. That grit, that carnality, that quotidian smut of dreary corporeality—these are exactly the qualities abundant in Kasagi’s best recordings and totally missing in Boogie-Woogie (and most contemporary Japanese cinema).
Postwar, Kasagi reigned supreme for a time; the vocal embodiment of “the hopes as well as the contradictions that emerged in Japan” after its defeat.[5] She, too, at the end of the 1940s would begin to be superseded by younger singers, particularly the then still teenaged Misora Hibari. The younger singer’s voice and sexualized stage presence at first provoked the revulsion of Japanese critics who found her to be the personification of national ruin,[6] but by the time of her death in 1989 became the most beloved of all of Japan’s pop singers of the postwar.[7]
Among the very few classically-trained singers whose career persisted in popular music late into the Shōwa era was the baritone Tachikawa Sumito, who died in 1985 from a stroke that occurred in mid-performance at the age of 56. Acclaimed in Japan for his performances of Papageno and Figaro in The Magic Flute and The Barber of Seville respectively, he was also widely known for singing popular music, dōyō (a Japanese genre of children’s songs), and for hosting various programs on radio and television. In defiance of enduring Western stereotypes of East Asians as “impassive” and “inscrutable”, the native Japanese capacity for emotionality unto bathos is probably second only to that typically associated with Russians. In proportion, as heard here in Tachikawa’s rendition of the Sugiyama Haseo song Kingyo-ya (Goldfish Shop)—whose nostalgic recollection of childhood images, disparately tossed by the fickle winds of memory, is evocatively alluded to in its spare arrangement for flute, vibraphone, and guitar—it is sweet without being cloying; all the more moving not only for how rare such heartfelt expression tends to be publicly expressed in the modern world, but for the implication that the vanished world being revisited by this singer, born in 1929, is the Japan of the 1930s; a period that the literary critic Tanabe Seiko retrospectively mourned as having been the apex of her nation’s “modern culture,” before the forever war in China that soon metastasized into a global conflict “dumped water on it, made it shrivel, and wither.”[8]
But when taken to its extreme, one gets the simpering, miserable, and dishonest vacuity of things like Boogie-Woogie.
Notes
[1] Dower, John W. (2014). “Japan’s Beautiful Modern War”. In Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World. New York City: The New Press. ISBN 978-1-59558-937-8. Page 98.
[2] Mori, Masato (2010). ニッポン・スウィングタイム [Nippon Swing Time] (in Japanese). Tokyo: Kōdansha. ISBN 978-4-06-216622-5. Page 238.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Anonymous (2010). 齋藤廣義 (in Japanese). Kotobank. URL: https://kotobank.jp/word/斉藤%20広義-1671461. Retrieved March 12, 2024.
[5] Nagahara, Hiromu (2017). Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and its Discontents. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-97169-1. Page 153.
[6] Shamoon, Deborah (Autumn 2009). “Misora Hibari and the Girl Star in Postwar Japanese Cinema”. Signs. 35 (1). University of Chicago Press. Pages 135–137.
[7] Ibid., p. 133.
[8] Sato, Hiroaki; Inose, Naoki (2012). “Chapter 3: The Boy Who Writes Poems”. In Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima. Berkeley, California: Stone Bridge Press. ISBN 978-1-61172-008-2. Page 58.
