(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.

Months ago, a friend of mine forwarded to me an article reviewing a compilation of historical recordings on the Sublime Frequencies label, Sound Storing Machines: The First 78 RPM Records from Japan, 1903–1912. Japanese music, in particular that of the interwar era, has been a years-long obsession of mine that has rivaled my other enduring passion, classical music. So I had a special interest in reading this article, the most recent of several I’ve read about this release.

The music on that disc is beautiful, but the way Robert Millis, the curator of this compilation, frames it is troubling. He chastises Fred Gaisberg, the original producer of these recordings, as a “colonialist.” In light of the way Millis presents this material, not to mention how he contextualizes it on social media, his comment is ironic. Arguably, what he does is worse since he plays it up as outré gonzo exotica despite knowing better. Gaisberg never consciously stooped to such exploitative tactics. (His recordings were made primarily for the Japanese market.)

Japan during the first two decades of the 20th century was undergoing the final stages of rapid changes which had begun the moment Admiral Perry first set foot on its shores. Some of this can be gleaned from reading the later novels of Sōseki, particularly The Gate and Light and Dark; which explore the sense of confusion, the “in-betweenness” that many Japanese of the period felt. During this period, things like shin min’yō (stylized folk music inspired by the German Volkskunde movement), shōka (instructional music taught in public schools, sort of a forerunner to the Soviet “mass song”), gunka (patriotic music), and opera arias were fast becoming popular across Japan. Theatres which mounted eclectic productions of Western classical music, stylized Japanese music, and Western-style pop such as the Casino Folies, Asakusa Opera, and Takarazuka Theatre were sprouting across the empire during this period. In 1915, Nakayama Shimpei composed “Katyusha’s Song,” the first genuine wasei Western-style pop song. It became an unprecedented hit which moved tens of thousands of records and helped to popularize the gramophone in Japan. Already by then a lot of the traditional culture, in particular the music, was becoming increasingly remote to newer generations of Japanese.

The cutoff point Millis uses for this set is telling. Nipponophone (today Nippon Columbia) began issuing recordings in 1912—the very first ones ever produced in Japan by Japanese. The repertoire on those early discs was mixed: there were some sides cut of rakugo (a traditional genre of comedic prattle and dialogue), kouta (geisha songs), and other traditional genres. Primarily, however, these early domestically produced Japanese 78s consisted of military marches and arrangements of Western music led by Setoguchi Tōkichi, Japan’s “March King.” I think the very first record cut, in fact, was of his Gunkan kōshinkyoku (“Warship March”) played by the Imperial Japanese Navy Band, of whom he was director at the time. I’ve read Millis’ disparaging remarks about this music, wherein these fascinating adaptations of Western music are dismissed by him as cheap imitations which impinge upon “authentic” Japanese culture. It brings to mind a problem that I was confronted with a few years ago. A professor of Japanese 20th century art and myself were attempting to interest museums in a touring exhibit we had devised wherein Japanese culture of the 1930s, especially how the visual arts combined with the dynamic musical culture of the era, intertwined. The focus would have been on nihonga (a genre of painting inspired by traditional woodblock prints but melded with Western perspective and neoclassicism) and on contemporaneous pop music. Although we received highly complimentary remarks on our proposal, we nonetheless kept meeting with rejections. Simply put, the art was deemed not “exotic” enough and its adaptation of Western ideas seen as “imitative.” While well-meaning, Millis similarly and inadvertently dumps out an entire history which continues to have important repercussions to this day simply because the Japanese desire to be part of the rest of the world resulted in something he perceives as “inauthentic.”

The writer of the aforementioned article bolsters Millis’ argument by referencing Tanizaki Junichirō’s In Praise of Shadows:

“Japanese music is above all a music of reticence, of atmosphere. When recorded, or amplified by a loudspeaker, the greater part of its charm is lost.”

A crucial piece of context is missed (or possibly ignored). In Praise of Shadows was mostly composed in the years 1933–1934, then revised and added upon until it was finally published in 1939. It was no coincidence that the 1930s, Japan’s Jazz Age, perhaps its most culturally dynamic years (decades later the literary critic Tanabe Seiko lamented that the period had been the apogee of "Japanese civilization" and that everything after was a sad footnote) had also been the same period when national pride was in the ascendant. As Mishima Yukio later observed, both phenomena were opposite sides of the same coin. Not only that, but by the date of its publication, Japan had become deeply embroiled in war with China. Upon the formal declaration of hostilities in 1937, Japanese leaders had boasted that the war would be won within months. Instead the Japan-China War became their Vietnam or Afghanistan; a “forever war” where, paradoxically, its end seemed to grow more distant with every victory achieved. On the homefront there were divergent responses to the conflict, ranging from repudiation to total embrace of Western modernity, each side seeking the revelation of “true” Japaneseness: the former through a return to traditional culture that was spiritually superior to the poisoned chalice of modernity; the latter by demonstrating that Japan was capable of beating the West at its own game, thereby demonstrating the superiority of the Japanese character. Tanizaki's criticisms of the Western-invented gramophone dovetailed with the growing Japanese skepticism of Western modernity of his times, which was as much aesthetical as it was political. (This theme would be probed much more deeply in the coming years by the "Kyoto School" of philosophers.) Consider, for example, a very widely held view in 1930s Japan that pathological Western individualism was the root of the Great Depression. Tanizaki’s conservativism reflects his times, as well as its own anxiety about defining Japanese cultural “authenticity” in the face of competing global nationalisms. It was also a contradiction of his younger self. In the 1920s he published several essays celebrating Western influence upon Japan, particularly with respect to sexual mores, social dancing, film, and recorded music. A lot of his enthusiasm for things Western can be found in his novel Naomi (Chijin no ai or "An Idiot's Love").

It’s a problem that East Asian art in general, in particular of the 20th century, is regularly confronted with. After all, nobody ever dismisses modern Russian culture as “inauthentic,” even though it is also based on ideas imported from elsewhere in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Donald Keene writes in the forward to his translation of Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human (Ningen shikkaku) about the puzzlement felt by some American readers at what they perceived was the incongruous absorption of Western culture into 20th century Japan:

In reading his works, however, we are sometimes made aware that Dazai's understanding or use of these elements of the West is not always the same as ours. It is easy to conclude from this that Dazai had only half digested them, or even that the Japanese as a whole have somehow misappropriated our culture.
I confess that I find this parochialism curious in the United States. Here where our suburbs are jammed with a variety of architecture which bears no relation to the antecedents of either the builders or the dwellers; where white people sing Negro spirituals and a Negro soprano sings Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera; where our celebrated national dishes, the frankfurter, the hamburger, and chow mein betray by their very names non-American origins: can we with honesty rebuke the Japanese for a lack of purity in their modern culture? And can we criticize them for borrowing from us, when we are almost as conspicuously in their debt? We find it normal that we drink tea, their beverage, but curious that they should drink whiskey, ours. Our professional decorators, without thinking to impart to us an adequate background in Japanese aesthetics, decree that we should brighten our rooms with Buddhist statuary or with lamps in the shapes of paper-lanterns. Yet we are apt to find it incongruous if a Japanese ornaments his room with examples of Christian religious art or a lamp of Venetian glass. Why does it seem so strange that another country should have a culture as conglomerate as our own? […]
A writer with such [a modern] intelligence—Dazai was one—may also be attracted to the Japanese traditional culture, but it will virtually be with the eyes of a foreigner who finds it appealing, but remote. Dostoyevsky and Proust are much closer to him than any Japanese writer of, say, the 18th century. Yet we should be unfair to consider such a writer a cultural déraciné; he is not much farther removed from his eighteenth century, after all, than we are from ours. In his case, to be sure, a foreign culture has intervened, but that culture is now in its third generation in Japan. No Japanese thinks of his business suit as an outlandish or affected garb; it is not only what he normally wears, but was probably also the costume of his father and grandfather before him. To wear Japanese garments would actually be strange and uncomfortable for most men. The majority of Japanese of today wear modern Western culture also as they wear their clothes, and to keep reminding them that their ancestors originally attired themselves otherwise is at once bad manners and foolish.

It’s a pity that Millis didn’t heed Keene’s parting advice.