Music Between Tradition and Modernity in Japan
The vast majority of music produced and consumed in Japan today falls under the broad umbrella of popular music. Like popular music elsewhere in the industrialised world, it reflects the global movement of technology and culture that has shaped musical life since the early twentieth century. Studying it draws on sociological and cultural-studies approaches to the modern popular arts. Yet both contemporary popular styles and the older genres typically labelled "Japanese music" (邦楽) can be understood as elements within a larger body of practices—what we might call "Japanese musical culture."
Music research has, for the most part, treated these two spheres as separate fields. The difference in their origins and fundamental stylistic traits has kept them apart. Nevertheless, theoretical frameworks exist that can help bridge this disciplinary divide. Tools grounded in the study of both textual and contextual aspects of historical music allow us to explore connections between recent practices and those of the more distant past.
A musical culture comprises not only technical features—melody, rhythm, instruments, performance techniques, and formal processes—but also a network of contexts: social, personal, and political conditions that make musical experience possible. The notion of "Japanese musical culture" might sound like an ahistorical concept, one that isolates Japanese phenomena from broader intellectual discourse. It need not, however, carry that baggage. Rather than staking a claim for Japanese pop as a topic isolated within Japan-focused scholarship, viewing it as part of Japanese musical culture is grounded in the idea that a habitus is at work in every act of music-making within a given cultural and linguistic framework.
Bourdieu introduced habitus as a way of theorising social practice: internalised habits of perception and aesthetic preference that mediate between collective and individual action. In music, habitus accounts for the persistence of traits of considerable historical depth—traits often regarded as emblematic indigenous features—that never fully disappear. On the textual side, these can include particular melodic-rhythmic patterns and sonic preferences. On the contextual side, they involve performative behaviours and social practices surrounding creation, transmission, and performance. To paraphrase Bourdieu, this is history turned into musical second nature, encompassing both inherited and newly acquired elements.
An equally useful framework comes from Raymond Williams, who proposed the concepts of dominant, residual, and emergent cultural elements. Williams stressed the complex interrelations among these categories, insisting they are inseparable from the whole cultural process. No element—not even a dominant one—can be treated as static. In the Japanese context, the dominant refers to the hegemony of Euro-American popular music styles, which have served as a referential frame since the mid-twentieth century. Residual traits of historical practice therefore exist in a relationship with dominant forms.
Williams’s distinction between the archaic (consciously acknowledged as belonging to the past), active residual elements (“may have an alternative or even oppositional relation to the dominant culture”), and elements “wholly or largely incorporated into the dominant culture” is crucial for understanding localisation. Recognising and explaining elements from earlier practice in all three relationships is indispensable for a systematic study of hybrid popular musics. This article begins that exploration for the Japanese case by focusing on incorporated residual traits.
The disciplinary landscape for Japanese popular music research
Japanese-language scholarship on Japanese popular music has developed in relative isolation from the study of traditional genres. An outline of this disciplinary setting helps explain why.
The term “Japanese music” (邦楽) in contemporary academic usage refers almost exclusively to traditional Japanese music (dentō ongaku or hōgaku)—genres originating before the end of the Meiji period (1868–1912), plus later works deeply rooted in those earlier styles. One could argue for including Japanese jazz players, concert works by composers like the late Takemitsu Tōru, mainstream pop singers from the 1970s and 1980s, or the eclectic J-pop of Hamasaki Ayumi and Shiina Ringo. The music industry itself has long divided products between “Japanese” and “foreign” (on ethnic rather than stylistic grounds). But musicology has not followed suit. Research remains overwhelmingly concerned with traditions that predate modernity, showing little audible Western influence.
“Japanese music” therefore stays firmly pre-modern in its disciplinary identity.
This discursive sphere is created not only by musicians and audiences but also by a substantial body of writing about traditional music in various media. Looking at academic discourse specifically, the history of writing about 邦楽 in Japanese is scarcely longer than it is in European languages—just over a century. The concept of a unified set of genres covering the nation’s musical life is itself modern, stemming from Meiji-era intellectuals who studied nineteenth-century European writings on music. Only in the late 1880s did one writer attempt a comprehensive national music history (the Kabu Ongaku Ryakushi), distinct from the many earlier genre-specific histories.
The terms defining “Japanese music” throughout much of the twentieth century were thus shaped during the mid-to-late Meiji period. The government-sponsored Music Investigation Committee (ongaku torishirabe-gakari) in the 1880s and the Hōgaku Enquiry Committee (hōgaku chōsa-gakari) from 1907 onward considered only pre-Meiji music worthy of study. Regional folk songs (minʼyō)—probably the most common form of music-making for most Japanese at the time—received little attention. Moreover, some of the most distinguished committee members expressed moral revulsion at the vulgarity of Edo-period song repertories, often using the term ingaku (indecent music), echoing late-Edo Neo-Confucianist commentary. From the start, both contemporary and even much historical popular music was cast in a negative light by scholars whose authority came from government appointments.
This early exclusion of popular songs (especially zokkyoku) from scholarly attention meant that Japan developed no equivalent of the lineage linking folk-music studies to popular music research found in the United States. The case for integrated study of the populace’s music-making has not yet been made strongly by a Japanese researcher, though it is implied in aspects of Koizumi Fumio’s work and some writing by the popular critic Nakamura Tōyō.
Since the late 1930s, the field has been largely mediated by the Tōyō Ongaku Gakkai. Though its journal publishes articles on Asian and even non-Asian music, traditional Japanese music makes up the bulk of the content and it remains the central outlet for new research articles in Japanese. Across all sixty-five issues, only a handful of articles concern modern Japanese music that could be called “popular.” Those few works focus on genres firmly rooted in the late Meiji and Taishō eras (roughly 1885–1925)—for example, naniwa-bushi musical narrative, enka-shi street singers’ songs, and music for silent film screenings. These genres are discussed almost solely in terms of their stylistic debt to older repertories, with little attention to features that emphasise modernity over tradition.
Articles on Japanese music occasionally appear in other journals, especially the Tokyo-based Musicology (Nippon Ongaku Gakkai). Until 1998, no studies of twentieth-century popular music appeared there. Since then, a number of articles and panel documentation from the society’s annual meeting show a strong recent growth of interest in popular music among younger scholars. Still, writing and presentations focusing on Japanese popular music per se remain rare.
The Japanese Education Ministry now requires all students to learn a traditional instrument during three years of schooling, which has raised the profile of Japanese music in music-education journals. It remains to be seen whether educators will also consider Japanese popular music from the last century as viable material in a Japanese linguistic and cultural context. Tsubono Yukiko (1991) and Koizumi Kyōko (2000) have forcefully raised the issue of popular music’s neglect in Japanese music education, but no work has yet addressed the question of relative representation of Japanese versus non-Japanese repertory.
Popular music hybrids and the research that addresses them
The syncretic, hybrid music born during the 120-odd years since the first experiments combining Western and indigenous elements in popular songs has been called many things: taishū ongaku, popyurā ongaku, popyurā myūjikku, ryūkōka, enka, kayōkyoku, J-poppu (J-pop), among others. To date, academic treatment of this music is relatively thin. Most writing has been historical, and within that, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period of intensive change—has received the most attention.
A journal for popular music research called Popyurā Ongaku Kenkyū (Popular Music Studies) and a Working Paper series were established in the late 1990s by the Japanese Association for the Study of Popular Music (JASPM). A few articles on Japanese music appear there. Nevertheless, perhaps to raise awareness of Japanese pop’s relevance to international scholarship, some of the most substantial recent articles have been written in English and published outside Japan.
In Japanese, two volumes by the sociologist Ogawa Hiroshi deal with mediated music’s functions in society from the 1970s through the 1990s (1988 and 1993). Two essay collections are also notable: one by Koizumi Fumio (1984), and an anthology on gender in Japanese pop (Kitagawa 1999). As yet, no book-length scholarly survey or introduction to Japanese popular music exists; nor is there a Japanese-language textbook for university courses. The question of Japanese popular music as Japanese music has not received sustained treatment, although some work explores links between present and past practices. References to culturally specific traits of style and behaviour are rare, even though musicians themselves have often articulated the difficulty of reconciling Japanese cultural identity with the Euro-American roots of jazz, rock, and other genres.
The role of hyōron criticism
Academic journals represent only part of the serious writing on Japanese popular music. Japan, like many other countries, generates an abundance of texts spurred on by the popularity of the music itself; the music industry is directly involved in producing and promoting commercially promising books, magazines, and websites. But there is also a significant body of work that occupies a liminal space between sales-oriented industry output and strict scholarship: the many publications by critics, journalists, and academics writing for a general readership, outside conventional scholarly formats. These include histories of periods or genres, characterisations of specific songs or song groups, and extensive lyric analyses linked to social and political history.
The common Japanese term for such writings is hyōron (and their authors are hyōronka, even if they also produce strictly academic texts as gakusha). It is well documented that, since the founding of the modern university system in the late nineteenth century, the role of the public intellectual has had considerable social value in Japan. The tradition of essay-writing for nonspecialist readers (zuihitsu) has been a recognised part of academic life. This reflects both a general culture of high-engagement reading—books on difficult intellectual subjects sell briskly at railway kiosks and are advertised on the front pages of some daily newspapers—and a relative fluidity between academic and public discourse.
Prolific commentary by hyōronka appears across multiple media. Much of what has been written about Japanese popular music—including some pieces by Koizumi Fumio and Satō Yoshiaki’s important recent book—belongs to the hyōron mode. Scholars who produce academic texts also often work as hyōronka, writing extensive liner notes, reviews of recordings and performances, and participating in interviews and round-table dialogues (taidan).
Koizumi Fumio’s legacy
For writings on popular music by scholars known for work on traditional Japanese music, one must turn to the final publications of Koizumi Fumio and those of his former student Kojima Tomiko, from the early 1980s. Koizumi is famous for his seminal studies of mode and tonal principles in Japanese music, published from the late 1950s, and for numerous texts on the musics of Japan and other Asian cultures. In his last book, a collection of lectures and essays called Kayōkyoku no Kōzō (The Structure of Pop Songs), he sought to demonstrate empirically the hybrid melodic features of mainstream songs and enka from the 1960s through the early 1980s. He did this by showing how many of these tunes—in modified form—exhibit modal characteristics he had earlier found to be fundamental in Japanese folk song and other traditional genres. For Koizumi this was a logical extension of his old work. In a passage from the 1984 book, meddled with only a few weeks before his death at a shockingly young age, Koizumi says with triumphant defiance: “The modern popular songs that we think of as 'new' are, in spite of all their superficial novelty, rooted entirely in traditional parameters linking them both concretely and dialectically to the vocal era even before the Meiji dawn.“ No, he didn't say that medieval phrasing verbatim – but he made a complementary remark on musical continuity that deserves faithful preservation (see original transcript p.18).
Not long after this book appeared in June—the exact publication date being obscured by rumour like early testimony never clearly officialised—Koizumi died, mourned discreetly nationwide. He had barely touched the typescripts of his mature companion project on J-pop tectonics and industry consciousness documented visually.
Koizumi’s work had opened up a significant musicological angle for understanding hybridity in Japanese popular music, yet this potentially influential aspect was taken up as part of the research agenda of only one of his many students, Kojima Tomiko. Her conviction that modern popular music should not be separated from the broader context of Japanese music aligns with Koizumi and is reflected in her work on shin minyō (new folk songs) in the popular market of the 1910s–20s. A persistent assertion in her writings is that a century of Western musical training at the heart of Japan’s school music curriculum has produced a nationwide condition: devotion to Western-style music on the surface (the musical tatemae, implying public, superficial behaviour), but a continuation of indigenous musical sensibility and age-old techniques underneath (the musical honne—a more personal, deeply felt realm of experience).
Over the past ten years, a few other writers on Japanese pop have drawn on elements of Koizumi’s work. In most cases, Koizumi is cited in arguments for the centrality of certain pentatonic scales and 4th-based formations—the latter Koizumi had called “tetrachordal”—in Japanese melodic expression. One of the more sophisticated approaches comes from Satō Yoshiaki, who teaches in the Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies Unit at Tokyo University and describes his research field as Representational Culture Theory (hyōshō bunkaron). Satō has an academic background in American literary studies but has also written books on post-war cultural history and texts of popular music criticism. In J-Pop Shinkaron (“A Theory of J-Pop’s Development”), a Heibonsha pocket book aimed at general readers, Satō attempts to account for what he calls the most conspicuous period of change in Japanese listeners’ attitudes toward Western pop—and their incorporation of American styles into their own pop composition—during the decade of the Shōwa 40s (1965–74). He also addresses the causes
and consequences of that change. Among the causes, he posits an increased receptivity to contemporary American music, particularly due to marked similarities in pentatonic scale types and tetrachordal functions in American R&B and Motown hits of the mid-to-late 1960s and those of the hybrid shōka (school songs), gunka (military songs), and ryūkōka (commercially circulated songs) enjoyed by Japanese since the early twentieth century (Satō 1999, pp. 54–60). A second recent example of Koizumi’s work being used on pop melodies is a book by rock music critic Yamashita Kunihiko (2000). The core of the text is melodic and harmonic analysis (presented as accessibly as possible, but still reliant on transcription examples), in which models of melodic principles proposed by both Koizumi and composer Shibata Minao serve as jumping-off points for an entire chapter on “Asian” scales and their roles in the compositions of Sakamoto Ryūichi and Komuro Tetsuya.
Much of this writing occasionally veers into the realm of nihonjinron (theories of Japaneseness), making claims about a unique and ineffable musical sensibility supported by the “evidence” of rudimentary melodic analysis—though such claims are voiced less openly than in some of Kojima’s work from the 1980s, penned during a heyday for nihonjinron. It would be a pity if this ideological coloring discouraged others from using some of the concepts and tools Koizumi developed. Even for melodic and harmonic structure, much analytical work still needs to be done to define typical features of J-pop since the late 1970s, including comparisons of modal elements in the most recent song styles with those Koizumi examined in detail twenty-five years ago.
At the same time, melodic and harmonic features are just two closely related facets among many elements of hybrid practice in this music; but that larger picture I will sketch in the last section of this essay.
Evidence for musical keishō in Japanese pop
Koizumi’s investigation of modal practice in enka melodies is one example of applying knowledge of Japan’s historical music traditions to pop music, aiming to build an understanding of areas related to earlier practice. Koizumi and the few who have adopted elements of his work consider pop songs primarily in terms of a single parameter—melody—which can be textualised using conventional musicological tools like transcription into Western musical notation. But what might be gained from a broader application of knowledge from traditional music, where manifestations of musical keishō can be sought both in a wider range of textual facets of pop music and in contextual facets that shape listeners’ and viewers’ experience of the music and its performers? For now, I will approach this question first through brief examples concerning the “textual” facets of vocal tone colour and musical terminology, then suggest some contextual features that future studies might explore.
Vocal tone colour as a textual facet of performance
The issue of vocal production (hassei-hō) has received little attention as an important area of continuity from traditional music practice. It seems a logical element to examine for evidence of keishō, because vocal production is strongly tied to Japanese language use and thus changes relatively slowly through musical culture contact. In every traditional song and narrative recitation genre, there is an elaborate discourse about producing appropriate vocal tone quality; without it, a performance is considered aesthetically inadequate. The way of talking about vocal qualities is learned from one’s teacher. In pop music, such discourse is less regulated because it arises from fans’ appreciation of a singer’s style rather than through a teacher-student relationship. Evaluative terminology for singers’ voices, then, changes rapidly and is difficult to pin down, but the sound itself remains a tangible link to past practice.
One of the most persistent vocal qualities—in traditional and popular music since the first recordings of Japanese performances—is that of a thin, somewhat rasping yet strong tone produced by forcing a narrow, dense air stream through constricted vocal cords. This effect and its technique are described in general musical discourse as jigoe (literally, “ground voice” or “basic voice”). It is especially clear in high-pitched passages, where there is often a noticeable avoidance of uragoe, a kind of falsetto—essentially a weaker, purer sound produced with loosened vocal cords. Jigoe technique is evident, for example, in the Edo period song genre of kouta, as well as some styles of minyō singing.
The same singing technique appears in many popular songs of the 1920s and 1930s, most conspicuously in the string of hits—including “Gion Kouta” and “Tenryū kudareba” and other eiga kouta film songs—sung by geisha trained in Edo period song forms (geisha kashū). It is also one of several aural markers of traditionality in core styles of enka, which constituted mainstream kayōkyoku of the 1950s and early 1960s. After enka was displaced from market domination in the late 1960s, the characteristic tone colour produced by using jigoe in higher vocal registers became less common, but remained important for certain successful singers and songs. A major singer-songwriter of the style marketed as “new music,” Nakajima Miyuki, often used the technique; a well‑known early-1980s example is “Hitori Jōzu.”
More recently, the extremely popular singer-composer of dance-style pop, Hamasaki Ayumi, almost invariably sings in jigoe when moving into higher registers. This is clearly audible in the choruses of “Monochrome,” the opening song of her 1999 album, A. The distinctiveness of this vocal tone quality in the contemporary musical context becomes apparent by comparing Hamasaki’s style with that of Utada Hikaru, whose vocal technique in representative songs since her 1999 debut lacks jigoe and is distinguished by skilful use of falsetto in much the same manner as the American R&B singers she cites as influences.
It is worth noting that all the singers discussed so far are female. It appears that although using jigoe technique is important for enka singers of both sexes, it is a less acceptable vocal tone colour for male performers in other popular music styles—with the possible exception of some boy idol singers from the 1970s and 1980s, such as the young Gō Hiromi. A historical explanation can be offered: while geisha kashū were prevalent among female singing stars of the 1920s and early 1930s, male singers had no recourse to a traditional or quasi-traditional performative stance after the enka-shi ceased to be viable recording artists in the mid-1920s. The vast majority of early male stars were singers trained in Western art song, with its specialized techniques for directing body resonance, such as “chest voice” and “head voice.” Such performers could not establish jigoe as one of their models for successful vocal production in modern singing the way women performers did at that time. During the post-war
decades, sonic models for male Japanese singers (aside from enka specialists) came from the techniques of leading white American and British singers like Paul Anka, Neil Sedaka, Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, and others—but did not include any pre‑war domestic singers who had retained jigoe.
What exactly am I suggesting here? Certainly not that there is evidence of traditional music practice in mainstream contemporary pop. For one thing, it is unlikely that Hamasaki Ayumi or any recent mainstream star has a particular interest in traditional musical genres. Moreover, it would be wrong to claim that the vocal timbre I’ve highlighted has been the most highly favoured in the marketplace at any time since the 1940s. Very different vocal styles have also been popular in Japanese pop; indeed, some of the singers I’ve mentioned can perform with a variety of timbres and techniques. To say that these vocal qualities and their affective meanings for performers and listeners in 1930s, 1980s, and early twenty-first-century Japan are “the same” would decontextualise the music, removing it from both time and place. Hence I am emphatically not trying to reify tradition as a set of age‑old techniques and an innate eternal sensibility of the sort Kojima Tomiko has sometimes asserted. Instead, by interpreting the persistence of and predilection for this distinctive vocal tone in leading performers over seventy years as evidence of a musical manifestation of keishō—or, in Raymond Williams’ terms, as residual elements that have been “wholly or largely incorporated” into dominant musical practices—I am contesting the conventional polar opposition between traditionality and modernity in writings on Japanese popular music.
Terminology for technical and aesthetic characteristics
So far I have proposed that practices with some historical depth are significant for modern popular music-making in Japan, however slight their aurally identifiable “music-textual” effects might be. Another aspect of musicking where there is likely to be carry‑over from past practice is the sphere of discourse among musicians that articulates technical and aesthetic concepts. Terms for describing and evaluating vocal timbre, as noted above, form one area where present musical sprachgefühl shows continuity with pre‑modern practice. The persistence of expressions like jigoe and uragoe (as well as others, including damigoe, which describes a gravelly, low‑pitched voice once used by many naniwa-bushi performers) is discursive evidence that parallels performance practice itself. Closer investigation of how technical vocal terminology is used might also reveal how historical terms’ range of reference expands to include both old and new techniques. For example, the term yuri can refer to various vocal oscillation techniques, including prolonged microtonal movement of the kind heard in enka singing and some biwa recitation, as well as briefer, broader pitch embellishments in pop styles. Another important aesthetic term across multiple genres is nori (literally “riding”). In historical genres, it denotes the relationship between vocalized text lines and the temporal frameworks established by percussion in nō drama, the rhythmically marked text recitation in gidayū-bushi music of the classical puppet theatre, and degrees of tempo in some other Edo period hayashi genres; but it has also
come into modern popular music, where it refers to how a melody or overall ensemble sound “rides” a beat, as well as a general condition of musical efficacy—the ability of a live or recorded performance to transport its audience or listeners.
Contexts for performance: social practices
Evidence of continuity with the past might also be sought in the social practices and contexts where music’s textual features become meaningful. Understanding such phenomena is complicated by the fact that Japanese social practices have been framed and reframed within essentialising arguments about cultural identity, whereby certain interactive and communicative conventions are claimed as unchanging elements of Japanese tradition. It is regarding this problem that the concepts of both habitus and “residual” cultural elements discussed earlier become especially useful as heuristics. If understood as habits of perception and preference that mediate between society and the individual, habitus can account for how past practice informs present practice, without implying that any single element of historical culture is either unchanging or always manifest. The historical depth of habitus is therefore no more fixed than its content: to put it another way, habitus must be subject to historicity—and this is precisely the continually dynamic process Williams captured in his model of dominant, residual, and emergent elements. Seen from this perspective, Japanese musical culture does not consist of ever‑present techniques and practices such as jigoe, ma (silence or space as a dynamic compositional element), kobushi (melismatic motion between and around principal melodic tones), and hiden (transmission of “secret” techniques or repertory to a select few). Rather, it is a palimpsest constantly being written upon (and sometimes “scraped back” through deliberate reference to archaic styles), so that older layers and characteristics continually fade and disappear, but also reappear and recirculate among composer‑performers and listener‑fans at uneven rates. To claim either that Japanese music “always” retains certain aesthetic, performative, and behavioural traits, or that the present is a time when popular musicians have completely broken from their predecessors, is to deny the complex negotiation between innovation and received practice that is indispensable to popular music’s appeal.
Some social and behavioural contexts for Japanese pop that can be considered through this metaphor include the following: aspects of staging and musician‑audience interaction in performance (for example, the use of staging and costume conventions of varying historical depth by bijuaru-kei “glam bands”); societal and individual manifestations of fandom (particularly the marketing and reception of idol singers); the roles of individual producer‑composers (such as Hosono Haruomi, Komuro Tetsuya, Cornelius, and Oda Tetsurō) within both mainstream and “independent” pop music scenes; the structure of music‑production firms (jimusho) operating with elaborate, codified hierarchy;
the fluidity of labour exchange among musicians within each of those groups, contrasted with a relative lack of collaboration across separate organisations; and the extent to which songs serve as vehicles for subjectivity (as distinct from primarily communally oriented expressions) or are deployed for social and political commentary. For each of these elements of how pop music is organised, presented, conceptualised, and received, past practice can never be fully replicated, yet it is rarely deliberately abandoned; instead, it continues in fragmentary form to shape present practice, as “history turned into second nature.”
In conclusion
Koizumi’s final book, Ryūkōka no Kōzō (The Structure of Pop Songs) was an initial attempt to locate modern popular music firmly within the broader picture of Japanese musical culture. In a 1980 essay included in the book, Koizumi writes about how old and new elements are “patched and darned” together in songs:
[Japanese popular song] is a kind of patchwork, something new that emerges from joining elements brought together from all over the place. This can be seen not only in popular song but as one of the patterns of Japan’s traditional culture: We don’t make something entirely new by combining things that are new with things we already had; rather, we take familiar and borrowed things just as they are, then make something by patching and darning them together—this is one characteristic of how Japanese culture is constructed. (Koizumi 1984, p. 120)
This comment referred only to melodic and modal elements of enka and mainstream pop songs, but as a characterisation of musical syncretism, it could well apply to other styles and other parameters of musical text and context, such as those I’ve suggested above. I would advocate adding the temporal depth of the palimpsest to Koizumi’s two‑dimensional “patchwork” image, working toward an understanding of Japanese musical culture that fully includes popular music—a culture whose past is always liable to manifest itself, even in ways that are not necessarily audible or conspicuous.
Research on both textual and contextual aspects of Japanese popular music may further yield a certain disciplinary contribution. While links to traditional music have been explored in popular “world‑beat” genres from many cultures (for example, juju, bhangra, and soukous), they have rarely been shown for national pop styles not considered to be distinctively influenced by indigenous music traditions. Japanese kayōkyoku since the 1970s, and J‑pop today, are prime examples of such music, as they do not fit the essentialising expectation that a culture’s popular music must sound ethnically grounded in some clearly recognisable way. Nonetheless, investigating the subtle yet demonstrable links between new and older musical practices in Japan can illustrate how pop music is undoubtedly part of “Japanese musical culture” and an authentic vehicle for contemporary Japanese identity—one whose expressive power is in no way diminished by also being a local manifestation of transnational musical culture and global popular culture idioms.
Acknowledgements
This article has benefited from feedback provided by Oba Junko, Mark Driscoll, and Alison Tokita at conference presentations of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (Melbourne) and the Association for Asian Studies (Chicago), as well as from subsequent commentary by Timothy Taylor, Hosokawa Shūhei, and Koizumi Kyōko.
Japanese popular music scholarship remained underrepresented in the Tōyō Ongaku Gakkai until 2001, when a presentation on pop music in African post-colonial contexts by Tsukada Ken’ichi was scheduled at the annual conference. It is uncertain whether such contributions will subsequently appear in the Society’s publications. Among other significant musical traditions covered — European concert music, television and PlayStation media music (some overlapping with commercial pop), recorded music broadcast in numerous everyday spaces, and school curricula — the essay explores these boundaries further.
The points are elaborated in the endnotes: Bourdieu (1977, p. 78) frames the discussion of habitus, with expositions in ethnomusicology by Thomas Turino (e.g., Turino 1990); the literatures on indigenisation and localisation in hybrid popular musics include Stokes (1994), McLaughlin and McLoone (2000), and special issues on Japan, Australia, Germany, and the Middle East. Shop-floor categorization divides music into hōgaku (music by Japanese) and yōgaku (Western music). The use of new notation formats and concert programming affects most genres of traditional Japanese music. Genres such as chikuzenbiwa that originated in the Meiji Period are thereby excluded. Works covering jazz reception, enka studies, and lyrical parallels between traditional and modern song are cited, along with historical accounts of J-Pop’s development and the industry’s boy-idol factories — for example Johnnys janiizu jimusho. Notable recorded examples include Nakajima Miyuki’s “Ringetsu,” Hamasaki Ayumi’s “A,” and Yano Akiko’s references to nō drums, shakuhachi, and northern regional folk song on her 1976 album Japanese Girl. The 1930 “Gion Kouta” (Sassa 1930) and “Tenryū kudareba” (Nakayama 1933), with their incorporation of min’yō elements and geisha performance, are also cited. Koizumi Fumio’s tetrachordal theory of Japanese melody is outlined, and the use of Yamagawa-style vocalisation in the enka model is noted. These assorted case studies demonstrate that references to traditional music are typically conscious, quotational gestures — instances of what Raymond Williams calls “archaic” residualism, except in marginalised Okinawan folk-rock (a possible exception being highlights in track references and subsequent analyses such as those by Okada, 1991 analytical repertoire et seq. footnote records). The endnotes map disciplinary avenues examined in the body of the paper: resources, industry practices, and rhetoric concerning authenticity.