1

The Invention of Popular Song

In May 1929 the Victor Talking Machine Company of Japan, a subsidiary of RCA Victor, released a record featuring a song entitled “Tokyo March.” Within a few months, an unprecedented 150,000 copies of this record were sold, making “Tokyo March” one of the first modern Japanese popular songs in the eyes of contemporaries as well as historians.1 Satƍ Chiyako (1897–1968), the soprano who recorded the song, became Japan’s first female popular song star (sutā). The song also launched the careers of Nakayama Shimpei (1887–1952), the composer, and Saijƍ Yaso (1892–1970), the lyricist, both of whom ultimately became giants in the popular song scene. During the next decade, Japan’s recording industry grew so rapidly that by 1937, the prewar height of record production, there were reports of popular song records that sold as many as five hundred thousand copies—no small feat in a period when the price of phonographs and records remained squarely within the realm of luxury goods.2 With such growth, popular song records came to be the most popular, and therefore most lucrative, product for the recording companies.
As important as the popular song genre’s explosive growth, however, was the fact that it had emerged as the product of a network of media industries, including not just music but also film, radio, and publishing, all of which combined to create a media product that came to boast unprecedented reach among a rapidly expanding audience. While such impressive technological and industrial developments clearly worked to commercialize and standardize what was being consumed by the audience, a close analysis of the making of “Tokyo March” and the controversies that followed its release also reveals the ways the song was recognized by its critics and advocates alike as part of the broader social climate that was rife with the tensions surrounding the apparent contradictions of modernity, including the specter of an impending class-based conflict that threatened to tear Japanese society apart. In particular, critics in Japan’s music establishment and their allies argued that popular songs, as dĂ©classĂ© as they were understood to be, actually condemned Japan’s masses to a perpetual state of cultural degradation, thus perpetuating class-based cultural divisions.3 As such, the popular song genre as a whole came to be simultaneously associated with the commercialization and homogenization of culture as well as its destruction by social divisions.
As already noted in the Introduction, the concern over the social impact of music was not, in itself, new at all. When the Meiji state sought to promote Western music as part of establishing “civilization and enlightenment” in Japan, it was driven as much by the concern about music’s ability to divide the still-fragile nation as it was by its ability to promote patriotism. In fact, the state’s concern about the social and political effects of music can be traced back to the decades immediately following the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603. Neither was it the case that what we would now commonly refer to as “popular music”—as in a musical culture shared by a wide cross-section of a given society—simply did not exist before the modern era. What was critically different, however, was the ways in which the definition of what counted as music, as articulated by the cultural elites in each of these historical periods, interacted with the realities on the ground. What ultimately made the emergence of both the modern Japanese popular songs and their critique in the 1920s so consequential was the fact that they signaled a fundamental redefinition of both the intellectual terms and the material conditions within which music was made popular.

Popular Music before Popular Song

How then was music defined and practiced before the emergence of popular songs? As the musicologist Hosokawa ShĆ«hei notes, premodern Japan did not, in fact, have an “all-embracing term referring to any humanly organized sound”—that is, the notion of music as a universal, cultural phenomenon simply did not exist before Japan’s encounter with the West.4 Instead, a broad range of practices that we would now instinctively understand as inherently musical were conceptually divided not only by the hierarchical status of those who pursued them but also by their gender and locale (as in the difference between urban centers and the provinces), not to mention the differences in uses as well as technical features, such as instruments and methods of notation. In this world, the chants sung in temples and the sound of shakuhachi (bamboo flutes) blown by a group of officially licensed blind street performers were not conceived as belonging to the same overarching cultural category, nor did people seek to place even the highly refined interplays of instruments and chants in the noh theatre, which was typically sponsored by the samurai elite, on the same conceptual plane as the ceremonial strains of gagaku (court music) performed in the imperial palace in Kyoto. While the term ongaku, used today as the Japanese equivalent to “music” in English, can be traced as far back as the late Heian period (794–1185), it was originally used almost exclusively to refer to specific types of religious and courtly practices that originated in China and Korea (as opposed to those that were deemed to be native) and this significantly limited use of the term largely continued throughout the premodern era.5
This is not to say, however, that Japan in the premodern era, especially under the Tokugawa shogunate, was completely bereft of what could reasonably be understood as an increasingly shared musical culture among those within its realm. Scholars have noted that in actual practice the same historical developments that rendered the segregation of the different status groups increasingly untenable during the Tokugawa era also worked to undermine the divisions between various forms of aesthetic and cultural pursuits that were considered to be appropriate by the ruling elite.6 While the Tokugawa state idealized and mandated the separation of different status groups—in particular the division between members of the ruling samurai class and those who were deemed to be “commoners”—as the cornerstone of social and political order, developments like rapid urbanization and commercialization steadily eroded such distinctions on the ground, as an increasing number of commoner elites rose to economic and social prominence. Under such circumstances, members of the commoner status gradually gained access to cultural forms that were deemed to be “above” them, including noh and gagaku, whose elite practitioners were increasingly open to taking on commoner students for fee.7 Perhaps more disturbingly for the Tokugawa rulers, members of the samurai class were equally attracted to decidedly commoner pursuits, such as kabuki theater and genres that featured instruments like shakuhachi and shamisen (three-stringed lute).8
The existence of numerous edicts forbidding such cultural intermixing issued not only by the officials of the Tokugawa shogunate in Edo (present-day Tokyo) but also by various provincial authorities throughout the Tokugawa period attest to both the governing elites’ enduring insistence on the need for the separation of status groups and the equally consistent futility of their efforts. However, they also reflect the fact that throughout this period the increasingly broadening chasm between the official ideal of separate cultures and the emergence of shared practices on the ground was never bridged by the development of an overarching notion of music that could have been used to privilege certain forms of musical practices over and against others. The Tokugawa officials’ edicts were aimed not at mandating, or for that matter banning, any particular pursuit for those they ruled; instead the goal, as the ethnomusicologist Gerald Groemer puts it, was “for all individuals to engage in morally sound cultural pursuits ‘proper’ to their officially acknowledged rank and station in society.”9 To pursue such an end, it was never deemed necessary to envision the entirety of the disparate cultural practices as a collective.
It is perhaps telling that one of the few premodern exceptions to the limited use of the term ongaku originated from the Europeans who visited Japan in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and who listed the term as the equivalent to their word for music in their dictionaries.10 Ultimately, however, it was only in the aftermath of the Meiji state’s introduction of Western music into the national educational curricula that the term ongaku gained wider currency within Japanese society. In other words, when Izawa ShĆ«ji and Megata Tanetarƍ called for the creation of a “national music” (kokugaku), what they had in mind was functionally equivalent to the notion of music as a universal cultural phenomenon; in fact, it did not take long for education officials and others to stop using kokugaku altogether, defaulting instead to ongaku. Either way, for the first time in history, Japan’s governing elite possessed a single cultural category that could, theoretically, bring together the disparate sound-making practices that had existed in Japan—an intellectual tool that suggested to possibility of bridging the Tokugawa-era contradiction between the reality of a shared musical culture and its official denial.
The soundscape that confronted the Meiji state, however, was far from simple. It included the various forms of Edo-period “commoner songs” (zokkyoku) that had continued to maintain their popularity into the new era, including kouta (ditty), hauta (short song), and nagauta (long song), all of which were accompanied by traditional instruments like shamisen and drums. They were, of course, what Izawa and his colleagues had in mind when they referred to parts Japan’s musical culture that were, for them at least, beyond the pale. During the first and highly contentious session of the Imperial Diet that met in December 1890, Tsuji Shinji, the deputy education minister, was forced to defend the funding for music education, along with other government priorities that came under the fierce attack of opposition legislators. Echoing Izawa, Tsuji argued that the state’s involvement in music education was necessary in order to elevate “national dignity” as well as “public mores,” since “much of traditional Japanese music needs to be reformed.”11 Outside of the Diet, Yatabe Ryƍkichi (1851–1899), the former head of the Tokyo Music School, repeated this refrain by lamenting the detrimental effect that commoner songs allegedly had on society and argued that “music is essential for the education of public mores.”12
However, Edo-era ditties were not the only ones to test the limits of the modern Japanese state’s definition of acceptable music. Nursemaids in rural villages and young women working in factories, for example, also used traditional song styles to make their own songs—some lewd, others plaintive—that protested against the various forms of oppression they faced, to the chagrin of their teachers and employers.13 Even more disturbingly for the Meiji state, the antigovernment Freedom and People’s Rights Movement of the 1880s helped to popularize a musical genre known as enka, which saw street singers gain fame by singing songs that satirized the alleged excesses of the authoritarian state and called for the establishment of democratic institutions such as a written constitution and a representative assembly.14 Following the opening of the Diet and the simultaneous demise of the antigovernment movement, enka began to widen its thematic scope to include love and humor, while continuing to produce some barbs aimed at the foibles of corrupt party politicians and bureaucrats. At the same time, the scope of these songs’ circulation widened considerably as enka-shi (enka singer-songwriters) progressed beyond their humble beginnings as street performers and utilized the emerging networks of modern journalism and publication, enabling them to reach a greater number of audience. Some, like Soeda Azembƍ (1872–1944), gained both fame and wealth, enabling them to pursue the lifestyles of celebrities before the advent of more highly capitalized mass entertainment like film and record.15
Simultaneously, entirely new musical practices also emerged, many of which drew in one way or another from the Meiji-era encounter with Western music. Along with the national education curriculum, Western music initially entered Japan through largely noncommercial avenues such as military bands, some of which were formed as early as the years preceding the fall of Tokugawa shogunate, and through the religious music introduced by Christian churches following their legalization in 1873. As a new urban landscape dotted with Western-style department stores, suburban “garden cities,” and railroad networks began to emerge in the first decades of the twentieth century, however, Western and Western-inspired music was deployed for decidedly commercial ends.16 In 1909, the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Tokyo organized the Mitsukoshi Boys’ Band, made up of young boys aged eleven through fifteen who were trained by former members of the Imperial Navy Band.17 Other department stores quickly followed suit and created similar bands as well as choirs, mostly made up of young boys and girls. By far the most successful and enduring of these was the Takarazuka Girls’ Opera, which still exists today as the Takarazuka Revue. Kobayashi Ichizƍ (1873–1957), who eventually developed his railroad business in the Osaka area into a massive conglomerate that included a department store chain, a baseball team, and a film company, initially created the Takarazuka Girls’ Opera in 1914 to entertain visitors at a spa that he developed at the suburban Takarazuka terminal of the Mino’o-Arima Railway. However, the opera quickly grew in popularity and eclipsed the spa as a highly successful attraction in its own right. The content of the performances also evolved from simple shows featuring choral singing and plays based on fairy tales to full-fledged Western-style musical revues that included the latest Western songs and theatrical techniques.18
During the same period, yet another highly popular “opera” emerged in Asakusa, prewar Tokyo’s preeminent entertainment district. The Asakusa Opera, as it ultimately came to be known, featured a creative mixtu...