Transnational Musicians

Precariousness, Ethnicity and Gender in the Creative Industry

Beata M. Kowalczyk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000330182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Biographies de musique

Informed by theories pertaining to transnational mobility, ethnicity and race, gender, postcolonialism, as well as Japanese studies, Transnational Musicians explores the way Japanese musicians establish their transnational careers in the hierarchically structured classical music world. Drawing on rich material from multi-sited fieldwork and in-depth interviews with Japanese artists in Japan, France and Poland, this study portrays the structurally – and individually – conditioned opportunities and constraints of becoming a transnational classical musician. It shows how transnational artists strive to conciliate the irreconcilable: their professional identification with the dominant image of 'rootless' classical musicianship and their ethnocultural affiliation with Japan. As such this book critically engages with the neoliberal discourse on talent and meritocracy prevailing in the creative/cultural industry, which promotes the common image of cosmopolitan artists, whose high, universal skills allow them to carry out their occupational activity internationally, regardless of such prescriptive criteria as gender, ethnicity and race. Highly interdisciplinary, this book will appeal to students and researchers interested in such fields as migration, transnational mobility, ethnicity and race in the creative/cultural sector, gender studies, Japanese culture and other related social issues. It will also be instructive for professionals from the world of classical music, as well as ordinary readers passionate about Japanese society.

Chapter 1

Theoretical and methodological approach

This chapter provides an overview of the relevant literature on the creative/cultural industries (CCI), and the classical music profession in particular, laying out the theoretical and methodological groundwork for an ensuing analysis of the transnational careers experienced by Japanese classical musicians. Informed by research on creative/cultural work, transnationalism, migration and postcolonial studies, the proposed analytical framework not only addresses issues such as gender, precariousness, professional identification and satisfaction already discussed in the literature on the classical music profession, but widens the field of this debate by incorporating the heretofore underexplored contexts of ethnicity and race into its scope. In the first part, I recapitulate the main points of a number of different arguments regarding the CCI, which I link to the critical approach to creative/cultural work that theoretically underpins this study. I focus specifically on the British model of the CCI due to its worldwide influence, particularly in Japan. After outlining the ongoing discussions about the CCI in both the UK and Japan, I shift to a focus on scholarly discourse about the issues affecting the classical music profession, addressing matters that are crucial for this study, such as gender, ethnic and racial inequities, precariousness as well as professional identification and satisfaction. In the second half of the chapter, I sketch out the theoretical approach used in my analysis of the work experience of Japanese classical music performers. I close this part with methodological remarks on empirical material and issues concerning fieldwork carried out in a foreign language, Japanese.

Creative/cultural industries from a critical perspective

Ample literature, whether academic or policy-based, has been devoted to the topic of the CCI, addressing the empirical and ideological underpinnings of the phenomenon. Several authors have pointed out, particularly in Western economies, that the emergence of the CCI in the late twentieth century was accompanied by unprecedented changes in the dominant modes of production and employment (see Harvey, 1989; Garnham, 2005). Shaken by a crisis in domestic manufacturing, governments – starting with the UK – launched a series of economic, industrial and cultural policies aimed at overcoming stagnation in the sector (Harvey, 1989; Garnham, 2005). These market-oriented strategies heralded a shift in capitalism from the Fordist to the post-Fordist era (Piore & Sabel, 1984). One corollary of these realignments was deregulation and liberalisation of the labour market, with flexible work modes increasingly taking the place of more costly full-time employment. The aim was to increase companies’ adaptability to altering market conditions.

As a consequence of this organisational restructuring, the role of trade unions and collective bargaining was significantly reduced, forcing workers to adapt to a less secure employment system. To grasp these novel managerial strategies, David Harvey (1989) coined the term ‘flexible accumulation’ to indicate

flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption. It is characterized by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing financial services, new markets, and above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation.

(p.147)

Fuelled by creative power drawn from artistic and cultural activities, the CCI represented one such novel sector promising economic growth and increased well-being for society at large, and professional satisfaction and self-fulfilment for the individuals working within it. The advantages offered by this new creative working environment shone even brighter when juxtaposed with the evident disadvantages of the alienating labour conditions prevalent in the previous industrial era (Banks & Hesmondhalgh, 2009: p.417).

Scholars link the origins of the CCI with the aforementioned ‘cultural industries’, a term denoting a sector of cultural production that since the 1990s has become ‘increasingly attached, in a new era of local and regional development policy, to the goals of regeneration and employment creation’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2008: p.556; see also Luckman, 2017). A turning point in this shift in discourse from cultural to creative industries was marked by a series of initiatives conceived and implemented by the UK’s New Labour government to spur British creativity. The definition coined by British policy-makers, which defined the creative industries as ‘those industries, which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’ (DCMS, 2001: p.5), proved to be highly influential on a global level, despite the fact that the concept first appeared in Creative Nation, a report on Australia’s first national cultural policy, in 1994. The scope of the new sector was wide enough to deem as creative such heterogenous activities as ‘advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and television and radio’ (DCMS, 2001: p.3). Cultural industry analyst Nicholas Garnham (2005: p.26) contended that policy-makers adopted this ‘new creative nomenclature’ specifically because it allowed the inclusion of computer software production, which was considered the most promising source of future economic growth and competitiveness.

Critics of the discourse on the creative industries being propagated by policy-makers with the support of several voices from academia responded with a harsh critique of the concept. They contended that the alarmingly precarious working conditions in this sector were being papered over by claims that excellence, meritocracy, democratic access, professional satisfaction and freedom were all purportedly guaranteed by these flexible employment modalities. By taking a closer look at television, new media (see Ursell, 2000; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011), film (see Faulkner, 1983), fashion (see McRobbie, 1998), classical music (Bennett & Hennekam, 2018; Scharff, 2018a), jazz (see Buscatto, 2007) and many other creative/cultural areas (see Mathieu, 2012), researchers unveiled numerous pathologies within the system. Work in the CCI was based on short-term projects, exploitation of the workforce, low pay, and a lack of social protections and benefits (see Neilson & Rossiter, 2005; Banks, 2007; Banks, Gill & Taylor, 2013; McRobbie, 2016). Instead of alleviating class (see Lehmann, 2002; Coulangeon, 2004b; Bull, 2019), racial and ethnic (see Thanki & Jefferys, 2007; Hesmondhalgh & Saha, 2013; Saha, 2018), and gender-informed inequalities (see Gill, 2002; Conor, Gill & Taylor, 2015), the CCI, in fact, reproduced them. Furthermore, researchers demonstrated how this precariousness extended to people’s private lives and social relations (see Sennet, 1998; Neilson & Rossiter, 2005). Pondering over the government’s failure to address the structural problems underlying the poor labour conditions in the creative/cultural sector, some scholars posited that raising these issues could put the whole creative policy in jeopardy (see Banks & Hesmondhalgh, 2009). They also explained that CCI advocates argued that access to jobs in this sector was ‘contingent on education and excellence’ not only to attract young people, but also confute any critique by placing the burden of responsibility for the precarious working situation on individual incompetence and lack of initiative (see for example Banks, 2007; Gill, 2014). This, in turn, reflected a neoliberal rationale, according to which a democratic market fairly assigns positions to individuals based on their credentials, and therefore these individuals are themselves to blame if they fail to get the best part of the cake (see McRobbie, 2002; Gill, 2014; Luckman, 2017).

Throughout the book I refer to the concept of CCI in such a critical manner, understanding ‘creative/cultural labour’ as work ‘geared to the production of original or distinctive commodities that are primarily aesthetic and/or symbolic-expressive, rather than utilitarian and functional’ (Banks & Hesmondhalgh, 2009: p.416). Moreover, in line with recent debates on the topic, I recognise that in critically examining the CCI one must move past the simple binary opposition of self-exploitation and self-fulfilment by exploring how artists negotiate and manage the precariousness of their work situation and how they attempt to fulfil their desire for occupational fulfilment by diversifying their work practices and weighing the aesthetic and financial rewards various opportunities provide (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011; Armstrong, 2013).

‘Cool Japan’: Creative industry in Japan

Given the Western critiques directed at the CCI, it may come as a surprise that the Japanese government has been uncritically following the British model of creative industries since the early noughties (Valaskivi, 2013: p.8). This is apparent especially in the ‘Cool Japan’ concept, which resonates with the ‘Cool Britannia’ campaign, a part of the creative industry policies launched by the UK’s New Labour to refresh the outward image of Britain with the help of popular culture and young artists such as the ‘Young British Artists’, ‘Brit-pop’, or the ‘British film industry’ (Banks & Hesmondhalgh, 2009: p.418).¹ What the Japanese marketing campaign shared with its British model, in particular, was especially an emphasis on nation-branding through popular culture and youth phenomena, which were considered exportable commodities (Valaskivi, 2013: p.8). Furthermore, the Cool Japan initiative supplementing Japan’s image as a modern, developed country with that of an exoticised, traditional part of the old Orient in order to attract foreign tourists (Valaskivi, 2013; METI, 2014; Iwabuchi, 2019). All in all, the slogan expressed an instrumental attitude to culture and cultural production, as did the discourse promoting the creative industries that have progressively sprouted in this country precisely on the ground of the Cool Japan policy (Valaskivi, 2013; Gotō, 2013; Iwabuchi, 2019).

The Creative Industry Division was set up by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in July 2011 with the goal of promoting the creative industries. This division was established to integrate and unite the already ongoing Cool Japan-related responsibilities, which heretofore had been dispersed between various offices involved in the country’s promotion (Gotō, 2013: p.11). The Cool Japan initiative document issued by the METI in 2014 presents the results of a survey conducted among people in the US, UK, Germany, France and Japan, in which Japan is portrayed as the most creative country in the world, with its capital Tokyo being the most creative city. Based on this data the authors came to the conclusion that Japan’s creative industries, specifically content (manga, anime, TV drama, music, movie), fashion, food and tourism, had great potential to contribute to the national wealth, partially because these sectors had already proven their global commercial appeal (METI, 2014: pp.3–8). Echoing their British colleagues, Japanese policy-makers see creativity primarily through market lenses as a key driving force of the economy that promotes the country worldwide, revitalises cities, expands markets and enhances employment, thereby ultimately contributing to national prosperity and well-being. What brings the creative discourses in the UK and Japan closer to each other, notwithstanding the many differences, is the main line of their narratives, which both emphasise the anticipated economic benefits generated by creative talents, while turning a deaf ear to structural problems affecting labour conditions in the sector.

Cultural sociologist Yoshizawa Yayoi (2011) explains that the dearth of research on labour in the art and creative sectors in Japan are ascribed to common-sense convictions, internalised by the artists and creators alike, according to which ‘it’s pretty obvious that people who make their living doing what they like face hardships’, that ‘art should be a non-profit activity’ and that ‘this situation can’t be helped’ (p.212). Both sides, society and the artist, concur that creators voluntarily sacrifice professional and life stability in favour of the freedom to engage in artistic creation (Yoshizawa, 2011: p.212). The silence about poor working conditions in art and culture is but one aspect of a broader problem, that is, the general marginalisation of what has been called ‘emotional labour’ (e.g. care work) persisting in Japanese society. Any such work seems to ill fit a society where labour and social security standards have been built around the model of a ‘healthy male Japanese full-time worker’ (Fujiwara & Yamada, 2011; Yoshizawa, 2011). Thus, the negligence of poor labour conditions in the creative industries has structural origins.

Yoshizawa (2011, 2018) sheds light on this overshadowed problem by portraying the precarious situation of freelancers engaged in arts projects in Osaka from 2000 onward. She relates the exploitation of creative workers with the project-oriented policies that dominate in the cultural sector. For example, by bringing attention to the system of financing the work of ‘artists in residence’, she reveals that contractors treat artists like ‘bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Technical note
• Introduction
• 1 Theoretical and methodological approach
• 2 Positioning Japanese classical music within the global hierarchy of value
• 3 The plight of musicians in Japan
• 4 Studying classical music in its ‘birthplace’: The Japanese go to Europe
• 5 Music knows no borders? Crisscrossing French, Polish and Japanese music milieus
• 6 Japanese classical musicians: Between professional satisfaction and frustration
• 7 Concluding remarks: Transnationality as a ‘Liminal status quo’
• Index