Sounding Out Japan

A Sensory Ethnographic Tour

Richard Chenhall, Tamara Kohn, Carolyn S. Stevens

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000182330
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Anthropology

This book takes the reader on a sensory ethnographic tour in Japan and describes the many ways sounds seep into everyday experiences. So many ethnographies describe local worlds with a deep attention to what is seen and what people say, but with a limited understanding of the broader sonic environments that enrich and inform everyday life. Through a focus on sounds, both real and imagined, the volume employs a critical ear to engage with a range of sonically enriched encounters, including crosswalk melodies in streetscapes, announcements and jingles at train stations, water features in gardens, dosimeters in nuclear affected zones, sounds of training in music and martial arts halls and celebrations under blossoming cherry trees. The authors use various analytic frames to understand the communicative and symbolic aspects of sounds and to sense the layers of historical meaning, embodied action and affect associated with sonic environments.

1Introduction

Sounding out Japan

Sounds are experienced through sensation and association. We (and perhaps you, the reader, if you have travelled or lived in Japan) share a sonic memory: we can hum the Japanese children’s folk tune Tōryanse (translated as ‘checkpoint’ or ‘let me pass’).

Cue 1.1 Listen here for a recording of Tōryanse at a pedestrian crossing outside Matsumoto Station.¹ https://soundcloud.com/sonicjapan/t-ryanse-street-crossing. Linked at http://sonicjapan.co/theme/safety

For us, the memory does not arise from an experienced childhood in Japan, but rather it is meaningful because we have heard it played at busy street intersections in Japan to indicate when it is safe for pedestrians to cross. Those totally unfamiliar with Tōryanse might appreciate it as an innocuous or charming alternative to the usual repetitive electronic pings or timed visual cues at pedestrian crossings in other parts of the world. Some, due perhaps to deafness or from wearing headphones playing alternative tunes, may miss it at the crosswalk. Still others who are much more familiar with the tune might be transported to memories of childhood, to games played, stories shared, sentiments felt.

While there are various theories as to its origin, Tōryanse refers to a time in Japanese history when there was a high rate of infant mortality; uncertainty about future generations gave rise to ritualised expressions of gratitude for a child’s safety and health. Many families still celebrate a female child’s seventh birthday by visiting a local Shinto shrine, and the song Tōryanse refers to this custom.² While the pedestrian crossing music does not include the lyrics, those familiar with the folk tune might be able to sing along:

Tōryanse, Tōryanse Koko wa doko no hosomichi ja Tenjin sama no hosomichi ja Chitto tōshite kudanse Goyō no nai mono tōshasenu Kono ko no nanatsu no oiwai ni Ofuda wo osame ni mairimasu Iki wa yoi yoi, kaeri wa kowai Kowai nagara mo Tōryanse, Tōryanse

Checkpoint, let me pass Where does this narrow pathway go? Isn’t this the path to Tenjin Shrine? Won’t you let me pass through? People without purpose shall not pass On the way to celebrate a child’s seventh birthday We humbly approach with offerings The trip there is fine, [but] the return trip is frightening Even though it is frightening Checkpoint, let me pass

Knowledge of this song is associated with a popular game played in school playgrounds: two children face each other, forming an arch by linking their hands, while the other children walk underneath the arch, around and around in circles. When the music stops, the interlocked hands are brought down, trapping the unlucky child caught at that moment, much like ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’. The original folk tune lyrics, combined with the actions of the game, may be understood as an allusion to the fragility of human life. At the pedestrian crossing, the tune may subtly trigger a sense of possible fright and act as a call for vigilance in crossing the road. This example shows how sounds are layered with multiple meanings, and are noticed and felt in a range of different ways. It is just one of a plethora of sonic encounters that everyone experiences as they move through public and private space.

This book will take the reader with us on a journey through a number of sites and analytic frames that we have traversed in our interest in sounding out Japan. It urges us all to recognise more than just the communicative and symbolic functions of sound (e.g., ‘cross the road now’), and to also hear the layers of historical meaning, embodied action and situational affect associated with sound in our everyday environment; it explores how sonic events in Japan (as elsewhere) reverberate through people’s lives.

One of the core presumptions that so much writing on Japan rests upon is that Japan is somehow unique or ‘special’ with regard to its associations and sensitivities to sound. A lovely illustration comes from Imada Tadahiko’s description of Japanese people gathering at the famous Shinobazu pond in Tokyo’s Ueno Park in the late Shōwa Period (1926–1989) to listen to the sound of the lotus flowers opening (1994; see also Gould, Chenhall, Kohn, & Stevens, 2019). The human ear is unable to physically detect a lotus flower opening; however, in a similar description of the sound of lotus flowers blooming, Kumi Kato describes how the Japanese word kiku, to listen, carries a much broader meaning than simply the act of listening, whereby a sound is received by the ear. Kato argues that ‘Kiku is an act of appreciating something with all of our sharpened senses’ (2015, p. 111). Sensing the sound of frost forming on a cold night, or the resonance of dew on a leaf in the morning dawn – deep listening – Kato explains, is a humbling ‘act of honoring’ sound, of showing ‘dedication to the time and space of its existence’, and touches our sense and feelings. The implication in these writings is that the Japanese approach to ‘listening’ is culturally specific, and something transient, valuable but possibly at risk of being lost.

This concern around the endangered and unique ways of engaging with sound in Japan has often been associated with the impact of modernity on what are viewed as traditional soundscapes, and it points as well to the impact of increasing noise pollution (Gould et al., 2019). In the 1990s, the Ministry of the Environment in Japan recognised how important an understanding and cataloguing of sound would be in the battle against noise pollution and the degradation of the environment (as well as preserving historical sonic artifacts). The Ministry collected submissions from all over the country, creating ’100 Soundscapes of Japan’ to ‘raise awareness of and preserve Japan’s natural and cultural soundscape heritage’ (Torigoe, 2005, p. 9). At the time of writing, only a few of these links are still available, but the project demonstrated a strong local sonic awareness linked to social, political and historical identities in Japan.

Scholars of Japan from around the world, including those writing in Japanese, have been active in documenting sounds and analysing reactions to sounds and their interpreted meanings,³ with some suggesting that there is a ‘cultural sensitivity to the uniqueness of Japanese soundscapes’ (Yoshimura, 1990, p. ii). While we are sympathetic to the historical particularism and specific cultural contexts that surround social phenomena, we are also wary of essentialising the Japanese aural experience and Japan’s sonic landscapes based on assertions that arise from writings now referred to as nihonjinron (‘theories of the Japanese’), which are largely dismissed as culturally reductionist. We want to be careful not to characterise Japanese sonic experience as something that cannot be understood and experienced properly by anyone without a significant depth of ‘Japanese knowledge’ of language, culture and place. Instead, we want to consider how the senses are always variously experienced, how sounds are diversely interpreted, and how sonic environments are ever-constructed by and through the people (both local and foreign) who encounter them. This book is thus an exploration of a range of possibilities – not only in terms of individual context and cultural experience, but also in terms of the analytic framings that can be used to make sense of these.

We capture the sounds of the city street, the train station, the workplace, places of leisure, places of healing – we then shine a light on how these sounds are experienced by different people, including ourselves. Sometimes these sounds are traversed daily by many people and sometimes they are sequestered into spaces occupied by particular communities of practice. The train station, for example, is recognised as a social and economic hub in almost all Japanese communities (Noguchi, 1990; Yoshimi, 1987; Freedman, 2010). Sounds produced in less public locations might reflect particular artistic and bodily practices (Coaldrake, 1997; Tokita, 1999). For example, the martial arts dōjō is a place of training that produces a distinct sensory experience (Cox, 2003; Kohn, 2007). The therapeutic setting is another location of practice where one can examine the interrelationship of sound and culturally and medically driven judgements of its effects (Chenhall & Oka, 2009; Reynolds, 1980). In the chapters that follow, we examine the sounds produced and consumed within these and many other places in our attempts to knit together some strands of sociality with the evocative feelings often experienced in these places.

A book could be filled summarising the burgeoning corpus of sound studies literature. It is a popular field, part of what has been called ‘the sensorial turn’ in the social sciences (Howes, 2006; Classen, 1993; Cox, Irving, & Wright, 2016). Various published collections have emerged quite recently that focus on sound, such as Pinch and Bijsterveld’s The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2011), Jonathan Sterne’s The Sound Studies Reader (2012), Novak and Sakakeeny’s Keywords in Sound (2015), Christine Guillebaud’s Toward an Anthropology of Ambient Sound (2017), Michael Bull’s The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (2018), Steingo and Skyes’ Remapping Sound Studies (2019) and Holger Schulze’s The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound (2020). Alongside the authors in these volumes, we can add many more in fields including anthropology, sociology, psycholinguistics, architecture, urban studies and musicology who have written about sound and social life, soundscapes, sound ecologies, sensory attunement, sonic affect and so on, with examples coming from all corners of the world, including Japan.⁴ We are not going to take you through every term here, but we do feel it is important to understand how some key concepts have driven the study of sound more generally and thus inform our study of sound in Japan. A key term that has been used broadly and critiqued extensively, and that tries to explain what it means to study sound, is the ‘soundscape’.

R. Murray Schafer is a composer whose seminal work on sound (first published in 1977) described various ‘soundscapes’ as interrelated to the natural and built environment: each ‘soundscape has its own unique tones and often these are so distinctive that they constitute soundmarks’ (alluding here, as one might guess, to ‘landmarks’; 1994 [1977], p. 26). Soundscapes and soundmarks are, he would suggest, iconic representations of particular places and times that ‘make the acoustic life of a community’ (ibid.). Schafer also attended to the listeners who belonged to communities and suggested that the soundscape would invite them to tune in to the sounds that mattered locally. Interestingly, he lamented the sonic state of urban environs where he felt that sounds have become removed from their place, creating a sense of what he called ‘schizophonia’ in the listener (cited in Erlmann, 2004, p. 7). So, this leaves us with an oft-used term that attaches sonic meaning to place and time. If Schafer were to consider the mechanically driven crosswalk tune in high-tech contemporary urban Japan, he may be disturbed by the displacement of the folk tune from its ‘natural’ soundscape (i.e., vocally produced song in rural or community level spaces populated by children) as well as what he would call the ‘schizophonic noise’ in which it is embedded.⁵

As time went on, different sound scholars developed their own versions of Schafer’s ‘soundscape’ (see Kelman, 2010, p. 220). Anthropologist Steven Feld has been credited with bringing the term into common use in his (and our) field (Novak, 2010), and he describes soundscapes as cultural systems. In his seminal ethnographic work on songs, birds, weeping, poetics and song amongst the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, Feld created the term ‘acoustemology’ (combining the terms ‘acoustics’ and ‘epistemology’) to emphasise ‘sound as a capacity to know and as a habit of knowing’ (2015, p. xvii), in order to express his findings that knowledge is not imparted merely through intellectual (primarily visual) means (2015, p. 12). Feld demonstrates how various sounds, such as birdsong, poetics and ceremonial weeping, become metaphors of Kaluli sentiments. With such understanding, our Tōryanse folk tune reclaimed as an urban crosswalk signal points to understandings of loss and fragility associated with culturally recognised rites of passage from childhood to adulthood (Billingsley, 2007).

Beyond understanding sound as interrelated through symbolic and social structures (Stoller, 1989), anthropologists more generally have expanded their ‘ears’ to include so much more than what can be mapped and interpreted. They increasingly consider the role of emotion, the activity of listening, the passivities of specific sonic spaces and the embodied ‘attunement’ associated with sonic experience (cf. Erlmann, 2004; Guillebaud, 2017; Steingo & Sykes, 2019; Schulze, 2018). In this volume, we are interested in recognising the usefulness of all of these lenses when considering the sounds we encountered and recorded and experienced in Japan. We recognise how sound, around the world, can often gesture to ‘culture’, and how it can include an understanding of social order. But we also understand how it urges us to think beyond sound as a culturally and socially inflected object to recognise the embodied, moving and often unarticulated experiences that adhere to the sounded and silent worlds we all traverse.

We are influenced in our thinking not only by shifting ideas in sound studies more generally, but by studies of sound in Japan in particular, some written in the Japanese language, and others produced in English. We have published elsewhere about how a sensory anthropology ‘of and in Japan’ has developed over the last decades (Gould et al., 2019; see also Hiramatsu, 2006). For our purposes here, it is interesting to note some of the themes that have emerged from studies of sound in Japan and the degree to which they engage with or critique Schafer’s work and others.

One such contributor is Torigoe Keiko, a distinguished sound studies scholar, who led the Japanese transl...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of sound cues and audio blog posts
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Note on text/translations
• 1 Introduction: Sounding out Japan
• 2 Sonic Japan
• 3 Sound as control
• 4 Sound in embodied practice
• 5 Silence and transformation
• 6 Sonic bloom
• 7 Conclusion: listening well into the future
• References cited
• Index