How pop stirred controversy in Japan

When West met East in the land of music, things did not always hit the right note.

She loves you yeah yeah yeah: a teenage girl dances with a member of the Tokyo Beatles, a Beatles cover band, during a performance in Tokyo in 1964. Getty Images

In his introduction to Tokyo Boogie-Woogie, Hiromu Nagahara quotes from the autobiography of Kikkawa Chõkichi, who, in 1883, became one of the first Japanese to graduate from Harvard University.

“We had in those days the old Japanese notion that singing was vulgar,” Chõkichi wrote, explaining why he was excused from choir practice.

Nagahara also records the famed Japanese author Fukuzawa Yukichi’s reaction to westerners dancing when he arrived in San Francisco in 1860 as part of a pioneering diplomatic mission to the United States. “I found it extremely difficult to suppress my laughter at the sight of men and women jumping around the room in a strange manner,” Yukichi recalled.

Such curious examples highlight the cultural gulf that still existed between East and West even as the Edo period of Japanese history (1603-1868) gave way to the Meiji period (1868-1912). It was the latter era, though, which resulted in Japan leaving behind its isolated feudal society past and transforming into the modern, industrialised country we know today.

Fascinatingly, Tokyo Boogie-Woogie – the book is named after a 1947 hit which bore the stamp of Japan's Americanistation under wartime occupation – views this transformation through the lens of popular song. But in this context, the author stresses, the term "popular song", or Ryukoka, is not some distant ancestor of J-Pop. Rather, it simply denotes any song that was popular in Japan between (roughly) 1925-1960, and has no specific connotation regarding any such song's musical style.

Early in the book, Nagahara, a professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sketches the musical landscape of pre-modern Japan. It’s gobsmacking to read Nagahara explain (as upheld by musicologist Shuhei Hosokawa) that “the notion of music as a universal, cultural phenomenon simply did not exist [in Japan] before Japan’s encounter with the West”.

What the avant-garde composer Yoshikazu Ishikawa called the “massification” of music consumption was aided by factors such as the founding of the Japan-America Phonograph Manufacturing Company in 1907, the arrival of western record companies Columbia and Victor in the 1920s, and the flowering of Tokyo’s urban consumer culture after 1923’s Great Kant Earthquake.

As an indigenous music industry got its backbone, popular song, aided by its still relatively new-fangled allies radio and cinema, became a desirable symbol of what Japan’s rapidly-growing throng of middle-class city dwellers called the modan (modern).

These popular songs largely stemmed from record companies funded by western cash and given that they were "immediately associated with contemporary trends such as the perceived Americanisation and eroticisation of Japanese culture", it was inevitable that various elite cultural commentators would line-up to critique and disparage them. Nagahara quotes extensively from those who thought popular songs such as 1929's Tokyo March, 1932's Love Fulfilled In Heaven, and 1936's Don't You Forget Me either vulgar, lowbrow or corrupting. But he also gives voice to those for whom such songs were totems of joy; valued expressions of freedom and change. With its strings and woodwind, Don't You Forget Me – sung by Watanabe Hamako, one of the most celebrated female singers in the early to mid-Showa era – sounds perfectly innocent today. It was banned by the censor for being too suggestive, however, and its growing popularity – and that of several copycat songs – greatly concerned officials.

Yet then, as now, banning songs sometimes lent them an appealing taboo. And by quoting from the German philosopher Theodor Adorno's 1941 essay On Popular Music, the author shows why elite critics opposed to the ever-growing consumption of popular song in Japan were ultimately on a hiding to nothing. "To dislike the song is no longer an expression of personal taste but rather a rebellion against the wisdom of a public utility and disagreement with the millions of people who are assumed to support what the agencies are giving them," wrote Adorno. "Resistance is regarded as the mark of bad citizenship, as inability to have fun, as highbrow insincerity."

The book’s account of censorship in Japan is fascinating and we learn that the stereotypical image of censors as joyless individuals prone to kneejerk reactions and inflexible opinions was a poor fit for celebrated home ministry official, Chikagorõ Ogawa.

A true music fan and an able music critic, Ogawa was in charge of censoring phonograph records from 1934 to 1942, and often “expressed his appreciation for the songs that were the very objects of his censorship”.

With record companies required to submit two copies of each new record to the home ministry three days prior to release, Ogawa was sometimes tasked with listening to scores of records each day, but he did so diligently and enthusiastically. He also banned surprisingly few records: only 20 between 1934-1937.

It's hard to imagine Nagahara's dense but always stimulating book being any more thorough in its exploration of the popular song era and its cultural and political ramifications. He writes that, on December 8, 1941, the day after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the Osaka Mainichi and Tokyo Nichinichi newspapers invited readers to write lyrics for a war-effort release entitled The Song of the Final Battle in Greater East Asia, and both Columbia and Victor released the winning effort using the slogan: "Slaughter the Americans and the British! They are our enemy!"

Contrastingly, we also hear plenty about Shizuko Kasagi, the free-spirited singer and actress who recorded 1947's Tokyo Boogie-Woogie and 1950's Shopping Boogie, and whose audibly Americanised music became "enshrined in the post-war Japanese memory as an icon of social and cultural liberalisation".

From there, it only remains for Ogawa to explain why the "popular song" era was all but over by the end of the 1950s and he does so with due care and insight. The rise of television and hugely influential shows such NHK's Amateur Singing Contest, and Fuji Television's Hit Parade created a demand for a new kind of music that was produced and consumed in new ways, and after The Beatles arrived in Japan in 1966, Japan's understanding of what constituted pop changed forever.

James McNair writes for Mojo magazine and The Independent.