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7 Regulations and Interventions Cabarets under Japanese and Nationalist Occupation, 1942–1947 Jose Contreras, one of many Filipino musicians who traveled to Shanghai during the 1930s to find work in the burgeoning musical entertainment industry there, had achieved fame as a bandleader by the occupation era. He emerged as a forceful leader and representative of the city’s music industry. One major reason for his power and influence lay in his collaboration with the Japanese occupation troops, for whom he served as an important cultural spokesman, promoting the ideology of the Pan-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere through the discourse of music.1 In the early 1940s, Contreras made efforts to blend popular Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese music together into a “musical montage,” which he played in “Greater East Asia” propaganda concerts held in theaters in Shanghai. In one, he arranged for performers from each Asian nation to sing the songs of another Asian nation, thus symbolizing “the interest each nation is taking in another’s music.” Contreras and his band played regularly in one of the most influential cabarets of the era, the MGM. There he worked under Zheng Weixian and Sun Hongyuan, whom as we shall see in this chapter, the occupation government co-opted to become the industry ’s most significant collaborators. This relationship undoubtedly contributed to Contreras’s own rise to power, which made him a natural candidate for leadership of the Shanghai Musicians’ Association, a role he continued to fill through the end of the 1940s. An article published in the pro-Japanese English-language propaganda journal Shanghai Times Week highlights the career of bandleader Contreras. This article describes the strong interrelationships that existed among the fantasy and entertainment spheres of cabarets, popular music, radio, and film during the war years. Contreras’s account of the rise of Chinese popular music in Shanghai during the 1930s is worth quoting at length: That the introduction of Western popular music to China was responsible for the birth of Chinese popular music is indisputable, Bandleader Contreras declares. The Chinese people heard them in the movies, over the radio, requested them at Shanghai.indb 207 2010/5/11 11:49:06 AM 208 · Shanghai’s Dancing World dance-halls: it was not long before Chinese popular songs were composed, and this marked an important step in the development of Chinese music—the singers began singing in their natural voices, instead of in the sing-song falsetto which entertainers had been taught for centuries. But popular Chinese music did not make the headway it should have. It was only recently that real progress started. With the ban on Anglo-American movies, the Chinese began to see more Chinese movies, where they heard Chinese songs rendered by famous actresses or artistes. With the field open to them, Chinese composers were able to create strong contacts with recording studios; dance bands began to play the songs and popularize them still more with their style of rendition ; popular singers began to feature them on their programmes. Never has Chinese music been so popular in Shanghai as today, Contreras reports, and never has its future seemed so bright. The popularity of Japanese and Filipino music is also marked.2 This passage reveals the connection between popular music, cabaret culture, and wartime politics—in this case those of censorship under the Japanese that led Shanghai film-goers to embrace the native film and music industry more fully than they had previously when Hollywood films dominated its film scene. Many of the songs featured in the cinema of this era, it may be added, were politically oriented toward the Japanese ideological battle for control over China, just as the Japanese military harnessed talents of famous singers of the period such as Bai Guang and Li Xianglan to support their war effort. Like American entertainers such as Bob Hope, who served as spokespersons for the Allied cause, Shanghai cabarets and their musicians helped spread the pro-Japanese message through the playing of popular dance-tunes drawn from wartime propaganda films sponsored by the Japanese. Even so, these tunes were still set to a Western beat, thus perpetuating the impact of Western musical culture over Asia, and by extent, the culture that Hollywood films and cabarets promoted. The article concludes by stating that Chinese pop music “maintains Western rhythm as its foundation. The downbeat—the hood upon which Western swing hangs—plays the same role in Chinese dance-tunes. Syncopation is a universal instinct.” By arguing that such a...

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