Made in Japan: Studies in Popular Music ed. by Tōru Mitsui (review)

Made in Japanprovides focused and digestible articles that expand on current literature in English on Japanese popular music. Part of Routledge's Global Popular Music Series ( www.globalpopularmusic.net), the text intends to provide "a better understanding of the different approaches in the field of non-Anglophone scholarship" (xi), bringing theoretical work by mostly Japanese scholars to a broader audience. The volume opens with the development of Japanese popular music that results from the rapid influx of Western influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are several surveys providing a similar overview (IASPM-Japan 1990; Hosokawa 1994; Stevens 2008), but here Mitsui provides a solid introduction to not only key works in English but also extant literature in Japanese on Japanese popular music (valuable for anyone, but especially Japanese readers looking for more source material). Organized in thematic sections, collectively the articles cover major figures, important styles, and significant social movements.

Part 1, "Putting Japanese Popular Music in Perspective," tackles various genres that have originated since the early twentieth century, while presenting new theoretical approaches to much-studied musics. Miyamoto, for example, argues that Takarazuka (an all-female revue) research since the 1980s requires new questions looking at the important role fans play in shaping star performers' careers, instead of the bulk of literature written by foreign scholars that so far has focused predominantly on gender (Robertson 1998) (34). Although Miyamoto suggests the close relationship between Takarazuka performers and consumers is unique, she could place this fierce fandom in dialogue with other fan club practices in Japanese popular culture (Galbraith and Karlin 2012). Nevertheless, she successfully argues for other important ways of reading relationships in this world.

Brunt in turn explores how Kōhaku Uta-gassen(a popular long-running annual New Year's song contest featuring well-known artists) builds a nation through "the simultaneous and shared experience of collective singing in the contest, to create the image of Japan uniting through its own popular song" (38). After introducing the history of the program and nature of the hierarchical relationships between the artists, she focuses on how Kōhakureflects the diversity of popular songs in the everyday life of Japanese. Singing creates a community among the performers onstage, the live audience, and viewers at home and even extends beyond geographical borders of Japan to reach those Japanese abroad.

Tōya takes the reader back to Occupation military bases and the postwar popular music performed by Japanese for servicemen, when numerous clubs were built on bases throughout Japan for American military. The musicians who learned this unfamiliar music were economically well off compared to most Japanese struggling after the war. Indeed, for the Japanese privileged to enter these off-limit spaces, "the music culture of the Occupation was a luxurious space in the very midst of postwar reconstruction, completely different from the situation of defeated Japan" (55). With a focus on the Zebra club in Yokohoma (including wonderful pictures that capture the ethos of this era), Tōya argues that "the clubs became places where the pattern of postwar Japan's popular music culture was created" (61) that would continue for decades to come.

Wajima moves forward historically to explore the emergence of the modern understanding of enkain the 1970s to represent an "older," "traditional" style as opposed to then-contemporary and heavily Western-influenced folk and rock. He argues that enkawas celebrated by a rising left that rejected the elite's penchant for Western classical music and critique of commercial music—instead espousing this Japanese sentimental song style as representing the people. Through use of traditional musical elements, such as konbushi(wide vibrato) and unari...