Marian Anderson’s 1953 Concert Tour of Japan: A Transnational History

Appendices and a full Japanese translation for this article are available at: https://www.press/uillinois.edu/journals/am/media/andersoninjapan/

On April 27, 1953, one year after Japan regained its sovereignty following the postwar Allied occupation, the famed African American singer Marian Anderson arrived in Tokyo for a concert tour. Sponsored by NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai, or Japan Broadcasting Corporation), Anderson’s visit was also endorsed by an interlinking network of national and local media, US Embassy officials, Japanese critics and performers of classical music, and the Japanese Red Cross Society (JRCS). She performed at some of the country’s leading concert facilities and filled the role of goodwill ambassador, staging a benefit concert for orphans in Hiroshima just eight years after an American atomic bomb had decimated that city. Anderson also performed at the Imperial Palace, which, as the New York Times reported, “had a Negro guest for the first time in its 2,600-year history.”¹ This was Anderson’s first visit to Asia. She stayed in Japan for over a month, performing several times in Tokyo and giving concerts in Nagoya, Osaka, and Hiroshima. Then on May 27 she made a brief trip to perform for US and UN troops serving in the Korean War. This visit took place in the midst of the fighting, turning out to be only two months before a cease-fire was signed with North Korea. Anderson’s 1953 journey to Japan predated her more extensive State Department–sponsored Asian tour, which took place four years later and did not include performances in Japan.²

Anderson encountered Japan as the nation was coming to terms with a new normalcy, fresh out of occupation, still healing from the abject defeat of World War II, and essentially reentering the community of nations. Crown Prince Akihito, as a notable example, spent six months of 1953 on a world tour, serving as the face of a recently reorganized country poised to make its debut on the international stage. The Allied plan for the reconstruction of Japan after World War II had promoted fast-paced Westernization and democratization, with vigorous endorsement from General Headquarters, or GHQ, as it was familiarly known in Japan. GHQ referred to the office of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), who led the so-called rehabilitation effort. Active promotion of Western traditions was central to this initiative, and the performance of Western classical music contributed to its overarching agenda, building on Japan’s strong history with European musical traditions. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, Japan was charged with special procurements by the US government; as a result, Japan experienced robust economic growth, which in turn made it possible to host foreign virtuosos. Prominent musicians from abroad like the pianist Walter Gieseking (March 1953), violinist Jascha Heifetz, and conductor Herbert von Karajan (both in April 1954) were invited by Japanese newspaper companies and by NHK, which had foreign cash on hand for cultural events.³ These stars of Western classical music performed in cities across the country, and Japanese audiences received them enthusiastically. Notably, they were white males of European or Russian origin in a field in which women excelled primarily as singers and from which blacks were summarily excluded.

This article brings a bicultural perspective to a significant moment of postwar cultural exchange between Japan and the United States, contextualizing Anderson’s concert tour and her symbolic presence as an icon of civil rights in relation to the vast Westernization project of the Allied occupation of Japan. It has been researched and written by a team of Japanese and US musicologists, with archival research undertaken on both sides of the Pacific, and it draws upon sources in both Japanese and English. Misako and Makiko visited archives around Japan, including those for NHK and the imperial family. They also went to the National Diet Library and its branches, which hold national and regional newspapers. Misako’s students at Kobe University...