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  • Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and Its Discontents by Hiromu Nagahara
  • Shawn Bender (bio)
Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and Its Discontents. By Hiromu Nagahara. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2017. l, 288 pages. $36.00, cloth.

In 2002, Japan instituted a curriculum revision requiring music educators in public schools to use traditional Japanese instruments in classes for the first time. The revision (gakushū shidō yōryō) directs elementary school teachers to introduce Japanese instruments to students in later grades along with general musical concepts such as pitch, rhythm, melody, and harmony. Middle-school music teachers as well must incorporate more than one traditional instrument over three years of teaching.1 Minimal as they seem, these additions mark a significant change to compulsory education in Japan. Since the nineteenth century, the music curriculum in public schools has, curiously perhaps, privileged Euro-American musical idioms and instruments over Japanese ones.

Hiromu Nagahara's attention to the complexities of musical nationalism in Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and Its Discontents provides some insight as to why this is the case. The book takes discourse about popular song as a lens through which to understand social change, democratization, cultural elitism, and the impact of mass media in Japan from the late nineteenth century through to the 1970s. Some of this ground has been covered previously in a book to which Nagahara makes frequent reference, Michael Bourdaghs's Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon (Columbia University Press, 2012). To Bourdaghs's pathbreaking take on popular music in postwar Japan, Nagahara adds a deeper look into prewar formations of the genre and applies a method that is resolutely historical. Texts of cultural critics and political elites about popular music are foregrounded in the book, as are the perspectives of important composers, arrangers, and singers. The actual musical content of the genre receives less emphasis.

From a quick glance at the title, readers might conclude that Nagahara's book focuses on contemporary pop music in Japan, or "J-Pop." The subject at the heart of the book, however, is an earlier kind of popular song known as ryūkōka. Ryūkōka emerged in the 1920s and had its heyday in the 1950s. The appearance of the genre is typically traced to the development of mass society and the impact of new mass media. Nagahara largely concurs with [End Page 226] this assessment but notes that it fails to explain why the tone of critical commentary toward popular song remained almost uniformly negative from the start. Taking this critical discourse as an analytical object instead "reveals that [ryūkōka] emerged . . . at the intersection of forces that encouraged the standardization of culture and everyday life in modern Japan and those that persistently reinscribed hierarchy and difference on the newly emerging mass society" (p. 6, emphasis in original).

Tension between hierarchy and democratization is, indeed, a theme that runs throughout the book. In the introduction and in chapter 1, Nagahara explores fraught understandings of Western and inherited forms of music in the Meiji period (1868–1912). Meiji elites did not view inherited forms of musical practice as worth celebrating. Classical stage arts had hierarchical structures of authority and modes of transmission that clashed with elite interest in cultivating horizontal bonds of affiliation among new imperial subjects. Inherited music of the lower classes was likewise dismissed as too vulgar and "morally debauched" (p. 14) for promotion on the national scale. In fluential bureaucrats like Izawa Shūji and Megata Tanetarō advocated adopting the music of Europe and the United States to further national aspirations of "civilization and enlightenment" (p. 10). In the 1880s, Japan began teaching music to primary school students on the basis of entirely Western models, a custom that held until the curriculum revision in 2002.

The hope of Meiji reformers was that a new "national music" (kokugaku) would emerge over time to replace both Western imports and inherited forms, one that would befit the people and the spirit of a new nation. But Nagahara shows that attitudes toward the new kinds of music that did develop were no less elitist than before. "Tokyo March," a song that Nagahara...

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