Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and Its Discontents by Hiromu Nagahara (review)

Analyzing the "popular" is a deceptively difficult task, for at least two reasons. Historically the word has been used in a multiple, or at least quite fluid, manner. It sometimes signifies "commonness," or, one might say, democratic everyone-ness, while at other times it points to a specific strata of society marked by vulgarity, lowliness, obsession, and similar qualities of the abject within a hierarchy of valorization—a sense of someone-ness (or someone-elseness). Meanwhile, in modernity, objects characterized by this adjective occupy a deeply familiar dimension of consumer society as entertainment commodities, and the way these objects are taken for granted often makes it difficult even to justify a serious analysis in the first place. While cultural studies and related disciplines of research have attempted, often quite successfully, to bring popular culture to the critical discussion of political resistance and agency, it remains tricky to discern how, historically, the very category of the "popular" comes into being as a salient object of public attention in specific sociocultural contexts and what continuing effects such efforts at categorization have on the reality of sociopolitical life.

Hiromu Nagahara's Tokyo Boogie-Woogie may be read precisely in terms of such questioning. Highly informative and lucidly written, the book explores the complex meanings of "Japanese popular music" in the historical context of the "Popular Song Era" of the 1920s through 1950s. Presenting a diverse set of evidence—from magazine columns to parliamentary proceedings, from Occupation-era documents to memoirs by industry players—the discussion situates Japanese popular music at a point of intersection among competing genres, tastes, and social and economic interests. The resulting analysis demonstrates how music critics, record companies, intellectuals, citizens' groups, bureaucrats, and policy makers attempted to carve out, police, and manipulate the contours of this music. It shows how the very idea of Japanese popular music functioned as a kind of cultural shifter, a constellation of signs—musical as well as discursive—whose point of reference moved according to the context of their invocation. Rather than treating popular music as though it were an ahistorical or naturally occurring category, the author draws attention to the ways in which social actors voiced and were recruited to diverging political imaginations through their reflexive statements about it.

Two such political imaginations or inclinations, in particular, organize the discussion: the "forces that encouraged standardization of culture," on the one hand, and those that "persistently reinscribed hierarchy and difference on the newly emerging mass society," on the other (p. 6). The author notes in the introduction that his analysis of the Popular Song Era is geared toward explicating "the ways in which the assumption of hierarchies, the desire for a democratic culture, and the interplay between these two competing inclinations among Japan's elites consistently undergirded many of the most consequential sets of ideas and forces that guided the ways in which people produced, consumed, and critiqued culture throughout the [twentieth] century" (p. 6). As such, he argues that far from being simply a chapter in the history of modern Japanese culture, the Popular Song Era was a conjuncture that produced enduring structural conditions for cultural practice and critique in the years that followed. Many readers familiar with recent developments in Japanese popular and media culture will take this argument seriously.

As suggested at the beginning of this review, one may understand the interplay between the forces of democratizing coevalness and hierarchical differentiation in terms of the fundamental affordance of the idea of "popular" culture to bring the two into a dialogic relationship; the chapters of the book trace the effects and conditions of this interplay in concrete historical contexts, beginning with the Meiji era. Following a brief but informative "prehistory" of the Popular Song Era, chapter 1 closely analyzes the emergence of "the masses" (taishū) in the interwar years in relation to commercial popular music. Also examined are the processes that contributed to the birth and...