Resonances of Chindon-ya: Sounding Space and Sociality in Contemporary Japan by Marié Abe (review)

Filling in a long-overlooked gap in ethnomusicological studies of Japanese music cultures, Marié Abe's richly detailed ethnographic work focuses on the practices of chindon-ya, the Japanese advertising bands. More specifically, Abe's work explores the ability of chindon-ya to both reinforce and challenge accepted narratives of homogeneity, difference, sociality, and public space in Japan. In trying to understand why chindon-ya—typically thought of as an old-fashioned, apolitical practice—has survived and has renewed relevance today, Abe demonstrates how sound, history, and sociality are interrelated through the soundings of chindon-ya and how they mutually produce space. Although it may be tempting to explain today's chindon-ya away as a nostalgic throwback to a prewesternized Japan, Abe's analysis delves much deeper, with very satisfying results. She demonstrates how chindon-ya performances enact a multiplicity of histories. These performances simultaneously attend to listeners in such a way that the troupes' goals of economic success and the creation of interpersonal sociality are successfully met.

The book has three main tropes that serve to structure Abe's analysis: hibiki (resonance), bachigai (out of place), and nigiyakasa (noisiness/liveliness). Abe does an excellent job utilizing these concepts to tie together understandings of chindon-ya's affective soundings. The use of these three themes serves to analyze several aspects of chindon-ya: how its soundings create sociality; the sense of social, temporal, and spatial difference created and attended by chindon-ya's presence; and the festive and lively feelings indexed in the sounds of chindon-ya. All together, these tropes structure Abe's exploration of chindon-ya's contradictory nature, demonstrating how chindon-ya is both inherently grounded in capitalist modernity while also representing those marginalized by it and how it has become politicized. I especially appreciated how she firmly grounded chindonya as a product of Japanese culture while pushing against (and not resorting to) the trap of nihonjinron (theories that assume cultural, racial, and economic homogeneity of Japan through claims to a special uniqueness of the Japanese people), the echoes of which still threaten to come out in some ethnographic works on Japan.

From the beginning, Abe's ethnographic stories draw the reader into the streets of Osaka and Tokyo, watching the chindon-ya and the effects of its resonances on listeners right alongside her. These types of depictions are crucial in bringing a living tradition off the page and into the reader's mind; without them, there is a danger in such studies losing their vitality in a forest of dense academic prose. And while Abe's writing at times finds itself in danger of wandering into such a forest, her lively depictions of her interlocutors and their soundings keep the reader coming back to learn more. Abe's depictions are further enriched by the excellent photos and audiovisual fieldwork recordings that make up the accompanying media website at http://www.resonancesofchindon-ya.com (accessed 27 March 2020), which she encourages readers to refer to regularly while moving through the book.

The prologue and introduction, ripe with ethnographic snapshots of chindon-ya, set the scene for the book and present its main arguments. As Abe writes, "Chindon-ya's sounds proffer a historical continuity in the understanding of streets as always heterogeneous and dynamic space produced through social relations, practices, and imaginaries. … At the center of this study of chindon-ya is a simple claim that dynamic interrelations of sound, history, and sociality produce space" (p. xxii). The introduction goes on to describe the sounds and practices of chindon-ya and an overview of its roots, history, and current form. Abe also introduces chindon-ya's ambiguities and contradictory nature through its transcultural root in both Japanese and European music—the debate of chindon-ya being understood as "not...