East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Current Issue

Preoccupied with the historical contradictions of seawater as manifested in the early to mid-twentieth century popular music history surrounding Japan, the Introduction to the Special Issue: ‘Resonating Across Oceanic Currents: Maritime Histories of Popular Music in and from Japan, 1920s-60s’ addresses a potentiality of the maritime frame as a method for moving away from historical periodization in popular music studies, and for reconsidering the approaches to ‘the global music history’. Above all, by contributing to the growing scholarship that engages with the oceanic frames as methods ripe for deconstructing music histories, it argues for the potencies of the maritime frame that, in many respects, brings to centre personal narratives, shifting geopolitical positionalities and subjectivities of musicians, listeners and creators in the study of popular music history.

This article examines the politics of cultural differentiation in wartime Japan, especially from the viewpoint of linguistic imperialism and musical mimicry, by researching official documents, newspapers and magazines, as well as investigating popular songs. Various sources from this period demonstrate that Japanese critics, musicians and musicologists were conscious of the cultural difference between Asian regions, even while the government propagated a unified East Asia. Different actors pursued contradictory objectives of cultural assimilation and dissimilation, reflecting tensions and contradictions in both popular attitudes and official policy. On the other hand, the boundary was distorted in musical practices, as seen in the way different languages were selected and used in the lyrics of wartime popular songs. This article analyses two cases as examples of this phenomenon: (1) popular songs sung by Chinese singers, mostly female, in Japanese patois, and (2) songs by Japanese singers in broken and role language. Even during the Second Sino-Japanese War, Chinese and Japanese singers visited each other’s countries on the pretext of ‘goodwill’ to record songs and participate in shows or radio broadcasts for local audiences.

This text discusses a well-known Chinese popular song, ‘When Will You Return’. The original recording of this song was performed with the accompaniment of western musicians. While the song has thereby been associated with both Chinese and tango imagery in Japan, it has also been subject to a variety of political interpretations. In China, meanwhile, it has been a site of frequently politicized criticism. In this article, I will attend broadly to its trans-border nature and then explore the mystery of the song’s composer and original accompanist.

This article explores collective experiences of Japanese popular music within the post-Second World War South Korean society along with related identity strategies – elimination, stratification and standardization – from postcolonial perspectives and discuss what characterizes ‘Japanese-ness’ as a musical, industrial and social product. In the context of strategies to eradicate it from the urban spaces, cultural industry and memories and bodies of Korean people, Japanese-ness – labelled under the moniker waesaek – was proscribed as a cultural remnant of imperialism, militarism and colonial dominion and thus, a harmful influence on its public. South Korean popular songs categorized as waesaek music within this model were subject to social criticism and gentrified in the music marketplace as trot. On the other hand, Americanization was an important strategy used to construct a new ‘Korean-ness’ separate from the Japanese-ness lingering within the country from its colonial past. Japanese-ness in popular music in post-war South Korea continually changed as it was re-imagined and re-constructed in parallel with musical, social and industrial changes in South Korea. Each of these strategies carries its own corresponding paradoxes, and Korean-ness and Japanese-ness are cast in sharp relief as distinct cultural products while still containing those paradoxes. This article argues that these strategies, both global and local in scope, highlight the fact that post-colonialism cannot be explained merely by the relationship between one colony and one empire but rather evolves in a global and local milieu, in which multiple empires and colonies are intertwined.

Focusing on a recently discovered collection of private recordings of Japanese singers in concert in Sacramento, California, in 1950, this article examines the audio record of the performance by Yamaguchi Yoshiko, previously known as Ri Kōran (Li Xianglan), as an instance of the emergence of new maritime routes of circulation for popular music in the early Cold War period. In the light of the supposed need for both Yamaguchi and her audience of Japanese Americans to seek ‘rehabilitation’ for their wartime activities, including incarceration of the latter in internment camps, the article traces a complex process of negotiation between performer and audience as each seeks to manage the tensions and contradictions of their shifting historical positions. The article also explores other recordings from the same collection, including those by Misora Hibari, Hattori Ryōichi, Watanabe Hamako, Kouta Katsutarō and the Akireta Boys, and provides an account of who made the recordings and how they were unearthed in 2008.

This article focuses on the transpacific circulations of Japanese popular songs alongside touring American military personnel in East Asia between 1945 and 1958: that is, from the end of the Second World War, across the span of the Korean War, and up to the year of the American ground forces’ withdrawal from ‘mainland’ Japan. By first tracing the trans-oceanic travels of musical souvenirs such as phonograph records and music boxes, and then by delving into their ‘afterlives’ as ex-souvenirs variously lost or preserved, this article reveals the seemingly minor yet no less significant histories and memories of musical objects containing within them the traces of post-war Japanese popular song. Over this period, musical souvenirs entered into postwar American households with returning military personnel, imparting to family and friends an auditory sensation of ‘Japan’ that carried with it the fantasy of knowing a place and culture that lay far across the Pacific. Although many of the Japanese pop songs contained therein lost their ‘souvenir’ status in the late 1960s, their recent revival via transnational online media suggests new ways of re-‘discovering’ and circulating a wealth of music that might have otherwise fallen into obscurity.

Review of: The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism, Robert Culp (2019)

New York: Columbia University Press, 392 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-23118-416-8, h/bk, $65.00

Review of: The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature, Kuei-Fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang (eds) (2022)

Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 249 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-88852-872-1, h/bk, HKD 620.00

Review of: The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography, Brian R. Dott (2020)

New York: Columbia University Press, 296 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-23119-532-4, cloth, $32.00/£28.00

Review of: Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness, Lily Wong (2018)

New York: Columbia University Press, 248 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-23118-338-3, h/bk, £55