Bricolage

This week I did what I think was quite a successful lesson on class consciousness.  On the first day, I posed four questions to the students, and asked them to work in 4 groups to come up with answers using their minds and their textbooks. (This is related to Craig, et al, Chapter 35).

1.  What is the meaning of “proletarianization” of the common people?

2.  What were living conditions like in 19th century European cities?

3.  What were the ideas of Karl Marx?

4.  Describe the causes of the formation of trade unions and mass political parties.

On the second day, I showed the first 20 minutes or so of a movie titled “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (with John Gielgud, among others) and asked the class to identify class structures as depicted in that movie.

This made the study of class structure, and the development of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in Europe generally, and more specifically in England, both effective and interesting for the students.

Yingjin Zhang, in Chinese National Cinema, provides a useful, and very complete, chronological account of the development of film in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.  An important subtext of Zhang’s history (he makes it his central goal, but the organization of the book is really that of a chronological history) is the idea that Chinese cinemas do constitute a national cinema, not in the sense of the nation-state, but in the sense of the nation people.  Andrew Jones’ Yellow Music, and Geremie Barmé’s In the Red both operate under similar assumptions.  First, that popular culture is most effective and valuable when it is a de-centralized product of a self-defined group (Zhang’s nation-people).  Second, that when used by the state popular culture is little more than a blunt instrument for propaganda, easily read and ineffective.  And third, that cultural history can be read through the intentions of culture producers and the environment and technology by which they are informed. All three authors address these points while dealing with essentially the same chronological structure, which frames their analysis in nearly every way.

I discovered upon reading the three assigned books for this week:  Andrew Jones’ Yellow Music and Geremie Barmé’s In The Red, that the chronology followed by Zhang is by no means unique among scholars attempting to decode Chinese popular culture in the twentieth century.  In fact, for all the criticism that these three authors heap upon the CCP for its blunt-instrument style use of popular culture to inculcate mass national values in the Chinese people, they seemed to me to be surprisingly willing to follow the political chronology of Chinese history when defining moments of popular culture change within Chinese society.

The fact is that all three accept this chronology and write around it.  Zhang makes it the centerpiece of his history of national film, where Jones actually begins with it, and rotates his whole story around this periodization scheme.  Barmé, trying to be revolutionary himself, tackles only the last piece of it, and makes the assumption that he is dealing with a piece of Chinese time that, by definition, is the end-point, the late-stage, of the very same chronology.

This chronological system of analysis begins with the prewar period, the search for modernity and national unity in a fragmented China threatened from without, and gloriously, though also infuriatingly, diverse within.  The Second World War then occurs, and this necessitates a shift toward nationalism in cultural production.  At the end of the war, the Revolution brings an end to KMT rule, and the People’s Republic of China, born of the nation, attempts to use culture to indoctrinate the masses in national and communist value systems.  Upon the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the death of Mao Zedong, a new opening to the world is engineered by Deng Xaoping, and that includes a freeing of cultural constraints, paving the way for Zhang’s Fifth Generation of filmmakers, and other producers more able, or willing, to buck the system, and less likely to be incarcerated for doing so.

The key to the entire chronological system being used here is the Maoist period from the 1950‘s to 1976, during which all three writers assume what Barmé has called the “Culture as Cudgel” model.[1] This is Barmé’s reference to the period between 1950 and 1978, when to produce culture products was to be required to produce state-sponsored, state-censored films with state-specified symbolism and dialogue.

All three authors implicitly set this period, or the attitudes toward the necessity of turning culture to some social use that characterized it, as the center-stone, and sort of a straw man despite its accuracy, as the fulcrum for their analytical projects.

For Zhang, it is this period that helps him set up the idea of Shanghai provenance and Chinese chronology as the essential features of Chinese national cinema, as opposed to the imposed national-state culture of the CCP.

For Jones, it is the desire of CCP culture worker predecessors such as Nie Er, who see the need to make popular culture have some social utility, some meaning, which sets up the whole discussion of “Yellow Music” – the western-influenced predecessor and erstwhile model for the New Music – as a cultural product.

For Barmé, it is the “Culture as Cudgel” period that makes it possible to imagine a freedom in contemporary Chinese culture that may not exist.  Since contemporary culture producers in China do not have the proverbial ax over the head when it comes to content in their culture products, it is easy to imagine that they are not co-opted by the state, when Barmé believes that in fact it is their co-optation by the state that makes them the artists they are.

Yingjin Zhang begins Chinese National Cinema with a short and useful explanation of his project.  He admits that China is a geographically and culturally diverse place, and takes note of recent approaches to cinema in general, and Chinese cinema specifically, that reject the idea that there is a single ‘national cinema’ history for China.  Zhang wants to compare Chinese cinematic history in all of its centers – Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taipei, looking for a set of cultural assumptions that show these traditions as Chinese not in the sense of the nation-state, but in the sense of what Zhang calls the “nation-people”.[2]

Concentrating on this cultural view of the nation-people, and thus giving some agency to the producers of Chinese popular culture even during the Cultural Revolution years, Zhang eventually succeeds in making a case for Chinese film as roughly comparable in all of the centers which he addresses.  Zhang’s point that this constitutes a kind of national cinema is not as securely founded.  His regional approach does a fine job of exposing the myths that have obscured the diversity of Chinese cinema in the name of the nation, but is unable to securely fasten them together as a national cinema with all of their differences intact.  Instead, Zhang connects the various cinematic traditions of Shanghai, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to a common set of origins, which, ultimately, seems to make them Chinese in provenance rather than in terms of a nation-people which he never fully defines.

Zhang’s first, and primary focus throughout the book, is the physical process of producing culture – in this case, specifically films – and relating that directly to the system by which audiences (the nation-people, presumably) were induced to view, and become comfortable with, this new form of art/entertainment.

Zhang’s first point, which he returns to quite often in the book, is that the new motion pictures, which premiered in 1896, were early on taken in China as being related to the shadow play in traditional Chinese entertainment culture.[3] The use of this term, according to Zhang, “foregrounds a conscientious effort of the Chinese to treat film as historically related to and conceptually indebted to some kind of Chinese tradition.”[4] In fact, film was placed within a chain of events which saw the shadow play move from China to the West, where film started.[5] Thus, in a sense, Chinese could take credit for the new art form, and so comfort in viewing it.

Still, film debuted primarily, as in the West, not as a fully developed art, but as a curiosity.  The technology for creating was new, venues suited to showing it did not exist, and so had to be improvised, and audiences were unsure what to expect, and whether they had gotten what they paid for.[6]

One of Zhang’s most critical points is that Chinese national film culture originated in Shanghai.  The first production company in China, Yaxia, was formed in Shanghai in 1909.[7] Zhang’s exhibition of Chinese film culture as it develops mostly in Shanghai gives readers a blow-by-blow of the art prior to the war with Japan which secures for Shanghai the title of origin.  Zhang’s narrative makes it clear throughout the book after this point that Shanghai is the place where the majority of pre-war production companies was born and died, where the largest number of theatres existed, and where the greatest box-office results were found.  Shanghai, with its growing middle class, its international character, and trading city status was the birthplace of the cinema that Zhang wants to call Chinese.

Zhang spends the majority of his space from Chapter one on talking about three things in a literal step-by-step history of film in Shanghai, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.  His first step in each part of each chapter is to introduce a new development in the film industry, usually introduced historically by a studio.  The focus of this is always on two things:  production process, and new methods of production, acting, and screenwriting that make up the content of film in each era.

This is the case when Zhang discusses the move of film from curiosity to narrative drama, through the development of the pre-war giant Mingxing studio.  Mingxing used the popular “butterfly” fiction of the day, full of stories of romance, emotion, and complex dramatic elements, all tied together by coincidence, to create narrative stories designed to pull the heartstrings of their audiences.  According to Zhang, when May 4^th intellectuals were critical of this form, Mingxing responded by updating their butterfly films with more edifying family themes that still used the elements of butterfly fiction, but gave a more moral, nationally oriented story.[8]

In fact, more than a national thread in the history of film, it is this type of stage-by-stage development of technology, plot elements, and film style that is the story Zhang wants to tell.  The idea of the change from curiosity to narrative form is mirrored in nearly every chapter of the book.  In Chapter 2, Zhang concentrates on connecting his vision of Chinese cinema to the experience of Chinese people in all areas (and specifically tries, rather unsuccessfully, to avoid tying this experience to the re-creation of the Chinese State) just before and during the war period from 1930-1949.  The missing element here is evidence about consumption that might show how Chinese audiences actually responded to the intentions of producers.

Jones follows this kind of analytical model as well, though the fulcrum of his chronology centers where Zhang’s is just beginning – in the early to mid-1930′s, with Japan’s conquest of Manchuria, social tensions, cosmopolitanism, and Chinese nationalism.

Ironically, Jones’ project is much more transnational in aim.  With the confluence of new musical technologies, Western music and Chinese music and musical traditions, Jones argues that in an attempt to be national, Chinese, and modern, New Music in fact became cosmopolitan, transnational, non-Chinese, and modern.[9] Jones is arguing that national history is not adequate to contain culture and the conflict between prewar popular music and the popular music of national utility created by Nie Er.  Instead, there is a need for a process “whereby “national cultures . . . [are] rearticulated within the new global framework” of colonial modernity.”[10] In other words, Jones sees the regional and colonial in the national, whereas Zhang sees the national in the regional.  These complex arguments bring us to a key question about popular culture in general which is worth asking:  where do popular culture modes begin and end?  Is popular culture a sign of increasing globalization, or simply cultural expressions of the national at the global level?

Jones sets this question off by making some important observations about two of his protagonists.  Li Jinhui, “to whom the creation of a hybrid genre of American Jazz, Hollywood film music, and Chinese folk music known in China as “modern songs” . . . is usually credited.”[11] This hybrid music, redolent of colonialism as of Chinese tradition, was eventually rejected by one of Li’s protégés, Nie Er, who wanted to create a form of popular music to inspire national sentiments and to increase awareness among Chinese of their plight within the world and within China.  Nie Er’s music was to be useful, and he thus tried to set it off against that of Li Jinhui, claiming both musically and in articles that were critical specifically of Li Jinhui’s style of modern music, its decadence and lack of social utility.  Yet, Jones notes that Nie Er and his fellow critics shared much with Li Jinhui musically.  In early leftist film scores, some of the simplest critiques of Li’s music were done by putting leftist words to Li’s own music.[12]

Nie Er himself was heavily influenced by what Jones calls phonographic realism – a rejection of the subjective techniques of Li’s mixed origin, emotionally driven songs performed by sing-song girls, with the explicit intent to be objective and scientific in representing the world through music.  The idea comes from Marxist cultural criticism, and was expounded, Jones says by the Creation Society, a group of leftist activists who shared Nie Er’s desires here.  A phonograph, it was said, did not observe the world from a particular perspective, hearing only what it wanted to hear.  A phonograph was objective, and to attempt to write music like a phonograph, hearing and creating an objective recording of the conditions of the world, was Nie Er’s and the Creation Society’s objective.[13] To be like the technology of recording, mechanistically to capture the world and present it to the nation-people, to borrow a term from Zhang, was to make oneself useful as a composer.

Ironically, Nie Er’s music drew on the same traditions, the same multi-cultural mix, as that of his teacher, Li Jinhui.  In making music useful and modern, Nie Er did not succeed in making it Chinese.

For Zhang in regards to film, as for Jones when it comes to music the point is that nationalist film was an increasingly popular product for directors and studios – particularly those in Shanghai, who were isolated in the International Settlement when Japan occupied Chinese Shanghai in 1937.  The same was true for ‘nationalist’ new music such as that created by Nie Er.  The 1930′s and 1940′s were a period of reaffirmation of Chinese identity, and the desire was not to broaden or contest what it meant to be Chinese, but to unify and solidify Chinese culture as a monolithic defense against conquest.

According to Zhang, the growing concern about Japanese control of Manchuria after 1932, and the war with Japan after 1937, engendered two major reactions.  These reactions coincide with the political/military realities of China at the time, though not with the geography of that political split.  Shanghai film-makers existed in a world where it was possible to collaborate with the Japanese, become both nationalist and leftist, or follow a line that encouraged a Chinese sense of nation without leftist ideology.  There were, according to Zhang, many films that were in between these extremes, and though censorship existed in all areas of China, many films were able to tread the fine line of censorship while expressing their messages in one or more of the above ideological camps.

Zhang characterizes this period as one of possibility, dynamism, and real subjective agency by film producers and directors.  Films explored, according to Zhang, “ideological struggles between the Nationalists and the leftists, between heroic glorification and humanistic exploration, between social realism and aesthetic modernism.”[14]

The possibility and freedom of expression that Zhang explores in the pre-war period is portrayed as having so much energy and creating such competition between studios that despite the existence of censors and a need to make profit or find financing, studios produced a plethora of films in art and popular genres.  Zhang’s discussion of this era almost seems like the foreshadowing of a communist straw man film industry after the revolution, which Zhang can then knock down later when he discusses the post-Cultural Revolution period.  This turns out to be exactly the case, but not until after Zhang takes a brief interlude to discuss Hong Kong and Taiwan and their relationship to Shanghai film during and before the war.

Zhang gives a critical foreshadowing of his most important contribution in this book in Chapter 4, “Cinematic Reinvention of the National in Taiwan, 1896-1978.”  Here Zhang makes the first point that, “Taiwan did not have a film production history of its own until the 1950′s.”[15] The chronology that Zhang has constructed in this book, with the goal of showing the culture of film as a part of national culture, is one that involves the development of China from one China through the war to multiple Chinas.

Consistent with this theme, this chapter on Taiwan cinema really gets going only when it begins to discuss the postwar transition.  Taiwan’s experience of Japanese rule prior to the war, then KMT rule, and finally, as the site of KMT power and political propaganda made this a particularly difficult place for a film culture to set down roots.  When Japanese films were banned in the postwar, the Taiwan reaction, according to Zhang, was to dust off old Chinese silent films (probably mostly produced in Shanghai) and import “over 100 Shanghai films. . .”[16] This direct connection to Shanghai is the source of the Chinese national in Taiwan film, as far as Zhang is concerned.  This provides the roots, and the experience of war, and particularly post-war and post-revolutionary trauma, martial law, and KMT propaganda, define the Taiwan film industry in its early incarnation.

The separation from mainland film culture comes in the early 1950′s with the emergence and popularity of Taiwanese dialect films.  These films emphasized the differentiation of Taiwan from the Chinese mainland, and catered to audiences who were becoming middle class and economically successful.  They also dealt with the social difficulties of becoming a modern, capitalist, urban state.

According to Zhang, the separation from mainland China was incomplete, caused insecurity, especially among displaced mainlanders, and this provided a market for Mandarin cinema, as well.  Zhang’s take is that the very cosmopolitan nature of Taiwan’s film market is evidence that Taiwan is a part of Chinese cinema history, apparently because it makes it clear that whatever the reactions, Taiwan is dealing with the same chronology as the other “Chinas” he is writing about.

In the same way, Zhang places Hong Kong within the chronology of Chinese cultural development, and connects Hong Kong film to roots in Shanghai cinema.  Since these connections are the only really stable ones, they are the bearers of his national standard.  In Chapter 5 he connects Hong Kong cinema to the pre-war Shanghai experience by claiming that so many Shanghai film-makers moved to Hong Kong during and after the revolution that Hong Kong underwent a cultural Shanghainization.  Major film companies that had had Hong Kong branches relocated production there, and others started it in the confines of the British colony in response to the arrival of the Chinese film industry.

Zhang maintains that the ideological battle between the KMT and the CCP were continued in Hong Kong Mandarin cinema, with left-leaning and bourgeois, market-oriented directors producing films about the nation as a whole, often ”in the tradition of postwar Shanghai realism.”[17] The shadow of Shanghai, and thus mainland China, as the arbiter of Chinese art and national identity, looms large here.  The development of Cantonese cinema in Hong Kong wins world-wide popularity and is diverse and well-produced.  Still, despite the linguistic victory of Cantonese in Hong Kong film, the local nature of these films is, according to Zhang, eventually subsumed back into a mainstream of Chinese film culture.

Jones, too, sees the creation of a new vocabulary of Chinese nationalism in music not simply as a replacement of pre-revolutionary idioms with new nationalist-socialist terms, but as an absorption and regurgitation of those idioms within the new cultural context.  The critical point, of course, is that Jones sees the chronology of these events in the same terms as Zhang.  Thus Jones’ story about the transformations of a song in the movie New Year’s Coin sees the possibility of salvation for the sing-song girls who have come to symbolize the decadence of Li Jinhui’s modern songs and the culture to which they are categorized as belonging.  The sing-song girl can become a part of society, but only by giving up her decadent ways and becoming a part of the collective.[18] Nie Er and others used Li Jinhui’s formula for popular songs to create a new nationalist song that reflexively attempted to negate its own roots.

A key theme in the Zhang and Jones books, whose chronology is taken up by Barmé, is the assumption that the popular culture in China comes from pre-war Shanghai.  This “sprouts of popular culture” idea is what informs Zhang’s idea of the Chinese national in cinema, and creates the Chinese colonial cosmopolitan in Jones’ understanding of Li Jinhui’s “Yellow Music”.

To a great extent, the evidence they share seems to bear them out.  Shanghai’s cosmopolitan nature, large population, and economic importance made it the popular culture capital of Republican-era China.  As Zhang notes, here was where the first movie studio came into existence in China.  Jones makes it clear that Li Jinhui’s broad popularity really began to soar when he and his troop came under the umbrella of the popular and market-oriented Lianhua movie studio in Shanghai.[19]

Further evidence that both Zhang and Jones see Shanghai as the source for Chinese popular culture comes in the discussions of competition which occur primarily in Shanghai.  Zhang discusses the cutthroat competition of movie studios, and then of theater chains, in Shanghai, as a driving force in the production decisions of the industry, dictating what kind of films would be made, what niche each company would fit itself into, and ultimately the survival of producers themselves.[20]

Finally, though, for both Zhang and Jones, the Second World War creates a difficult period for culture producers, most of whom felt some need to express themselves in support of national goals of defense.  These expressions, though, were often of varying ideological quality, with artists on the left, and others on the right, and frequent interchange between them.

The war, however, also forced many producers of popular culture to either live with Japanese occupation in Shanghai, or find a new place where production of culture without Japanese influence or interference was possible.  The dearth of such places, and of consumers for their products, led to a period of drought which many production companies did not survive.[21]

Following the war was the revolution period, and this also created shake-ups in the industry.  The growth of films produced by the CCP, the bald use by the CCP of popular culture to create national and collective consciousness (the “Culture Cudgel” of Barmé referred to earlier) as well as anti-communist propaganda in song and film, KMT training films and documentaries in pre-1949 China, and in Taiwan after 1949.  Zhang wants to argue that the Communist victory makes Taiwan and Hong Kong as much a part of the Chinese nation-people as are those in the PRC, because of the fact that, although their experiences were different, they were reacting to the same post-revolutionary changes.  Thus Zhang’s concentration on Taiwanese Mandarin cinema in Chapter 4, and on Hong Kong Cantonese cinema as an outgrowth of Shanghainization in Chapter 5.[22]

Jones is interested in this part of the chronology of Chinese popular culture, as well.  It is in the post-revolution era when the reactionary music of Nie Er, his foil for Li Jinhui, comes into its own as pragmatic music of the Chinese Communist nation-state, in the service of the people through educating them about their essential and objective collective unity.[23]

It seems clear then that for Zhang and Jones, who have worked together closely, the chronology of the development of Chinese popular culture follows a clear pattern that reflects the chronology of Chinese political developments.  The fulcrum for both books is the Maoist era of 1950-1978, during which subjective, individual expression was not only unacceptable, but not allowed by the state.  On either side of this era, there is a period of possibility and amazing cultural production – a real counter-culture, as Barmé defines it – not as a binary opposite to the dominate or state-sponsored culture, but as a series of graded alternatives to the blunt simplicity and repetitive nature of state-centered symbols and narratives.  This fulcrum period, which is, in effect, a popular culture wasteland in the minds of these two writers, provides a sort of steeping period during which lack of expressive opportunity allows Chinese producers of popular culture to store their collective productive energy for the more freely expressive time to come in the post-Mao period.  It is here that the work of Geremie Barmé becomes most relevant.

Barmé, in his introduction, paints himself as a dissenter when it comes to popular culture analysis.  He gives a long description of his education in China to establish his credentials, he spends time on eschewing recent scholarly trends toward theorizing in analyses of popular culture, while keeping himself in the game by not espousing a ‘just the facts’ approach for which he could be easily criticized.  In fact, Barmé seems to define himself as a researcher and his argument about popular culture primarily in the negative.

In any case, after making his remark about the blunt brutality of cultural suppression in the Maoist period, Barmé goes on to say that, contrary to popular belief, Chinese artists and culture producers are not any more free today than they were then.  In fact, he says, “[after] decades of rule by Proledic [the dictatorship of the proletariat], external political coercion and the internal pressures of the Chinese deep structure meld to create a new self-censoring cultural figure, the state artist. . .”[24]

In Barmé’s view, the new artists of the post-Mao period are not really any more free, they simply are better able to negotiate with the state a position of acceptance of the social contract which allows them some room to criticize society.  The true art, according to these people, says Barmé, is in the ability to “write between the lines” and create culture products that can be passed into production by the state, but also contain critique of that state in subtle ways, coded into the writing in such a way that it is recognizable, but not clear or obvious.[25]

For Barmé, though, this new art of subtle critique, as well as the more overt critiques of Communist Party Rule that have appeared in the recent past are not a sign of a new freedom.  They are instead relatively meaningless, barbs directed at officials, the state of society, or, ironically, and the media itself, but produce no action, and no material change.[26]

Conversely, the market itself, thought of in the West and by many Chinese as the agent of change in the possibility of self-expression, is frequently seen as corrupt by its participants, both producers and consumers alike, for the very reason that it is the market.  This comes clear in the story of author Yu Jie’s book Fire and Ice, rushed to press in the ironic moment of celebration of the importance of Beijing University just as one of its most prominent students, Wang Dan, was being ejected from China for taking its tradition of free speech and criticism too seriously in 1989.  Yu’s critique of the Maoist period and of critics of the new cultural and market freedom was barbed and direct, but appeared to many of its readers as redolent of the market pandering that was the target of the very people the book aimed at.[27]

For Barmé, then, Chinese contemporary popular culture is a circular argument that adjusts itself to the prevailing political winds for market purposes, but achieves nothing important through its cultural criticism in what is a kind of ultimate betrayal of the objectives of Lu Xun.

My key point here is that, writing about the post-Mao period as he is, Barmé does not call into question the chronology used by Zhang and Jones, but works with it, simply correcting the view that the era after the fulcrum period is really an indicator of a return to subjectivity or agency.  The fundamental structure of equating the popular culture chronology to the chronology of China’s modern political history remains unchanged.

Still, Barmé does add something new to the mix in the post-Mao period – a sense that popular culture is not linked to political or social change at all, except, because of the market, as a reflector – a mirror that inadequately expresses the opinions of the masses as contrary to, but not necessarily any better than, those of the holders of power in China.  Worse, because the producers, and especially the consumers of Chinese popular culture are essentially subalterns themselves, popular culture functions as a way to provide the masses with a voice with little risk, because as shrill as it may be, this voice can say nothing.  To twist a phrase from Spivak, the subaltern can speak, but it has no impact.

This brings several questions to mind.  First, does the production of culture really fit the political periodization so neatly?  If so, do the politics drive the culture, or does the culture, as Jones wants to think, provide us with the understanding of our time, which we therefore create in line with our understanding?  In other words, is political culture the real driver of historical change?  Another key question might be, is it possible to write a chronological history in terms of the production of culture, rather than the events of politics?

Finally, one primary missing piece to all three of these analyses is any clear sense of what consumers thought as they participated in re-producing these cultural artifacts, be they songs, movies, novels, etc., during each of the periods discussed.  This is, of course, a tall order, especially, as Jones mentions, because of the relative difficulty of finding sources created by the producers themselves.  The chances of finding evidence about how consumers – common Chinese from various classes, locations, etc., viewed these products as they were using them would be very hard to find indeed, especially from the pre-war period.

However, as Stuart Hall and John Storey have pointed out, and Jones has mentioned, the culture production system is a two-way street.  Producers may have intent for the use of their products, and their meaning, at the time of production.  Consumers, however, use products, even cultural products, for their own purposes.  Even if it were possible for Nie Er to create an objective musical recording, the consumers of that recording would all use it in subjective ways.

Zhang gets close to this analysis – maybe as close as can be for the pre-war period – when he shows statistics of theater attendance, quotes from movie magazines and theater advertisements, etc.  Still, these statistics are only slightly useful, and don’t give a complex story about individual consumption habits.  The movie magazines are highly mediated, themselves selling to their audience ideas that they think people want to hear, but cannot be sure of, and they were mostly the products of the moving production companies.

The closest to this kind of analysis is Barmé, but his book reveals him as a participant in the wars over popular culture – one of the many voice-ful, but ultimately perhaps meaningless subalterns – in the debate.  He has access to much of the evidence on consumption, and uses it to fire potshots at his critics rather than to make a critical reading that is really useful. Still, Barmé’s approach is useful.
Bibliography

Barmé, Geremie. In The Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Jones, Andrew F. Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001.

Zhang, Yingjin. Chinese National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004.

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[1] Geremie Barmé, In The Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 1.

[2] Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York, Oxon: Routledge, 2004; reprint, NY, NY: Routledge, 2005), 5-6 (page citations are to the reprint edition).

[3] Ibid., 13-15.

[4] Ibid., 15.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 17-20.

[7] Ibid., 19.

[8] Ibid., 22-28.

[9] Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 7-20.

[10] Ibid., 10.  Here Jones is himself quoting from Wang Yuhe.

[11] Ibid., 6.

[12] Ibid., 113.

[13] Ibid., 108.

[14] Zhang, 59.

[15] Ibid., 113.

[16] Ibid., 121.

[17] Ibid., 159

[18] Jones, 130-133.

[19] Ibid., 97.

[20] Zhang, 58-81.

[21] Zhang, 83-95.

[22] Zhang, 113-185.

[23] Jones, 133.

[24] Barmé, 2.

[25] Ibid., 6.

[26] Barmé, 147-149.

[27] Ibid., 350-353.

In Staging the World Rebecca Karl argues that contemporary approaches to the study of nationalism are too narrow.  Benedict Anderson sees nationalism as defined by the state even as it defines the state, and analyzes nationalism’s development primarily as an internal politico-cultural process.  Prasenjit Duara, Karl says, goes just he opposite direction and uses local history to oppose the idea that nationalism exists in any way but the contrived narrative produced by a governing body trying to define and legitimate its control over geographically, culturally, and economically disparate areas.  Rather than these narrow approaches, Karl argues that Chinese nationalism at its inception was a complex set of intellectual conceptions not circumscribed by the existence or position of the Chinese state, nor defined by processes within China alone.  Instead, Karl posits the possibility that Chinese intellectuals perceived China as a national entity by way of a growing sense that China was a part of the world, and that there were certain analogues for China’s problems in other places in the world from which the Chinese could learn and by which China could be reimagined as a modern state.  This sense of China in the world Karl calls “globality’, and it is her position that China discovered itself by creating histories of other places within the colonized world (Turkey, Japan, Hawaii, South Africa and the Philippines, among others) that served as tropes for thinking of China’s problems, opportunities, and identity in the intellectual world of 1898-1911.

Weston, Timothy B.  The Power of Position:  Beijing University, intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898-1929. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004.

In The Power of Position, Weston contends that during the Republic the founding and growth of Beijing University as an intellectual center for China created the mouthpiece for Chinese intellectuals to make a case for themselves as the proper leadership for China in the modern era.  After making this point in his introduction, the second and third chapters discuss the founding of Beijing University in the end of the Qing Dynasty as the Jingshi daxuetang and then follow the University through China’s 1911 revolution and its aftermath in Beijing.  Weston’s primary goal in the fourth chapter is to show the University’s ability to position itself as new, but the inheritor of the intellectual tradition in China. In the fifth, titled “The Insistent Pull of Politics” he asserts that intellectuals saw themselves as the proper leaders of society, in the Confucian style, and sought to use Beijing University as their mouthpiece and as a place to train their students to think in terms of service to the larger nation of China.  In chapter six, Weston sees this process of moving from Imperial University to “Beida”, the modern hotbed of intellectual discovery and political activism, as having reached its peak in the May 4^th Movement of 1919.  Chapter seven discusses a crossroads after the 1920′s during which the University seemed to be trying to choose between political activism and academic professionalism, where the problems of modern society could be thought out in a quiet, careful, critical way.   Westons conclusion is that Beijing University was uniquely positioned to accomplish the task of mediating the modern and traditional through an essential conservatism that came with the territory of being an intellectual in China, whatever the subject of study.  Rather than seeing Beijing University as a revolutionary place, then, Weston sees it as essentially a liberal institution, rooted in the Republic, and dedicated to the values of intellectual social leadership, individual self-reflection, critical thinking, and service to society as a whole.

Howell, David L., Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth Century Japan.

Berkeley and  Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 2005.

In Geographies of Identity David Howell sets out to present what he calls a series of essays on the changing features of identity in the period of transition between early modern and modern (read Tokugawa and Meiji) Japan.  Howell’s project is worthwhile, though the way in which he goes about it in this book, using unconnected essays to make a variety of points around and about the main idea, leaves gaps that make the whole less than fully successful.

First, in his introduction, Howell attempts to cobble the essays together into a coherent whole – a project which he then warns the reader not to look for.[1] In fact, this is the theme of the introduction.  At one and the same time, Howell comes up with interesting, even compelling theses, then constantly defines them in the negative or warns us not to look for too much in them.  This technique is dismaying, and makes the book seem very much like a set of notes from another research project published in order to clear the author’s desktop.

In addition, a number of promises go unkept, or are only partially fulfilled.  He spends time in the introduction, for example, explaining how he sees the concept of Japanese identity traveling across the Tokugawa-Meiji boundary in a kind of discontinuity-that-is-continuity.  “I write,” he says, “as an early modernist looking across the transom into the modern world.”[2] Across this divide, “Contiuity and disjunction were one and the same.”[3] This is an interesting, though counter-intuitive idea, though no less difficult than the idea of transition in educational thought provided by Brian Platt in regards to the same historical nexus.  Platt, however, focuses his book on this difficult concept and makes his point rather well.  Howell never comes back to it, and while the idea can be detected in some parts of the book as an undercurrent, whatever it carries with it is quickly submerged by the essays presented, and the way in which this connection-that-is-division works is never satisfactorily explained nor worked out through a discussion of historical events or evidence.  This is one fundamental flaw of the disjointed essay approach Howell uses:  no single theme can be easily carried through the book without continually making it explicit.

Still, some of Howells ideas are very worthwhile.  It would do the field some good if he would turn some of his essays into monographs in their own right.  His primary concept – that identity is partially defined by institutions and the way in which they shape the social, political, and economic topos, and that one primary function of such institutions is to create borders and delineate the space in which they exists, whether that be geography in the traditional political sense of the word, or geography in the sense of status divisions, institutional-functional divisions, or other delineating ideas.[4]

Most of the introduction, however, is spent defining what the book is not.  It is not a book about ethnic identity.[5] “This book is… not a history of the Ainu, nor for that matter a history of the discourse of Japanese ethnic and cultural identity.”[6] It is not a book about “how the Japanese Self was constructed vis-à-vis an Ainu other.[7] Howell promises he “will not say much about how individuals imagined ethnic and national communities.”[8] The classification of what the book is, and what it does, in fact, intend to do, has to be read as a function of what it does not.

Ultimately, this collection of essays is an institutional history of the classification of individuals by state organizations and institutions (or the equivalent thereof in the Tokugawa period) and the way in which those institutional classification of individuals circumscribed the possibilities of identity within which they could operate.

Defining the book’s intent in a positive way, it is possible to find some merit – in fact some important contributions, in Howell’s work.  He remains throughout his own worst enemy, though, refusing to take his ideas to their destinations, sometimes, apparently, through sheer stubborn rejection of the need to write more.

Whatever the case, Howell’s sense that identity is circumscribed by institutions is hardly new, but its application to the Tokugawa-Meiji transition can be enlightening.  His two chapters on the Ainu, for example, are useful in the way in which they present the change in official recognition of Ainu as a part, or not, of the state itself.  Howell’s argument here is that the arrival of the Meiji government overturned Ainu identity itself.  In the Tokugawa period, Howell argues that the Ainu as trading partners provided the Matsumae clan, then after 1855 the Shogunate, with important revenue, and so keeping their identity separate from that of Japanese was institutionally as well as economically useful.[9] In the Meiji period, Howell makes the well-taken point that the needs of a centralizing state made it more useful to erase categories of Ainu identity officially as Japanese, without special privileges or state-supplied identities, so that identity for Ainu individuals became a function of private practice and personal proximity to Ainu population centers, but not an officially recognized category.[10] By doing this, Howell explains in his introduction, ““Japanese” was the only identity through which Ainu subjects could negotiate with the nation-state.”[11]

Howell’s most important point in the book is in his first chapter, where he discusses the idea of status as “geography of identity.”  Howell’s assumption here is that the idea of status was at once a state-complicit, if not a fully state-sponsored, system and a framework for local authority and social relations that was naturalized (ala Ooms) through practice so as to make performance of status-based roles manifest definitions of individual identity within an ever-larger set of politico-social systems.  Further, Howell wants us to see that the Tokugawa Shogunate , through the status system, did function as a state apparatus.[12] He tells us, “The very pervasiveness of the status system freed the state from the need to intervene directly into community affairs because it could depend on internal hierarchies to take care of the details of administration.”[13] Though this is not a new idea, Howell does give it new life in discussing it in terms of institutional frameworks, making the point that understanding identity in Tokugawa Japan requires that we understand how institutions functioned at all levels, and uncover the hidden links between them.  One of these links was the status system, according to Howell.

This argument underpins the rest of the book.  In chapters on the transition to a Meiji state, Howell discusses how changes in status structures allowed the Meiji state to redefine its relationship to all Japanese, by making all subjects of the emperor equally Japanese, rather than defined by status and operating on different levels with different understandings of the geographies in which they acted based on political differences alone.  By doing this, the Meiji state was able to create a Japanese identity that was national in character and geographically centered on the emperor’s seat in Tokyo.[14]

Howell bases his discussion of the change in burakumin status under the same rubric.  His contention is that by officially making the burakumin status the same as that of commoners, the Meiji state was able to also create a large new group of subjects from whom taxes could be taken and eventually service required.[15] According to his discussion of changes in the status system in Chapter 3, “the Meiji state expected much more of its subjects than their money, and over time it translated expectations into demands ever more effectively.”[16] The leveling of status, including that of burakumin and Ainu, forced these groups to act within state definitions of being Japanese, without special limitations, but also without special protections.  The only way to relate to the state was through the same apparatus that all other Japanese did so.

This, however, was not always easily accomplished on the non-state level, according to Howell, and when problems at this level led to violence, Howell wants to claim that such violence was an opportunity for the state to assert its national central authority.  The chief merit of this argument, as well as its greatest difficulty, is that Howell here discusses violence as not-class-conflict.  That is, he attempts to remove social class from the picture by discussing the violence involved in some peasant protest (particularly the Mimasaka Blood Tax Revolt) not as class-based or identity-based protests, but as essentially a conflict between the official version of identity and local perceptions of identity politics.[17] This is problematic because there is clear evidence that such conflict was class-based.  However, Howell’s argument is compelling as well because he is able to show that a different dimension existed at the level of state-society relations.  This argument deserves the attention of a full monograph.

The unconverted opportunity presented above shows up one great weakness of the book: it attempts to universalize its arguments with reference to all ethnic and social groups in Japan.  The problems here are legion, but might still be dealt with if Howell were to make an effort at unifying his thoughts, and removing ideas that didn’t work.  One example is the leveling argument made in the first three chapters of the book in comparison with that made about the Ainu and about Ryukyu.  To suggest that status defined social, political, and economic relations in the Tokugawa period is not a new, nor very much argued, point.  This is solid ground.  To go further, as Howell does, and make the link to identity – that is, that status affected not only relations between individuals and groups, but political and geographical realities, economic opportunities, and social relations, making the realities – the identities – of individuals and groups in one status group essentially invisible to those in another – is a very interesting idea, and one that, again, deserves the attention of an entire, and theoretically unified, monograph.  The goal of the book, in other words, is subverted by its best argument.  To treat the burakumin, the Ainu, and the Ryukyu people as the same is antithetical to the very approach of this particular idea.  If their identities were different during the Tokugawa period, that is probably because these groups did, in fact, have different geographies in every way that Howell describes the term.  They lived, even the burakumin in this case, in different places which probably precluded most contact between them.  To make a cross-application of a Marxist concept reread – class consciousness read here as identity consciousness – these groups, even had they been in contact with each other in regards to identity and ideology – would have required much more common ground than they had.  Howell does not even begin to think about that, but lumps them together.

In addition to the above oversight, Howell also ignores the differences in size between these groups, and the essential differences between their relations to the Tokugawa state.  The Ainu were only a few thousand in population, where the burakumin, already identified as Japanese ethnically, had a population in the millions.  Moreover, the burakumin, while they were, as Howell points out, largely autonomous in their social and political activities because of their outcaste status, were Japanese, and politically a part of the Tokugawa order and Japanese history.  The people of the Ryukyus had their own monarchy, and political relations to the Qing state as well as to Satsuma (though not, for some time, directly to the Tokugawa).  Thus there are few comparisons to be made in terms of why differences, even within the Tokugawa status classification system, existed between these three groups.  To treat them, then, as undergoing similar processes of integration into the Meiji state stretches Howell’s argument of the Tokugawa-Meiji transition as consisting of ruptures-as-continuities really only confirms the taxonomic oxymoron he is working with, and does not end up enlightening the reader as to what these changes might really have meant in terms of the transition, or of modernity.

Because of its disjointed nature, and comparison of apples with oranges when it comes to groups incorporated into the Meiji state from outside the Tokugawa status structure, Howell’s book largely fails.  This in spite of the fact that some of his ideas could be very useful analytical frameworks for examining the period of 1850-1890.  What this suggests to me is that Howell really needs to break this book up into its constituent essays, look at each carefully, and provide monographs where there is merit.  The essays cannot really work, either together or apart, in the length, or the degree of depth, that they exist in this volume.

---

[1] David L. Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth Century Japan, (Berkely, Los Angeles, and London:  University of California Press, 2005), p. 17.

[2] Ibid., p. 3.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Howell, p. 4, 5.

[5] Ibid., 6.

[6] Ibid., 9.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 13.

[9] Howell, p. 141-153.

[10] Ibid., p. 174.

[11] Ibid., 15.

[12] Ibid., 42-43.

[13] Ibid., 43.

[14] Ibid., 45-78.

[15] Ibid., 78.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Howell, p. 90-91.

Yamashita, Samuel Hideo.  “Reading the New Tokugawa Intellectual Histories,” in The

Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1.  Winter, 1996.  pp.1-48.

Samuel Hideo Yamashita’s “Reading the New Tokugawa Intellectual Histories” is one of the most useful, and readable, review articles I have encountered.  In it, Yamashita makes a clear delineation of the field into four major “interpretive communities” after discussing reasons for the decline, and then renewed interest in, the intellectual history of Japan from 1600-1868.[1]

The first issue that Yamashita deals with in this 1996 article is a set of reasons for what was at the time a renewed interest in Tokugawa Intellectual History.  According to Yamashita, there were four reasons for this increased participation in the field.  The first, and in Yamashita’s view probably the most important, was the appearance in English of Maruyama Masao’s own discussion of the issues in Nihon Seiji Shisō-shi kenkyū (Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan).  Second, according to Yamashita, was the publication in Japanese of several collections of the work of Tokugawa intellectuals, which made the material more accessible.  Third was an increase in conferences dedicated to the subject, and finally, Harry Harootunian’s Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period, the controversial nature of which appears to have enlivened discussions.[2]

Yamashita notes that while interest was on the increase, agreement about the meaning of texts and ideas, their place in the context of the historical narrative, intellectual provenance, and impact on later Japanese history was not.  In fact, Yamashita here defines his four “interpretive communities” (he apparently does not want to preclude the possibility of collusion between groups, as he does not call them schools of thought, though he treats them as if that is what they are in essence).[3] These four schools he calls the “modernization group,” the “de Bary group”, the “New Intellectual History group,” and the “postmodernists”.  In the remainder of the article, Yamashita defines the methodology of each group, and provides a critique of each in relation to the others.  The article provides a very solid sense of the state of the field in 1996.

The first of the interpretive communities that Yamashita dives into is, almost inevitably, the Modernization group.  This group, according to Yamashita, “have been the most influential interpretive community in Japanese studies in the United States.”[4] This is true, he says, to the point where the dominant view of the Japanese past in the United States can be attributed to this group.[5] The exemplar which Yamashita uses for this group is not one of the “big names” such as Reischauer or Bellah (though he does briefly mention Bellah), but Richard Rubinger’s book Private Academies of Tokugawa Japan, whose stunning scope Yamashita describes in a way that sounds much like an extended version of Maruyama’s book.[6]

The point of Yamashita’s look at Rubinger is to emphasize the conception of intellectual history as progressive – searching for the preconditions for the Meiji period and Japan’s modernity, and explaining why Japan was the only non-Western nation to become a modern industrial and military power.  Yamashita refrains from calling this view of Japanese history teleological, however and instead emphasizes the “progress” of modernization historians by looking at the works of Bob Wakabayashi and Kate Nakai.  Yamashita wants to show that the teleological, and uncritically progressive viewpoint of early modernization theorists was tempered by the sophistication of later practitioners.[7]

The next group that Yamashita digs into is the “de Bary group.”  Here, Yamashita gives props to de Bary and his students for forcing the field of Japanese studies to recognize Tokugawa Intellectuals, particularly Neo-Confucian scholars, as belonging to a wider field of Confucian philosophers including those in China and Korea.  After roundly criticizing Japanese studies scholars in the United States for ignoring the possibility that Chinese studies scholars might have a viewpoint in this field, Yamashita goes on to discuss the problems with de Bary’s analysis, as well, noting that he places Japanese Confucianism within a context so large as to make it disappear, showing disappointment in a scholar the caliber of de Bary accepting the simplistic “Japan as copycat” argument, and chastising even the more sophisticated analysis of de Bary’s students for their characterization of Japanese Confucian scholars as simply trying to find a method to characterize the Way for Japanese.[8] The primary critique that Yamashita levels is that the context that de Bary and his students used is too broad, while at the same time, he is pleased to see that the de Bary group provided a corrective for the vision of the modernizationists – namely, that Neo-Confucian scholarship in Japan was not a conservative, obstruction to progress, but a changing, dynamic set of ideals itself.[9]

Yamashita next turns to the “New Intellectual History” group, suggesting that they act as a corrective to the most egregious errors of both the previous groups, providing in their more narrowly contextualized histories and self-aware analyses useful contributions that also attempt to avoid the Euro-centrism of the modernizationists and the over-generalized contextualization of the de Bary group.

Yamashita makes Herman Ooms his first exemplar here, and immediately shows how Ooms’ Tokugawa Ideology goes straight to the heart of the problems of both of the first two groups.  Ooms’ view of Japanese Confucianism as unavoidably influenced by Shintō, and his ability to show how Japanese intellectuals were not limited to Confucian scholars, but existed in many manifestations and experienced change over time counter the theses of the Modernization and de Bary groups quite effectively.

Yamashita characterizes the New Intellectual Historians as trying to recognize themselves within the process of writing as well as work with sufficient sources in Japanese to make their aims as clear as possible, and to avoid the Euro-centrism of the Modernizationists and the over-generalization of the de Bary group.  They succeed at this, according to Yamashita, through the use of European models of linguistic and methodological analysis that may, in fact, be creating a new Euro-centrism, not in assumptions about the reality and superiority of Western culture in the content being presented, but in the use of essentially Western modes of evaluating the evaluation of history.  That is to say, when Harootunian uses Althusser to think about “nativist learning,” are his reading strategies making assumptions about Japanese texts of the Tokugawa era that are really only applicable to European – or even more specifically, French – documents?  Yamashita is still undecided on this, but his critique seems valid, if only for those who use these strategies.[10] Still, Yamashita gives props to the New Intellectual Historians for trying, and says that he thinks this more nuanced approach works to correct over-generalized notions of Japanese history provided by the other two schools, if only because it recognizes what they do not – that objectivist history is problematic.[11]

The key problem that Yamashita notes with the New Intellectual Historians is the potential for theory to overtake history in the content of their work.  This has not, he says, happened for the most part, though he does make clear that the work of Koschmann and Harootunian have been given more scathing indictments on such things that even others in the same group.

Finally, Yamashita turns to the group he calls postmodernists, exemplified by Naoki Sakai.  This, he says, is more likely than any of the other three to fall into the trap of theoretical overdetermination and a paucity of primary sources.  The key difficulty that Yamashita finds with postmodern intellectual history is its, in his view, openness to the impossibility of the project it is undertaking.  He talks almost breathlessly about Sakai’s willingness to recognize his own limitations even as he writes, and to remind the reader of his own subjectivity.[12]

Yamashita seems to see this postmodern history as a further narrowing of the context of the field, so that even the author is immaterial to the history being written, and all that is attended to is the superficial text itself – the assumption being that such is the only thing that a historian can actually have access to.[13] Other assumptions – about authorial intent, cause and effect, even the direct relation of events – is too interior, and the only analysis that can be made is intertextual.[14]

Yamashita’s chief critique of the postmodernists is concentrated solely on Sakai, and consists primarily of the recognition that other postmodern historians have done much more with their methodology than he has.  “My point,” Yamashita says, “is that the postmodern turn makes possible much more than what Sakai, in his extraordinary book, has shown us.”[15]

Ultimately, Yamashita sees this division of thought on Tokugawa thought to be a healthy turn in the field.  The discussion goes on, rather than remaining in one unself-critical field.  As Yamashita says, “All historians make these rhetorical choices.  Although some do so consciously, most make them without realizing it.”[16] That the field of Tokugawa Intellectual History has a set of groups making conscious choices, and in debate with each other about those choices, makes the field vital and useful.

Yamashita’s analysis is a good one, but falls prey to some of the critiques he levels as his authors.  This may be to some degree a function of the time in which he wrote it – more than a decade ago, now – and so the various camps have come to see each other in different lights, and have factionalized somewhat.  In attempting to contextualize the field, to borrow a metaphor from his own discussion of the de Bary group, Yamashita has to some degree over-generalized in creating his four categories.  It is, in 2007, hard to imagine Ooms and Harootunian inhabiting the same intellectual space.  Harootunian and Sakai seem to have more in common than the former two, and the position of postmodernists has come to be dominated by the University of Chicago.  In addition, the very difficulty, and the vociferous nature of the critiques of, this postmodernist school, seems to have driven a wedge into the field, making intellectual history both the province of the postmodernists (who dominate the field and allow little room for others with a different approach), and an arcane discipline that holds little appeal to the current crop of graduate students in Japanese studies.

As a foundation for understanding the field in the last decades of the twentieth century, and as a primer for the field as it is today, Yamashita’s analysis is a very good one.  Still, it needs updating.

---

[1] Samuel Hideo Yamashita, “Reading the New Tokugawa Intellectual Histories” in The Journal of Japanese Studies (22:1, Winter 1996), 4.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 6.

[5] Ibid., 7.

[6] Bid., 8,9.

[7] Ibid., 9,10.

[8] Ibid., 15.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 37.

[11] Ibid., 36.

[12] Ibid, 38,39.

[13] Ibid., 42.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid., 43.

[16] Ibid., 46.

This paper sets out to contextualize the life of one prewar Japanese cultural producer who operated within the heterogeneous edge of Bourdieu’s theoretical field of cultural production:  popular song composer Nakayama Shimpei.

Nakayama Shimpei is not the best known among Japanese composers, but he was one of the most prolific, creating more than 300 songs in his lifetime.  Many of Shimpei’s songs are so well known in Japan today that they have become a part of the cultural fabric, sung by all, though few know who first created them.  They are a part of the invented tradition of Japanese popular music.  Children in kindergarten learn some of Nakayama’s simple songs, including the appeal for good weather in Teru teru bozu, and the call to come home played on the local fire station loudspeakers at 6:00 pm each day, also known as Yūyake koyake.

Nakayama Shimpei was born March 22, 1887, the twentieth year of the Meiji era, to Nakayama Kannosuke and his wife Zou, in Shimotaka-gun, Hinomura (currently, Nakamura-city, Daijishinno #65) in Nagano Prefecture.[1] His family was a transplant from Gunma prefecture (Joshu), and became gono (wealthy farmers) after settling in Hinomura.[2]

There was no history of music or musicians in the Nakayama family, but Shimpei’s father’s older brother, the sixth head of the family since the move from Gunma Prefecture, supplemented his income by working at a local comedy establishment known as the Uguisu-ya.  He enjoyed doing comedy so much that in middle age he renounced his patrimony, passing it to Shimpei’s father, and moved to Edo to try to break into the business.  He was unsuccessful, working as a tax and bill collector in order to survive, never able to quit his day job.[3]

Because of his older brother’s move to Edo, Shimpei’s father Kannosuke took over the family farm and other businesses.[4]

Shimpei was born to a large family.  He was the fourth surviving child (two of his elder sisters had already died by the time he arrived in the world), and would have at least one younger sibling, a brother, born in February, 1889.  When Shimpei was three years old, in 1890, his eldest brother Kanzo died.  The cause of death is not clear, nor is the effect of the death on Shimpei’s parents.[5]

At age six, Shimpei entered elementary school, starting at Nagano Prefecture Kakoi-gun Mura-ritsu Hino Jinjo Elementary School in April of 1893.[6] In July of that same year, Shimpei’s father Kannosuke died.  His death would require major adjustments as Shimpei’s mother Zou had to make ends meet.  Whatever wealth the family may have had up to this point seems to have dissipated in this period.  Also because of these events, Shimpei’s schooling was cut short in 1897, when he was ten years old.  After graduating with honors from the fifth grade, and giving the valedictory address at the graduation ceremony, Shimpei had to leave school in order to help his mother with the many responsibilities of running a gono household.[7]

Later, in a 1935 article for Chuo Koron, Shimpei would remember that music education in his first years at elementary school was rather limited:  “at the time, elementary school music education was not as extensive as it is today. There was no chance to look at written music, and no specifically scheduled time for musical education in the school day.  It was just done when there was some free time, and only sung and heard.”[8]

He goes on to say that, “If I remember right it was around the time I was in second grade that a baby organ was first provided.[9] It was just at the time the Sino-Japanese war began, so we played epic energetic military marches like Toshima no ikusei and Yuukan naru suihei on this baby organ and sang our young hearts out.  There is no reason to say that such singing had any special effect on me at the time, but it is a fact that gunka (literally “military songs”  軍歌) left me with a love for music that I was unaware of then.”[10] Shimpei was stirred not by the strains of Beethoven or Wagner, but by marches and army songs.  The nearest American equivalent might be the military marches of John Philip Sousa.

So, instead of an inspired prodigy, we have an every day kid.  During his childhood, Shimpei participated in street fights with students from other elementary schools, stole and ate watermelons from the fields, and even once conned a band conductor into letting his friend onto the stage with the flutes at festival time – even though the friend couldn’t play.[11] He was a talented musician in his local area, but he was no stand-out composer growing up hidden from the world in rural Nagano, and was certainly not already marked to be one of the most remembered composers in Japan’s modern history.  In fact, much of Shimpei’s life has a kind of accidental quality about it.

In 1898, Shimpei’s older brother Akiyoshi was promoted from his work in the village administrative office to a post at the district (‘gun’) level.  This promotion brought enough money to the family to allow Shimpei to return to school, and he was matriculated at the local higher elementary school in April of that year.[12] Poor performance in his first two years of higher elementary school forced him to drop out, however, and he returned again to work, this time apparently as much to mollify his mother’s disappointment as to earn money for the family.[13] In his diary, Shimpei says he will never forget that year (1900) because the burden of his mother’s disappointment over his failure in school made the tough work in a Kimono cloth maker’s shop even harder.[14]

Eventually, Shimpei did graduate from the higher elementary school.  While there the second time around, he had become quite interested in literature and current events, and did especially well in music and physical education.[15]

In 1905, at age 18, and after graduating from school, Shimpei began to worry about his future. Eventually, he decided to go to college and become a teacher.[16]

Ambitious, and ready to begin on a path to his own future, Shimpei took a deep plunge in July of 1905, setting his sights on Tokyo, and on gaining the necessary credentials for his chosen career.  His desire was to become a teacher, and already he was showing signs of interest in a literature as well as music, both of which would become the roots of experience that served him so well as a popular song composer.  Aside from learning to play the organ, he had already joined a local poetry and music study group known as the Wakasaikai (若采会), the purpose of which was to read and write so-called new poetry and to publish a new, and very short-lived literary journal for Nagano youth called Hokushinbungei (北信文芸).[17]

Lamenting in his diary that “if I don’t achieve my dream, I cannot come home,” he accompanied a friend who had enlisted in the army on his way to Nagano city.[18] Once his friend had gone on to the recruiting station at Ueda, Shimpei continued his journey to Tokyo, stopping at Takazaki along the way.  He talks about seeing soldiers, and visiting the gates of training grounds to watch recruits being put through their paces, and about how their commitment to protect the nation moves him.[19] This appears to be, again, a formative experience related to his musical memories of the Sino-Japanese War, and the patriotic fever gripping Japan itself as he was going up to the capitol.

Literature and music came together even further upon Shimpei’s arrival in Tokyo, at Ueno station on November 29, 1905.  It was here that he met Shimamura Hogetsu, a fellow native of Nagano, who had agreed to put Shimpei up in his home in exchange for some household work, and to guide him in his studies.[20]

Hogetsu had lived for short periods in both Russia and England, and was interested in translating and popularizing the literature of those two cultures.   He was also a Waseda University professor of Literature, and restarted the literary journal Waseda Bungaku in 1906. Waseda Bungaku was filled with the work of a variety of writers, but quickly also became a vehicle for Shimamura’s translations, and his own essays and plays.  He seems mostly to have been interested in drama, translating and publishing in the journal several plays within his first five years.  That year, Hogetsu also founded the Bungei Kyoukai, a literature and drama production group.  This organization would be, in 1914, the organizer for Shimpei’s popular music debut when it produced Tolstoy’s Ressurection, dramatized, set to music, and translated into Japanese.  The first production sponsored by the Bungei Kyoukai was to be performed that very month – November of 1905 at the Kabukiza in Ginza.  On the bill were Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and the musical Shouon. [21]

In 1906, Shimpei was 19, living in Tokyo with the Shimamura family as houseboy for Hogetsu.  From this time on, as mentor more than master, Hogetsu encouraged Shimpei to study music, even providing a room in his house where Shimpei could practice on a used organ he purchased with money from the work at the Shimamura house.  Hogetsu also taught him English in his spare time, and talked about the performing arts with Shimpei frequently.  It is clear, also, that Hogetsu’s advice, related to his own popularizing of Western Literature, had some influence on the way Shimpei thought about the music he was beginning to study.  Hogetsu advised him that composing popular music for Japanese would mean making traditional sounding music, rather than creating a new, Western, sound.  Hogetsu’s advice would find its way into most of the popular songs Shimpei composed after 1914, in which he manipulated Western music notation, and musicology, to produce a sound that could be written for any instrument, but sounded distinctly Japanese and traditional as well.  This is the yonanuki scale discussed below.

So, while working for Hogetsu, Shimpei worked to achieve his dream of entering the Tokyo Conservatory of Music (東京音楽大学), even taking lessons at the Tokyo Music Association ( 東京音楽協会) in Kanda.[22] He was already thinking of the kinds of songs that would later flow from his piano, even while he retained his goal of becoming an elementary school music teacher.

In 1908 Shimpei successfully tested into the Tokyo Conservatory of Music, and began his formal education.[23] In 1909, as classes began, Shimpei majored in Piano, and was taking piano, music theory and composition, music history, German, Japanese, violin, and voice.[24] Perhaps one reason that Shimpei is, and was, taken seriously as a composer despite the genres of music he chose to work with had to do with his formal education in the most respected academy of music in Japan at the time.  His position in the field of musical production was secured, in great part, by this education.  His skills thus firmly established, he could be taken seriously as a composer no matter what he chose to create from his well-healed keyboard.

As he had at the end of his childhood education in 1905, upon graduating from the conservatory in 1912, he immediately began worrying about his future, explaining that as a composer he still had not found his voice, wondering how he was going to make money, alone in Tokyo with no job. [25] He resolved to write articles for Waseda Bungaku as often as he can, and says he is taking evening classes in foreign language.[26]

In 1912, Shimpei began working as a school music teacher in a poor district of Tokyo, and writing for Waseda Bungaku in his spare time.[27] In 1914, Hogetsu determined to turn Tolstoy’s novel into a musical production, and asked Shimpei to write the theme song for one of the characters to appear in the play.[28] The song, in which the main character sings a lament to the love of his life, was made to tug on heartstrings.  After Kachyusha sold 20,000 records in the first year, Nakayama’s name became quite well known, and the success kicked off an era some historians of Japanese music have called the era of show tunes.

It seems that the most popular songs sold as records after the success of Kachyusha’s Song were nearly all from productions like that created by Hogetsu and Nakayama – musical dramatizations of famous Western literature, or productions of Western operas in Japanese language.  Tabako nomenome was written for a Japanese version of Carmen, and Nakayama’s most popular song, even today, and most important in terms of establishing Japanese popular music style, was also one of these show tune spin-offs called Sendo kouta (Boatman’s song), which was featured in a musical version of Turgenev’s The Night Before.[29]

These songs borrowed from Western music, and from Japanese music, but were not confined by the musical rules of either style, and came to be known as Shimpei Songs.[30] Sendo kouta in particular , Nakayama’s biggest hit, used a “minor yonanuki scale” to achieve a sound that is more traditionally Japanese than a Western style scale can, and the use of this scale, along with the arrangement of the song, made it the model on which composers of Japanese popular music would base their tunes from that point on.[31]

A large part of Nakayama’s success in the music industry, and in society at large, came between in 1927 and 1928, after the publication and recording of Sendo kouta.  Nakayama’s success at using the minor yonanuki scale and blending Western and Japanese musical styles, and the effectiveness of the lyrics provided for his songs by his collaborators Noguchi Ujo, Shimamura Hogetsu, and Kitahara Hakushu led to a series of new developments in popular music, none of which were fully or originally Shimpei’s own, but by which he was able to capturing the popular mood time and again.  The popularity of His “Boatman’s Song” (Sendo kouta), produced in 1922, comes clear when we recognize that several record companies published recordings of the song by various artists.  This song was popular enough in its day to drive the market.  With tunes like Sendou Kouta, Kimi Koishi, and many others, the decade of the 1920’s provided the gold standard – the model on which most popular songs came to be built.  Sendou Kouta was the specific model.  Its minor yonanuki scale, the popularity of its lyrics, and the mood of the music itself all helped to place this particular song at the tope of Japanese popular music sales.  Shimpei Himself became so popular, and his music so enduring that in 1987 the Nippon Victor company released  a compilation of his greatest hits to commemorate what would have been his hundredth birthday.

For many critics, Sendou kouta was a bit dark in its outlook, regardless of its popular success.  Noguchi Ujo’s lyrics (”I am withered grass on the river bank.  You, the same.  We’ll never flower in this world,”) combined with the dark tones of Nakayama’s minor yonanuki scale, made it seem overly pessimistic.[32] The song, however, remained popular among the public, and so this reversal of fortunes only opened the way for Nakayama and others to improve on this new model of popular song.  Nakayama and Noguchi produced Habu no Minato (The Harbor of Habu) in 1928, and production could not keep up with sales.[33] Inspired by this Nippon Polydor executives conceived of the first popular song to be produced from the beginning as a song for recording, rather than as a popular song picked up after performances made it a hit.  This song, Kimi Koishi (You, Sweetheart), was designed, as critics of pop music today lament regularly, to be innocuous, less depressing, less reflective of the times, than Sendo kouta.  A love song, it hit the market with a splash, and the market never looked back, adopting, on the urging of the President of Nippon Victor, American Benjamin Gardner, the American marketing style where record companies designed and manufactured hits for the market, becoming part of the productive process, rather than simply distributors of products.[34]

By 1921, for example, a new style of popular music, shin-minyo, was beginning to make inroads into the music sales market, spurred on by the participation of Noguchi Ujo, Nakayama’s lyricist collaborator, in a poetic movement of the same name.[35] In 1924, Nakayama produced the most popular song of that genre, Suzaka kouta .

Shin-minyo was intended by its creators to be directly related to the Folk songs of Tokugawa era villages in style and content.  Its proponents, composers and listeners from the cities (primarily Tokyo) made it into a movement that had two primary goals.  First, it was a conscious attempt to return to idealized Japanese tradition.  Second, composers, performers, and audiences of shin-minyo were attempting to recover a sense of Japanese identity, and to make a profit doing so.  They created this new music based on what they thought was a pan-Japanese folk music tradition.  One of the primary architects of this movement, Kitahara Hakushu (also one of Shimpei’s collaborators) wrote that “Japanese folk songs, once the voice of the people and the land, have since the Meiji period largely lost their local color and folkness. . . [authentic] folk songs which still preserve their original dignity are extremely rare.”[36] Hakushu’s goal, in part, was to keep this tradition alive by writing new songs in its image.  The result of the work of Hakushu and Shimpei, among others, though, was a creation of another hybrid.  This musical style used the yonanuki scale – an adaptation of western musical notation and organization – in order to provide a standard way for composers to record their ideas.  It was also, as mentioned earlier, written mostly for city dwellers, originally to provide music that would satisfy their desire for memories of their hometowns, and later to idealize Japanese rural life as a pan-Japanese furusato, or hometown.  Eventually, as with Shimpei’s Suzaka kouta, these songs came to be written on commission for factories, or onsen villages, as advertisements to entice city dwellers to return to the countryside – to their Japanese heritage in the form of a generalized furusato, but to act, and spend, like tourists.  This music is an interesting blend of tradition and modern, of culture and market.  Its origins with Kitahara Hakushu and Nakayama Shimpei show an attempt to bring traditional music back into modern Japan, but it is driven by a modern market, and commissioned by modern businesses who wish to capitalize not on local economics, but on the national economics of a modern state.  In a way, shin-minyo often seems like the equivalent of Kawabata Yasunari’s opening to the novel Snow Country (Yuki guni).  It evokes a past that is no longer there, and revels in the sentimentality of the memory, by claiming its own location within the tradition of that past.

It seems clear that Nakayama Shimpei was in on the ground floor of the creation of the popular music industry in Taisho and Showa Japan.  It remains, now that we have a skeletal chronology of his life, to look at the field of popular culture and place him within it.

The heterogeneous edge of the field of cultural production (which I will call the field of popular culture) in Japan during the period from 1906 to about 1930 was in the process of expansion.  The arrival of the record industry (Nippon Columbia set up shop in 1907, Nippon Victor and Deutsche Polydor in 1928), and the eventual creation of songs for the popular market specifically, rather than as street songs, or within specific genres of traditional music, and by industrial means of production and distribution, meant a much more direct contact between music producers and distributors and the society at large.  This tended to expand the field on its heterogeneous edge, making new space for music makers with both new means, and new styles to add.

Among those new producers, Nakayama Shimpei played a critical role, though he was not the only one.  The inventors of the yonanuki scale, so useful for adapting traditional Japanese music to western style musical notation, and then transposing it to Western musical instruments, were critical in forming the possibility of this field.  They included Kitahara Hakushu, Soeda Azenbo, and other early producers of popular street songs known as jiyumin enka.  This music transformed into a popular music, rather than a politically motivated street patter, after the promulgation of the 1890 constitution, and as these three and others set some of the songs to music, and wrote other, less political and more sentimental songs in the first decade of the 20^th century.

In Nakayama’s own time, the production of popular songs intended specifically to appeal to mass audiences in terms of both words and melodic form was the result in large part of the activities of Shimamura Hogetsu, and the Bungei Kyoukai, translating European literature and plays into English, and popularizing them by setting them to music.  Kachyusha’s song is the earliest example of this.[37]

In addition, the other major composers of popular song during Nakayama’s lifetime were very few – Soeda, Narita Tamezo, Sasa Koka, and a few others.[38] The number of lyricists slightly larger, but all worked with all of the composers, and the record companies shared their services as well as those of the most popular singers.  Hence, the world of popular music production was relatively small, and in many ways, its inhabitants worked together as they created a new commercial entity within Japan’s field of cultural production.[39]

What seems to set Nakayama apart in this world, making him one of its most sought-after, and prolific composers, was his revolutionary use of the minor yonanuki scale to compose the Sendo kouta (Boatman’s Song), and the fact that he did not come from Tokyo, which appears to have made him interested in music, culture, and life outside the great urban areas of pre-war Japan.  At least, they appear frequently in his songs, and those appearances, like the music in Sendo kouta, seem to have paved the way for others to follow.  Nakayama’s inspirations, and willingness to write for various markets, his ability to understand those markets in terms of the preferences of people who made them up, and the ways in which those people were entering the modern world, seem to have put him at the forefront of an industry that was expanding at an amazing speed in the early 20^th century.

Nakayama Shimpei’s life, then, was a process of position-takings, some conscious, others less so, that eventually led him to a life of reasonable prosperity. Never the less, Nakayama Shimpei has also become a kind of culture hero – Japan’s music man – the standard by which the impact of other Japanese composers, including the even more famous 1930’s sensation Koga Masao, have been measured within the field of popular music production.

In Bourdieu’s field of cultural production it is not clear, then, where Shimpei stands.  His songs sold well, and set up the music industry for greater and greater impact on the fields of power and economics.  This might make him a part of the heterogeneous end of the field.  However, the artistic, and technical importance of his work, and the reverence in which he seems to be held by listeners and composers alike, during his time and ours, seems to put him closer to the homogeneous edge – a place of great cultural capital.  As a cultural producer, Nakayama Shimpei seems to have been as much an enabler of market oriented popular culture as he was a cultural icon.  Perhaps he stands at both ends of the field:  well regarded, with great sales numbers.

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[1] Nakayama, Urō. Nakayama Shimpei sakyoku kokuroku nenpyo [中山晋平 作曲刻六年表]

(Nakayama Shimpei: A Chronology of a composer).  1980. p. 287.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Nakayama, Urō, p. 288.

[8] Nakayama Shimpei, Autobiography of Nakayama Shimpei (Nakayama Shimpei jiden中山晋平自伝) in Chuo Koron, Showa 10, August, 1935, p. 374-375.  Shimpei here appears to be referring to the fact that his elementary school had no instruments to accompany the students, so music class was either a kind of music appreciation, or  just group singing.

[9] Ibid.  According to the Nakano city history, a baby organ was provided for the Hino Elementary School in March of Meiji 26.   It is unclear if this is the same organ mentioned above.

[10] Ibid/, p. 376.

[11] Nakayama, Urō, p. 288. Quoting Shinanokyoiku “Nakayama Shinpei Special Edition (Showa 40, October issue) Shinano Kyou\ikukai.  According to a former classmate, a Mr. Arataki,  “Shinpei and I were both bald like Buddhist monks during our school years, and we always had rock fights with the kids from other districts.  We also played lots of hide and seek with our friends, and sometimes we’d go break a watermelon in the field and eat it there.  We still attended the third level shrine of Shinno when we were kids, and Nakayama played the flute there every year, and was very good at it.  However there were only two chairs for flute players, and one more was needed, so Shinpei said to me “Arataki, you play, and even if you don’t make any sounds, just move like you’re playing, so we sat together in the flute place.”

[12] Ibid., p. 288.

[13] Ibid., p. 289.

[14] Ibid., p. 289.

[15] Ibid., p. 289.

[16] Ibid., p. 291.

[17] Ibid., p. 291.

[18] Ibid., p. 291.

[19] Ibid., p. 292.

[20] Ibid., p. 292.

[21] Ibid., 292-293.

[22] Ibid., 293.

[23] Ibid. 295.

[24] Ibid. 295.

[25] Ibid. 297.  This is an interesting point to come to in the narrative of Nakayama Uro, and I wonder if he was aware of the similarities between Shimpei’s situation in 1912, and that of Shimpei’s uncle in Edo before his birth.  Although historically it really has no use in explaining Shimpei’s life, it certainly has the quality of a story that might have been a family treasure of some sort – contributing to the legend of Shimpei.  It would be interesting to find more on this.

[26] Ibid. 298.

[27] Ibid. 300.

[28] Ibid.,  302.

[29] Ishikawa Hiroyoshi, Gouraku no senzenshi (娯楽の戦前史) (A History of Prewar Entertainment Culture), (Tokyo:  Toshosensho, 1981),  73.

[30] Ibid., 73.

[31] Ibid., p. 74. A yonanuki scale is basically a Western 7 tone scale (8 tones if you include the octave) from which the fourth (yon) and seventh (nana) have been removed (nuku) hence  hence YoNaNuki.  This sort of scale gives a series of tones that in combination sound more like the tonal mix of older Japanese instruments, particularly the Koto and Shamisen.  Thus, this is a sort of “Easternization” of a Western tonal system.  For more on this see Sonobe Saburo, A History of Japanese Popular Music (日本の流行歌史) and Nakamura Toyo, “Early pop song writers and their backgrounds” in Popular Music, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Cambridge, England:  Cambridge University Press) 1991.

[32] Nakamura Toyo, “Early pop song writers and their backgrounds” in Popular Music, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Cambridge, England:  Cambridge University Press, 1991), 266.  In this case, the translation belongs to Nakamura.

[33] Ibid., 267.

[34] Ibid. 267-268. Nippon Polydor, along with Nippon Victor, were formed in the mid 1920’s to capitalize on increasing music sales in Japan.  The parent company of Nippon Polydor was Deutsche Polydor, which owned its Japanese subsidiary fully.

[35] Ibid., 279.

[36] Kitahara Hamushu, Nihon minyo sakka shu (Tokyo:  Dainihon Yubenkai, 1927), 3-4.

[37] Nakamura Toyo, p. 266.

[38] Ibid., p. 267-268

[39] Ibid., 265-277.

Maruyama Masao.  Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, Mikiso Hane, trans. (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1974)

Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan was Maruyama Masao’s first effort in his overall attempt to find an explanation of the modern history of Japan which did not depend wholly on Marxist theory, nor give all of the credit for Japan’s modernization to the West.  In his introduction he makes clear the environment in which he was writing: Japan in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  The context Maruyama gives, including the war in Asia, the conference at Kyoto University on “Overcoming Modernity” and the general intellectual climate make it quite amazing that a critical analysis of Tokugawa era thought could be written at all.  Maruyama’s book, however, does the job well.

In the first part of the book, Maruyama attempts to explain the success of Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan by likening that period to the Hegelian “static history” of China.  The relatively stable nature of Tokugawa society and its rigid, reified social structure make this period, unlike others in Japan, perfect for the growing popularity of Confucianism that Maruyama wants to talk about.

After setting the stage, Maruyama discusses the dominant school of Confucian thought in Tokugawa Japan, Chu Hsi Confucianism, discussing how early philosophers including Fujiwara Reika and Hayashi Razan uncoupled Confucianism from Buddhism, with which it had been closely related in Japan, and how it provided the thesis of Tokugawa social and intellectual organization.  Maruyama does an excellent job of showing how Chu Hsi Confucianism amalgamates other traditions in Chinese philosophy, including yin/yang ideology, among others, and creates a unique place for itself in Chinese intellectual history.  This very uniqueness, though, according to Maruyama, makes Chu Hsi Confucianism very inflexible, so that its followers really cannot evolve without punching irreparable holes in the overall system.

This sets up well the direction and target of the book:  an explanation of the development of the Kokugaku school of thought in the late Tokugawa, which, Maruyama says, turned Chu Hsi Confucianism on its head, and yet never escaped the feudal beginnings of the Tokugawa political economy.

Maruyama’s discussion of the tenets of Chu Hsi Confucianism is thorough, coherent, and lucid.  The organization of his essay takes a reader easily through a complex set of ideas.  The only critiques possible here are that Maruyama’s description is a little too coherent, giving the reader a sense that he has encapsulated the universe of Japanese intellectualism in Chu Hsi philosophy, which sends a false message that Confucianism was the only stream of thought in the Tokugawa era that mattered.  In fact, he makes special note of this fact later in the book when he shows that the Kokugaku scholars located the beginning of their own ideas in the 17^th century, so that the Chu Hsi thinkers of the Tokugawa period could not have been its intellectual progenitor.

Maruyama makes a case that the majority of Chu Hsi scholars were unable, because of the closed nature of Chu Hsi philosophy, to do anything more than reiterate the basic tenets of the founding thinker.   This means, though, that the rigidity of Chu Hsi thought was bound to change as the Tokugawa political and social system changed over their course of existence.  In a way, this is the antithesis of his original point – that Chu Hsi Confucianism was successful in Tokugawa Japan because of its feudal rigidity, which made it a static society analogous to that of China.  However, he also uses this idea of slow change in the Tokugawa period to underpin a history of the subtle variations in Chu Hsi thought that evolved over the course of the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries, as Tokugawa society evolved.  He discusses the objections to Chu Hsi orthodoxy of such figures as Yamaga Sōkō, Ito Jinsai, and Kaibara Ekken, each of whom put a crack in the foundation of the Chu Hsi school, either through innovative ideas, or through rigid adherents to the fundamental tenets.

Maruyama locates the real revolution in Japanese Confucian thought, though, in Ogyū Sorai, whose ideas, he says, led to a “complete collapse of the Chu Hsi school.”[1]

Maruyama then goes into the characteristics of the Sorai school, while acknowledging that there were still other Confucian lines of thought in existence, and that the Chu Hsi line was not completely gone by any means.  He gives an account of Sorai’s interest in philology, or kobunji-gaku – the investigation of the meaning of words and ideas in the context of their own time, and explains the secular, political leaning of Sorai’s ideas.

Using his system of uncovering the ancient meanings of words, Sorai cam to emphasize the Six Slassics, rather than the Four Books that were so important to the Chu Hsi scholars.  He devalued any works later than these as being essentially polemical – reactions against the thought of others in the Hundred Schools period, and thus impure ideas already changed by the changing meaning of words.  He also carefully defined The Way as belonging specifically to the Early Kings as human beings, and consequently, even though they were for him sages, they were also human, and not gods.  This made his thought both universal, and heavily political in focus.  Maruyama even compares Sorai here to Machiavelli.

In keeping with his own goals, Maruyama in chapter four makes the link between the Sorai School and Kokugaku, contending that the two were linked, if not in intellectual genealogy, at least in terms of association, common interests, and similar approaches to the problems they set themselves.

Maruyama’s first point here is that Sorai’s ideas were in two general directions, one secular and political, the other secular and social.  After his death, according to Maruyama, his students split along these lines, with the social/literary line moving more and more toward literary criticism, and the political line becoming increasingly uncompromising and inflexible in its application of Sorai’s ideas.

Both Sorai’s school and the Kokugaku school of Motoori Norinaga.  , he says, were interested in The Way as essentially political, but where Sorai and his followers saw The Way, and the examples of the Early Kings as universal, Norinaga made them specific, saying that there is no one Way, but that the Way is different depending on one’s cultural and political context.  Thus, the Way for Japanese must be different from the Way for Chinese.

What is important here is Maruyama’s method of analyzing this connection.  In a very Hegelian way, he sees the Kokugaku scholars as the antithesis of the Sorai school.  He emphasizes the connection between the two in order to juxtapose their ideas.  Since both are in fact dealing with The Way of Confucianism, even if one is in the process of rejecting it, neither has escaped it.  This is the way toward a synthesis which will bring a new paradigm according to the Hegelian model of historical change.  Maruyama is here trying to show that Japanese intellectuals, while they were still trapped in a feudal mode of thought (or perhaps because they were so trapped), were developing an indigenous kind of modernity.  His careful discussion of the development of political and philosophical differentiation of national morality and religion, as when he shows that Norinaga was able to use Sorai’s personalization of the Confucian Sages to make them human, and thus subject to error.  This allowed Norinaga to claim that Japan’s emperors were related to gods, and for the Kokugaku scholars, this made Japanese belief systems in fact more real than those of Chinese Confucianism, since the sages were humans reacting to social context, while Japan’s emperors were descended from the creators.

Ultimately, Maruyama comes back to his own reasons for doing the history that he has undertaken.  In his conclusion, he makes it clear that he sees an intellectual history of Tokugawa era Japan as legitimate in part because it does not fit within the political chronology, but shows a development of its own, and in part because, he admits, he is looking for the growth of a modern consciousness in Japanese thought.  He apologizes for concentrating solely on the disintegration of Confucianism by way of noting that Confucianism was at the beginning of the Tokugawa period the main stream of Japanese philosophical thought, and that its disintegration was unexpected.  Once again, in his conclusion, he turns to the Hegelian construction of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, by suggesting that the pre-modern consciousness of the early Tokugawa period had to be erased through a process by which Confucian rationalism was replaced by the irrational and the subjective (Kokugaku), and then the synthesis of the two would create a new modern paradigm.

What Maruyama leaves unsaid, but implicit in his formulation, is that this movement toward modernity was interrupted by the arrival of Commodore Perry and those who followed from the West, and necessity and contact forced a Western modernity on Japan, and that this uncomfortable modernity led to many of the problems that would become the cause of the Second World War.

Maruyama’s thesis is compelling, and his analysis and command of ideas and history superb.  However, the entire book is more complete than I expected it to be, with all loose ends tied up, even though, by his own admission, Maruyama fails to deal with other streams of political, moral, and religious thought that were available in the same period.  Such neatly tied up ends seem to suggest, and evidence Maruyama presents support this, that in many cases, the theory here has driven the evidence rather than the other way around.  Maruyama is searching for an alternative “Japanese Modernity,” and in the sophistication and concreteness of Kokugaku ideas, he finds what he is looking for.

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[1] Maruyama, p.67.

Ikegami, Eiko, Bonds of Civility:  Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture, Cambirdge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, 2005).

In Bonds of Civility, Eiko Ikegami, a Sociologist, is refreshingly unapologetic about finding in her archaeology of Japanese aesthetic culture the preconditions of modernity – of the Meiji state, and of Japanese political, national, and social consciousness within aesthetic culture of the Edo period.[1] In fact, I found a number of ideas in Ikegami’s work to be free of the heavy debate over the nature of Japanese “modernity” that so overwhelms historians on both sides of the 1868 line.

Rather than rehash this debate, Ikegami moves very quickly, and in a lucid, well-constructed way, to give recognition to the complications that her “pre-conditions” argument creates for her, to set up a more complex version of Modernization Theory which recognizes no break in 1868, but rather posits a continuum of change from the 17^th through the 20^th centuries.  Ikegami here is clearly closely connected to Hegel and Habermas in the way she views history as progressive.  In fact, she directly acknowledges Habermas’ idea of the “Public Sphere” in her claim that Japan is moving toward civility during the Tokugawa period.[2]

Still, one of the most interesting and useful streams of though in Ikegami’s book is the distinction she makes between the “civil society” which Habermas describes as developing in 18^th and 19^th century Europe, and the “civility” she claims developed in Japanese aesthetic culture over roughly the same period.[3] In Chapter One the subject is “Civility without Civil Society”, and Ikegami here focuses on the fact of the success of the warrior elite at maintaining privilege, social distinction and hierarchy, and the creation of a de-centralized state as evidence that civil society, as Habermas defines it, with a political dimension, could not exist, but that civility – horizontal relationships, could.[4]

For Ikegami, the development of civility in Tokugawa aesthetic and cultural practice is a part of her argument for the Tokugawa period as a time of development in the direction of the “Modernity” of Meiji.  However, Ikegami, unlike the Modernization School historians, does not preclude the possibility of other modernities in Japanese development during and after the Tokugawa period.  She does try to make the point that when the political, economic, and military centralization occurred after 1868, social structures for civil society were already in existence, in the form of highly developed civility, based on the horizontal relations of aesthetic and cultural associations.  Ikegami in fact defines civility as,”the effective grammar of sociability [which] allowed Tokugawa individuals to interact safely and confidently with those individuals whose backgrounds were unknown or apparently different from their own.”[5] This sociability, and its independence from the ties of politics, land tenure, or economics, meant, in Ikegami’s mind, that individuals within Japan were prepared by the late Tokugawa period to see themselves as members of a nation greater than their own local ties, and potential participants in national activities, culture, and history.  They were, then, as she puts it, modern “before modernization.”[6]

In Chapter Two, Ikegami moves from the historical to the theoretical in order to deal with one of the most crucial problems in cultural history: the question of agency in historical change.  This thorny problem is in many ways akin to the question of whether one should vote if one lives in a democratic society, since one vote in the United States, for example, is only one in nearly 75 million eligible to vote, the key is whether that one small voice makes any difference.  In the same way, Ikegami has to deal with agency in both the production and consumption of culture.  Her affinity here with Marx, Habermas, and Hegel is clear.  In order to define culture and cultural consumption as modern or approaching the “Modern”, Ikegami, in her introduction and first chapter invoked the idea of the Tokugawa period as “proto-industrial”.[7] This makes it necessary, and possible, for her to dissect culture in terms of consumption on a Marxist model, which posits that mass culture (i.e. “national culture”) is not possible until a large group of consumers of that culture appear.  The Frankfurt school of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, among others, was admant in the idea that mass culture requires both mass production and mass consumption, and neither of these are possible without the appearance of a bourgeoisie and a proletariat.  The public sphere of Habermas, which Ikegami invokes again in Chapter Two, is closely related to this idea, for it is in the bourgeoisie that Habermas locates the horizontal associations, existing within salons and coffee houses in Europe of the 19^th century, which he wants to call the “Public Sphere”, and where free discussions of ideas in multiple areas can create changes in social thinking.[8]

Ikegami makes a direct connection between her own thinking and Habermas here in the process of making her case that a series of social/cultural webs intersect with individual agents and thus mass activity and individual agency are both possible.  In section two, Ikegami sets out to demonstrate the way this intersection works by showing how aesthetic associations acted as essentially horizontal associations that cut across hierarchical status and economic distinctions to create societies within societies, where individual members were parts of separate hierarchies dependent upon their mastery of the aesthetic rather than their lineage, wealth, or political position within the greater community.  Ikegami calls these associations Za, using the Japanese word to pinpoint a social formation whose definition is not easily accessible in English.[9]

In the second section of the book, Ikegami shows how these Za Arts originated with the early Japanese imperial court, where they were not only developed, but became a means of communicating power relations in the earliest of Japanese political systems.  Thus, the context of the appreciation of beauty as a part of a web of social and political relations was established very early.  This provided the background against which a truly proletarian, horizontal development of associations within which individuals could express themselves as equals in the appreciation and execution of aesthetic practice could develop.[10] The development of Za Arts from a formalized court-style ritual which conveyed political power to a set of associational cultural activities in which participation was broad across all levels of Japanese society, though, required several centuries of historical change.  Ikegami begins with a discussion of the development of linked verse (renga) and the way in which its departure both from the locus and the formality of the imperial court in a period of declining court power (the 12^th and 13^th centuries), along with the rise of the Muromachi Shogunate and the interest in newly powerful samurai in both court and associational culture moved linked verse to a new cultural space – literally a public space – where the limits of power met the limits of social divisions.[11]

The development of za arts in a non-political way in these liminal spaces in medieval Japan made possible the creation of associations in the spirit of ikki – groups of individuals who shared aesthetic and cultural values on an equal footing, regardless of their social or political standing.[12] By the end of section two, Ikegami has shown this pattern of growth of politically and socially neutral cultural spaces to be true for renga, tea ceremony, and popular music in the Medieval period.

What ikegami really wants to get to, however, is the growth of these networks of cultural associations in the Tokugawa period.  She does so in the third section of the work, by noting a few major qualitative changes.

The first of these changes was the rapid growth of four systems of communicative networks that encouraged growing social ties in the seventeenth century.  Those four included the processes of state creation, market-oriented trade systems, commercial publishing, and the growth of aesthetic associational networks.  All of these acted together to create a kind of gestalt in which communication and awareness of cultural, social, and political connections among people at every level of society was on the increase.[13]

The second major change involved the need for the Tokugawa Shogunate to recreate itself as a public organization rather than a private warrior clan.  The creation of this state publicness by the Shogunate led to the development of multiple levels of “publicness” and the arrival of the idea of private space, which was the result of the fact that categorizing public space led to areas of life that were not categorized, in which non-public, unregulated activities could occur.  This private space then became the site of associational groups’, based on aesthetic pursuits, activities and communications.  This is the development of a public sphere ala Habermas, albeit without the overt political element.[14]

In discussing “The Rise of Aesthetic Civility,” and the development of Haikai, Ikegami then brings the reader to her full argument, which is that interest in aesthetic pursuits existed across class boundaries, and in every part of Tokugawa Japan.  Since the interest was there, and such activities existed outside of the formal regulatory system for the most part, such associations tended to cross hierarchical boundaries set up in the political, economic, and social arenas, and made it possible for Japanese to experience each other as different individuals with similar interests.[15] In addition, the long history of aesthetics as important in Japanese politics and social circles tended to reinforce the image of aesthetic pursuits as something intertwined with Japanese identity, despite the de-centralized nature of the political state that the Tokugawa had crafted.

Ultimately, Ikegami wants to present her argument of aesthetic associations as public space a la Habermas for three reasons – first to show the development of a proto-modernity as discussed above.  Second, to broaden the idea of the public sphere beyond the bourgeouis salons of post-Enlightenment Europe and suggest that such associational forms were available in non-European cultures as well, and third, to show that associational developments outside of standard or official spaces for the expression of wealth, power, or identity can exist, and that such spaces have value as challengers to the status quo.

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[1] Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility:  Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture, Cambirdge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, 2005), 9.  Here Ikegami states:  “The fact that a plane of commonality evolved primarily within the realm of the beautiful in Tokugawa society, which was otherwise decentralized and divided, holds some suggestive implications for the post-Tokugawa development of the modern Japanese nation-state.”

[2] Ibid., 12-18.

[3] Ibid., 14-15.  Here Ikegami goes briefly into the difference she sees, focusing “on the notion of civility rather than civil society.”

[4] Ikegami, 19-43.

[5] Ibid., 4.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ikegami, 15.

[8] Ibid., 45.

[9] Ibd., 67-76.

[10] Ikegami, 82-83.

[11] Ibid., 90-91.  Here, the terms Ikegami is interested in are kugai and mu’en – kugai denoted a “public (but not political) space in the sense of a publicly usable space in a temple, or a market.  Mu’en denoted a kind of topographical/political neutrality, a liminal space where the crossing of borders made redefinition of reality possible.

[12] Ibid., 115.

[13] Ibid., 132.

[14] Ikegami, 134-139.

[15] Ibid., 140-153.

My interest is in the Japanese popular music industry and its early development.  I want to know the way the industry developed sales, marketed music, and developed talent.  At this point in my research, I know that the first gramophones arrived in Japan in the 1890′s, and the first “record players” in about 1905.  By 1920, something called “electronic recording” technology was developing that made songs much easier to listen to because it automated the process, meaning that the old hand-crank system was replaced.  The hand crank had a tendency to be very fast when fully cranked up, then slow down as the spring lost tension.  This, according to 歌の昭和史 led to recordings whose speed and tone were inconsistent.  So electronic recording was a major breakthrough in the industry．There must be some books that give me some chronology on this, and some basic, kind of mechanical history to start with.  I’ll have to look at William Malm.  But also at the history of the American Recording Industry.  Maybe I should start with something about Edison or Menlo Park.

In any case, the first record company in Japan was an indigenous company.  (name?)  They sent their artists to the United States to record, and the discs were mastered and pressed in the United States as well.[1] Victor Japan was opened as a subsidiary of Victor Music Co. in the United States, Victor also sent over a president (Benjamin Gardiner) who began very early to get a feel for the Japanese popular music recording industry, and by 1924 to change it to suit corporate marketing needs.

When he arrived, he found a music industry whose marketing and sales pathways were very similar to those that had developed in the United States in the 1860′s, during the lifetime of the first American popular music composer to actually make a full-time living at his work – Stephen Foster.  In Japan during the last years of the 19th and the first part of the 20th century, music was created by numerous individual composers working for themselves.  They would compose songs, then sell them to publishing houses if they could.  It always helped if the tune had been made popular in a stage drama of some kind, or played in a coffee house or one of the increasing number of night entertainment spots.  If the song sold well as sheet music, after 1914, it might be picked up by a record company and pressed.  The biggest example of this pattern before 1924 was Nakayama Shinpei’s huge hit Kachyusha no uta (Katyusha’s song) which Nakayama had written for Shimamura Hogetsu’s musicalization of Tolstoy’s Resurrection.  Nakayama was, in 1914, a new graduate of the Tokyo Conservatory of Music, and had been houseboy and student of Hogetsu.  He provided the music for Hogetsu’s lyric, designed as part of an attempt to popularize Russian Literature in Japan.  Hogetsu believed that part of the modernization process should include the introduction to common Japanese of Western literature, and he had since 1905, as the new editor of the magazine Waseda Bungaku, set himself the task of doing so by first translating literature from Russian and English, and then setting up a drama organization to present such literature in stage form to draw a less reading public to it.

In any case, Shinpei’s first major song, Kachyusha no uta, also became his first major hit, selling more than 20,000 copies of records, and even more sheet music.  It was the first in a long chain of popular songs about love lost to destiny that have come to be called enka – but it was not the first enka song.

The music we call Enka, developed in the early part of the Meiji period out of several critical influences.  Western music was one, but I don’t want to overemphasize that, because the instrumentation was sometimes used for its portability, and much of the musical structure of songs was changed to suit Japanese tastes and instrumentation, so it is more like parts of Western music were adopted to make Japanese music more universally understandable – more portable – but Japanese music was not changed fundamentally by just this.  Another influence on Enka was the political movement known as the Jiyumin Undo, or the People’s Rights Movement.  This was a politically risky movement of people agitating for a constitution and democracy in Meiji Japan.  Their activities were risky, and in many cases banned outright by the special police law.  So they often turned to street musicians who played short songs and sang politicized protest lyrics, sold the songs as broadsheets, and got away before they could be arrested.  This “music” – it was often little more than a rap or patter, was called Jiyumin Enka for the most part, because it was about the Jiyumin Undo and because the people who performed it were called enkashi because what they performed was engeki – performance.  In other words en (演) ka(歌) shi (氏). I also know that there was at the time a general attempt in many ways at leveling Japanese social and economic differences, and reducing the hierarchy as it had existed in the Tokugawa period.  This was the point of the destruction of the Samurai Class.  In line with this, merchants and wealthy farm and artisanal families – those who could afford to, had by the end of the Tokugawa Period, and certainly into early Meiji, begun taking on the trappings of what we might call middle class life.  Part of that was entering the musical traditions of their previous social superiors – the samurai and court nobles.  So while these middle class families were buying and educating their children in the use of pianos from the west, they were also buying and teaching their children to play koto and shamisen, for example, from the samurai and court classes.  So enka was product of exoticization and appropriation of domestic as well as foreign traditions, and mixing them together with the traditions and styles of the new middle class in the Meiji Period.

After the 1890 constitution was promulgated.  the Jiyuminken Undo lost steam, but the need for enkashi to make a living still continued, and many turned to singing less political songs, with themes of love, loss, and duty, but with the same instrumentation and musical styles as they had used for the more political songs.

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[1] 歌の昭和史