Sowing the Seeds: Nakayama Shimpei and the Field of Popular Culture Production in 1920’s Japan

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 20th 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 20th 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.


[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.

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