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.

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

– By Patrick M. Patterson

I began this project as a way to look more thoroughly at the subject of my dissertation: a composer of popular music in Japan after 1912.  I had become so narrowly focused on the cultural and economic context of popular music creation and distribution in pre-World War II Japan that I felt I needed to place my ideas, and “my composer” in a global context and see if anything that I was thinking about was reflective of larger trends in History and the study of popular culture.  One of my axioms as I worked through my research has been the idea of Stuart Hall, reflected by John Storey and other authors, that mass culture, national trends, and marketable popularity developed as an integral part of industrial technology, transportation, and distribution infrastructure in industrializing nations.  I was pleased to find, then, that a comparison of two composers, my own Nakayama Shimpei of Japan, and the United States’ Stephen Foster, whom I chose at random as someone with superficial similarities to Nakayama, for which comparison might be useful, seems to bear this idea out.

As Stephen Collins Foster lay dying at Bellevue Hospital in New York in 1864, both Japan and the United States were entering periods of transformational social conflict. In the United States, the Civil War and, in Japan the Meiji Restoration were both about defining what the modern nation was, who it would include, and how it would include them. Stephen Foster (b.1827, d. 1864), and Nakayama Shimpei (b. 1887, d. 1967), played important roles in the cultural transformations of their respective nations as they redefined themselves and created new national identities out of diverse local cultures.

Stephen Collins Foster was born on July 4, 1827, youngest of nine children in a well-to-do middle class family in the greater Pittsburgh area of Pennsylvania. At the time of his birth, Stephen’s father William was a successful real-estate speculator and Democratic Party politician. His mother was every bit the well-to-do socialite in an up-and-coming new industrial center. The family lived in a suburban home on a large plot of land that was part of the property Foster had developed, and Mrs. Foster had named the place “The White Cottage.”  For for Stephen, this was always home – the place where all good things were to be found – a kind of Xanadu that was lost and never regained when, the year after Stephen’s birth, his father lost the home and all his property in a loan foreclosure.

Growing up in Pittsburgh, Stephen Foster displayed creativity with music at a young age.  By the time he was 17, he was writing tunes in the style of popular English parlor songs, and setting poetry to music, as happened with “Open Thy Lattice, Love” the first extant song composed by Stephen Foster, published in 1844.[1] Even as early as age nine, Stephen and his friends put on shows that mimicked the popular “black-face” minstrel acts of the day.[2] Stephen’s act was, according to his brother Morrison, so popular that he became the only one in the group to perform in every show, and was paid a percentage of the box office take.[3] He also wrote some of the music for these shows, and became as adept at writing black face songs as he was as writing parlor songs. He is said to have been an accomplished player of several musical instruments, and is supposed to have studied classical music on his own.

In 1848 he wrote “Oh, Susanna,” a song destined to become one of the most popular songs in world history up to that point. In the 1850’s, signing several exclusive contracts with his music publisher, Stephen Foster became the first composer of popular music in American history to make his living exclusively from that work.  He also became the man who introduced African-American and slave culture, however superficial and stereotyped, to white Americans in the northern industrial cities.

Like Stephen Foster, many of Nakayama Shimpei’s more than 300 songs are so well known in Japan today that they have become a part of the cultural fabric of Japan, sung by all, though few know who first created them.  Children in kindergarten learn many of Nakayama’s simple songs, and they are called home from play in the evening by the local fire station loudspeakers broadcasting perhaps his most famous: Yūyake koyake.

Shimpei was born to a large family on March 22, 1887, in what is currently Nakamura-city, in Nagano Prefecture.[4] He was the fourth surviving child. When Shimpei was in second grade, he began to learn to play a “baby organ”.[5] In his diary he says that this “was just at the time the Sino-Japanese war began, so we played epic energetic military marches and sang our young hearts out.”[6] In school, he did especially well in music and physical education.[7] In 1905, at age 18, he decided to go to college in Tokyo and become a music teacher.[8]

Shimpei’s journey to Tokyo began in the company of a friend who had enlisted in the army on his way to Nagano city.[9] Stopping at Takazaki, a city along the way, Shimpei wrote in his diary about seeing soldiers.  He went to the gates of the training grounds to watch recruits being put through their paces, and was moved by their commitment to protect the nation.[10] What is important about this episode is that it fits with the interest Nakayama was to continue to display in Japanese identity.  During his life, he regularly toured Japan and wrote songs based on his experiences about Japanese people and Japanese places.

It is this sense of national identity with which both Foster and Nakayama worked that is the focus of my interest. Stephen Foster’s songs were created in the ten years prior to the start of the Civil War in the United States. This period saw an America trying to define itself. It was a nation built on business and entrepreneurship, and the freedom of personal action which supposedly encouraged businesses to take root and grow. Still, the business of America remained agriculture, and the laborers in agricultural areas included large numbers of slaves. The tension between freedom and slavery, opportunity and bankruptcy were probably easily detected everywhere. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was known to Foster, and, his notes show that he began what was to become “My Old Kentucky Home” with that book in mind.[11] The Underground Railroad was already a fact of American life. Yet white people, abolitionists, northern industrialists and laborers, and even slave owners, did not know much about black culture, language, or thought, and assumed blacks to all be inferior in every way. The introduction of southern culture, and slave culture, along with the culture of the West, provided Americans with the imagined elements of their society, and allowed them to begin forming a new image of what it meant to be American that included at least some of African American culture. Stephen Foster’s songs show this, too. His stereotyped, caricatured protagonists cannot pronounce English except in a faux southern twang with a speech impediment thrown in to boot, his black face protagonists are all from the margins of American society.  His music, taken as a whole, encompasses the subduction of the American Frontier, and the American South, into the mainstream of American culture. His popular songs were a necessary voice within the nation, helping people to define and redefine themselves based on the new concept of identities.  He was not alone in this, but was influenced by abolitionists (though there is no evidence that he was one) in the idea that slaves were unhappy and appears to have believed that he could turn his blackface music into something respectable to the white, middle class theater going audience without removing the elements that made it exotic.[12] Foster’s songs did bring stereotyped images of American blacks to popular music and the theater, but he knew the music he was imitating, and this combination of imitation and ridicule was able to bring the problems of blacks, and the appeal of a new kind of music, to the attention of North Eastern middle class white society, however subconscious and derogatory his songs might otherwise be.[13]

So one of Foster’s greatest contributions is as the beginning of the influence of the music of African Americans on popular music.[14] In a way, as William W. Austin has noted, this, like Beethoven and his use of the waltz, is really the “adoption of a new, foreign rhythm” that creates a new fashion, but the “foreign rhythm” came from within the United States, and could be claimed as part of American culture in a growing nation, just as performers often claimed Foster’s songs as their own.[15]

Nakayama Shimpei was born into a similar situation, albeit after Japan’s civil war, and well into the twentieth century. Still, it was in the Meiji era, from 1868 to 1912, that Japan underwent its first great, and very sudden, wave of industrialization. Japan by 1914, the year of Shimpei’s debut on the stage as a composer, and the production of his first hit song, had undergone in only 50 years an industrial revolution that had taken 120 years in the United States, and had reached a rough technological parity with American corporations. The wrenching changes that accompany a society through an industrial revolution in terms of relocation of labor, issues of management, reformation of the class structure, conversion to wage work, etc. were causing tremendous change and pain throughout Japan.

One of the most important changes to occur was a new sense of Japan as a nation that was coming to be held by those at all levels of the class structure.  This had been encouraged with the Meiji Government’s abolition of the Samurai caste, which tended to make the Emperor the center, and level the social playing field.[16] It required more factory workers, and often located factories near the farming communities where laborers lived in the off-season. It required workers of all types to move into the larger cities such as Osaka, Tokyo, Fukushima, and Sendai, to name only a few. These workers needed places to stay, and felt foreign in the cities. They tended to settle, in neighborhoods that were made up of others from near their native place. These local laborer and business communities attempted to maintain their own cultural traditions, even performing local folk, songs.[17] Like the United States, though without the slaves, the new nation of Japan came to be made up as much of people from the periphery of society – farmers, laborers, women – as it was by the central powers of government, the bureaucratic class and the educated elite. It was, like Foster, these people to whom Nakayama Shimpei turned for his inspiration, and for his market.

Nakayama Shimpei’s first popular song, Kachushya no uta, or Katchusha’s Song, came from a Western musical tradition, and was created as a part of a musical production based on Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection.[18] This “musicalization” of a Western novel gave Shimpei the opportunity to customize Western music to suit a Japanese audience.  The result of his hybridization was a song that was, like Foster’s “Ethiopian Songs,” the “adoption of a new, foreign rhythm” that creates a new fashion, and this fashion was the most popular song in Japanese history to that point.

A large part of Nakayama’s success in the music industry, came after the publication and recording of “Boatman’s Song” (Sendo kouta), produced in 1922, which remained at the top of Japanese popular music sales into the 1930’s.[19] Nakayama’s success with Sendo kouta, and in blending Western and Japanese musical styles, and the effectiveness of the lyrics of his collaborators led to a new style of popular music, called shin-minyo (New Folk Songs).[20] Shin-minyo was intended by its creators to be directly related to the Folk songs of Tokugawa era villages in style and content.  In 1924, Nakayama produced the most popular song of this new genre, Suzaka kouta.[21] The twist on this was that Suzaka kouta was written on commission for a country onsen spa, and was specifically designed to promote tourism to the resort, but was sold to the market as a popular song in the style of local folk music. This irony was a central part of shin-minyo, however, very much like the irony of Stephen Foster’s use in his black-face minstrel music of stereotypes and caricatures of black speech and slave life, Shin minyo targeted middle class city folk while staking a claim to legitimacy as country folk songs.

The final comparison I want to make has to do with the modernization of music distribution systems.  In Stephen Foster’s time, music was printed and distributed by a growing group of professional music publishing houses.   One of the skills that Foster had to learn was how to negotiate contracts with these firms, and how to keep them using his music without paying him.[22] The difficulty in doing this was related to the lack of copyright laws, and the difficulties involved in monitoring a new capitalist distribution system with pre-modern technology.  Foster, for example, never had a means by which he could independently verify the number of sheets of a particular song a publisher had sold, and so had no way to verify that he was being fairly paid.  He was, however, the first American to become a full time composer of popular songs.[23] The music publishing and distribution system of the United States’ growing economy played a large role in this, making his songs available in sufficient quantities and at sufficiently low cost that Foster could survive for fourteen years without a separate “day job” as it were.

In a similar way, though later and with different technology, the music industry of newly industrialized Japan made Nakayama Shimpei wealthy and famous.  The new technology in the industry in Nakayama’s lifetime was the record player.  Its role in his popularity and wealth was central.  In 1928, for example, Nakayama and Noguchi produced Habu no Minato (The Harbor of Habu) for sheet music publication, and performance.  The song was soon recorded, and record production could not keep up with sales.[24] Inspired by this, Nippon Polydor executives created 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 from sheet music 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 earlier songs.  A love song, it hit the market with a splash, and the market never looked back. Most Japanese record companies adopted the new policy of the President of Nippon Victor, American Benjamin Gardner, who began using 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.[25] As with Foster, new technology in production and distribution of popular music was the primary means by which Shimpei came to have such a large impact on Japan’s modern culture.

It seems to me that an analysis of the development of mass culture and the music industry in any culture can benefit from a comparative approach.  My own look here at Japan and the United States has found each at the edge of its industrial revolution, and has been, I think, able to place the development of popular music within that phase of national history as an integral part of the development of a national market, a national identity, and a mass culture industry.  I find it fascinating that, 60 years apart, both Foster and Nakayama wrote songs for a new nation that became popular because of new capabilities in national distribution and sales.  In many ways, this comparison seems to bear out the ideas of Stuart Hall and other analysts of popular culture that popular culture is an integral part of an industrial infrastructure.  At this point in my own work, this comparison has given me the opportunity to think more about the development of a global mass culture within a global context of industrialization.  It seems helpful to me to know that Shimpei’s experience did not occur in a vacuum, but was related in real ways to the experiences of others like Stephen Foster in other developing nations.

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[1] Charles E. Hamm, Yesterdays: popular song in America, (New York: Norton, 1979), 204.

[2] Ibid., 207.

[3] William W. Austin, “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “The Old Folks At Home”: The Songs of Stephen C. Foster from His Time to Ours, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1975, reprint 1987), 7.

[4]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), 287.

[5] Nakayama, 287.  According to the Nakano City history, a baby organ was provided for the Hino Elementary School in March of Meiji 26.  It is unclear of this is the same organ mentioned above.

[6] Nakayama, 289.

[7] Ibid., 289.

[8] Ibid., 291.

[9] Ibid., 291.

[10] Ibid., 292.

[11] Hamm, 215; Austin, 189.

[12] Ken Emerson, Doo-dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 183.

[13] Austin, v.

[14] Austin, v.

[15] Austin, xxii.

[16] Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period, 35, 36.  Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1985) 9.

[17] Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period, ed. Marius Jansen (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1985) 35, 36.

[18] Nakayama, 302.

[19] Ishikawa Hiroyoshi, Gouraku no senzenshi (A History of Prewar Entertainment Culture), (Tokyo:  Toshosensho, 1981),  73; Nakamura Toyo, “Early pop song writers and their backgrounds” in Popular Music, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Cambridge, England:  Cambridge University Press, 1991), 266.

[20] Nakayama, 287.

[21] Nakayama, 287.

[22] Emerson, 175-183.

[23] Hamm, 224-227.

[24] Nakamura, 267-268.

[25] Ibid. 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.

This paper attempts to trace a connection between a contemporary Japanese rock band called Kishidan and the subculture of Japanese high school rebels called yankii.  Kishidan markets itself as an authentic yankii band, claiming to have created a subgenre called yank-rock that plays specifically to the ethos of that subculture.  The twist on all this authenticity is the fact that the yankii subculture peaked in popularity during the 1980’s and Kishidan’s fans are not primarily adults with memories of that decade, but high school and college-age members of Japan’s contemporary youth culture who were born too late for the ‘80’s.

So Kishidan’s yank-rock authenticity rests on a nostalgic rehashing of a cultural phenomenon that most of its fans have never participated in.  Their access to it is literary: they read it as a text through the experience of movies, books, video games, and popular music.  Kishidan’s version of Yankii culture is therefore also literary – a tragic-comic playground in which a working class rebellion against mainstream social norms is turned into a kind of high school photo album in which Japan’s young people can laugh at earlier generations even while recognizing in themselves a set of similar experiences.  Kishidan sets itself up as a site of asobi where the toys are the experiences of youth, and of kata – patterns of social behavior which, through repetition, have become literary signifiers themselves.  For this reason, Kishidan’s performances and music have a surprising quality.  The themes they address in the words and music are important, deep, and involve common experiences that produce powerful emotions, but watching them one is always not quite sure if they are serious.    Despite their rebel image, Kishidan fits well with trends common in much of Japan’s contemporary popular music scene.  Though they cater to a different fan base, their popularity is similar to that of recent groups such as the Gospellers and Something Else, whose referent is the 1960’s Group Sounds movement, and whose cultural product is a manufactured nostalgia.

Kishidan’s yankii costume play and tongue-in-cheek nostalgia for 1980’s culture looks on the surface to be all image and no substance.  In fact they are playing with the past as a literary subject. Kishidan inhabit the myth of the Japanese high school rebels of the 1980’s, as a place from which to critique mainstream Japanese society of the present.  Their critique is, as Brian McVeigh has said about their clothing, anti-official, even para-official.[1] Kishidan use their performances to mock mainstream society, adults, youth angst, and even themselves.  They encourage laughter of the sort described by Mikhail Bakhtin in his idea of the Carnival – an unrestrained humorous critique that does not desire to overturn society but recognizes the participation of the critics in the mainstream order of contemporary Japanese society.[2] Ultimately the effect of this is to include the public as silent partners in the rebellion of the yankii.  Bakhtin wrote of folk discourse at a Carnival as a kind of free-wheeling critique of society that could not exist without the existence of the official discourse as its counterpart.  In this same way Kishidan closes the circle between the exclusivity of the yankii gangs and the members of the society who have looked at them, and romanticized their rebellion from outside, helping each to recognize themselves in the others.

Kishidan was formed in 1997, but its cultural reference point is actually the pop music culture of the 1980’s when Japan was at a high point in its international and domestic economic position. This was the period of the economic “bubble,” during which money flowed easily, and employment, income, and consumption were at high levels.  For that reason, today in Japan anything that can be attached to the culture of Japanese living at the end of the period of high economic growth in the 1980’s is called “bubbly” in a sort of nostalgic way.  During the 1990’s and the early years of the Twenty-first century, the decade of the 1980’s was seen as a point when Japan had reached a position of importance and influence in the world which it had never held before, and a part of that importance was the soft power of cultural exports—particularly anime and manga, but also including music, television dramas, and movies.

It was in this context that Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi, a straight-ahead rocker, performed his song “Japan,” in 1991 to large audiences, asking in English: “Japan, where are you going?  Japan, what are you doing?” and proceeded to answer that question with another series of ambivalent statements and answers about Japanese profligacy and place in the world – a kind of search for meaning and authenticity in Japan’s participation in world affairs beyond the fact of production for the world’s consumers, a rich but amoral presence in world politics, and a reputation for technical excellence.  Nagabuchi seems to have been looking for authentic engagement in the world.  This sense of Japan’s growing importance in the world, and its economic profligacy as a problem, though, seems by the dim light of the lost decade of the 1990’s to be naïve, and can be called “bubbly” and optimistic.

Other bands that were popular in the early 1990’s had less to say about Japan’s relationship with the world, but much to say about the relationships of Japanese selves to tradition, society, lovers, and even consumption.  Some were still “bubbly”.  Others, like Mister Children, The Gospellers, and Something Else, were trying to move on, combining the Group Sounds Movement of the 1960’s with 1990’s production values and technologies to suggest a retrenchment to simpler, less profligate values.  All had fan bases, and the most successful catered to, subcultures whose values were literally worn on their sleeves.  The 1991-1994 disco phenomenon, centered around Juliana’s Tokyo and its female regulars, called bodi-con, (for ‘body-conscious’), and recognizable by their tightly fitting little dresses in various colors who danced in cages to a relentless house music beat is one example.  But there were others.  The 1980’s and early 1990’s was also the heyday of the yankii – the gangs of young toughs in stylized gakuran (high school uniforms) who had a reputation for disrupting class, intimidating teachers, vandalism, drinking heavily in public, and getting into turf wars and petty criminal activities.  This youth subculture was romanticized even as it was occurring in manga, television, and popular music.  Television talk shows frequently discussed these gangs as the central youth problem at the time, and lamented them as a sign that young people no longer had good values – a common refrain in mainstream news societies about young people’s culture.  Kishidan has tapped into this historic cultural phenomenon to claim authenticity as its inheritor.

Kishidan was formed in 1997, signed with EMI Records, Japan in 1998 and sold its first album in 2002 after.  With an over-the-top yankii look and a single called One Night Carnival, the promotion video for which made clear their connections to yankii culture, Kishidan was “bubbly”.  The band’s six members each have stage names and personas: Ayanokouji “Thelonius” Show (Show), Saotome Hikaru (Hikaru), Saionji Hitomi (Tommy), Hoshi  Grandmarnier (Ranma), Shiratori Shouchikubai (Matsu), and Shiratori Yukinojou (Yukki), several of which suggest a kind of excess.  “Show,” as Ayanokouji is usually known to his fans, is the leader, MC, and the so-called “dragon voice” for the group. Tommy, the lead guitarist, performs as the insane member of the band – he behaves in a vaudevillian way as a self-destructive, compulsively violent but likeable clown.  Hikaru is Show’s backup singer, and dances in front of the band with his oversized pompadour hair and overdone expressions that support Show’s antics.              Kishidan’s music is technically solid.  Created mostly by Ayanokouji Show, it is a mixture of rock, rockabilly and JPop sounds.  Some of the band’s most popular hits have been “crying songs” with a comical twist.  Kishidan embrace the yankii influence in their image and music. They call themselves the founders of “yank-rock” and claim a working class steel town heritage, noting that they are from the “crow town” of Kisarazu, Chiba, and that they “rule over the delinquent gangs” there.[3] Kishidan has embraced yankii culture as it wanes, and in turn fans of yankii culture have embraced them – when Nintendo Corporation created a game based on the ubiquitous high school cheering clubs called ouendan (officially sanctioned extracurricular clubs in which members wear yankii style clothing and get rowdy in the stands in support of high school sports teams), Kishidan’s music and look were featured in the game.  But Kishidan is a simulacra of the yankii.  Their look is over the top – their gakuran are tailored and slick – evoking the yankii look, but not the home-made quality of the yankii reality.  Most members of the band wear pompadours that are two to five times larger than the pompadours of groups that influenced the yankii look such as the rock band Yokohama Ginbae or the Yoyogi Park dancers of the 1980’s, whose pompadours were made from their own hair.  Kishidan’s music is often sensitive, complex, and full of messages that are seemingly at odds with the bad-boy image of the yankii they are channeling.  In short, Kishidan’s yankii image is obviously, and intentionally, cospuray – costume play – and their music is a sophisticated blend of rock stylings designed to appeal to a broad range of fans, not just the dying breed of the yankii.

To understand the music and image of Kishidan, it is important to know who the yankii are.  They share a set of ideas, clothing styles, hairstyles, and attitudes the bosozoku motorcycle gangs, and it is possible for a member of one to be a member of the other.  These groups are primarily male-oriented, though women join and play a deep role, which includes as much dressing of the part as the men, and support of the men in a hetero-normative set of gender relationships which reify male power and dominance. Still, yankii girls are supposed to be masculine in many of their habits.  While they defer to the boys’ authority, among girls their image is that of delinquent toughs in a way equivalent to that of yankii boys, but distinguish themselves from the boys by small feminized gestures that could include display of a cute stuffed animal chained to a belt.  Primarily, though, their femininity is performed as dependence on the males, and as objects of possession to be fought over by their fathers and boyfriends.  Paradoxically, both yankii boys and girls are also often portrayed in mass media, and by Kishidan, as being attracted to mainstream members of the opposite sex, who are frequently seen as a kind of savior from the delinquent lifestyle the yankii have fallen into.  These gender roles suggest that to be a yankii is to exist in a liminal space between adolescence and adulthood, where the problems of growing up, love, sex, responsibility, and identity, are worked out in a state of becoming adult, Japanese, and mainstream.  In all cases, members of these gangs leave the gang at points of their lives when transition to adulthood begins – graduation from high school, starting a first job, getting married.  In fact, the yankii are seen far less frequently in Japan, and those that do still dress and behave according to the yankii image exist more on the fringe of society in the first decade of the Twenty-first century.

During the 1980’s, though, these yankii were the bad-boys of Japan, romanticized in literature, film, and music.  They had their own subculture, and other, popular subcultures were built up for them to inhabit in the minds of those who observed them.  Music was always a primary part of the yankii lifestyle, as was clothing style.  The most common outfit was the stylized gakuran and seiraa-fuku – the ubiquitous high school uniforms required of most Japanese high school students.  in yankii style, these included the standing collared Prussian-military style uniform jacket, usually worn with collar unbuttoned and a tank top undershirt beneath, often lengthened so that the hem of the jacket hung down to the knees or below.  Frequently, the second button of the jacket was missing – given to a girlfriend as an unspoken declaration of love.  Buttons were often stylized themselves – oversized, shiny and gold.  The pants were as stylized as the jacket – made into virtual balloons, some in clear imitation of the billowy pants worn by construction workers.

This fashion found its 1980’s visual showcase in four locations.  The first was among the high school cheering clubs (ouendan) who wore stylized uniforms as a rather extreme way to show school spirit, along with extreme hairstyles, including faux punk pink mohawks and exaggerated James Dean-style pompadours.  It could also be found in the rockabilly circus that existed along the bridge and walkway to Yoyogi Park, off of Harajuku in Tokyo, where garage bands of all stripes came to play for micro-audiences, and dance clubs who performed to rockabilly music wearing updated 1950’s American nostalgia clothing and James Dean Style hair.  Another was the popular 1980’s band Yokohama Ginbae (Yokohama Silver Fly), who also performed in 1950’s American nostalgia clothing – mostly black biker leather and tight jeans, and occasionally the gakuran discussed above, along with pompadours and dark sunglasses.  The last and perhaps most widely disseminated source of access for young people to this fashion image was the publication in the 1980’s of the hugely popular manga Bebop High School about the adventures of a group of high school toughs in pompadours and stylized gakuran and the live-action television series that this manga spawned.  The television drama theme song was performed by Yokohama Ginbae.

Yankii identity was therefore confirmed by common clothing, commonly accepted music, and group-oriented activities.  These gangs self-identified as bad-boys (furyoukai, tsupparikai – the world of delinquents), and acted the part to the hilt.  Further, their exposure to mainstream society through interfaces such as popular music, television and manga assured that mainstream society knew about yankii culture.  In addition, the yankii subculture of the 1980’s was very much a working-class culture, as can be seen in the modification of gakuran to look like carpenter’s pants, and it attempted to preserve a kind of pure adolescent experience.  It was also not revolutionary – it did not seek to overturn the social order, but simply to operate at its fringe, in a kind of liminal space between adolescence and adulthood, where any juvenile delinquency could be attributed to youth, and from which all members were eventually expected to reenter society, get respectable jobs or become respectable housewives, and take on the roles of their working class parents.  That is to say – it was an anti-official subculture, but one that was tolerated as an outlet for youthful energy – a chance for young people to get the rebellion out of their systems before growing up.

Part of Kishidan’s appeal to the general public begins right here, at the point of reentry into the mainstream of Japanese society.  In the promotion video for their song kekkon toukon koshinkyoku – mabudachi (“Wedding March”), the members of Kishidan perform in a hotel ballroom decked out for a wedding reception, stocked with guests, and complete with newlyweds waiting for speeches and entertainment. From the double back doors comes Kishidan, in tight caricatures of high school uniforms reminiscent of 1980’s yankii teen rebels and the popular comic series Bebop High School. But rather than the tough rock they are known for, they begin to sing a very melodic song that seems reminiscent of 1980’s girl idol groups such as The Candies (and perform a cute dance in unison) that recognizes the transitory nature of the moment, and the misery of the father of the bride, who is shown at home, unable to bring himself to witness his daughter’s wedding.   The song laments the end of childhood as marked by three features: the groom’s re-entry into mainstream society as symbolized by his commitment to his bride; the bride’s sacrifice of her own youth and perhaps some happiness on the wedding alter; and the bride’s father’s sense of losing his daughter as he comes to accept her marriage to this man and a life for her that will be as grey, mainstream, and banal as his own. The chief source of hope in the song is the bride’s mother, who seems to understand both the rebelliousness of the bride and her groom, and the sacrifice that they are about to make, and to not be worried about either.  It is the mother, and the words of the song, that make it clear that this is not revolutionary.  The social context is upheld, despite the rebelliousness and delinquency of the groom and his friends in their youth. In the end, the bride’s father comes to the wedding and dances along with Kishidan and everyone else, and the members of Kishidan promise to carry on their rebelliousness in the name of the groom.[4]

In its attention to re-entry into mainstream society, this song and its promotion video describe the life of members of the furyoukai (the delinquent world) of yankii culture as a liminal experience in which, as Arnold van Gennep has said, entry into the liminal space provides an opportunity for the subject to experiment with identity – to think and be whatever he or she wants to be – and to reenter the world a changed person.  But reentry does require reacceptance of the social norms which don’t apply in the liminal space, and the bride and groom are described in the words to the song, and in the images in the video, as two formerly liminal individuals who now must conform to their new mainstream role as adults in Japanese society.

But there is more here than just the liminal.  The element of surprise in the cuteness of the song, the musical cross-dressing in the song itself, which is not Kishidan’s usual fare, and the reference to the 1980’s in choosing a song style in the mode of The Candies all combine to include a humorous element.  This re-entry is not just a serious and somber business, and it allows for jokes at the expense of the mainstream – the official culture.  This fits well with Bakhtin’s idea of the Carnival, and of the laughing folk as a social force.  Bakhtin’s Carnival is a place where social commentary can exist, and even the most serious things be satirized, but out of which comes no revolution or attempt to overturn social order.  The comical nature of the song and of the setting within the promotion video is a kind of self-directed laughter that still succeeds in being subversive.  Brian McVeigh has also suggested in his analysis of the uses, and mis-uses, of uniforms in Japanese society that the stylization of the gakuran is subversive without being revolutionary – the appropriation of the high school uniform, and its subversion through modification into a grotesque of itself is an act of both criticism of the system represented by the uniform, and acceptance of membership within that system as the basis for criticism.  This, what McVeigh calls anti-official action, complains about the cultural context, but seeks to take part in, and even to benefit from that culture.[5] By critiquing Japanese mainstream culture in this way – poking fun at both the subject of the criticism and the point of view from which it comes, Kishidan has made it clear that they are not really yankii, even while overtly claiming that they are.  They are taking a position, claiming authenticity, as yankii in order to speak to mainstream society about the values of the yankii, romanticized and nostalgized as a part of the common Japanese past.
Kishidan’s debut single was another matter.  In many ways, One Night Carnival was a Bakhtinian Carnival – all the grotesquerie, all the social critique, all the anti-official laughter, but none of the re-entry of the song described above.  Still, it is not revolutionary in the sense that the anti-culture of the yankii that Kishidan claims to inhabit would clearly lose its meaning if the mainstream culture it comments upon were to disappear.  Yankii culture here is not an alternative cultural model, but a liminal place in which commentary on the mainstream can safely take place.   Every scene in this promotion video evokes 1980’s working class Japan from the point of the yankii rebel. It opens with a white-clad biker riding through a tunnel to a solid four-beat bass rhythm and pulsing guitar riff. As the scene shifts to a bridge over Tokyo bay, the same rider, Kishidan leader Ayanokouji Show, this time wearing a billowy blue caricature of a high school uniform leans over to a similarly over-the-top yankii girl in stylized uniform and says, “wanna come to my place?” The rest of the video is repeated images of the six-member band Kishidan walking through graffiti-ridden parks, standing around under freeway overpasses, and playing music in a dirty abandoned parking lot, all in billowing retro-yankii high school uniforms with kung fu slippers and over-the-top James Dean hair, dancing in unison in the style of high school cheering clubs with the Kimitsu works of Nippon Steel Corporation glittering in the background, singing about teen love and angst.[6]
One Night Carnival is very demonstrative of the working class culture that Kishidan claims as its own, with scenes from neighborhood parks marked with graffiti, hangouts under freeway overpasses, and dirty parking lots, bridges, and steel factories forming the majority of the backdrops.  The critique of society comes from that perspective, too.  Teens with little hope, but lots of hormones trying to decide what is right, and find ways to vent their energy and frustrations, and to demonstrate emotions they are not yet used to.  The music has elements of rockabilly and hard rock, and the lyrics give vent to a kind of street ethic that is similar in some ways to the populist music of Bruce Springsteen in the United States.   The band seems to want to present its music as an authentic comment on social problems for working class teenagers in its own time, and it does so by digging up the past – referencing the 1980’s and presenting Japanese teens in working class neighborhoods, or in gangs, as the underside of successful Japan.  They are using nostalgia in their images and songs to dredge up a historical past that they can then use as a source for community and a base for social commentary.[7]
This strategy does seem to be working with Kishidan’s audience.  In video recordings of Kishidan concerts, many fans can be seen dressed in yankii style.  On Internet fan sites, the nostalgia for the 1980’s is frequently a topic of conversation[8].   On music blogs and their official website, Kishidan claim to be part of the “culture of delinquent gangs in the crow town of Kisarazu, Chiba.”[9] Fans buy into Kishidan’s representations of Yankii culture.  On one internet fan site a fan worried after having bought a Kishidan CD, whether his humanity would suffer from the band’s influence.   The band’s official website claims that “yank-rock” takes as its themes the yankii subculture of the 1980’s.  One of the nicknames the band has given itself is Tanabata-yarou no A-chiimu (The A-Team of Tanabata-guys) – a moniker that refers both to a slang term coined in the 1980’s Japanese TV drama Bebop High School, in which tanabata-yarou referred to a boy willing to let down his friends just to chase girls.  The A-Team part of the title is a nod to the 1980’s U.S. television series “The A-Team” starring Mr. T.  Here we have inter-textuality between cultures and times, as well as a sort of picking and choosing from the past in order to support subversive messages of the present – both television dramas were popular among young people, both were mildly subversive in content, and both refer to a past with which the members of Kishidan and their audience have probably only had minimal experience.  Their contact with the source material of the 1980’s, whether it be Yokohama Ginbae, or the A-Team, is primarily literary in nature – they can access it through archived sources such as videotape, books, and compact discs, but have no direct experience with the context of events that created those cultural artifacts.  Evidence of the literary, inter-textual nature of Kishidan’s music and its fans, can also be found in fan commentary online:  one fan has said that “there are many quotes from ‘80’s subculture.  If you don’t know 80’s subculture you can’t enjoy these parts [of Kishidan’s performance].”   Another fan notes that “they cut up ‘80’s JPop and mix it up!”[10] Fans do notice and participate in the parsing of 1980’s subcultures, and dress the part when they attend concerts.  Kishidan is establishing a nostalgic space among post-1980’s Japanese youth within which they can place their own readings of Japan, class, and youth culture as commentaries upon social problems in the post-bubble era.  To be “bubbly” is to be ironic, in a Bakhtinian sense, to laugh at official culture even while expecting to participate in that same mainstream culture as adults.  Kishidan is “bubbly” in its tongue-in cheek references to 1980’s culture, and, as we have seen with the reference to The A-Team above, they allude to foreign cultural products as well.  On Oops.net, fans have commented on the ubiquitous male dancers at Kishidan concerts, who wear cut-off jeans and American-flag patterned tank tops and do what looks like calisthenics on stage behind the band: “I really liked the Americaman dancers in the back!”[11] As with the references to Japanese culture of the 1980’s, it appears that specific meaning does not have to attach to these dancers – their suggestion of United States culture is enough – the inter-textual play of images both domestic and foreign, contemporary and historical, provides the liminal space in which the Carnival can take place – a palimpsest of costume play and commentary on the present through asobi – play with images and symbols from the past, and present, the local and the foreign.
Kishidan performs a version of rock music whose images at first seem disconnected from any reality, Japanese, or foreign, but taking the time to read them yields rich results.  Kishidan gives Japanese fans one of the greatest shows on earth:  the band provides a Carnival within the liminal space carved out of the ideological and cultural trace of the recent past and the present.  With adept use of symbolism, and a large dose of asobi, Kishidan plays with images of gangs, bad-boys and bad girls.  In a literary sense they stand at the underbelly of technological, economic powerhouse Japan, and belt out a critique of the mainstream political and cultural reality in which they and their fans live by telling love stories interspersed with sophisticated inter-textual jokes.  By taking the rebelliousness and intimidation out of the yankii, they have made him a source of nostalgia and a critical figure whose consciousness can be inhabited by any Japanese.
REFERENCE LIST:

“Midnight Special the Knights Kishidan from Route 127 of Fairies”.  Tokyo, 2009.  (May 11, 2009). 4/11/2009. <http://www.kishidan.com/index2.html>.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production:  Essays on Art and Literature. European Perspectives. Ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Forman, Murray. “‘Represent’: Race, Space and Place in Rap Music.” Popular Music 19.1 (2000): 65-90.

Hesmondhalgh, David. “Post-Punk’s Attempt to Democratise the Music Industry: The Success and Failure of Rough Trade.” Popular Music 16.3 (1997): 255-74.

Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno & Max. “The Culture Industry:  Enlightenment as Mass Deception.”  (1947).

Hosokawa, Shuhei. レコードの美学 [the Aesthetics of Recorded Sound]. Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1990.

Kishidan. “The Aishiteru (the アイシテル).” 2006.

—. “Kekkon Toukon Koshinkyoku – “Mabudachi” （結婚闘魂行進曲「マブダチ」).” Trans. Kishidan. Tokyo, 2004.

—. “Koibito/Love Ballad Ha Utaenae (恋人／Love Balladは歌えない).” 2002.

—. “One Night Carnival (Pv).” Trans. Kishidan. Tokyo, 2002.

—. “One Night Carnival Live.” 2007.

—. “Secret Love Story.” Kishidan Promotion Video. 2003. Vol. 2009.

—. “Swingin’ Nippon (スウィンギン・ニッポン).” 2003.

—. “Zoku (族).” 2004.

Lachmann, Renate, Raoul Eshelman, Marc Davis. “Bakhtin and Carnival:  Culture as Counter-Culture.” Cultural Critique 1.11 (1988-1989): 115-52.

Launey, Guy de. “Not-So-Big in Japan: Western Pop Music in the Japanese Market.” Popular Music 14.2 (1995): 203-25.

McVeigh, Brian J. Wearing Ideology : State, Schooling and Self-Presentation in Japan. Dress, Body, Culture. Oxford ; New York, NY: Berg, 2000.

Mitsui, Toru. “Japan in Japan: Notes on an Aspect of the Popular Music Record Industry in Japan.” Popular Music 3 (1983): 107-20.

Moore, Allan. “What Should a History of Popular Music Tell?” Popular Music History 1.3 (2006): 329-38.

“Oops! Music Community:  What Is Kishidan? (Kishidan to Ha?)”.  1999. Blog.  (May 10, 2009): A brief description of the band in blog form with fan posting. Spoo! Inc. May 10 2009.

van Elteren, Mel. “Populist Rock in Postmodern Society:  John Cougar Mellencamp N Perspective.” Journal of Popular Culture 28.3 (1994): 95-124.

Yano, Christine R. Tears of Longing:  Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song. Harvard East Asian Monographs. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2002.

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[1] McVeigh, Brian J. Wearing Ideology : State, Schooling and Self-Presentation in Japan. Dress, Body, Culture. Oxford ; New York, NY: Berg, 2000, 160.

[2] Lachmann, Renate, Raoul Eshelman, Marc Davis. “Bakhtin and Carnival:  Culture as Counter-Culture.” Cultural Critique 1.11 (1988-1989): 121-23.

[3] “Oops! Music Community:  What Is Kishidan? (Kishidan to Ha?)”.  2009. Blog.  (May 10, 2009): A brief description of the band in blog form with fan posting. Spoo! Inc. May 10 2009.

[4] Kishidan. “Kekkon Toukon Koshinkyoku – “Mabudachi” （結婚闘魂行進曲「マブダチ」).” Trans. Kishidan. Tokyo, 2004.

[5] Lachmann, Renate, Raoul Eshelman, Marc Davis. “Bakhtin and Carnival:  Culture as Counter-Culture.” Cultural Critique 1.11 (1988-1989): 115-52.

[6] Kishidan. One Night Carnival (Pv). Tokyo, 1998.

[7] van Elteren, Mel. “Populist Rock in Postmodern Society:  John Cougar Mellencamp N Perspective.” Journal of Popular Culture 28.3 (1994): 100-102.

[8] “Oops! Music Community:  What Is Kishidan? (Kishidan to Ha?)”.  1999. Blog.  (May 10, 2009): A brief description of the band in blog form with fan posting. Spoo! Inc. May 10 2009.

[9] Ibid.  “Oops! Music Community:  What Is Kishidan? (Kishidan to Ha?)”.  1999. Blog.  (May 10, 2009): A brief description of the band in blog form with fan posting. Spoo! Inc. May 10 2009.

[10] Ibid.  “Oops! Music Community:  What Is Kishidan? (Kishidan to Ha?)”.  1999. Blog.  (May 10, 2009): A brief description of the band in blog form with fan posting. Spoo! Inc. May 10 2009.

[11] “Oops! Music Community:  What Is Kishidan? (Kishidan to Ha?)”.  1999. Blog.  (May 10, 2009): A brief description of the band in blog form with fan posting. Spoo! Inc. May 10 2009.

In Water Boys, Shinobu Yaguchi’s film about high school boys who put on a synchronized swimming demonstration for their high school festival, ideas of masculine identity are a site of play through which Yaguchi explores with the audience the meanings of being young, male, and on the edge of adulthood.  The movie is a comedy, and that format allows the director to create a liminal space, both for the characters and the audience which allows for play as the audience and the characters redefine themselves.  Through being drawn into the identity negotiations experienced by the characters in the film, Yaguchi also helps his audience take part in the discourse of gender formation.  We are able to see that as with the construction of fragile selves that teens go through in this period of their lives, their construction of their own and others’ gender identities is performative, constantly undergoing change and emerging anew, and contingent upon the social milieu and general context in which they perform it.

Arnold van Gennep has defined liminal space as a situation of transition, in which a person undergoing transition exists in between the reality of the past and the reality to come.  In this transitional space, van Gennep says that anything is possible, and the subject redefines themselves in ways not predictable before the transition began.  The film Water Boys sets up this kind of liminal space in two ways:  first, the boys who are the main characters of the film are seniors in high school; with only a short time to go before becoming legal adults, they find themselves in the midst of an academic, emotional, and social transition to adulthood, but not having finished school, they are not yet adults.  They are thus free to redefine themselves in the course of the film.  But the film also provides a liminal space for the audience to watch the transition of the boys in the film, and to vicariously redefine ideas of youth, and of gender, while observing.  This liminal space is therefore a discursive site for the negotiation of gender identity, among other things, both for the characters and for the audience.

Joan Scott has suggested that gender is discursively constructed knowledge about sexual difference, and that it is one part of identity, which itself is a constructed notion.  Gender and identity are constructed, according to Scott, and Judith Butler. Creation of gender identity is a process of constituting the self through repetition of acts that embody certain ideas – what Scott calls “knowledge, about sexual difference.”[1] Gender is, then, as Butler says, performative.  It is constantly reified through a reflexive process in which the gaze of others who recognize certain kata, or regularized cultural patterns, within the performance of an individual, reads those patterns as appropriate acts for either males or females.  However, as Scott notes, gender disguises itself as a set of binary opposites – male and female are frequently thought of as being opposite from each other, and so clearly delineated from each other in expected, and acceptable, behavior and norms.  But such an opposition is not, in fact, possible.  To be recognized as masculine, for example, requires the negation of feminine behavior.  But this assumes that heterosexual behavior is the norm by which gender is defined – as Butler puts it, “the sexist claims that a woman only exhibits her womanness in the act of heterosexual coitus in which her subordination becomes her pleasure.”[2] So gender is not necessarily directly related to sexual practice.  Instead, gender consists of a series of performances of roles based on male or female binary stereotypes.  These stereotypes are misleading in that gender roles appear to exist among real people not as binary opposites, but along a range between and on either side of those binary normative descriptors.  Thus gender performance serves both to reify normative gender ideas while also denying them in the process of constructing individual and social group identities.  This means that masculinity, which belongs to one of the poles of the false binary of gender, is always emergent and that it is always contingent upon  changing circumstances, and that it reifies itself through frequent reiteration in performance.

Gender, if it is not directly related to sexual practice, is then a social construct.  If it is a social construct and not a matter of natural physiology, it must also be performed in order to be realized.  In Water Boys, the performance of gender along a wide range of possibilities that opens space for thinking about masculinity is a major theme.  We can see the performance of masculinity perhaps most clearly in the character of Sato, the former basketball player who joins the swim team, he says, because he likes the looks of the new coach.  Sato begins the film with hair in an afro, and an attitude that he really belongs to the elite basketball club, but has come out in order to watch Mrs. Sakuma.  He performs the role of a heterosexual male jock, until we learn that he did not quit the basketball team, but was kicked off because he never made it to practice.  Once it is clear that he is a case of failed masculinity – rejected by the male teammates whose friendship he had claimed as the hallmark of his power in the school, Sato becomes the quitter that he thinks he is, drifting away from the synchronized swimming team into a punk band, then leaving that as well.  Ironically, when he is confronted late in the movie with the knowledge that he is the object of Saotome’s affections, he does not have the extreme masculine reaction one might imagine.  He is stunned, but takes the news calmly, and even accepts a public hug from Saotome during the final phase of the ‘sychro’ performance.  By the end of the movie, Sato’s, and the audience’s, feelings about homosexuality or better, the kata of stereotyped male homosexuality, have been changed by the performance of Saotome, and by the performance of masculine bonding among all the members of the team.

If we see Sato as becoming less and less the afro-end basketball jock, and more and more an average boy with problems, we see the main character Suzuki in his own series of problems as well.  Suzuki is captivated by synchronized swimming as soon as he first sees it, and the film makes it clear that he is interested not in the high school girls all watching by juxtaposing the possibilities of girl-watching (short skirts, girls in swimsuits) with Suzuki’s obviously exclusive interest in what is going on in the pool.  He is clearly less strong, and less athletic, than Shizuko, who becomes his girlfriend.  He regularly leaves Shizuko behind in small acts of loyalty to the male members of his ‘synchro’ team.  Suzuki’s performance of gender is very neutral, and his masculinity is as much in limbo as he is in liminal space throughout most of the movie, until at the end, he dances exclusively for Shizuko, and unabashedly wears a tiny swimsuit that she has sewn for him with “Love” printed in pink across the front.  His final performance for her leaves him, for the moment, in the masculine camp for the simple reason that he has made a normative heterosexual choice of partner.

Saotome, on the other hand, is clearly performing homosexuality from the moment we meet him.  There is no question that during the first swim practice he is watching one of the other boys rather than the coach, though which boy it is remains a matter for speculation.  The boys go to sell tickets to the show in order to raise money for refilling the pool, and Saotome cries in happiness when the transvestite hosts and their female clients buy them out.  He cries again on numerous occasions.  When Suzuki begins reconstituting the team after visiting Sea World, Saotome is found in a greenhouse tending a small flower garden.  He is given stereotyped actions that function as kata to make his homosexuality obvious from the beginning.

Less obvious is the gender of Ohta, whose behavioral kata are sometimes quite male, as when he goes with Sato to peep at Saotome and Suzuki on the beach late in the movie.  At other times they are quite ambiguous or at best gender neutral; for example his dancing in a G-string to the all-male (all G-stringed) aerobics video, and his clear mastery of rhythm on the Dance-Dance Revolution game.  Boys don’t dance – or do they?  Ohta performs an ambiguous gender identity that leaves us guessing all the way to and beyond the end of the film, even though we come to be fairly clear about what his likely sexual preference is.

So gender is constituted through performance, and reiterated through constant continued performances.  Since performance requires an audience, at least in part, one’s gender is determined by the way in which the audience reads the performance and reacts to it.  But as it is performed, the audience does not remain static.  Changes in audience and situation lead to changes in context and performance.  Therefore, gender is also fluid, in the process of being constructed – emergent.

Masculine identity, because of its constructed nature, is always emergent.  It is re-formed after each new situation in which one participates, and exists in the making as an improvised performance of the moment in which one reacts to the immediate situation informed by the trace of one’s conceptions of self and gender present only in the immediate past.  Each new act is then an act of re-creation of gender identity in which the trace is subsumed into the performance of the present.  In Water Boys, the premise of the movie provides a good example of this kind of emergent identity.  At Tadano Boys’ High School, sports dominate the boys’ extracurricular lives, and for Suzuki, the demise of the swim team, on which he was a less-than-stellar performer, is a kind of loss of identity.  In the early part of the movie, he learns about the new swim coach as he is trying to retrieve his goggles and swimsuit from a derelict locker on the deck of a run-down pool – an image which is meant to convey the way he is feeling mentally at the prospect of the demise of the swim team, and of his chances to redeem himself as an athlete in his senior year.  This is the end, and he now has to look for a new beginning.  His inability even to get rid of the tiny stray dog who defends the pool as his territory is a testament to the liminality of the situation – Suzuki is confused and unable to decide what to do or how to do it.  Still, he has no choice but to reinvent himself.  This reinvention begins almost the moment he meets the new coach, the very feminine Mrs. Sakuma.  But Suzuki is confused.  His reinvention of self involves a rebuilding of his own performance of gender identity in the way in which he views and behaves toward the coach.  Still, his masculinity in this scene is also ambiguous, brought into question because of the fact that Suzuki is the only legitimate member of the revitalized swim team. His legitimacy comes from that reality that he is the only swimmer who was previously involved in the sport.  The new recruits to the team have come to ogle the new coach.  Their performance of expected masculine heterosexual interest reflects on Suzuki in two ways.  First, their single-minded interest in the coach, not the sport, highlights the fact that Suzuki is not there only to gaze at a female body.  He wants to swim, but this duality of purpose to some degree emasculates him in comparison with his more single-minded teammates.  When the entire team discovers that the coach, Mrs. Sakuma, wants to turn the team into a boys’ synchronized swimming team, Suzuki’s prior commitment to the coach to stay on the team further emasculates him.  Further, he actually likes the idea sub-consciously, having been attracted to synchronized swimming by accident in the first scene of the film, and this repressed desire to do “synchro” reduces his masculinity even more.  Each event, and Suzuki’s reaction to it, has a deep effect on the way both the audience and Suzuki perceive his masculinity.

But masculinity as a part of identity is contingent, as well.  Each new context brings self-mage into new focus in contrast to people and events around oneself.  We learn immediately after the new coach arrives, for example, that heterosexual interest in the female coach is not the only reason many of the boys have joined the swim team.  Kanazawa, a brainy, but nerdy, math wiz joins because he needs exercise.  His interest in the coach as a woman is clear, but he is not by any stretch the athletic type.  At one point as the team begins to practice for their synchronized swimming event, Kanazawa can be seen holding on to the pool wall and practicing his kick.  His masculinity is in question here, since he is an un-athletic member of a school devoted to athletics.  Sato, it turns out, is a former member of the basketball team, but is unwilling to work hard in practice, and so quits the team.  The fact that he is perhaps the most stereotypically masculine member of the core group of boys hides the fact that he does not have the work ethic, or the drive to win, that might define him as the man’s man role that he performs might require.  Saotome is clearly homosexual, and so is not there for the coach, but is there for ogling – one of the other primary male characters.  This comic portrayal of a nerd, a failed jock, and a gay guy show that performance of masculinity is contingent upon the situation and the immediate audience for one’s gender performance.  When Sato suggests that Saotome is in love with Suzuki at that first practice at the pool, Suzuki’s response is rejection of the very idea.  Later, when Suzuki has to explain that in fact, Saotome has confessed his feelings for Sato instead, the boys deal with this new fact with some sensitivity – in spite of the fact that they had come expecting to find some romantic developments in the relationship between Suzuki and Saotome.  Having gotten to know each other, the boys don’t stop thinking, or joking, about gender, but they do come to realize that each is dependent upon the others for some of the identity he is constructing, including understanding of gender.  Masculinity, therefore, is contingent upon the situation, and the audience that one is performing for.

Gender, then, is a discursive construction, part of the construction of self which is also produced through discourse within a social context.  As one pole of the normative (heterosexual) gender duality, masculinity is also constituted through performance, and often the possibilities for performance of masculinity, and its reification as ‘the norm’ in human gender choice through performance of its perceived opposites, can be explored well through entertainment products such as films.  Water Boys director Shinobu Yaguchi does a wonderful job of exploring these possibilities in this humorous film, which pulls few punches in its portrayal of masculinity, and masculine confusion, among high school boys in Japan.  If anything, the best we can get from this film is to see the falsity of the gender duality mentioned above.  Masculinity, as a subset of gender, clearly has its own subsets of behavior all of which appear most clearly in contrast to each other.  Through his adept framing of the movie, Yaguchi has been able to create a liminal space through which we can view a range of masculine possibilities in Japanese culture, and the very changing, contingent, and performative nature of those possibilities.  They seem to be as fleeting, experimental, and dramatic as the high school senior year experienced by the Water Boys themselves.

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[1] Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. Rev. ed, Gender and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, 2.

[2] Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Thinking Gender. New York: Routledge, 1990, xii.

Nostalgia is a search that is rooted in the exile from traditional cultural forms that is symptomatic of late capitalism.  In this search are all tourists in a global empire of signs, unmoored and reading images of other pasts and alternative pasts as floating signifiers which help us to appropriate romanticized experiences that never were.  Nostalgic memories are comforting, and are often triggered by encounters with nostalgic things – objects or ideas that bring to mind comforting memories.  Yet, nostalgia is often imagined and so does not have to be moored to real events.  The nostalgia in the film Tonari no Totoro is an excellent example of a series of signifiers that can easily be appropriated by viewers.  In particular, Tonari no Totoro provides all of us, as tourists, with multiple view points on the way to our own generalized longing for childhood and the countryside.  What is ironic about this film as a location for the generalized global nostalgic is that it does not have the ‘odorless’ or mukokuseki quality discussed by Joseph Tobin in the edited volume Pikachu’s Global Adventure – in fact, Tonari no Totoro is redolent of Japanese culture.  In effect we are touring an idealized place and period in Japan.  Still, the nostalgia that it creates works for non-Japanese audiences as well as Japanese.  This is primarily because the film is not about being Japanese.  It is a tour for those of us who live the experience of modern urban life and feel alienated from tradition and culture.  As tourists, we view Totoro in search of those traditions and cultures which we no longer have ourselves.

The sense of nostalgia that the movie creates is based on this feeling of exile from anchoring cultural forms and the desire to return to those forms.  As a tourist looks for hints of a ‘true culture’ in places where it can’t exist, tourists of nostalgia look for a personal past in a romanticized general human experience.  Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart has defined nostalgia as dependent not on the reality of memory, but on a series of practices which read cultural images and code them instantly as the play of forms, the traces of interpretive strategies by which individuals craft meaning, rather than as acts participated in and remembered.[1] According to Stewart, our viewing of cultural artifacts which we read as nostalgic is akin to the practices of tourists, the difference being only that the practice of nostalgia is a touring/looting of the global past, and of culture.  We collect images, signs, which we read as disassociated memories – floating signifiers of a romanticized, timeless past that we appropriate as a longing for connectedness in the disconnected cacophony of the marketplace of late capitalism.  Totoro works as nostalgia on this level.  In fact, Totoro is imbued with nostalgic devices from multiple memories, times, and even places.

The film even has a nostalgic frame of reference with which we can circumscribe our tour of Japan’s idealized past countryside and of Japanese childhood.  This frame is important for the feeling of nostalgia, because it creates a liminal space within which we can reinvent ourselves through the reformulation of our generalized memories.  That frame of reference has to do with time.  Tonari no Totoro was produced by Studio Ghibli in the 1980’s.  This was the time of bursting urbanization and the real estate bubble.  Roland Barthes went to Japan and declared it the world’s first truly post-modern society: an ’empire of signs’ by which he meant the urban world of Japan was a world of floating signifiers, disconnected from anything but the meaning invested in them at the moment by those relating to them.  But the film is set in the 1950’s.  The family does not own a car, and there is no telephone in the house.  The rural roads are surfaced with dirt, and the bus is an old 1950’s snub-nose.  There is no automation, so the bus must have a conductor at the door.  It is ironic that the period in which the movie is set, and the period in which it was actually made sit on opposite ends of the income-doubling policy of the Japanese government, and the period of high economic growth, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the economic bubble of the 1980’s.  To watch the movie in this frame of reference is like looking backwards through a long tunnel to the beginning of a journey.  The film was made in the 1980’s urban world that Satsuki, Mei, and their father come from, and is about the rural, childhood, nostalgic world of the 1950’s.   For this reason, although it is a kind of convenience that children can get a thrill from viewing the movie, it seems that the content of Tonari no Totoro is coded for consumption by adults.

These adult consumers of Tonari no Totoro are tourists of the countryside.  The countryside presented in the movie is Japan’s inaka in the 1950’s, before the period of high growth and income doubling.  But it can stand for a generalized countryside, outside of modern urban life, simply because it is the countryside.  The journey of Satsuki and Mei, and their father to the old house at the beginning of the movie can be read as a migration from the modern city to the “unchanging” countryside, and is analogous to the nostalgic journey undertaken by the audience watching the film.  The house they move into is old, and ready to fall down.  It looks very much like a Meiji-era western style farmhouse, and that is no surprise, since producer Hayao Miyazaki has admitted a “nostalgia” for what he has called “pseudo-Western-style buildings.”[2] The fact that the house is in terrible condition, and that it is probably haunted, all make Satsuki and Mei a bit scared, and somewhat excited.  The very oldness of the house, and the fact that it has been made home by soot sprites makes it at once a place of apprehension, and of magical comfort for the two main characters.  All of these things are a part of its existing in the countryside.  They are also signs of the haunting which consumers of the film read into their own immediate experience, as they can draw up their own nostalgia for the countryside through the ‘ghosts’ of the film characters,  and the quality of dreams that is so common in the world of Japanese anime.

In many ways, this is reminiscent of the way in which Japanese culture adopted the Tales of Tōno, an early 20^th century attempt at recording the folk stories of the Japanese countryside before it disappeared through urbanization and westernization.   Author Marilynn Ivy has found that the social process of popularizing the Tales of Tōno involved the experience of an unusual (virtually indecipherable) dialect of Japanese that came to be associated with the inaka, or countryside, along with a kind of fascination with the primitive and almost brutal nature of the stories, and the simplicity (Ivy often reads it as poverty) of life in the Tōno region.  But, as she notes about the idea of hometown, or furusato, the existence of  Tōno as an idealized, sentimentalized referent for a Japan that has passed into history and a “Japaneseness” that has somehow been lost in the mad rush of modern development was only possible through the viewing of Tōno from afar.  Those to whom a place is actually home do not need to refer to that place as the place of their origin.  As Stewart noted, the nostalgia is not for a real experienced past, but a practice that calls up the trace of that past that exists within its absence in a scene drawn from a parallel experience in a foreign culture. The same is true for urban Japanese looking for a sense of their cultural origins – those for whom Tōno culture is a part of daily existence do not think of it as more than their daily routine.  Those who look from afar for signs of traditional culture, though, see Tōno as a place where traditional culture is performed on a daily basis, and adopt the Tōno culture as a sign of their own lost moorings to earlier Japanese cultural authenticity.[3] Miyazaki, by showing the traditional trappings of the Japanese countryside, including the rice fields worked by hand by family groups of farmers, the natural rhythms of the countryside (time in the movie is marked exclusively by weather, and consists of months as the smallest unit), mountain shrines, old trees, dirt roads, and old-style vehicles probably obsolete even by the 1950’s is calling up the ghosts of viewers’ pasts by showing them the ‘ghosts’/characters in the film, and the spectral landscape which they can haunt.  For foreign viewers this constitutes an opportunity to reflect upon the scene of supposed Japanese cultural nostalgia, and recall the nostalgic past that exists through its absence in the scene being watched.  That is, they are touring the episodes in Totoro and assigning meaning that they wish to assign – a nostalgia for nostalgia.

These tourists of the countryside, though, are also tourists of childhood.  As tourists seek to become temporarily, vicariously, members of the culture they are visiting, but must always remain on the outside, viewers to this movie can relive childhood through Satsuki and Mei, but can always and easily return to their adult world.  Once again, it is the absence of child-ness which allows these viewers to imagine their own childhood through the main characters of the film.  The nostalgia for childhood that this movie evokes is complex and provides many opportunities through multiple layers of signs for viewers/consumers to appropriate for the purpose of reading a generalized nostalgia of their own experience onto it.  First, the simple fact of having been a child in or before the 1980’s – the scenes of outdoor play, the excitement of exploring a countryside wonderland, and the idea of walking to school with friends all can be appropriated by adult viewers as generalized memories of childhood.  In addition to the basic relation that adult viewers might make to the characters, the use of film techniques to emphasize characters’ feelings and situations is masterfully done in order to create a sense of sympathy, which can also often trigger nostalgia.  Frequent close ups of Mei and Satsuki in intense emotional situations, as when the film cuts to a shot of Satsuki’s beat-up feet, bruised and blistered from running in sandals for hours, or a close-up of the goat that tries to take Mei’s ear of corn lead us to recognize the desperation of both characters at crucial points in the narrative, and to relate through the characters’ facial expressions to their own childhood experiences of pleasure, pain, fear, and excitement.

Second, the plot of the movie is driven by the childhood fears that go with moving to a new place, to the idea of a haunted house, the difference in dialect and behavior between country and urban people, and the foreignness of the countryside.  I have noted before how all of this is similar to the journey taken by the audience in the process of viewing the movie.  Further, a kind of vicarious titillation at re-experiencing the pain and fear of a child whose parent is not well helps us to explain the overdone nature of the characters emotions of fear for their mother.  The vivid sequences of Totoro flying, and the cat bus parting the woods give a sense of the wonder and mystery of the world that exists when one is a child.  The clear linkage between the blowing wind that makes Satsuki drop the firewood she is carrying on the first night in the new house, and the inability of the adults to see anything but wind when Satsuki and Mei pass them riding in the cat bus provides adult viewers with a gateway into the magic of the world of children, as does the way in which Mei first discovers Totoro.  This movie provides an unambiguous opportunity to temporarily return to a generalized childhood.  This invitation works on so many levels of consciousness, it is difficult to refuse.

In fact, there are also some very specific elements involved in the movie that provide nostalgia that could be related directly to the personal experience of some viewers.  For instance, the movie itself evolved from a 1970’s era television anime by the same producers (Takahata and Yamazaki) called Pandakopanda, the art and storyline of which is very similar to Totoro, though the main character is a panda.  Adults who viewed the original TV series will find Totoro to be quite a nostalgic experience, with a similar cast and art reminiscent of the Pandakopanda series.[4] When they watch Totoro, it is entirely possible that they will be transported back to memories of life when they watched Pandakopanda as children, even though the story of Totoro has nothing to do with their memories.  Nostalgia, then, allows us to fill space between the film and our own suspension of disbelief in the reality of animated characters with personal experience and memories.  These memories need no direct relation to what we are watching.  They can be triggered by the situation on-screen.  Watching, we recognize a situation analogous to our own that constitute the memories of an unknown other.  We transfer our nostalgia to the scene we are witnessing, relating ourselves to the characters, and filling in the interstices of the character’s experience and the situation we are witnessing with our own memories.  By giving the character our own memories and thoughts, we appropriate the character, and so inhabit the character as ourselves within the scenes of the movie.  This process of nostalgia-creation is what makes Tonari no Totoro so successful, even in an international context, and even without deodorizing.

In this way, a large part of the success of nostalgia in Tonari no Totoro is the fact that the main characters, Satsuki and Mei, are young girls (shoujo), yet their childhood experience stands for the childhood experience of all viewers.  Shoujo are commonly androgynous in appearance, and that is certainly the case with Satsuki, whose hair is short, and somewhat unkempt, and who, despite her skirt, frequently looks like a boy.  Satsuki’s androgyny is also reflective of the Japanese popular aesthetic of the bishonen – loosely translatable as the beautiful young boy, who is also androgynous, and who exhibits characteristics that are sometimes more relevant to female behavior than male, such as easy tears, smooth, feminine facial features, and relationships with other characters that are non-sexual in nature, but show much caring from the heart.  Both Mei and Satsuki are constructed such that they are clearly female, and yet their differences with males are somewhat effaced.  Satsuki is clearly somewhat of a ‘tomboy’ – willing and able to play games with the boys, and not shy about sticking her tongue out at her classmate and neighbor Kanta when he bothers her.  But she is also distinctly female.  She carries Mei at the bus stop while waiting to give an umbrella to her father.  She makes bento lunches for everyone in her family in the absence of her mother, and she is clearly flattered by her mother’s comment, during the hospital visit, that her hair is just the same as her mother’s was when she was a child.  Satsuki’s foil in this role is the coarsely male character of Kanta, whose stereotypical male behavior sets off the androgynous Satsuki as female.  Satsuki’s curiosity is combined with courage, as in the scene in which she charges up the stairs despite her fear of the ‘dust bunnies’ living in the attic, and takes a look around before opening the window.  She clearly has motherly instincts. She is willing to run for hours searching for Mei, despite the bruises, dirt, and blisters on her feet.  But she can be aggressive like a boy in scenes like the one in which she stops the motorcycle by jumping in front of it.  As an androgynous female, Satsuki is effective as a kind of ‘every child’ with whom both males and females can relate.

Along with that fact, the unmediated way in which Satsuki and Mei, two urban children relocated to the countryside, take in life in their new surroundings can remind parents of a romanticized childhood self.  The pain of the possibility of mother’s death, along with the thrill of flying with Totoro, and of participating in a magical tree raising ceremony, however much it might be a dream, can lead to a sensation of longing for the unproblematized experience of a child experiencing life for the first time.  In this way, as Stewart says, adults watching Tonari no Totoro become tourists of an experience that they cannot have had, but from which they can code a nostalgia for a generalized experience of childhood and feast on the longing that such an imaginary provides.

The movie Tonari no Totoro, then, is itself an act of nostalgia.  It provides a space where adults and many children can find traces of a past that is less than a memory, and therefore, common to all.  Satsuki and Mei act as signs that we read as ourselves, as bakemono tour guides taking us away from the busy, urban, modern life that we live to a generalized mythical countryside in which we find ourselves, once more, children –  not the children we were, but the children we want to have been.

---

[1] Stewart, Kathleen. “Notalgia – a Polemic.” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 3 (1988): 229.

[2] Ryoko Toyama, trans. “Interview:  Miyazaki on Sen to Chihiro No Kamikakushi.” Animage, no. May (2001).

[3] Ivy, Marilyn. Discourses of the Vanishing : Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

[4] Niskanen, Eija. “Untouched Nature, Mediated Animals, in Japanese Anime.” Wider Screen, no. 1 (2007), http://www.widerscreen.fi/2007/1/untouched_nature_mediated_animals_in_japanese_anime.htm.

Anne Allison’s Nightwork looks at the world of the high priced hostess club in 1990’s Japan.  Her questions are simple, but bring out some deep answers.  Why do men frequent hostess clubs?  What is the purpose of corporate entertaining?  Why do corporations entertain their employees and customers at hostess clubs, rather than other venues?

Allison comes up with some surprising, but reasonable conclusions after having worked in a high priced hostess club herself for four months, and interviewed large numbers of male customers, female hostesses and mamas.

One of the answers is that men don’t go to these clubs to engage in sexual activity with women, or to find sexual partners.  They are instead participating in “heterosexual, homosocial” behavior – their heterosexual banter with the hostesses ultimately functions to bond the men who participate together in a kind of mutual experience.

Another answer involves the effect this behavior has on work – the entertainment of this kind helps corporations to reward their employees for loyalty, give them incentives to stay later than they might otherwise at work, and bond them closer to the corporation than even to their families.  The men are entertained, and feel their value to the company has increased because of the amount the company is willing to spend on this entertainment.  The company gets loyal workers who are in essence on the job all the time.

In the last analysis, Allison uses a late capitalist analysis heavily grounded in Marx to point out that the hostess club functions as a locus where everything is reduced to capital relations.  The entertainment is not just about flirting with women, but functions on another level as a means to show how much the company is willing to pay to entertain its elite male employees.  The hostesses are not really potential sex partners for the men, but paid employees whose job it is to engage in conversation that makes the men feel like men, and ignores their inadequacies and imperfections.  The fact of paying for this service bonds employees to the company ever more closely until their tether is abruptly cut at retirement.  Allison discusses this in terms of a Lacanian “lack” – the use of money to provided entertainment in this tantalizing way always promises satisfaction, but always leaves the men not completely satisfied, wanting more, in an empty cycle.

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Nostalgia is a search that is rooted in the exile from traditional cultural forms that is symptomatic of late capitalism. In this search are all tourists in a global empire of signs, unmoored and reading images of other pasts and alternative pasts as floating signifiers which help us to appropriate romanticized experiences that never were. Nostalgic memories are comforting, and are often triggered by encounters with nostalgic things – objects or ideas that bring to mind comforting memories. Yet, nostalgia is often imagined and so does not have to be moored to real events. The nostalgia in the film Tonari no Totoro is an excellent example of a series of signifiers that can easily be appropriated by viewers. In particular, Tonari no Totoro provides all of us, as tourists, with multiple view points on the way to our own generalized longing for childhood and the countryside. What is ironic about this film as a location for the generalized global nostalgic is that it does not have the ‘odorless’ or mukokuseki quality discussed by Joseph Tobin in the edited volume Pikachu’s Global Adventure – in fact, Tonari no Totoro is redolent of Japanese culture. In effect we are touring an idealized place and period in Japan. Still, the nostalgia that it creates works for non-Japanese audiences as well as Japanese. This is primarily because the film is not about being Japanese. It is a tour for those of us who live the experience of modern urban life and feel alienated from tradition and culture. As tourists, we view Totoro in search of those traditions and cultures which we no longer have ourselves.

The sense of nostalgia that the movie creates is based on this feeling of exile from anchoring cultural forms and the desire to return to those forms. As a tourist looks for hints of a ‘true culture’ in places where it can’t exist, tourists of nostalgia look for a personal past in a romanticized general human experience. Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart has defined nostalgia as dependent not on the reality of memory, but on a series of practices which read cultural images and code them instantly as the play of forms, the traces of interpretive strategies by which individuals craft meaning, rather than as acts participated in and remembered.[1] According to Stewart, our viewing of cultural artifacts which we read as nostalgic is akin to the practices of tourists, the difference being only that the practice of nostalgia is a touring/looting of the global past, and of culture. We collect images, signs, which we read as disassociated memories – floating signifiers of a romanticized, timeless past that we appropriate as a longing for connectedness in the disconnected cacophony of the marketplace of late capitalism. Totoro works as nostalgia on this level. In fact, Totoro is imbued with nostalgic devices from multiple memories, times, and even places.

The film even has a nostalgic frame of reference with which we can circumscribe our tour of Japan’s idealized past countryside and of Japanese childhood. This frame is important for the feeling of nostalgia, because it creates a liminal space within which we can reinvent ourselves through the reformulation of our generalized memories. That frame of reference has to do with time. Tonari no Totoro was produced by Studio Ghibli in the 1980’s. This was the time of bursting urbanization and the real estate bubble. Roland Barthes went to Japan and declared it the world’s first truly post-modern society: an ’empire of signs’ by which he meant the urban world of Japan was a world of floating signifiers, disconnected from anything but the meaning invested in them at the moment by those relating to them. But the film is set in the 1950’s. The family does not own a car, and there is no telephone in the house. The rural roads are surfaced with dirt, and the bus is an old 1950’s snub-nose. There is no automation, so the bus must have a conductor at the door. It is ironic that the period in which the movie is set, and the period in which it was actually made sit on opposite ends of the income-doubling policy of the Japanese government, and the period of high economic growth, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the economic bubble of the 1980’s. To watch the movie in this frame of reference is like looking backwards through a long tunnel to the beginning of a journey. The film was made in the 1980’s urban world that Satsuki, Mei, and their father come from, and is about the rural, childhood, nostalgic world of the 1950’s. For this reason, although it is a kind of convenience that children can get a thrill from viewing the movie, it seems that the content of Tonari no Totoro is coded for consumption by adults.

These adult consumers of Tonari no Totoro are tourists of the countryside. The countryside presented in the movie is Japan’s inaka in the 1950’s, before the period of high growth and income doubling. But it can stand for a generalized countryside, outside of modern urban life, simply because it is the countryside. The journey of Satsuki and Mei, and their father to the old house at the beginning of the movie can be read as a migration from the modern city to the “unchanging” countryside, and is analogous to the nostalgic journey undertaken by the audience watching the film. The house they move into is old, and ready to fall down. It looks very much like a Meiji-era western style farmhouse, and that is no surprise, since producer Hayao Miyazaki has admitted a “nostalgia” for what he has called “pseudo-Western-style buildings.”[2] The fact that the house is in terrible condition, and that it is probably haunted, all make Satsuki and Mei a bit scared, and somewhat excited. The very oldness of the house, and the fact that it has been made home by soot sprites makes it at once a place of apprehension, and of magical comfort for the two main characters. All of these things are a part of its existing in the countryside. They are also signs of the haunting which consumers of the film read into their own immediate experience, as they can draw up their own nostalgia for the countryside through the ‘ghosts’ of the film characters, and the quality of dreams that is so common in the world of Japanese anime.

In many ways, this is reminiscent of the way in which Japanese culture adopted the Tales of Tōno, an early 20^th century attempt at recording the folk stories of the Japanese countryside before it disappeared through urbanization and westernization. Author Marilynn Ivy has found that the social process of popularizing the Tales of Tōno involved the experience of an unusual (virtually indecipherable) dialect of Japanese that came to be associated with the inaka, or countryside, along with a kind of fascination with the primitive and almost brutal nature of the stories, and the simplicity (Ivy often reads it as poverty) of life in the Tōno region. But, as she notes about the idea of hometown, or furusato, the existence of Tōno as an idealized, sentimentalized referent for a Japan that has passed into history and a “Japaneseness” that has somehow been lost in the mad rush of modern development was only possible through the viewing of Tōno from afar. Those to whom a place is actually home do not need to refer to that place as the place of their origin. As Stewart noted, the nostalgia is not for a real experienced past, but a practice that calls up the trace of that past that exists within its absence in a scene drawn from a parallel experience in a foreign culture. The same is true for urban Japanese looking for a sense of their cultural origins – those for whom Tōno culture is a part of daily existence do not think of it as more than their daily routine. Those who look from afar for signs of traditional culture, though, see Tōno as a place where traditional culture is performed on a daily basis, and adopt the Tōno culture as a sign of their own lost moorings to earlier Japanese cultural authenticity.[3] Miyazaki, by showing the traditional trappings of the Japanese countryside, including the rice fields worked by hand by family groups of farmers, the natural rhythms of the countryside (time in the movie is marked exclusively by weather, and consists of months as the smallest unit), mountain shrines, old trees, dirt roads, and old-style vehicles probably obsolete even by the 1950’s is calling up the ghosts of viewers’ pasts by showing them the ‘ghosts’/characters in the film, and the spectral landscape which they can haunt. For foreign viewers this constitutes an opportunity to reflect upon the scene of supposed Japanese cultural nostalgia, and recall the nostalgic past that exists through its absence in the scene being watched. That is, they are touring the episodes in Totoro and assigning meaning that they wish to assign – a nostalgia for nostalgia.

These tourists of the countryside, though, are also tourists of childhood. As tourists seek to become temporarily, vicariously, members of the culture they are visiting, but must always remain on the outside, viewers to this movie can relive childhood through Satsuki and Mei, but can always and easily return to their adult world. Once again, it is the absence of child-ness which allows these viewers to imagine their own childhood through the main characters of the film. The nostalgia for childhood that this movie evokes is complex and provides many opportunities through multiple layers of signs for viewers/consumers to appropriate for the purpose of reading a generalized nostalgia of their own experience onto it. First, the simple fact of having been a child in or before the 1980’s – the scenes of outdoor play, the excitement of exploring a countryside wonderland, and the idea of walking to school with friends all can be appropriated by adult viewers as generalized memories of childhood. In addition to the basic relation that adult viewers might make to the characters, the use of film techniques to emphasize characters’ feelings and situations is masterfully done in order to create a sense of sympathy, which can also often trigger nostalgia. Frequent close ups of Mei and Satsuki in intense emotional situations, as when the film cuts to a shot of Satsuki’s beat-up feet, bruised and blistered from running in sandals for hours, or a close-up of the goat that tries to take Mei’s ear of corn lead us to recognize the desperation of both characters at crucial points in the narrative, and to relate through the characters’ facial expressions to their own childhood experiences of pleasure, pain, fear, and excitement.

Second, the plot of the movie is driven by the childhood fears that go with moving to a new place, to the idea of a haunted house, the difference in dialect and behavior between country and urban people, and the foreignness of the countryside. I have noted before how all of this is similar to the journey taken by the audience in the process of viewing the movie. Further, a kind of vicarious titillation at re-experiencing the pain and fear of a child whose parent is not well helps us to explain the overdone nature of the characters emotions of fear for their mother. The vivid sequences of Totoro flying, and the cat bus parting the woods give a sense of the wonder and mystery of the world that exists when one is a child. The clear linkage between the blowing wind that makes Satsuki drop the firewood she is carrying on the first night in the new house, and the inability of the adults to see anything but wind when Satsuki and Mei pass them riding in the cat bus provides adult viewers with a gateway into the magic of the world of children, as does the way in which Mei first discovers Totoro. This movie provides an unambiguous opportunity to temporarily return to a generalized childhood. This invitation works on so many levels of consciousness, it is difficult to refuse.

In fact, there are also some very specific elements involved in the movie that provide nostalgia that could be related directly to the personal experience of some viewers. For instance, the movie itself evolved from a 1970’s era television anime by the same producers (Takahata and Yamazaki) called Pandakopanda, the art and storyline of which is very similar to Totoro, though the main character is a panda. Adults who viewed the original TV series will find Totoro to be quite a nostalgic experience, with a similar cast and art reminiscent of the Pandakopanda series.[4] When they watch Totoro, it is entirely possible that they will be transported back to memories of life when they watched Pandakopanda as children, even though the story of Totoro has nothing to do with their memories. Nostalgia, then, allows us to fill space between the film and our own suspension of disbelief in the reality of animated characters with personal experience and memories. These memories need no direct relation to what we are watching. They can be triggered by the situation on-screen. Watching, we recognize a situation analogous to our own that constitute the memories of an unknown other. We transfer our nostalgia to the scene we are witnessing, relating ourselves to the characters, and filling in the interstices of the character’s experience and the situation we are witnessing with our own memories. By giving the character our own memories and thoughts, we appropriate the character, and so inhabit the character as ourselves within the scenes of the movie. This process of nostalgia-creation is what makes Tonari no Totoro so successful, even in an international context, and even without deodorizing.

In this way, a large part of the success of nostalgia in Tonari no Totoro is the fact that the main characters, Satsuki and Mei, are young girls (shoujo), yet their childhood experience stands for the childhood experience of all viewers. Shoujo are commonly androgynous in appearance, and that is certainly the case with Satsuki, whose hair is short, and somewhat unkempt, and who, despite her skirt, frequently looks like a boy. Satsuki’s androgyny is also reflective of the Japanese popular aesthetic of the bishonen – loosely translatable as the beautiful young boy, who is also androgynous, and who exhibits characteristics that are sometimes more relevant to female behavior than male, such as easy tears, smooth, feminine facial features, and relationships with other characters that are non-sexual in nature, but show much caring from the heart. Both Mei and Satsuki are constructed such that they are clearly female, and yet their differences with males are somewhat effaced. Satsuki is clearly somewhat of a ‘tomboy’ – willing and able to play games with the boys, and not shy about sticking her tongue out at her classmate and neighbor Kanta when he bothers her. But she is also distinctly female. She carries Mei at the bus stop while waiting to give an umbrella to her father. She makes bento lunches for everyone in her family in the absence of her mother, and she is clearly flattered by her mother’s comment, during the hospital visit, that her hair is just the same as her mother’s was when she was a child. Satsuki’s foil in this role is the coarsely male character of Kanta, whose stereotypical male behavior sets off the androgynous Satsuki as female. Satsuki’s curiosity is combined with courage, as in the scene in which she charges up the stairs despite her fear of the ‘dust bunnies’ living in the attic, and takes a look around before opening the window. She clearly has motherly instincts. She is willing to run for hours searching for Mei, despite the bruises, dirt, and blisters on her feet. But she can be aggressive like a boy in scenes like the one in which she stops the motorcycle by jumping in front of it. As an androgynous female, Satsuki is effective as a kind of ‘every child’ with whom both males and females can relate.

Along with that fact, the unmediated way in which Satsuki and Mei, two urban children relocated to the countryside, take in life in their new surroundings can remind parents of a romanticized childhood self. The pain of the possibility of mother’s death, along with the thrill of flying with Totoro, and of participating in a magical tree raising ceremony, however much it might be a dream, can lead to a sensation of longing for the unproblematized experience of a child experiencing life for the first time. In this way, as Stewart says, adults watching Tonari no Totoro become tourists of an experience that they cannot have had, but from which they can code a nostalgia for a generalized experience of childhood and feast on the longing that such an imaginary provides.

The movie Tonari no Totoro, then, is itself an act of nostalgia. It provides a space where adults and many children can find traces of a past that is less than a memory, and therefore, common to all. Satsuki and Mei act as signs that we read as ourselves, as bakemono tour guides taking us away from the busy, urban, modern life that we live to a generalized mythical countryside in which we find ourselves, once more, children – not the children we were, but the children we want to have been.

In Water Boys, Shinobu Yaguchi’s film about high school boys who put on a synchronized swimming demonstration for their high school festival, ideas of masculine identity are a site of play through which Yaguchi explores with the audience the meanings of being young, male, and on the edge of adulthood. The movie is a comedy, and that format allows the director to create a liminal space, both for the characters and the audience which allows for play as the audience and the characters redefine themselves within a space at the edge of their existence up to this point. Through being drawn into the identity negotiations experienced by the characters in the film, Yaguchi also helps his audience take part in the discourse of gender formation. We are able to see that as with the construction of fragile selves that teens go through in this period of their lives, their construction of their own and others’ gender identities is performative, constantly undergoing change and emerging anew, and contingent upon the social milieu and general context in which they perform it.

Arnold van Gennep has defined liminal space as a situation of transition, in which a person undergoing transition exists in between the reality of the past and the reality to come. In this transitional space, van Gennep says that anything is possible, and the subject redefines themselves in ways not predictable before the transition began. The film Water Boys sets up this kind of liminal space in two ways: first, the boys who are the main characters of the film are seniors in high school, with only a short time to go before becoming legal adults, they find themselves in the midst of an academic, emotional, and social transition to adulthood, but not having finished school, they are not yet adults. They are thus free to redefine themselves in the course of the film. But the film itself provides a liminal space for the audience to watch the transition of the boys in the film, and to vicariously redefine ideas of youth, and of gender, while observing. This liminal space is therefore a discursive site for the negotiation of gender identity, among other things, both for the characters and for the audience.

Joan Scott has suggested that gender is discursively constructed knowledge about sexual difference, and that it is one part of identity, which itself is a constructed notion. Gender and identity are constructed, according to Scott, and Judith Butler, through a process of constituting the self through repetition of acts that embody certain ideas, as Scott says, knowledge, about sexual difference.[1] Gender is, then, as Butler says, performative. It is constantly reified through a reflexive process in which the gaze of others who recognize certain kata, or regularized cultural patterns, within the performance of an individual identify those patterns as appropriate acts for either males or females. However, as Scott notes, gender disguises itself as a set of binary opposites – male and female are frequently thought of as being opposite from each other, and so clearly delineated from each other in expected, and acceptable, behavior and norms. But such an opposition is not, in fact, possible. To be recognized as masculine, for example, requires the negation of feminine behavior. But this assumes that heterosexual behavior is the norm by which gender is defined – as Butler puts it, “the sexist claims that a woman only exhibits her womanness in the act of heterosexual coitus in which her subordination becomes her pleasure.”[2] So gender is not necessarily directly related to sexual practice. Instead, gender consists, at least in part, of a series of performances of roles based on male or female binary stereotypes, but existing not as binary opposites, but in a range in between and on either side of those binary normative descriptors. Those performances serve both to reify normative gender ideas, while denying them in the process of constructing individual and social group identities. This means that gender, and so masculinity, which belongs to one of the poles of the false binary of gender, is always emergent in the case of individuals, or of social groups, that it is always contingent upon circumstances, and circumstances change, and that it reifies itself through frequent reiteration of performance.

Gender, if it is not directly related to sexual practice, is then a social construct. If it is a social construct, and not a matter of natural physiology, it must also be performed in order to be realized. In Water Boys, the performance of gender along a wide range of possibilities that provide space for thinking about masculinity is a major theme. We can see the performance of masculinity perhaps most clearly in the character of Sato, the former basketball player who joins the swim team, he says, because he likes the looks of the new coach. Sato begins the film with hair in an afro, and an attitude that he really belongs to the elite basketball club, but has come out in order to watch Mrs. Sakuma. He performs the role of a heterosexual male jock, until we learn that he did not quit the basketball team, but was kicked off because he never made it to practice. Once it is clear that he is a case of failed masculinity – rejected by the male teammates friendship with whom he had claimed as the hallmark of his power in the school, Sato becomes the quitter that he thinks he is, drifting away from the synchronized swimming team into a punk band, then leaving that as well. Ironically, when he is confronted late in the movie with the knowledge that he is the object of Saotome’s affections, he does not have the extreme masculine reaction one might imagine. He is stunned, but takes the news calmly, and even accepts a public hug from Saotome during the final phase of the ‘sychro’ performance. By the end of the movie, Sato’s, and the audience’s, feelings about this have been changed by the performance of Saotome, and by the performance of masculine bonding among all the members of the team.

If we see Sato as becoming less and less the afro-end basketball jock, and more and more an average boy with problems, we see the main character Suzuki in his own series of problems as well. Suzuki is captivated by synchronized swimming as soon as he first sees it, and the film makes it clear that he is interested not in the high school girls all watching by juxtaposing the possibilities of girl-watching (short skirts, girls in swimsuits) with Suzuki’s obviously exclusive interest in what is going on in the pool. He is clearly less strong, and less athletic, than Shizuko, who becomes his girlfriend. He regularly leaves Shizuko behind in small acts of loyalty to the male members of his ‘synchro’ team. Suzuki’s performance of gender is very neutral, and his masculinity is as much in limbo as he is in liminal space throughout most of the movie, until at the end, he dances exclusively for Shizuko, and unabashedly wears a tiny swimsuit that she has sewn for him with “Love” printed in pink across the front. His final performance for her leaves him, for the moment, in the masculine camp for the simple reason that he has made a normative heterosexual choice of partner.

Saotome, on the other hand, is clearly performing homosexuality from the moment we meet him. There is no question that during the first swim practice he is watching one of the other boys rather than the coach, though which boy it is remains a matter for speculation. The boys go to sell tickets to the show in order to raise money for refilling the pool, and Saotome cries in happiness when the transvestite hosts and their female clients buy them out. He cries again on numerous occasions. When Suzuki begins reconstituting the team after visiting Sea World, Saotome is found in a greenhouse tending a small flower garden. He is given stereotyped actions that function as kata to make his homosexuality obvious from the beginning.

Less obvious is the gender of Ohta, whose behavioral kata are sometimes quite male, as when he goes with Sato to peep at Saotome and Suzuki on the beach late in the movie. At other times they are quite ambiguous or at best gender neutral; for example his dancing in a G-string to the all-male (all G-stringed) aerobics video, and his clear mastery of rhythm on the Dance-Dance Revolution game. Boys don’t dance – or do they? Ohta performs an ambiguous gender identity that leaves us guessing all the way to and beyond the end of the film, even though we come to be fairly clear about what his likely sexual preference is.

So gender is constituted through performance, and reiterated through constant continued performances. Since performance requires and audience, at least in part, one’s gender is determined by the way in which the audience reads the performance and reacts to it. But as it is performed, the audience does not remain static. Changes in audience and situation lead to changes in context and performance. Therefore, gender is also fluid, in the process of being constructed – emergent.

Masculine identity, because of its constructed nature, is always emergent. It is re-formed after each new situation in which one participates, and exists in the making as an improvised performance of the moment in which one reacts to the immediate situation informed by the trace of one’s conceptions of self and gender present only in the immediate past. Each new act is then an act of re-creation of gender identity in which the trace is subsumed into the performance of the present. In Water Boys, the premise of the movie provides a good example of this kind of emergent identity. At Tadano Boys’ High School, sports dominate the boys’ extracurricular lives, and for Suzuki, the demise of the swim team, on which he was a less-than-stellar performer, is a kind of loss of identity. In the early part of the movie, he learns about the new swim coach as he is trying to retrieve his goggles and swimsuit from a derelict locker on the deck of a run-down pool – an image which is meant to convey the way he is feeling mentally at the prospect of the demise of the swim team, and of his chances to redeem himself as an athlete in his senior year. This is the end, and he now has to look for a new beginning. His inability even to get rid of the tiny stray dog who defends the pool as his territory is a testament to the liminality of the situation – Suzuki is confused and unable to decide what to do or how to do it. Still, he has no choice but to reinvent himself. This reinvention begins almost the moment he meets the new coach, the very feminine Mrs. Sakuma. But Suzuki is confused. His reinvention of self involves a rebuilding of his own performance of gender identity in the way in which he views and behaves toward the coach. Still, his masculinity in this scene is also ambiguous, brought into question because of the fact that Suzuki is the only legitimate member of the revitalized swim team. His legitimacy comes from that reality that he is the only swimmer who was previously involved in the sport. The new recruits to the team have come to ogle the new coach. Their performance of expected masculine heterosexual interest reflects on Suzuki in two ways. First, their single-minded interest in the coach, not the sport, highlights the fact that Suzuki is not there only to gaze at a female body. He wants to swim, but this duality of purpose to some degree emasculates him in comparison with his more single-minded teammates. When the entire team discovers that the coach, Mrs. Sakuma, wants to turn the team into a boys’ synchronized swimming team, Suzuki’s prior commitment to the coach to stay on the team further emasculates him. Further, he actually likes the idea sub-consciously, having been attracted to synchronized swimming by accident in the first scene of the film, and this repressed desire to do “synchro” reduces his masculinity even more. Each event, and Suzuki’s reaction to it, has a deep effect on the way both the audience and Suzuki perceive his masculinity.

But masculinity as a part of identity is contingent, as well. Each new context brings self-mage into new focus in contrast to people and events around oneself. We learn immediately after the new coach arrives, for example, that heterosexual interest in the female coach is not the only reason many of the boys have joined the swim team. Kanazawa, a brainy, but nerdy, math wiz joins because he needs exercise. His interest in the coach as a woman is clear, but he is not by any stretch the athletic type. At one point as the team begins to practice for their synchronized swimming event, Kanazawa can be seen holding on to the pool wall and practicing his kick. His masculinity is in question here, since he is an un-athletic member of a school devoted to athletics. Sato, it turns out, is a former member of the basketball team, but is unwilling to work hard in practice, and so quits the team. The fact that he is perhaps the most stereotypically masculine member of the core group of boys hides the fact that he does not have the work ethic, or the drive to win, that might define him as the man’s man role that he performs might require. Saotome is clearly homosexual, and so is not there for the coach, but is there for ogling – one of the other primary male characters. This comic portrayal of a nerd, a failed jock, and a gay guy show that performance of masculinity is contingent upon the situation and the immediate audience for one’s gender performance. When Sato suggests that Saotome is in love with Suzuki at that first practice at the pool, Suzuki’s response is rejection of the very idea. Later, when Suzuki has to explain that in fact, Saotome has confessed his feelings for Sato instead, the boys deal with this new fact with some sensitivity – in spite of the fact that they had come expecting to find some romantic developments in the relationship between Suzuki and Saotome. Having gotten to know each other, the boys don’t stop thinking, or joking, about gender, but they do come to realize that each is dependent upon the others for some of the identity he is constructing, including understanding of gender. Masculinity, therefore, is contingent upon the situation, and the audience that one is performing for.

Gender, then, is a discursive construction, part of the construction of self which is also produced through discourse within a social context. As one pole of the normative (heterosexual) gender duality, masculinity is also constituted through performance, and often the possibilities for performance of masculinity, and its reification as ‘the norm’ in human gender choice through performance of its perceived opposites, can be explored well through entertainment products such as films. Water Boys director Shinobu Yaguchi does a wonderful job of exploring these possibilities in this humorous film, which pulls few punches in its portrayal of masculinity, and masculine confusion, among high school boys in Japan. If anything, the best we can get from this film is to see the falsity of the gender duality mentioned above. Masculinity, as a subset of gender, clearly has its own subsets of behavior all of which appear most clearly in contrast to each other. Through his adept framing of the movie, Yaguchi has been able to create a liminal space through which we can view a range of masculine possibilities in Japanese culture, and the very changing, contingent, and performative nature of those possibilities. They seem to be as fleeting, experimental, and dramatic as the high school senior year experienced by the Water Boys themselves.