– 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.
[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.