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.
[1] 歌の昭和史