Apparently, this rural bus stop claims to be the place where the nekobus stops…

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 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.

Nakayama Shinpei was one of the most influential composers in modern Japanese history. He was born in 1887 in what is now Nakano-shi, in the Northern part of Nagano prefecture. He was fourth of five boys, and had two sisters who died before he was born. His oldest brother died in 1893. Shinpei’s household was an old one, with important ties in what was then the village of Nomura, where they had set up household after moving from Gunma-ken in the Edo period. His father was the son of a village headman, but the Nakano family had limited ties to the entertainment world, as well – his grandfather’s older brother had given up his claim to the family headship, and moved to Edo (Tokyo) during the Edo period, where he became a tax collector in order to pay for his attempts to make connections and break into the entertainment world as a comedian.

Shinpei himself began studying music in his first year in elementary school, in 1894, where he began taking lessons on a miniature organ, learning to play the military marches of the era during the first year of the Sino-Japanese war. Shinpei has said that these songs had a profound influence upon his understanding of music.

(Nakayama, Urō. Nakayama Shimpei sakyoku kokuroku nenpu [中山晋平 作曲刻六年表]
(Nakayama Shimpei: A Chronology of a composer). 1980. pp. 287-8)

Well, it has been some time since I posted on this blog, but I have some things to write about now, so thought I would dig back in. I have been on a trip to Japan for the last several weeks, and will continue here for a bit more time while I do some research for my dissertation, and my kids are in school, and my wife visits relatives. In all, it has been an interesting trip.

Today, I am interested in energy and the environment, and the growing cultural participation, here in Japan, in preserving both. I find it very interesting that public awareness of, and participation in, environmentally conscious and energy preservation related behavior seems, at least on the superficial level, to be more pervasive than it is in the United States.

Of course, hotels here are doing the same thing that hotels have been doing in the states for some time – that is, making it possible for guests to choose to use the same towels and sheets during all or part of their stay, rather than taking clean ones each day, thus, the claim is, saving water, soap, and the disposal of the mixture of those two after washing, as well as, of course, saving hotel costs. This has always seemed like a sensible thing to me, though I have done no research into the actual effectiveness at preserving energy and the environment. It is a small gesture, but real savings comes in small steps. So Japanese hotels are, and have been, doing this, and surprisingly, most guests participate by not having towels and bedding washed every day – even at hot springs resorts.

Another interesting observation I was able to make this time is the frequent use by hotels of rainwater for toilets. The claim of course, is that the use of rainwater means less use of well water for such things, and this saves water for drinking and agriculture, thus drawing down aquifers to a lesser degree. Again, I have done no research into the real-world effectiveness of this, and it seems to me, having grown up thinking of the water cycle as a closed system, that water used, whatever its source, is water used, and it still needs to be cleaned, etc. However, there is probably something to be said in an urban environment where run-off does not easily sink into the soil. Perhaps it preserves aquifers by siphoning off rainwater from the streets and rooftops. Since urban rainwater would seem to be less pure than purified well-drawn drinking water, it stands to reason that it is probably lower-cost, can be stored on rooftops, and may in fact benefit the environment by its efficiency alone.

My main point is, though, in Japan, the public seems to want to know that this is the case, and everyone I talk to is familiar with this measure. Its effectiveness as an environmental and energy-saving measure seems less important here than its usefulness in creating public awareness of the issue, and driving voluntary participation in other more useful measures.

Everywhere I go, people are interested in preserving water and energy. Of course, this has always been a part of Japanese daily life, at least since I first came here in 1989. Partly I think this is due to the fact that everything is relatively expensive here (though Hawaii now gives Japan a serious run for its money in that department). Another reason might be the relatively compact nature of most urban and suburban areas – with high population density, small homes, and close walls, what you throw out the window, into the garbage, or wash down your driveway very quickly becomes your neighbor’s business.

My mother-in-law was explaining this to me the other day when my wife and I were asking about the usefulness of the “amado” – the aluminum gate doors on all the windows in her house, which she, like everyone in the neighborhood, closes every night. She told us that it wasn’t really necessary any more to keep out storms, as it had been in older Japanese homes. It wasn’t really necessary to keep out burglars, she said, because if they want to get in, they’ll get in. She acknowledges that mostly they are a holdover from a different time, but now it is the privacy that, for her, makes them worthwhile. Certainly, we are within easy view of other neighbors from any window.

This living in a crowd kind of thinking seems to be related to saving energy and preserving the environment. When we were cleaning moss off the driveway a couple of weeks ago, I asked for soap. She said she didn’t want to do that because it would wash into the street and be a problem for her neighbors and the water supply. I definitely notice fewer people out washing their cars now than there were a dozen years ago. My wife says it is for the same reason. People don’t want to be seen washing soap and chemicals into the wastewater drain. Whatever the case, it seems that lack of privacy may be partly responsible for environmental awareness. Certainly, like Hawaii, there are strict laws about what you can and can’t wash down the storm drains with the hose, too. Can’t discount the law as a way to discourage unwanted behavior.

In Japan there have long been commentaries on the contemporary “tsukai-ste bunka”- the “disposable culture”. This has always manifested itself in the pervasive use of waribashi – break-apart chopsticks (which are pervasive in Hawaii, too). Well, the wari-bashi are disappearing, even from the tables of ramen shops, to be replaced with chopsticks that are provided, then washed as silverware, by the restaurant. This is a significant increase in cost, but because customers are demanding it, restaurants are responding. In corporate lunch rooms and school lunches, as well as take-out lunches at convenience stores (bento), people regularly now use their own chopsticks, which they carry with them in a special case to keep them clean, and the lunches no longer provide the waribashi taped to the side or lid. This tsukai-ste culture also was visible in disposable cameras and use of batteries in electronic devices.

The other day, I saw a commercial for batteries that really made me think. It said – “how long are you going to remain in the tsukai-ste culture? Join the modern world, and use rechargeable batteries.” Of course, it was a corporate commercial – for Toshiba batteries, I believe. The point is, the sale was being pitched based on a perception that Japanese customers now desire to avoid tsukai-ste products. Like most popular culture, the question is whether the commercial is being driven by consumer demand, or trying to drive it. Probably a little of both. This shows an interest in preventing waste, caring for the environment, and reducing energy use in both the consumer and corporate mindset. I see new examples of this every day.

It is simply a willingness to go to some new habit, whether it be active participation in curbside recycling, which Americans do, reduction of water use, which Americans do, reduction of electricity usage, which Americans do, or reduction in travel miles and gasoline usage, which Americans do, to some extent, that I see here. In Japan it is combined with a popular culture presence – a kind of expectation that everyone is doing it, and a sense that it is cool not to waste – that I don’t see in American popular culture. I find that to be an interesting difference.