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.

(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.

– 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.

[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.