Long before karaoke's ubiquity and the rise of global brands such as
Sony, Japan was a place where new audio technologies found eager users
and contributed to new cultural forms. In Electrified Voices, Kerim
Yasar traces the origins of the modern soundscape, showing how the
revolutionary nature of sound technology and the rise of a new auditory
culture played an essential role in the formation of Japanese modernity.
A far-reaching cultural history of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph,
radio, and early sound film in Japan, Electrified Voices shows how
these technologies reshaped the production of culture. Audio
technologies upended the status of the written word as the only source
of prestige while revivifying traditional forms of orality. The ability
to reproduce and transmit sound, freeing it from the constraints of time
and space, had profound consequences on late nineteenth-century language
reform; twentieth-century literary, musical, and cinematic practices;
the rise of militarism and nationalism in the 1920s and 30s; and the
transition to the postwar period inaugurated by Emperor Hirohito's
declaration of unconditional surrender to Allied forces--a declaration
that was recorded on a gramophone record and broadcast throughout the
defeated Japanese empire. The first cultural history in English of
auditory technologies in modern Japan, Electrified Voices enriches our
understanding of Japanese modernity and offers a major contribution to
sound studies and global media history.