From the beginning of the American Occupation in 1945 to the post-bubble
period of the early 1990s, popular music provided Japanese listeners
with a much-needed release, channeling their desires, fears, and
frustrations into a pleasurable and fluid art. Pop music allowed
Japanese artists and audiences to assume various identities, reflecting
the country's uncomfortable position under American hegemony and its
uncertainty within ever-shifting geopolitical realities.
In the first English-language study of this phenomenon, Michael K.
Bourdaghs considers genres as diverse as boogie-woogie, rockabilly,
enka, 1960s rock and roll, 1970s new music, folk, and techno-pop.
Reading these forms and their cultural import through music, literary,
and cultural theory, he introduces readers to the sensual moods and
meanings of modern Japan. As he unpacks the complexities of popular
music production and consumption, Bourdaghs interprets Japan as it
worked through (or tried to forget) its imperial past. These efforts
grew even murkier as Japanese pop migrated to the nation's former
colonies. In postwar Japan, pop music both accelerated and protested the
commodification of everyday life, challenged and reproduced gender
hierarchies, and insisted on the uniqueness of a national culture, even
as it participated in an increasingly integrated global marketplace.
Each chapter in Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon examines a single
genre through a particular theoretical lens: the relation of music to
liberation; the influence of cultural mapping on musical appreciation;
the role of translation in transmitting musical genres around the globe;
the place of noise in music and its relation to historical change; the
tenuous connection between ideologies of authenticity and imitation; the
link between commercial success and artistic integrity; and the function
of melodrama. Bourdaghs concludes with a look at recent Japanese pop
music culture.
