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Crafting the Showa Dream in Popular Song: “Hachi-Roku” and the Invention of Modern Kayokyoku, 1959-65

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Crafting the Showa Dream in Popular Song: “Hachi-Roku” and the Invention of Modern Kayokyoku, 1959-65 Crafting the Showa Dream in Popular Song: “Hachi-Roku” and the Invention of Modern Kayokyoku, 1959-65 Michael FURMANOVSKY Ryukoku University 要旨 大衆向け歌曲に託された昭和の夢ーー「八六」と現代歌謡曲の発現(1959-65) 本稿では、昭和 30 年代後半(1959-65)に、歌謡曲と呼ばれる現代日本のポピュラ ー・ソングの礎が築かれる中で、永六輔と中村八大という伝説に名高い作詞家・ 作曲家のコンビが果たした役割について考察する。当時都会に暮らす日本人の夢 や欲望、そして挫折を明確にし、それを歌に織り込むことにおいて、早稲田が輩 出したこの 2 人の作詞・作曲家が、いかに同業者たちを凌いでいたかを指摘する。 2 人が生み出す楽曲は、単調だが安定の得られる事務職に就き、核家族家庭に身を 落ち着け始めた、いわゆる新しいサラリーマン世代の心を捉えたのである。さら に本稿では、この 2 人の作詞・作曲家たちが活躍した時代の社会・文化的背景に も着目し、テレビ番組「夢であいましょう」に２人が提供した楽曲の歌詞を分析 することを通して、時代精神を捉える能力において、この２人がいかに秀逸を極 めていたかを明らかにする。 Introduction In recent years, cultural studies scholars working in the field of post-war Japanese popular music, have made great strides in uncovering a history that just ten years ago was largely unexplored. While still considered somewhat obscure, this rich history is gradually reaching a new audience of younger Japanese who have developed a nostalgic interest in mid-Showa-era culture, both material and artistic (Sand, 2007). This article aims at adding Japan’s post-war songwriting to the contributions and analysis made by scholars writing in English in the area of jazz (Atkins 2001, Molasky, 2006); enka (Yano, 2002); kayōkyoku and Group Sounds (Bourdaghs, 2012); rokabiri (Furmanovsky, 2008); folk (Tachi, 2009); rock (Stevens, 2008) and hip hop (Condry, 2006). Of these popular culture specialists, the work of Bourdaghs deserves special merit since his recent Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon is the first detailed analysis of the main currents of Japanese pop music since the war. Bourdagh’s work, which is discussed later, builds on the pioneering studies of the pre- war years by Mitsui Toru (1997). Mitsui’s work, as well as that of Japanese scholar Kikuchi Kiyoshi (2008), has been especially useful in bringing attention to Koga Masao -1- and Hattori Ryuichi, the two leading figures in pre-war Japanese musical innovation. Koga is generally regarded as being the father of modern day guitar-based enka while Hattori is acknowledged as the musician most responsible for the post-war melding of ryūkōka, (the generic word for Japanese popular song) with rumba, tango, jazz, Hawaiian and other genres. This combination would ultimately coalesce into what became known in the early 1950s as mudo kayōkyoku (a genre now generally labeled as “enka”), the single most popular genre of the decade and one that remains part of the cultural identity of the surviving pre-baby boom generation. Taken collectively Bourdaghs and Mitsui’s efforts to describe and explain Japan’s post-war musical development, allow for an increasingly nuanced understanding of the origin of the modern Japanese pop song. Yet one area still remains relatively neglected; namely the role of the songwriter in fashioning the songs that are the soundtrack to post-war Japan’s dramatic recovery and rise. This article focuses on the work of Nakamura Hachidai and Ei Rokusuke, a pair of so-called “free songwriters.” This term was given to the new 1960’s generation of songwriters whose output was not contracted to a specific record company.1 Both men were born in the early 1930s, and educated at Waseda University in the 1950s before and emerged in the early 1960s as the core of a handful of musical and cultural innovators. Working as a songwriting duo, much in the tradition of contemporaneous American songwriters such as Leiber-Stoller, Bacharach-David, King-Goffin and Weil-Mann, these two men would not only reinvent the Japanese kayōkyoku genre but, with a handful of contemporaries, go on to play a pivotal role in reshaping Japanese popular music as a whole. 2. Songwriting as Generational Statement: The 1930s Cohort Given the huge diversity of songwriters responsible for creating the songs that are considered to define the first half of the 1960s in the U.S and U.K, it is surely remarkable that just a handful of individuals, could dominate the world of songwriting in Japan during a period of great social and cultural change. Yet, it is indisputable that composer-arranger Nakamura Hachidai and lyricist Ei Rokusuke (hereafter “Hachi-Roku”) achieved a level of musical ubiquity during these years that dwarfs any of their contemporaries in the west. Indeed collectively these two songsmiths played a role in writing many of the best-selling modern-idiom kayōkyoku that define the period from 1959-65 (see appendix). 2 Any explanation of the manner in which Hachi-Roku put their generational stamp on Japanese popular music, must give due attention to their early experiences in post-war Japan. Born in 1931 and 1933 respectively, the two men entered high school precisely at the time when occupation reforms were at their most experimental, namely 1947-52. As such they benefited from a greatly liberalized atmosphere in which pre-war, hierarchical and -2- nationalistic attitudes towards western musical styles were being broken down and discredited. It would of course be simplistic to equate the songs that they would write a decade later with their experiences in high school and Waseda University. Yet as their own educational experiences, both in high school and university suggest, there can be little doubt that the optimistic, experimental and fertile post-war cultural environment that existed within many of Japan’s urban schools during these years, would be a factor in shaping the melodies and lyrics that remade Japanese popular culture (Nakamura, Kuroyanagi & Ei, 1992: 63-72; Ei, 2006, 14-17). 3. Nakamura Hachidai and the role of jazz during the U.S Occupation Much has been written about the way in which the policies of the GHQ helped foster a cultural renaissance in occupation-era Japan. Building on the work of Yoshimi (2003), the first to discuss the role of Japanese musicians in entertaining American troops, Bourdaghs has greatly expanded our understanding of the early 1950s with his nuanced discussion of jazz singer Kasagi Shizuko and Misora Hibari’s divergent careers during the jazz boom that followed the end of the occupation in 1952 (31-46, 55-72). Lasting around five years, it drew on the abilities and interests of pre-war jazz musicians, but soon attracted a new crop of adherents from a perhaps unexpected source; students from elite universities in Tokyo and Kansai (Atkins, 170-74). While some of these students were aware of the pre-war association of jazz with the dance hall-based underworld of alcohol and prostitution, few seem to have had any compunction about embracing it in its exciting new incarnation. Indeed, having experienced firsthand the social revolution that the immediate post-war years had brought in almost every area of life while in their mid-teens, a number of students at elite private universities such as Waseda, Rikkyou and Aoyama saw jazz as an authentic and highly attractive art form that, because of the occupation, was within their reach. No individual in Japan’s post-war popular music history better encapsulates the post- war jazz musician turned composer, than Nakamura Hachidai. Working almost non-stop from his first hit in 1959 (age 26) until his illness and untimely death at age 61, Nakamura’s compositions with lyricist Ei Rokusuke, place him at the pinnacle of Japan’s songwriting hall of fame, rivaled only by Koga and Hattori. Because of the worldwide success of his “Ue o muite arukō” (sung by Sakamoto Kyu), Nakamura’s name appears in a number of English language articles and books on Japanese popular culture including those by Bourdaghs and Stevens. Largely missing from these accounts of the success of the so- called “Sukiyaki” song, however, is any analysis of how he and Ei reinvented and reinvigorated Japanese popular song, or the way in which the duo’s work came to embody the zeitgeist and longings of their generation—much as the mudo kayō came to embody the one that emerged immediately after the war. -3- Born to a musical expatriate family in Japan-occupied Qingdao, China in 1931, Nakamura’s promise as a classical piano student led his father to send him to Tokyo to attend an elementary school run by Ueno Ongaku Gakuen, a forerunner of Tokyo Geijitsu University. Evacuated to Kurume in Kyushu in 1944, he attended a school affiliated with Waseda University and was soon invited to play piano for a high school chorus club. After school, the teenage prodigy, already a devout fan of the eclectic music programs broadcast by U.S military radio station FEN, began playing with two local jazz bands. By the time he entered Waseda University’s Literature Faculty in 1949, the eighteen year-old was proficient enough to attract the attention of his musical “senpai,” Watanabe Shin, the founder of the Six Joes, Japan’s leading jazz combo. Dropping out of university, he toured almost every urban area with the group in the early 1950s and, at the age of just 21, found himself catapulted to the status of a minor star. In 1953, he joined arguably the top three jazz musicians of the day, Kawaguchi George, Matsumoto Hidehiko and Ono Mitsuru to form the legendary “Big Four,” an experience that further refined his skills and musical sensibility. Despite this success, however, he found himself out of a job when the jazz boom faded in 1957-58 (Nakamura Obituary, 1992). In the next two years, Nakamura contemplated his future in a music business dominated by carefully constructed but increasingly formulaic mudo kayō a genre that had become increasingly dominated by professional songwriters affiliated to the major record companies (Sukiyaki Song Anniversary Website). 4. “Kuroi hanabira” and the birth of modern kayōkyoku With its flowery, poetic and sentimental lyrics, mudo kayō was squarely aimed at the troubles of urban migrants and blue-collar workers who frequented the watering holes of Tokyo during the harsh economic reconstruction years. Perhaps no song better captured the mudo kayō sensibility better than the massive 1957 hit “Yūrakuchō de aimashō” (Let’s meet at Yurakucho), composed by veteran songwriters Yoshida Tadashi and Saeki Takao and sung by crooner Frank Nagai (Kayo Kyoku Plus).
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