“ERSATZ AS THE DAY IS LONG”: JAPANESE POPULAR MUSIC, THE STRUGGLE FOR AUTHNETICITY, AND COLD WAR ORIENTALISM Robyn P. Perry A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS May 2021 Committee: Walter Grunden, Advisor Jeremy Wallach © 2021 Robyn P. Perry All Rights Reserve iii ABSTRACT Walter Grunden, Advisor During the Allied Occupation of Japan, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) Douglas MacArthur set forth on a mission to Americanize Japan. One way SCAP decided this could be done was by utilizing forms of media that were already popular in Japan, particularly the radio. The Far East Network (FEN), a network of American military radio and television stations in Japan, Okinawa, Guam, and the Philippines, began to broadcast American country & western music. By the early 1950s, Japanese country & western ensembles would begin to form, which initiated the evolution toward modern J-pop. During the first two decades of the Cold War, performers of various postwar subgenres of early Japanese rock (or J-rock), including country & western, rockabilly, kayōkyoku, eleki, and Group Sounds, would attempt to break into markets in the West. While some of these performers floundered, others were able to walk side-by-side with several Western greats or even become stars in their own right, such as when Kyu Sakamoto produced a number one hit in the United States with his “Sukiyaki” in 1963. The way that these Japanese popular music performers were perceived in the West, primarily in the United States, was rooted in centuries of Orientalist preconceptions about Japanese people, Japanese culture, and Japan that had recently been recalibrated to reflect the ethos of the Cold War. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project has been in the works for over four years. My first foray into the topic of postwar Japanese popular music was the final paper I wrote for a Historical Writing course that I took during my sophomore year at California State University, East Bay taught by Dr. Richard Kim. As a United States History major having to write on a historical subject that had to be transnational, encompassing two or more nations, I was at a complete loss – until I found Japanese surf music from the 1960s. Motivated by my love of rock and roll and all things midcentury modern, I wrote a report on Japanese rock and roll from 1956-1971, a tall order for a second-year history major when next to no information existed on the subject in English or in the West besides on blogs and in Facebook groups. Since finishing that final paper for Historical Writing, which ended up being published in the first volume of the East Bay Historia, researching, writing, and presenting on postwar Japanese popular music has truly become not only my passion and my niche within the world of academia, but also my life’s work. I am indebted to so many individuals for both the completion of this work and the continuation of my research. First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis committee, Dr. Walter Grunden (advisor) and Dr. Jeremy Wallach, for their tireless efforts that included listening to my endless lectures on J-rock, reading my drafts and stream of near-continuous emails, and always giving me helpful feedback. I would like to thank Dr. Grunden specifically for the sheer amount of time and positive energy he put into his advising time with me, and I would like to thank Dr. Wallach for the opportunities he gave me to spread my wings as a popular culture scholar by allowing me to present in his Asian Popular Music course and inviting me to the Society for Ethnomusicology Conference in Bloomington, Indiana in 2019. v Besides my committee members, there are many others I have to thank for making this academic dream of mine a reality. Professors at both Bowling Green State University and California State University, East Bay have provided me with not only a working knowledge of Japanese history, culture, and language, but have also bestowed upon me the skill set I need to continue to work as a successful historian and academic: Dr. Benjamin Greene, Dr. Tyler DeWayne Moore, Dr. Ryoko Okamura, Prof. Akiko Kawano-Jones, Dr. Linda Ivey, Dr. Anna Alexander, Dr. Albert Gonzalez, and Prof. Shiori Hoke-Greller. The confidence given to me via wonderful email compliments from Dr. Michael Bourdaghs, author of Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-pop, the first English-language study on postwar Japanese pop music, and Prof. Michael Furmanovsky, who has published several articles on Japanese popular music in the 1950s and 1960s and has met and interviewed several of our favorite idols, was integral to the completion of this project. I would like to acknowledge several members of my graduate cohort and the cohort who graduated the year before my own who allowed me to bounce ideas off them and who provided peer editing: Andrew Bartel, Kyle Rable, Julian Gillilan, Everett King, and Daniel Durkin III. Shaydon Ramey also provided assistance with some translations of European source material. I would also like to thank a handful of friends back home in the Bay and L.A. who have listened to me talk about this project for several years in every possible capacity: Eric Chaing, Jose Luigi Madrid, Glenard Sulicipan, Sandra Torres, Pablo Narez, Simran Arora, and Vanessa Mayorga, along with Bowling Green State University’s undergraduate History Society for giving me a platform to present my work in progress. I cannot forget my amazing boyfriend, Stephen Chang, who continued to show me undying love and support as I spent the majority of the first year of our relationship hyper-focused on the writing of this project. vi My deepest gratitude goes to Tsuyoshi Nishimura, a very active member of a Facebook fan community surrounding the Japanese popular music genre of Group Sounds, who has taught me more about the subject of midcentury Japanese popular music than anyone or anything I could find in the West and/or in the English language. I still cannot believe my luck that I have had online correspondence with Mickey Curtis, one of the sannin rokabirī otoko, and the late Alan Merrill, a friend of The Spiders and a fellow bandmate of Hiroshi “Monsieur” Kamayatsu in Vodka Collins. Both Curtis and Merrill have not only approved of and commended my work but gave me some perspective on what it was like to be an English-speaking performer in the Japanese music scene during the time I was researching. Last but certainly not least, I would like to give a major shout-out to the three-person North American fanbase of postwar Japanese popular music that consists of myself, Leonardo Flores, and Kelley Denise Schultz. Leonardo and I met up to trade Group Sounds 45s and chat for about three hours in a taco stand in Riverside, California. I am so grateful for Denise, essentially the co-author of this project, who is my “best GS friend” after four years and who helped me research bands and performers with the eagerness and passion that only two fangirls can possess. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER I. A CHANGE OF FACE: CHANGING DEPICTIONS OF THE JAPANESE THROUGHOUT WORLD WAR II AND THE ALLIED OCCUPATION OF JAPAN ........ 12 The Yellow Peril ........................................................................................................... 13 Early Wartime Depictions of the Japanese ................................................................... 18 Depictions of the Japanese Following Pearl Harbor ..................................................... 23 The Japanese as Super Humans .................................................................................... 30 Postwar ......................................................................................................................... 35 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 37 CHAPTER II. “BORROWED FROM WAY BACK WHEN”: POSTWAR JAPANESE COUNTRY & WESTERN AND CONTRASTING IDEALS OF MODERNITY .................. 39 Cowboys and Indians, or GIs and Japanese? ................................................................ 40 The Evolution of the Western and the Singing Cowboy .............................................. 42 The Imagery and (Fabricated) Authenticity of American Country & Western ............ 44 Japanese Country & Western and the Diplomacy of the Cowboy ................................ 46 Kazuya Kosaka, the First J-Pop Star............................................................................. 49 Bringing It All Back Home: Japanese Country & Western in the U.S. ....................... 51 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 55 CHAPTER III. FROM “TRANSOCEANIC MUTILATIONS” TO “SUKIYAKI”: THE WILTING OF MASCULINE JAPAN AND THE CREATION OF A POSTWAR “ORIENTAL EDEN” ...................................................................................................................................... 57 American “Japan Crazes” ............................................................................................. 57 viii The Shibui Craze ........................................................................................................... 58 The Wilting of Masculine Japan ..................................................................................