“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 ...... 60
Setting the Stage: The Allied Occupation ...... 63
The Development of Rock and Roll in Japan ...... 64
Postwar Musical Exotica...... 65
Kyu Sakamoto ...... 66
Cold War Orientalism and Kyu Sakamoto’s Popularity in the United States ...... 68
Japanese Rockabilly as “Threateningly Hyper Masculine” ...... 73
Conclusion ...... 77
CHAPTER IV. “WHOM ARE THEY FOOLING?”: JAPAN’S BOOMING POSTWAR
ECONOMY AND PERCEPTIONS OF ELEKI & GROUP SOUNDS PERFORMERS AS
IMITATORS OF WESTERN CULTURE ...... 80
Japan’s Industrial Westernization in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries ...... 80
The Typhoon: Eleki and the Rise of Japanese Surf ...... 82
Yuzo Kayama ...... 83
“Let’s Go Wakadaishō!”: Eleki no Wakadaishō as the 1960s Japanese Middle-Class
Ideal...... 85
Takeshi Terauchi ...... 87
Operation Z: Group Sounds as Japan’s Answer to the British Invasion...... 89
The Spiders ...... 90
“Let’s Go Spiders!”: The Spiders’ European Tour ...... 95
“Sad Sunset”: The Spiders’ Attempt to Break into the American Market and the
Orientalization of Group Sounds in the United States ...... 100 ix
Made in Japan ...... 102
Conclusion ...... 104
CONCLUSION ...... 106
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 111 x
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1 “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs,” from a 1941 issue of Time ...... 17
2 “The Little Jap is a Big Job!” Official U.S. Army Poster ...... 19
3 “The Monkey Folk,” from a 1942 issue of Punch, a British magazine ...... 22
4 “Jap Hunting Licenses”...... 25
5 “Made in Japan, caught in the Pacific, tanned in the U.S.A.” ...... 26
6 The “Louseous Japanicas” ...... 28
7 The Tokio Kid ...... 32
8 Life magazine’s Picture of the Week, May 22, 1944 ...... 34
9 The cover of the September 15, 1945 issue of Leatherneck ...... 36
10 A Japanese rendering of Commodore Matthew Perry’s “Japanese Olio Minstrels” by
Shiryo Hensanjo, 1854 ...... 46
11 A Far East Network advertisement showing Japanese broadcast locations ...... 48
12 Kazuya Kosaka, arguably the first J-pop idol ...... 51
13 Jimmie Tokita on The Jimmy Dean Show, February 8, 1966 ...... 54
14 Chiyako Saito on The Jimmy Dean Show ...... 54
15 Jap Beast and His Plot to Rape the World, 1942 ...... 62
16 The cover of Babysan: A Private Look at the Japanese Occupation ...... 63
17 From the Los Angeles Times, Doris Day and Kyu Sakamoto ...... 70
18 The Japanese cover of 「上を向いて歩こう」 juxtaposed with the American cover of
“Sukiyaki” ...... 73
19 The Sannin Rokabirī Otoko, the Three Rockabillies ...... 74 xi
20 Yuzo Kayama performing with The Ventures during their 1965 tour of Japan ...... 85
21 Yuzo Kayama and Takeshi Terauchi in Eleki no Wakadaishō ...... 86
22 The cover of Takeshi Terauchi and the Blue Jeans’ Let’s Go Eleki-Bushi ...... 89
23 The Spiders ...... 92
24 An advertisement of The Beach Boys playing in Japan with The Spiders listed as the
opening act, January 1966...... 94
25 The Spiders in Amsterdam...... 96
26 The Spiders pose outside of the legendary Star Club in Hamburg, Germany ...... 97
27 Europa no Spiders: The Spiders in Europe...... 99
28 The Spiders as seen by Hawaiian newspaper readers ...... 101 1
INTRODUCTION
In 1962, a decade following the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan and just a year prior to Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki” became a number one hit in the United States, Philip K.
Dick published The Man in the High Castle. This alternate history novel tells the story of what would have happened had the Axis Powers won World War II, primarily focusing on main character Robert Childan who owns an American antique shop in San Francisco, now located in the Japanese-controlled Pacific States of America. In this new San Francisco, the racial hierarchy has changed dramatically. Black Americans had now been reduced back to slaves, the local
Chinese population had been transformed into second-class servants, and non-Jewish White individuals had become second place to their new Japanese overlords. Childan’s primary customer base at his antique shop is now Japanese government and business officials who populate the Financial District and love to collect old Americana, particularly from the Civil War or the Wild West.
In the middle of the novel, Robert Childan is requested to have dinner with Paul
and Betty Kasoura, who hope to purchase some of Childan’s pieces. Paul and Betty live in a
modern, Japanese-only apartment building in San Francisco. The interior of
the Kasouras’ flat is described as fitting the shibui aesthetic, very popular at the time when The
Man in the High Castle was published, to a tee:
Tasteful in the extreme. And – so ascetic. Few pieces. A lamp here, table, bookcase, print
on the wall. The incredible Japanese sense of wabi. It could not be thought in English. 2
The ability to find in simple objects a beauty beyond that of the elaborate or ornate.
Something to do with the arrangement.1
Childan also seemed to feel the same way about Mrs. Kasoura herself, almost equating her with the décor in her home as she sits on the carpet in the Japanese seiza style, dressed in a silk kimono and obi. During Childan’s and the Kasouras’ pre-dinner conversation, they discuss African American jazz from New Orleans, which the Kasouras’ are big fans of and own some records. Thankfully, according to Childan, the Kasouras’ presented him with a dinner of steak and baked potato rather than anything Japanese, which Childan had eaten so much of since the war.2 It was during dinner, after realizing the sheer capacity of various
collectable and expensive Western knickknacks the Kasouras’ own, along with the other
Japanese elites that now run the city, Childan loses his composure and begins a long, inner
monologue about how the new Japanese overlords in San Francisco were “pillaging from [his]
people”:
Face facts. I’m trying to pretend that these Japanese and I are
alike. But observe: even when I burst out as to my gratification that they won the war,
that my nation lost – there's still no common ground. What words mean to me is sharp
contrast vis- à -vis them. Their brains are different. Souls likewise. Witness them
drinking from English bone china cups, eating with US silver, listening to Negro style of
music. It's all on the surface. Advantage of wealth and power makes this available to
them, but it's ersatz as the day is long.
1 Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962), 109. 2 Dick, The Man in the High Castle, 116. 3
Even the I Ching, which they've forced down our throats; it's Chinese. Borrowed
from way back when. Whom are they fooling? Themselves? Pilfer customs right and left,
wear, eat, talk, walk, as for instance consuming with gusto baked potato served with
sour cream and chives, old-fashioned American dish added to their haul. But nobody is
fooled, I can tell you; me, least of all.
Only the white races endowed with creativity... And yet I, blood member of the
same, must bump head to floor for these two. Think how it would have been had
we won! Would have crushed them out of existence. No Japan today, and the USA
gleaming great sole power in the entire world.3
Childan’s inner thoughts on the Kasouras’ as pilferers of Western culture continues after he compliments Mrs. Kasoura on the meal and thinks, “What they say is true: your powers of imitation are immense. Apple pie, Coca-Cola, stroll after the movie, Glenn Miller... you could paste together out of tin and rice paper a complete artificial America.”4 Ultimately, after his
appointment with the Kasouras’, Childan learns that the Japanese are “not exactly human. They
don the dress but they’re like monkeys dolled up in the circus. They’re clever and can learn, but
that is all.”5
These excerpts from The Man in the High Castle encapsulate most postwar Americans’
internal struggle with Japan’s and Japanese people’s transformation following World War II.
Over the course of about two decades, the Japanese went from being considered the ghastly
Yellow Peril to annoying and cunning little monkeys to the ferocious “Jap Beast”6 to the United
3 Dick, The Man in the High Castle, 117. 4 Dick, The Man in the High Castle, 118. 5 Dick, The Man in the High Castle, 119. 6 Jap Beast and His Plot to Rape the World, Country Press: 1942. 4
States’ newest younger sibling and ward to look after as the bulwark against communism in East
Asia during the Cold War. While Americans living in the 1960s may have no longer seen the
Japanese as any number of the horrendously racist tropes that they were portrayed as during
World War II, they still did not see them as equals to White Euro-Americans. While postwar,
post-Allied Occupation Japan may had been reintroducing itself into the global economy at an
astounding speed, Japan, Japanese culture, Japanese people, and Japanese products were seen as
highly inauthentic and cheap, as “tin and rice paper” mockeries of Western equivalents, to use
Dick’s language, and as even potentially devious. Was the conniving little monkey of twenty
years’ past planning for a counterattack at any moment… or were the Japanese just taking
advantage and copying, or “aping,” to get ahead on the world stage?
This thesis examines just one of the innumerable results of nearly half a millennium of
intercultural commerce and communication between Japan and the West: post-World War II
Japanese popular music, the first iterations of modern-day J-pop and J-rock. A wealth of knowledge exists in the scholarship of Japanese popular culture that became popular in the West, particularly in the United States during the twentieth century; yet the majority of these trends
took place in the latter half of the century: martial arts, ramen noodles, sushi, Hello Kitty,
Pokémon, anime, manga, and the like. Meghan Warner Mettler’s How to Reach Japan by
Subway: America’s Fascination with Japanese Culture, 1945-1965 explores some facets of
Japanese culture that became popular in the United States immediately following World War II
but focuses on highbrow trends rather than popular culture that became fads among primarily the
American upper-middle class and elite rather than with average Americans.
Japanese popular music has no lack of interest from both academic and non-academic
sources. Yet, while prewar Japanese classical music and jazz and economic boom-era idol J-pop 5
from about the mid-1970s onward have no lack of scholarship and devotion in either Japan or the
United States, Japanese popular culture and music of the immediate post-Occupation era, from
about 1952 to 1970, lacks comparable attention. Proper scholarship on this subject (particularly
in English) is nearly nonexistent, save for Michael Bourdaghs’ Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara
Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-pop and Michael Furmanovsky’s various articles on
Japanese pop music from the 1950s and 1960s.
This thesis focuses primarily on five different genres of postwar Japanese popular music,
country & western, rockabilly, kayōkyoku, eleki, and Group Sounds, and their attempted
breakthroughs into the Western market from about 1952-1970. This project is just one effort to
show that Japanese popular music from the immediate post-Occupation era was not just a short-
lived fad or existed in just a purely Japanese bubble. “Poorly produced” Japanese-language covers of English hits and “accent-laden” attempts at singing English in kissaten (clubs) to
Japanese teenagers and American servicemen - “transoceanic mutilations,” as they were referred
to as in one Time article about Japanese rockabilly in 1958 - were just a fraction of this era of
music.
Unfortunately, Western writers often depict early male Japanese pop and rock stars as
purely Japanese phenomena who shot onto the scene like flaming comets and then quickly
fizzled out once they became relics of an antiquated, Occupation-era or economic boom-era
Japan. Japanese rockabilly and other Western-influenced music genres of the postwar era, such as eleki and Group Sounds (Japan’s answers to surf and the British Invasion, respectively), are often presented in the West as quirky and weird short-lived fads of Japan’s postwar culture, more like fun facts rather than as coherent episodes of Japanese youth and music culture and history.
At the same time, the performers of these music styles are often portrayed as cheesy, “wannabe” 6
Japanese imitations of infinitely popular Western acts such as Elvis Presley, The Beach Boys,
The Monkees, and The Beatles - almost as “exotic jokes” - rather than as the talented, unique
individuals they were (and still are), performing in an extremely unique, and culturally
ambiguous, time and space.7
The small handful of historians and writers who have attempted to tackle this subject (in
English, at least) tend to ignore the significance that the nearly five hundred years of racial
interpretations from both sides of the Pacific had on these postwar music styles and how this
transnational history influenced their reception in both Japan and the West. Many also fail to
address how simply popular and well-loved these music genres came to be in both Japan and the
West, even if only for short periods of time, and how Japanese popular music would pave the
way for other international acts in the West, Kyu Sakamoto’s visit to the United States during the
summer of 1963, for example. There has yet to be an extensive study of how various genres of
postwar Japanese popular music were perceived in the West, particularly the United States, and
this thesis attempts to address that gap in the scholarship.
The present thesis approaches the subject through the frame of Orientalism. In his 1993
work Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said, the founder of postcolonial studies and the critical
concept of “Orientalism,” argues that “at the heart of Orientalism… lay an ideology of difference. Orientalism constructed the ‘East’ and ‘West’ as internally coherent and mutually exclusive entities.”8 Said points out that, within the context of Orientalism, “there is an ‘us’ and
a ‘them,’ each quite settled, clear, unassailably self-evident.”9 This idea constructed “the East as
7 7 Michael K. Bourdaghs, Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop (New York: Columbia Press, 2012), 100. 8 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 10. 9 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), xxv. 7
an inferior racial Other to the West, and legitimated European imperialism by overdetermining
the idea of Western superiority.”10 The West is presented as “rational, progressive, adult, and masculine” while the East is “irrational, backward-looking, childish, and feminine.” Within the context of the geopolitics and mindset of the time period, the concept of Cold War Orientalism adds a bit of a twist to Said’s definition of Orientalism. According to Christina Klein, a professor in the English Department at Boston College and author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the
Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961, Asia was often portrayed as a “contested terrain caught in the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, or explored the tensions between
U.S. expansion and Asian decolonization.”11 In terms of Cold War Orientalism, the United
States was the overarching, global Western power as opposed to the old culturally significant,
colonial “regimes” of France or Britain who had been displaced after World War II. The
popularity of Kyu Sakamoto and his “Sukiyaki” is an excellent and often overlooked example of
Cold War Orientalism.
While there has been much discussion within academia for the past half century on the
subfield of Orientalism as established by Edward Said, the theory of Cold War Orientalism, best
discussed so far in Christina Klein’s Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow
Imagination, 1945-1961, is still new, but builds upon Said’s work both chronologically and
theoretically. Said’s Orientalism tends to focus on the world prior to the end of World War II
when the vast colonial networks of European nations such as Great Britain, France, and others
led to a more Middle Eastern-centric Orientalism. Cold War Orientalism shifts the chronology
and terminology to after the Second World War when the United States had taken over Europe as
the dominant global power and began its cultural hegemony around the world. Since the United
10 Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 11. 11 Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 10 8
States’ frontier had expanded so far West it became East into Asia with events such as Perry’s
expeditions to Japan in 1853-1854 and the Philippine-American War from 1899 to 1902, “the
Orient” to the United States became East Asia, rather than the Middle East. Information on Cold
War Orientalism and exotica, particularly musical exotica, such as in Philip Hayward’s Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music, has proven to be illuminating, as it led to a greater understanding of how centuries of racial preconceptions, particularly of East Asian individuals, could be translated so well into the realm of American popular music in the late
1950s and into the 1960s.
A robust historiography exists on the Orientalism surrounding the ever-changing image
of Japan and the Japanese. The works of John Dower and Naoko Shibusawa are indispensable
when tracing changing depictions of the enemy on both sides of the Pacific during and following
World War II and throughout the Allied Occupation of Japan. Dower’s War Without Mercy
demonstrates the sheer intensity that the War in the Pacific was fought with, backed with feelings
of racial animosity and hatred that sometimes bordered on the genocidal, while Embracing
Defeat adroitly encompasses its title by discussing not just Japan’s defeat during the Second
World War but its absolute subjugation to the Allied Powers, particularly the United States,
during the Occupation. Naoko Shibusawa’s America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese
Enemy, particularly paired with Klein’s Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow
Imagination, 1945-1961 and Meghan Warner Mettler’s How to Reach Japan by Subway:
America’s Fascination with Japanese Culture, 1945-1965, expertly demonstrate how Americans
viewed their new Asian allies in the years following the Second World War. Postwar Japanese
popular music has yet to be contextualized within this framework of Cold War Orientalism as
presented by Dower, Shibusawa, Klein, and Mettler. This thesis argues that the West’s – 9 specifically the United States’ – ever-changing opinions of the Japanese is what led to certain genres of postwar Japanese popular music and specific performers to either become popular or flop among Western audiences. Yet, while some performers became more popular than others outside of Japan, racializations that were direct descendants of those from World War II influenced how these performers were seen: often with the monkey or “aping” trope close at hand.
Chapter one discusses the changing imagery of the Japanese during and immediately following World War II to provide historical context for what followed in the postwar era.
Before the war, Americans had come to see the Japanese as diminutive and harmless, almost as toy soldiers or pestering little monkeys, during their imperial conquests in other locales in Asia during the 1930s, especially prior to the Nanking Massacre. However, once the United States learned of Nanking and Pearl Harbor was attacked, the Japanese were depicted as ferocious, deceptive animals and beasts with fangs and claws that should be hunted for sport. Immediately following Japan’s defeat and during the Allied Occupation, Japan once again became a charming but disgruntled little pet. Over the course of but a decade, the American interpretation of the
Japanese transformed “from killing the monkey-men to turning them into democrats,” as John
Dower puts it.12
Chapter two, which focuses on Japanese country & western music, takes a more detailed look at the American wartime concept that fighting the Japanese in the Pacific Theater could be compared to fighting Native Americans on the American frontier and that it was Americans’ right and a part of their frontier-fighting heritage to do so. During the Occupation, Japanese musicians began to form country & western ensembles to perform at American military bases
12 John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999), 213. 10 and clubs inspired by the music they heard broadcast on the Far Eastern Network (FEN). While initially an extremely impressive form of mimicry and imitation used to impress primarily White
GIs from the American South, Japanese country & western blossomed into a unique genre all on its own and singer Kazuya Kosaka would arguably become the first J-pop idol. Japanese country
& western became the great grandfather of modern J-pop and symbolized progress, westernization (specifically Americanization), and modernity in Japan. However, when this music style was translated back to the United States about a decade later in 1966, when footage of Jimmie Tokita, Chiyako Saito, and the “Japanese Grand Ole Opry” appeared on an episode of the Jimmy Dean Show, it hit at a time when both Japan and the American Wild West were seen as antiquated and primitive, resulting only in confused laughter from an American audience.
Chapter three highlights the importance of Kyu Sakamoto’s “Ue o Muite Arukō,” later bastardized to “Sukiyaki,” becoming the number one hit in the United States during the summer of 1963, less than two decades following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. How could this have happened? Originally a rockabilly singer, Sakamoto’s love ballad accelerated his rising stardom just as the United States was going through its exotica boom. Nineteen years old at the time the song was recorded, Sakamoto was Orientalized and feminized by mainstream media for audiences in both the United States and Great Britain. His ties to Japanese rockabilly, including his claim to fame as one of the many “Japanese Elvises,” were stripped away from him as this was seen as too threateningly hypermasculine for Western audiences. Sakamoto was the ideal canvas for early 1960s America to project its Cold War Orientalist thoughts and feelings upon.
Chapter four examines the genres of eleki and Group Sounds, Japan’s answers to surf rock and the British Invasion, and their significance during Japan’s economic boom, especially their reliance on electric instruments, particularly the electric guitar. Eleki legend Yuzo 11
Kayama’s Wakadaishō film series helped cement the ideals of what it meant to be middle class in 1960s Japan to Japanese teenagers and young adults. Presenting perhaps one of the first biographies of the legendary Group Sounds bands The Spiders in English, this chapter also discusses Group Sounds’ popularity in Western Europe as opposed to in the United States where the Japanese and Japanese products were still viewed as cheap imitations.
This thesis contributes to areas of post-World War II/Cold War-era international popular culture and cultural exchanges and fusions; international relations, particularly between the
United States and Japan; globalism; popular music; race; gender; both American and Japanese teen/youth culture; Orientalism; and even race relations within the United States during the pre- and post-Civil Rights era. The author’s main hope is that this work will allow for postwar
Japanese popular music and its performers to be acknowledged for their historical and cultural significance and for the subject to be seen through a more serious lens, rather than as the exotic joke that some Western writers have incorrectly depicted them as. 12
CHAPTER I. A CHANGE OF FACE: CHANGING DEPICTIONS OF THE JAPANESE
THROUGHOUT WORLD WAR II AND THE ALLIED OCCUPATION OF JAPAN
United States-Japanese relations began in 1853 when Commodore Matthew C. Perry
sailed into Uraga Bay with his black ships. With the arrival of Perry and his crew, Japanese
artists immediately attempted to get a look at him and his fleet. By the following year, many
Japanese depictions of Perry and his black ships appeared.13 The widespread circulation of
American depictions of Asian individuals also began around the same time, largely fueled first
by anti-Chinese sentiment as a reaction to the immigration of Chinese to the West Coast during
the Gold Rush and the use of Chinese laborers to build railroads, and then later anti-Japanese
sentiment. By the start of World War II, Americans had been exposed to depictions of Asian
individuals for nearly a century. However, the war and the subsequent Allied/United States
Occupation of Japan was a turning point for American racial attitudes towards Asians,
particularly the Japanese. During the early days of the war, in the minds of westerners,
characterizations of the Japanese borrowed from old “Yellow Peril” tropes: they were lesser,
physically small men, not capable of doing much damage, aside from being generally
treacherous, cunning, and dishonest.
The malleability of racial and ethnic stereotypes allowed for westerners to portray the
Japanese how they wanted them to be seen both during and following World War II. As John
Dower has demonstrated, during the war, particularly following Pearl Harbor, the images that
Americans saw in their daily lives portrayed the Japanese as various forms of non-humans,
13 John W. Dower, “Perry,” Black Ships & Samurai: Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan (1853-1854), MIT Visualizing Cultures, last modified 2010, https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/black_ships_and_samurai/bss_essay02.html; Dower, “Black Ships,” Black Ships & Samurai, last modified 2010, https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/black_ships_and_samurai/bss_essay03.html. 13
including monkeys, vermin, and as targets for hunting for sport and extermination. However,
following the war, once the Japanese became the political and economic allies of the United
States against the rise of communism in postwar Asia, this malleability allowed for
the transformation of the Japanese into the United States’ own disgruntled yet charming pets:
still inferior yet under America’s guidance. Building upon the work of John Dower, this work
will argue that this transformation occurred not only because of a deliberate propaganda
campaign conducted by the United States government and military during the war and the
Occupation, but also because as the people of the West, predominantly those in the United
States, and Japan came increasingly into closer contact through marriages, business transactions,
and the intersection of popular cultures, the previously hostile and derogatory images of the
Japanese took on a more humanized and conciliatory form, at least until the trade wars of the
1970s and 1980s.
The Yellow Peril
According to Japan’s Greater East Asia War Inquiry Commission, in a 1943 report
entitled “The American-British Challenge Directed Against Nippon,” the decades following the
United States’ “open door” policy with China in 1899 saw an increase in anti-Japanese sentiment
and activity. While not just apparent in the “economic strangulation” and the strengthening of
Anglo-American military presence in Asia and the Pacific, anti-Asian sentiment, first anti-
Chinese, and then later anti-Japanese, roared in the United States during the latter half of the
nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth, particularly on the West Coast.14
Following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, many Japanese individuals took advantage of the
labor shortage in the United States and immigrated. However, shortly thereafter, the victory of
14 John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 59. 14
the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War not only caused a spike in anti-Japanese suspicions but multiplied Yellow Peril-induced xenophobia.15 The League of Nations’ denial of Japan’s
Racial Equality Proposal following their involvement in World War I did not do much to help
East Asians be seen as an equal race compared to those of Euro-American stock.
By the time of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Americans had been exposed
to images of Asian individuals through media as diverse as songs, plays, vaudeville, newspaper
articles, cartoons, comics, novels, and films for nearly eight decades. One of the first
interpretations of Asian individuals in the United States was “John Chinaman,” who, according
to the 1855 song of the same name, was dishonest, would not assimilate to American culture,
would lie and steal (even under oath), ate rats and puppies, and who, along with “all [his]
thieving clan,” was deceitful.16 “The Chinaman” would become a vaudeville trope, used by
popular culture creators from Mark Twain and Bret Harte in their 1877 play Ah Sin to Fleischer
Studios’ cartoon “The Chinaman” in 1920 (the same studio that created Betty Boop and Popeye
the Sailor). The Hearst newspapers and others on the West Coast warned of a Yellow Peril as
early as the 1890s. In 1905, the San Francisco Chronicle ran two different articles about how
“Japanese Bring Vile Diseases” and “Japs Bring Frightful Diseases.”17 These popular tropes and
stereotypes were the only representations of Asian individuals most Americans ever saw and led
to how Asians of all backgrounds were perceived in the United States during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. While Japanese individuals and Americans of Japanese descent
had lived on the West Coast of the United States since at least the 1890s, they, along with
15 Dower, War Without Mercy, 156. 16 “John Chinaman,” The California Songster (San Francisco: Appleton, 1855). 17 “Japs Bring Frightful Diseases,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 2, 1905, http://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-69- 26/; “Japanese Bring Vile Diseases,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 13, 1905, http://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho- 69-34/.
15
Chinese and other Asian immigrants who moved to the United States during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, were viewed as an unassimilable “Yellow Peril” who could survive
on nothing but rice and would use their cunning and guile to give them an unfair advantage,
particularly over Euro-American farmers in the Central Valley of California.18
According to Christina Klein, author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow
Imagination, 1945-1961, during the decades of the interwar period, American depictions of
Asians shifted to reflect “the possibility and then reality of war in the Pacific against Japan.”19
By this time, American popular entertainment had depended on a set of characters that derived
from vaudeville, one of which was the “Chinaman” as mentioned above, who by this point had
evolved into a generally East Asian “Oriental” man rather than any specific Asian ethnicity.20
This “Oriental” character reappears in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s through pulp novels and
movies that contained “Oriental villainy and detective heroics [such as] Fu Manchu, Ming the
Merciless, Charlie Chan, and Mr. Moto,”21 all of whom were depicted by White actors in yellowface when on the silver screen. These yellowface characters were built upon stereotypes that fell on either one of two ends of a spectrum: bumbling and asexual like Charlie Chan on one end, or evil and cunning like Dr. Fu Manchu on the other.22 This prewar characterization of
Asians, inherited from nearly a century of racialized depictions, helped Washington and
Hollywood depict the Japanese “as a faceless mass of subhuman enemies worthy of
18 Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 2. 19 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 4. 20 Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 132. 21 Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 4. 22 Cynthia P. Wong, “‘A Dream Return to Tang Dynasty’: Masculinity, Male Camaraderie, and Chinese Heavy Metal in the 1990s,” in Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music Around the World, ed. Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger, and Paul D. Greene (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011), 72.
16
extermination” to the American public while portraying the Chinese as amicable allies during
wartime.23
The American government realized that the American people needed to soften on the
general pan-anti-Asian sentiment that had been so prevalent in the country since the middle of
the nineteenth century. To differentiate our newly found Chinese friends and allies from the enemy, Time magazine ran a now-infamous 1941 article entitled “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs.” This article features four photographs, a young Chinese man next to a young
Japanese man and an older Chinese man next to an older Japanese man, along with a bullet- pointed list of physical features and a few nonsensical suggestions (e.g., “most Chinese avoid horn-rimmed spectacles”), to instruct Americans on how to attempt to tell Chinese and Japanese
apart. Unfortunately, according to the article, “there is no infallible way of telling them apart...
even an anthropologist with calipers and plenty of time to measure heads, noses, shoulders, hips,
is sometimes stumped.”24 How else could Americans differentiate the Japanese?
23 Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 4. 24 “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs,” Time, December 22, 1941.
17
Figure 1: “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs,” from a 1941 issue of Time.
18
Early Wartime Depictions of the Japanese
During the early days of World War II, the Japanese were typically presented as physically small, incapable, subhuman beasts. Western wartime sources considered Japanese
civilization backwards and barbaric compared to that of the West and argued that the Japanese
were far less advanced than individuals of Euro/Anglo-American stock. Prior to Pearl Harbor,
Westerners greatly underestimated Japan, and United States military officers ranked it as “no
better than a class C nation.”25 Some viewed the Japanese as far less than that. According to
General Sir Thomas Blamey from Australia, “beneath the thin veneer of a few generations of civilization [the Japanese] is a subhuman beast, who has brought warfare back to the primeval, who fights by the jungle rule of tooth and claw, who must be beaten by the jungle rule of tooth and claw.”26 English General Robert Booke-Popham, who was commander-in-chief of the
United Kingdom forces in the East Asia, reported during a tour of Hong Kong in December 1940 that “[he] had a good close-up... of various sub-human specimens dressed in dirty grey uniform, which [he] was informed were Japanese soldiers.”27 In 1941, Time reported that the Japanese
were “big only in their fury.” These “little men” were advancing through Malaysia with “tiny
one-man tanks and two-man gun carriers.”28 American historian and journalist William Henry
Chamberlin observed that “the Japanese are great in small things and small in great things.”29
The Japanese were characterized not only as physically small, but as treacherous and cunning, borrowing from old nineteenth-century Yellow Peril tropes.
25 Dower, War Without Mercy, 98. 26 Dower, War Without Mercy, 53. 27 Dower, War Without Mercy, 99. 28 Time, December 29, 1941. 29 Dower, War Without Mercy, 98. 19
Figure 2: “The Little Jap is a Big Job!” Official U.S. Army Poster Throughout the war, pseudo-scientific/anthropological approaches were taken to describe why the Japanese behaved the way they did and why they were simply so inferior to those of
Euro/Anglo-American stock. The Japanese were rumored to be mentally handicapped in comparison to Anglo-Europeans and were sometimes considered pre-modern people who were incapable of modern warfare. The Japanese mind was described as “pre-Hellenic, prerational, and prescientific” and inherently more feminine, utilizing “instinct, intuition, apprehension, feeling, emotion [and] association of ideas, rather than by analysis and logical deduction.”30 The curator of the Division of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution during the war let President Roosevelt know in a correspondence that the reason why the Japanese were “as bad as they were” was because the Japanese skull was “some 2,000 years less developed than
30 Dower, War Without Mercy, 106.
20
ours.”31 One example of this pseudo-anthropological reasoning backfiring is that on the night of
a fatal Japanese air raid in Singapore, no one was at the Air Raid Precautions headquarters
because a Royal Air Force officer had informed the air raid wardens that the Japanese could not
fly in the dark, influenced by false ideas that the Japanese were poor pilots because the whole
Japanese race suffered from myopia and inner-ear defects. According to this line of thought, the
way that Japanese mothers strapped babies to their backs apparently caused the babies’ heads to
bounce around, permanently impairing their sense of balance.32 According to Westerners, the
Japanese were simply an inferior race, mentally and physically. Many of these pseudo-scientific
racializations stemmed from Russia’s defeat during the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. This
victory of an Asian nation over a White European one threatened the West’s White supremacist
mentality and colonialism. Characterizing the Japanese as naturally inferior beings helped quell
Westerners’ rising anxiety over the idea that perhaps the Japanese were not so inferior after all.
Racial and ethnic stereotypes are quite malleable, and the same caricatures used for one
group can be and are often adapted to another group that is deemed as possessing a specific set of
inferior characteristics at a specific time. In the context of the United States, “America’s other”
constantly changes as each new era “demands a new representation of the seditious foreigner,” a
change brought about by differing cultural conditions, economic needs, political exigencies, and
social conflicts.”33 During World War II, many of these centuries-old stereotypes were adapted to the most prevalent and rabid enemy at hand: the Japanese. According to Henry Luce, publisher of Time-Life during World War II, “Americans had to learn to hate Germans, but
31 Dower, War Without Mercy, 108. 32 Dower, War Without Mercy, 105. 33 Ali Behdad, A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005), 11.
21
hating Japs comes natural – as natural as fighting Indians once was.”34 Construction of racial
differences has always been important to the United States’ expansion, both within the ideology
of Manifest Destiny to overtake the continent and later once the United States began expanding
its empire offshore. To midcentury Americans, much like the Native Americans once were, the
Japanese were savages who “adhered to strange, irrational beliefs and failed to abide by the laws
of the ‘civilized’ western tradition. The brutal treatment of Allied prisoners of war... and their
alleged suicidal devotion to the emperor made them... more outrageous foes than the Germans,”
with whom Americans felt they had more cultural affinity.35 In both the United States and
Britain, prior to and following Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were always more hated than the
Germans or the Italians and were considered not just a race apart but more often a species
apart.36
Comparing racial or ethnic groups to animals was not only reserved for the Japanese
during World War II. It was (and continues to be) a centuries-old tactic used to quite literally
dehumanize enemies. In the Western world, these enemies were (and are) often non-White, or even more generally non-Anglo-American. In the United States, Indigenous and Black
individuals have often been portrayed as animals to degrade and dehumanize them and their
culture, and to distance them from the Anglo-American mainstream, not just culturally but
physically. The Japanese were often depicted as apes or monkeys, dogs, vermin such as rats, snakes, and insects (heavily borrowed from Yellow Peril tropes), and other types of animals. The monkey or ape characterization directed towards the Japanese seemed not only to be some of the most common during the war but would also last into the postwar Occupation period. From the
34 “On to Tokyo and What?” Life, May 21, 1945, 32. 35 Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 2. 36 Dower, War Without Mercy, 8.
22 initiation of Japanese conquest in Southeast Asia, starting in late 1941, Western journalists referred to the soldiers as “apes in khaki” and British politicians referred to them as “beastly little monkeys.”37 This image was so ingrained within the Western mindset that it was rumored that
Japan took Singapore through the dense jungle of the Malay Peninsula by swinging from tree to tree.38 An American who spent time in Japan between 1936 and 1941 described the evolution of a moderate Japanese newsman he knew into a “mad dog,” and mad dogs “are just insane animals that should be shot.”39 However, the worst depictions of the Japanese would occur following
Pearl Harbor.
Figure 3: “The Monkey Folk,” from a 1942 issue of Punch, a British magazine.
37 Dower, War Without Mercy, 84. 38 Dower, War Without Mercy, 84. 39 Dower, War Without Mercy, 83.
23
Depictions of the Japanese Following Pearl Harbor
Following the shock of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese sentiment exploded in the United States. White civilization itself was considered to be at stake.40 As John Dower has
written, the attack on Pearl Harbor was, according to American media, “premeditated murder
masked by a toothy smile,” cunningly planned by “yellow bastards.” Private citizens and public
offices made their hatred known: a man chopped down four Japanese cherry blossom trees along
the tidal basin in Washington, D.C. “frustrated that he couldn’t get at the real Japanese,” and the
first man to show up at a recruiting center after Pearl Harbor was quoted as saying that he wanted
“to beat them Japs with my own hands.” Instantaneously, the Japanese went from being considered treacherous and cunning, small monkey-men, wartime intensifications of old Yellow
Peril caricatures, to devolving into something truly monstrous and inhuman, the sadistic and savage “Jap beast,” a new and horrifying evolution of these old tropes.41
Some of the vilest wartime characterizations of the Japanese were those that depicted
them as literal vermin of various non-human species, worthy targets for hunting and
extermination. Following Pearl Harbor, various iterations of “Jap Hunting Licenses,” usually
wallet cards, became popular as widely as California, Kansas, Tennessee, New York, and
Panama, often stating that open season began December 7, 1941 and that there was “no bag limit.” Many of these cards featured images of Japanese as various types of vermin, such as
snakes or skunks, or simply as a grinning head hanging on a wall as a hunter’s trophy.42 The
Department of Conservation in Nashville, Tennessee denied a demand for these licenses and
40 Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 123. 41 Dower, War Without Mercy, 112; Jap Beast and His Plot to Rape the World, Country Press: 1942. 42 “World War II Anti-Japanese ‘Jap Hunting License’ Wallet Card Lot,” Hake’s Auctions, last modified July 10, 2018, https://www.hakes.com/Auction/ItemDetail/221966/WORLD-WAR-II-ANTI-JAPANESE-JAP-HUNTING- LICENSE-WALLET-CARD-LOT. 24 explained that it was because it was “open season on ‘Japs’ - no license required.”43 One propaganda postcard shows a yellow-skinned Japanese soldier skinned and flayed open, hanging from a wall with his stomach down, with “Made in Japan, caught in the Pacific, tanned in the
U.S.A.,” stamped across his back.44
43 Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 1. 44 Babcock & Borough, “Made in Japan,” https://greatwar.digitalscholarship.emory.edu//postcards/emory:b3jbk.
25
Figure 4: “Jap Hunting Licenses.” Most which list an opening date of December 7, 1941, the date of the attack on Pearl Harbor. From Hake’s Auctions.
26
Figure 5: “Made in Japan, caught in the Pacific, tanned in the U.S.A.” An undated postcard produced by Babcock & Borough based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico that depicts a cartoon of a grinning, naked, yellow-skinned Japanese soldier wearing a military hat that has been skinned and is flayed open, belly down, on a wooden background. From Emory University’s Digital Scholarship website.
27
From Leatherneck, the official magazine of the United States Marine Corps, comes a cartoon from 1945 which depicts the “Louseous Japanicas,” an almond-eyed, buck-toothed, horned bug, reminiscent of a louse, with the fur pattern on its tail creating a rising sun.
According to the text accompanying this illustration, the Marine Corps was “especially trained in combatting this type of pestilence” and was “assigned the gigantic task of extermination” of these bugs. The text goes on to state that “...before a complete cure may be effected the origin of the plague, the breeding grounds around the Tokyo area must be completely annihilated.”45
American Marines were being told that Japanese soldiers must not only be defeated in the war, but that the Japanese race must be completely wiped from the face of the planet in order to truly ensure victory and defend White civilization. Ernie Pyle, an American journalist and war correspondent during World War II, stated to his audience that while the enemy in Europe was still horrible and deadly, they “were still people,” whereas the Japanese in the Pacific “were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.” Pyle admitted after seeing some Japanese prisoners that they “gave [him] the creeps.”46
Admiral William Halsey, Jr. told a news conference in 1945 that he believed a “Chinese proverb” that the Japanese race was a product of mating between apes and Chinese criminals.47
45 “Louseous Japanicas,” Leatherneck, March 1945. 46 Ernie Pyle, Last Chapter (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1945), 5. 47 Dower, War Without Mercy, 85.
28
Figure 6: The Louseous Japanicas. Published in the March 1945 edition of Leatherneck, the US Marine Corps’ official magazine. Notice that the text uses genocidal language by suggesting that all Japanese “breeding grounds” should be completely annihilated. This animalization of the Japanese was not just reserved to wartime journalism but crept
into the civilian population through everyday popular culture. In the 1943 Looney Tunes short
“Tokio Jokio,” which is supposed to simulate a Japanese wartime weekly news update (the
“Nipponews”), the first scene depicts a rooster, about to crow, who melts away to give way to a
vulture who, with coke-bottle glasses and a big grin, says in a heavily accented voice, “cock-a-
doodle-doo, please,” as the imperial Japanese flag appears in the background. Later in this short,
a Japanese soldier jumps into a log, where a skunk comes up and puts a clothespin on his nose,
insinuating that the Japanese soldier is even more of an unpredictable nuisance than the skunk itself is.48 At the end of the Popeye cartoon, “Scrap the Japs,” after defeating the Japanese,
48 Tokio Jokio, directed by Noman McCabe (1943; Los Angeles, CA: Leon Schlesinger Productions, 2016), YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy9rGAO-qfc.
29
Popeye tows a “Jap Scrap Repair Ship” with a metal covering over it, full of Japanese soldiers who are chattering nonsense. As the image zooms out, the ship looks increasingly like a cage and the Japanese get on all fours, grow rat tails, and scamper about in a big pile, as their gibberish turns into squeaks.49
Japanese citizens of the United States and Americans of Japanese descent were also
racialized and dehumanized at home. While most Americans differentiated “good Germans”
from the Nazis, the racial and cultural differences between Americans and the Japanese were just
too “natural” and “commonsensical” to most Americans at the time.50 Due to the incorrect belief
that the Japanese were simply unassimilable and naturally incompatible with American virtues
and culture, more than one hundred thousand Japanese individuals and Americans of Japanese descent living on the American West Coast were forcibly sent to internment camps following the
attack on Pearl Harbor. Many Americans, even some who worked in government, believed that
no individual of Japanese descent could not have undying, suicidal loyalty to the emperor, so
these individuals’ property and belongings were either sold or destroyed before they were
transported to internment camps that were located far away from the West Coast, with some as
far east as Arkansas. The ideology of treating the Japanese and individuals of Japanese descent
as animals physically manifested at home as some were kept in makeshift “assembly centers” in
(usually un-mucked out) horse stalls on racetracks or fairgrounds, such as at Tanforan Racetrack
in San Bruno, California, before being sent to the main internment camps farther east. Dr. Seuss
helped the internment effort with his cartoon entitled “Waiting for the Signal from Home...”
showing a mass of stereotypical “Japs” waiting in line down the Pacific Coast of Washington,
49 Scrap the Japs, directed by Seymour Kneitel (1942; Miami, FL: Famous Studios, 2017), Vimeo video, https://vimeo.com/231221592. 50 Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 2.
30
Oregon, and California, waiting to pick up blocks of TNT from a structure labeled “Honorable
5th Column.”51
The Japanese as Super Humans
Wartime depictions of the Japanese were almost always nonhuman, even if they were not directly animals or vermin. By 1942, following the trauma of Pearl Harbor, American and British military experts became almost “morbidly obsessed” with the seemingly invincible foe that the
Japanese had become.52 Now evolved forms of the monkey-men that they were so recently
perceived to be, swinging from trees in Malay jungles with humorously small, the Japanese were
now considered a more daunting enemy than the Germans: they had become the “Japanese
superman.” A month after Pearl Harbor, Secretary of War Henry Stimson gave a speech warning
Americans that the Japanese were “tough, well disciplined, and well equipped.”53 The transition from subhuman to superhuman, from lesser men to supermen, due to one single event was abrupt and jarring, but in both iterations the Japanese were perceived as something other than human.54
The cover of the December 12, 1942 issue of Collier’s magazine commemorated the one-
year anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The illustration portrays Prime Minister Hideki
Tojo as a vampire bat in Japanese military uniform about to drop a bomb marked with skull and
crossbones onto Pearl Harbor below. A series of propaganda posters from the same year created
by Douglas Aircraft Company utilized a character called the “Tokio Kid,” a yellow-skinned
demon-looking depiction of a Japanese soldier, complete with pointed ears, massive drooling
fangs, and long, sharp, claw-like fingernails, often holding a dagger with blood dripping from the
blade. The Tokio Kid was often seen attempting to convince American workers (in broken
51 Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), “Waiting for the Signal from Home...” PM, February 13, 1942. 52 Dower, War Without Mercy, 99. 53 Dower, War Without Mercy, 111. 54 Dower, War Without Mercy, 99. 31
English) to skip work or waste scrap metal and was used to portray the image of the nonhuman
Japanese superman to the American public. Perhaps the scariest threat of this new evolution of
the Yellow Peril bogeyman was not the animalistic, savage, and sadistic “Jap beast,” but the idea
that Japan could potentially lead the “billions” of other Asians against the West as well,
completely overtaking “White civilization.”55 In regard to more popular forms of entertainment,
the Japanese were almost always portrayed as a homogeneous horde - as “photographic prints off the same negative” according to Frank Capra’s Know Your Enemy: Japan.56 This is seen in many
comics and cartoons too, ranging from the illustrations of Dr. Seuss to the Popeye cartoon
“You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap.”57 However, this stereotype came directly from the Japanese
government and military – the phrase “100 million hearts beating as one” was often used to
illustrate the Japanese people’s unity and loyalty to the emperor and nation.
55 Dower, War Without Mercy, 117. 56 Know Your Enemy: Japan, directed by Frank Capra and Joris Ivens (1945; Washington, D.C.: U.S. War Department, 2020), YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG7puijZOWU. 57 You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap, directed by Dan Gordon, written by Jim Tyer and Carl Meyer, (Famous Studios, 1942), https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mzyap.
32
Figure 7: The Tokio Kid. A collage made by the author of various iterations of the racist caricature created by the Douglas Aircraft Company. Some images from Calisphere. The Japanese were completely dehumanized both inside of and outside of the military.
Soldiers who suffered from shell shock and battle fatigue were said to have “gone Asiatic.”58
“Souvenir hunting” was not only widely practiced but encouraged. News accounts of American soldiers collecting and bringing home “war trophies,” usually ears and teeth from sometimes dead, sometimes alive Japanese soldiers, were quite well known during and after the war. In his memoir With the Old Breed, World War II veteran Eugene B. Sledge recorded the story of a
Marine slitting open the cheeks of a wounded Japanese soldier as he carved out his gold teeth with a kabar.59 Soldiers in the Pacific boiled the skin from Japanese skulls to make table ornaments or carved bones to create letter openers.60 In April 1943, The Baltimore Sun ran an
58 Dower, War Without Mercy, 145. 59 E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed (New York: Presidio Press, 2007), 120. 60 Edgar L. Jones, “One War is Enough,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1946, 48-53.
33
article about a local mother who had asked authorities to allow her son to mail her a Japanese
ear.61 One issue of Life published a full-page photograph of a young woman posing with a
Japanese skull her fiancé had sent her, which she decided to name Tojo. It was declared Life’s
“picture of the week.”62 One reader wrote into Time in 1943 to let them know that they
“thoroughly enjoyed reading of the ‘cold-blooded slaughter’ [of the Japanese] ... another good
old American custom I would like to see is nailing a Jap hide on every ’backhouse’ door in
America.”63
61 Dower, War Without Mercy, 65. 62 Life, “Picture of the Week,” May 22, 1944. 63 Time, April 19, 1943, 10.
34
Figure 8: Life magazine’s Picture of the Week, May 22, 1944. A young Arizona war worker poses with a real Japanese skull that her G.I. boyfriend had sent her, which she decided to name “Tojo.”
35
Postwar
Following the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the
surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945, the Japanese were still seen as the enemy. A Gallup poll
showed that most Americans even wished that there had been more atomic bombs dropped on
Japan.64 Not only did Americans need to become civil toward their newest political and
economic ally but in the context of the Cold War, Japan served as a “bastion of freedom” in Asia
and the Pacific against the rise of communism propagated by the Soviet Union and China.
Therefore, the United States’ State Department “sought to transform Japan’s public reputation
quickly from a menacing and brutish war machine into a softer, friendlier nation.”65 While
Americans were able to be sold on “accepting their old enemy as a new ally,”66 this did not mean
viewing Japan as equal. During the Occupation, one of the most prevalent characterizations of
the Japanese was that of the simian “monkey-man” having become a charming yet disgruntled little pet, stubborn yet still succumbing to the wills of his new owner, the United States.67 The
cover of the September 1945 issue of Leatherneck, celebrating the victory over Japan, was a
cartoon drawn by Fred Lasswell of a terribly upset looking monkey in Japanese military uniform
sitting on the shoulder of a rejoicing G.I.68 The characterization of the Japanese as the monkey
who “imitates his trainer,”69 the United States during and following the Occupation, would last
even further into the postwar, post-occupation era.
64 Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 3. 65 Meghan Warner Mettler, How to Reach Japan by Subway: America’s Fascination with Japanese Culture, 1945- 1965 (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 3. 66 Mettler, How to Reach Japan by Subway, 4. 67 Dower, War Without Mercy, 13. 68 Fred Lasswell, cover image, Leatherneck, September 15, 1945. 69 Dower, War Without Mercy, 85. 36
Figure 9: The cover of the September 15, 1945 issue of Leatherneck. Celebrating Japan’s surrender and the new Allied Occupation of Japan, a Japanese soldier is depicted as a cute yet disgruntled little monkey in uniform sitting on the shoulder of a rejoicing G.I. One of the most significant works that assisted in the State Department’s goal to transform Japan’s image at home was Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, an anthropological study of Japan. The work was published in 1946, just one year following the beginning of the Allied Occupation of Japan. The study was the result of “anthropology at a distance,” meaning that Benedict could not visit Japan to conduct research during the war, nor had she ever visited Japan prior. Therefore, Benedict’s work relied primarily on accounts from
Japanese individuals living in the United States and Westerners who had lived in Japan along with literature and movies.70 According to Benedict, the Japanese’s “reliance upon order and hierarchy and our faith in freedom and equality are poles apart.”71 Yet, following the war, the
70 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1946), 8. 71 Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 315.
37
Japanese were taking “the first great step toward social change by identifying aggressive warfare as an ‘error’ and a lost cause.”72 Benedict concludes the work with the sentiment that “Japan can set herself to prove how well she has learned the lesson that imperialistic dynastic enterprises are no road to honor.” Ultimately, the United States would allow Japan to “learn her lesson” and to prove herself to be simultaneously the perfect younger sibling, pet, and apprentice, an arrangement that would last well into the Cold War.
Conclusion
Following Japan’s defeat during World War II and its immediate subjugation as an occupied territory of the American empire, the United States realized that it had to change the way in which it thought about Japan and the Japanese. As our newly found “friends,” and particularly as a proponent of democracy and a bulwark against communism in Asia, it was now counterintuitive for Americans to view its new ally as one of any of the horrendous, racist caricatures the Japanese became during wartime and to want to hunt them down for sport.
Postwar interpretations of Asia and Japan would be less searing than previous interpretations of the rat-like Yellow Peril or the fang-toothed “Jap beast,” yet they were still crafted with
American exceptionalism and perceived cultural superiority in mind. In the postwar era, Japan needed to be reconfigured in the eyes of the United States to become more straight forward and accessible. Japan would now be portrayed to the American public as an obedient and peaceful land, yet one incapable of producing anything authentic or on its own. In the postwar era, Japan would be characterized as feminine and infantile, not as the fang-toothed, animalistic Japanese soldier of but a few years prior. This transformation allowed for postwar Americans to feel more
72 Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 43. 38 comfortable with our new Japanese allies and the new cultural exchanges and fusions they would experience, yet still feel that they and their own were superior.
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CHAPTER II. “BORROWED FROM WAY BACK WHEN”: POSTWAR JAPANESE
COUNTRY & WESTERN AND CONTRASTING IDEALS OF MODERNITY
Being one of the most predominant styles of “White music” in the United States before,
during, and after World War II, Japan got a taste for country & western during the Occupation as
it was one of the music styles, along with jazz, that could be utilized to push forth the Supreme
Commander for the Allied Power’s (SCAP’s) agenda for the Americanization of Japan. While
country & western music may seem as American as a style of music can get, the country &
western music Japan was exposed to (along with what most Americans were exposed to at the
same time) was a fabricated image. As many cultures do when exposed to something new,
Japanese performers took this music style and “Japanized” it to make it something uniquely their
own. However, when Japanese performers attempted to sell their now doubly fabricated image of
country & western music back to the United States, it made the postwar Japanese seem even
more behind the times and out of touch than Japanese country & western performers had
expected.
While American perceptions of the Japanese had improved since the end of war, these
perceptions did not change in a very neat or linear fashion. The postwar American public’s
attitude towards the Japanese largely depended on how cultural outlets were reporting and how
geopolitical goals were improving or worsening at any given time.73 One minute, the Japanese may had been postwar Americans’ newest ally or even their charming little pet, a subservient geisha, and the next they may once again have been considered as any one of the many Cold War
Orientalist tropes that postwar Americans decided fit Japan and its people. This also happened
73 Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 10. 40
regarding Japanese popular music in the United States. Unfortunately for Japanese country &
western performers, they would attempt to break into the American market just as the
significance of the cowboy in American popular culture began to dwindle.
Cowboys and Indians, or GIs and Japanese?
As mentioned in the first chapter, during World War II, fighting the Japanese in the
Pacific Theater was sometimes compared to the supposed hallowed American tradition of
fighting Indians out on the frontier. It was Henry Luce, publisher of Time-Life during World War
II, that stated, “Americans had to learn to hate Germans, but hating Japs comes natural – as
natural as fighting Indians once was.”74 Just two years later, in 1947, contemporary historians were already publishing similar sentiments. Samuel Eliot Morison, who was also the biographer of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, stated in The Struggle for Guadalcanal, the fifth volume in his series History of United States Naval Operations in World War II:
This may shock you, reader; but it is exactly how we felt. We were fighting no civilized,
knightly war. We cheered when the Japs were dying. We were back to primitive days of
Indian fighting on the American frontier; no holds barred and no quarter. The Japs
wanted it that way, thought they could thus terrify an 'effete democracy'; and that is what
they got, with all the additional horrors of war that modern science can produce.75
74 “On to Tokyo and What?” Life, May 21, 1945, 32. 75 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Struggle for Guadalcanal: August 1942-February 1943 (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1947), 187. 41
Essentially, American soldiers’ near-genocidal treatment of the Japanese in the Pacific Theater
was justified as it was an extension of not only their heritage but also their right and natural
instinct as Americans to fight an exotified Other out in this Far Western frontier.
Emily Rosenberg, professor emerita of history at University of California, Irvine, argues
in her work A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory that one of the reasons
why Americans were so shaken after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was because it echoed
the United States’ “frontier-fighting heritage.” It was President Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy
address, which utilized language such as “infamy,” “treachery,” and “an unprovoked and
dastardly attack,” that helped develop what Rosenberg refers to as an “infamy framework.”76
This infamy framework, a basic allegory which predated the attack on Pearl Harbor itself77, found its origin in the remembrance of two of the most significant legends (yet defeats) of the
American frontier: the Battle of the Alamo and Custer’s Last Stand.
Like Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Alamo was “a massacre by racialized primitives that rallied righteous revenge.”78 Following the attack, “Remember the Alamo!” would become a
slogan Americans would remember, just like how they would “Remember Pearl Harbor!” about
one hundred and ten years later. The December 9, 1941 edition of the Portland Oregonian
published a catchy song: “Let’s remember Pearl Harbor/As we go to meet the foe/Let’s
remember Pearl Harbor/As we did the Alamo.”79 Daniel Peña, a professor of English at
University of Houston–Downtown, states that the remembrance of the Alamo has always been
dedicated to the American fear of the other: specifically, the Mexican body, Mexican invasion,
76 Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2003), 12. 77 Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live, 32. 78 Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live, 12. 79 Don Reid and Sammy Kaye, “Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor,” (Republish Music, 1941).
42 and Mexican agency. H.W. Brands, the chair of the History Department at the University of
Texas at Austin, writes that the Battle of the Alamo was a “military mistake of mythic proportions” but became a legend about White heroes who were pushed to the limits by a tyrannical, racialized Other.80
Remembrance of George Custer’s Last Stand and his army’s defeat at the Battle of Little
Bighorn could also be found in the way Americans reacted to and remembered Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor and these two legendary frontier defeats took place on the “margins of civilization”
- the former in the Pacific Theater, the latter two out on the frontier in the American West -
“which poses the most extreme test of the culture’s value and its power to shape history.”
Rosenberg asserts that ultimately Pearl Harbor acted as a refresher of the “last-stand legend.”
These legendary frontier defeats on the margins of civilization delivered by barbarous, savage, and feminized Others from the East were reflected in the attack. It was only “natural,” considering Americans’ frontier-fighting heritage, that “righteous revenge, even expressed in divine retribution,” would be Americans’ reaction to such a humiliating defeat as Pearl Harbor.81
The Evolution of the Western and the Singing Cowboy
While westerns have been filmed since the late nineteenth century, their history dates back even before the advent of film. Forerunners of the American western dime novel appeared as early as the 1830s, and by the late nineteenth century these western stories had become quite a popular form of entertainment and pulp magazines also began to print western stories. Even so, the cowboy was not the original hero of most of these novels and stories. It was usually the
Indian scout, prairie guide, road agent, or buffalo hunter who was the center of attention in these
80 Daniel Peña, “Remember the Alamo (Differently),” Texas Observer, August 22, 2017, https://www.texasobserver.org/remember-alamo-differently/. 81 Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live, 13. 43
early westerns.82 In 1882, Buffalo Bill Cody developed his first Wild West Show in his hometown of North Platte, Nebraska as a Fourth of July celebration and by the next year it would go on to tour the United States for twenty-five years. In 1887, the Wild West Show toured
Europe and received royal acclaim after performing for Queen Victoria in London. Buffalo Bill
reached the peak of his fame in 1893 when he performed the show adjacent to the World’s Fair
in Chicago.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Thomas Edison had invented the movie camera and
began to make early, crude films that were shown in vaudeville houses. Edison had made some
short films of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley shooting guns and in 1898 the first western film
premiered, a three-minute-long movie called Cripple Creek Bar-Room, which featured actors
dressed as cowboys drinking at what seems to be a saloon bar. In 1903, the first feature film, The
Great Train Robbery, was developed as a ten-minute-long western. With Broncho Billy
Anderson’s development as the first western hero character on film, he filmed his movies during the first three decades of the twentieth century in the wilds of Northern California, notably filming many in the Niles Canyon in what is now the city of Fremont, California, about thirty-
five miles southeast of San Francisco, and then eventually moved the industry to Hollywood. It
was Broncho Billy who developed the modern, twentieth century image of the cowboy.
It was in these silent films where the cowboy star began to develop. With the introduction
of “talkie” films in 1927 with The Jazz Singer, by 1932 the singing cowboy emerged. In 1935,
Gene Autry would star in his first feature, Tumbling Tumbleweeds.83 These singing, cinematic
cowboys helped developed country & western as a form of popular music in five major ways: 1)
82 Warren French, “The Cowboy in the Dime Novel,” The University of Texas Studies in English 30 (1951): 219- 234, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20776038. 83 Don Cusic, The Cowboy in Country Music: An Historical Survey with Artist Profiles (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2011), 5-8.
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“cowboy songs” now became a form of popular music, rather than folk music; 2) country music moved out of the South and became a national phenomenon; 3) it showed that there was money to be made in the industry; 4) it changed the image of country music from hillbilly to attractive singers wearing flawless cowboy costumes; and 5) cowboy music now had a wealth of songs to pull from that was created specifically for popular consumption. It was the singing cowboys of
Hollywood from 1935-1950 that were responsible for making country & western music a popular genre but also completed changed and updated its image for wider consumption.84
The Imagery and (Fabricated) Authenticity of American Country & Western
Most know the story of the birth of American rock and roll: that it was born largely as a combination of country music (the “White side” of rock and roll) and of blues, jazz, and R&B
(the “Black side”). However, while Black music styles have always been extremely authentic as they originally never reached commercial success (i.e., success with White audiences) largely due to racism, country music was fabricated from the start. Even before the phonograph was making its way into homes, country music was used to advertise products and radio stations advertised their performers as “hillbillies” and country bumpkins when singers would show up in their Sunday best to perform at barn dances, fiddling contests radio stations, and recording studios.
With the help of the popularity of western films, the symbol of country & western music evolved in the first six decades of the twentieth century from its earliest incarnation as “old- timer” mountain men to “hillbillies” to rough-riding cowboys. Eventually, the image of the
“rhinestone” cowboy that is still associated with the “Nashville-ization” of country music largely formed in the late 1950s through mid-1960s to have country singers differentiate themselves
84 Cusic, The Cowboy in Country Music, 9.
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from rockabilly performers.85 There was somewhat of a geographic dissonance between what
“real” country music was and the imagery that it took on. While country music really derived
from the folk music of individuals of Scots-Irish descent living in the Appalachian mountain range, the image of the singing cowboy is inherently western, and the image of country music has remained as such. While this is confusing even within the confines of the United States, this poetic escapism of the popularity of the cowboy, and specifically the singing cowboy, is even
more complex across borders.
While a cowboy in Japan may seem like one of the strangest possible phenomena to
occur, it is grounded in some historical reality. When Commodore Matthew C. Perry returned to
Japan in 1854 after his initial convoy requesting Japan open for trade, he provided a lavish
dinner and entertainment for the Japanese commissioners onboard his flagship, the Powhatan.
One of the forms of entertainment that Perry provided was “negro minstrelsy” that was
apparently so good that some of the American sailors onboard compared Perry’s minstrel show
to Christy’s Minstrels, an act that was currently playing in New York City.86 The Japanese were
so fascinated by Perry’s minstrel concert, Japan’s first exposure to American popular music, that
the minstrel troupe continued to perform during the convoy’s stay in Japan under the name of the
Japanese Olio Minstrels, that some observers preserved these shows for posterity via
illustrations. A few of these illustrations still survive and in them the backing band clearly plays
American instruments that would soon come to be associated with country & western music:
guitars, banjos, fiddles, bones, tambourines, and triangles.87 In both Japan and the United States,
85 Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 55-94. 86 Victor Fell Yellin, “Mrs. Belmont, Matthew Perry, and the ’Japanese Minstrels,’” American Music 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 257-275. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3052600. 87 John W. Dower, “Encounters: Facing ‘West,’” Black Ships & Samurai: Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan (1853-1854), MIT Visualizing Cultures, last modified 2010,
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the popularity of the minstrel show would pave the way for country & western which has roots in
the minstrel tradition via “race music,” hokum blues, and hillbilly music, along with a set of
characters that would show up in early country & western songs.
Figure 10: A Japanese rendering of Commodore Matthew Perry’s “Japanese Olio Minstrels” by Shiryo Hensanjo, 1854. Note the focus on the performers’ instruments: bones, guitars, banjos, fiddles, a triangle, and a tambourine. From John Dower’s “Black Ships & Samurai” on MIT’s Visualizing Cultures website.
Japanese Country & Western and the Diplomacy of the Cowboy
As mentioned above, western films and country & western music started to become most
popular in the United States in the mid-to-late 1930s and 1940s. At the same time, due to the
Allied victory of World War II, the old imperial regimes and cultural significance of Europe, particularly Britain and France, were being displaced by that of the United States, which had come out on top following the end of World War II. The American empire expanded its grasp and initiated occupations in Germany and Japan. The United States expanded its cultural hegemony across the globe and along with it went the premier American icon: the cowboy.
https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/black_ships_and_samurai/bss_essay05.html; Shiryo Hensanjo, The Japanese Olio Minstrels, screened watercolor, 1853-1854, University of Japan, http://www.cottonhistories.com/items/show/1427.
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According to Yosuke Kitazawa, a reissue producer at Light in the Attic Records, the
American Occupation of Japan “sw[u]ng open the saloon doors to the Western world.”88 In
Occupied Japan (and in other locations around the world around the same time) western films and music emerged as popular forms of entertainment emanating from the United States.
MacArthur himself enjoyed watching westerns as a hobby and form of relaxation while acting as
SCAP in Japan.89 Soon the Far East Network (FEN), a network of American radio and television
broadcasts, would be established. WVTR, the first station of FEN, was established just days after
Japan’s surrender. By the late 1940s, the station was already playing country & western music,
particularly on its hour-long program “Chuck Wagon Time.” While FEN’s primary audience was
the American troops stationed in Japan, they became popular among Japanese listeners and
provided helpful for those learning English. These radio stations were where most Japanese
would first hear country & western music and would help it remain influential. For example,
Chuckwagon Boys would become the name of an early, very popular Japanese country &
western group.90
88 Yosuke Kitazawa, “Y’All Come: Japan’s Country Music Scene,” PBS SoCal, last modified September 11, 2019, https://www.pbssocal.org/country-music/yall-come-japans-country-music-scene/. 89 John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 205. 90 Kitazawa, “Y’All Come”; Michael Furmanovsky, “American Country Music in Japan: Lost Piece in the Popular Music History Puzzle,” Popular Music and Society 31, issue 3 (2008): 360.
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Figure 11: A Far East Network advertisement showing Japanese broadcast locations. From “Y’All Come.” Initially, Japanese country & western music was a deliberate imitation of American
country & western. This is not surprising as most of the early country & western performers
relied on the approval of G.I.s, who made up the bulk of their audiences both inside and outside
of American military bases. During these early stages of the genre, not much thought was given
to the idea of performing country & western in Japanese. These Japanese musicians pulled off
the remarkable task of not only singing English-language country & western music but even enunciating in a way reminiscent of rural Whites of the American South, an amazing feat to think of when considering the enormous cultural and linguistic boundaries and obstacles this task presented. Many music aficionados and cultural historians alike have dismissed and lambasted these talented Japanese country & western performers efforts as simple, silly mimicry, but such intense dedication to the emotional and aesthetic dimensions of American country & western music is hard not to be impressed by.91
91 Michael Furmanovsky, “‘Rokabiri,’ Student Radicalism, and the Japanization of American Pop Culture, 1956- 1960,” 国際文化研究 (2008): 2, https://www.academia.edu/34080784/_Rokabiri_Student_Radicalism_and_the_Japanization_of_American_Pop_Cul ture_1955_60.
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Due to the economic situation of Occupied Japan, many country & western musicians had to keep singing covers of well-known cowboy songs in English. However, those that came from higher class backgrounds were able to start singing American country & western music in
Japanese. In most cases, the English lyrics were translated by Hattori or Iwatani Tokiko and then reworked to fit the song’s original melody.92 Alongside of this came the trend to mix both
English and Japanese lyrics into the cover, often with the title line or chorus of the song in
English and the rest in Japanese, still a popular trope found in Asian music today.
Kazyua Kosaka, the First J-Pop Star
It was Kazuya Kosaka (小坂一也), arguably Japan’s first pop star, who made the strongest strides to perform country & western in both English and Japanese. Kosaka started his music career in a group that performed Hawaiian music in American servicemen’s clubs, motivated by access to food and hard to find musical instruments.93 Strongly influenced by
Kuroda Biji, arguably the first western singer in Japan, Kosaka became the lead singer of the
Wagon Masters, a country & western group formed by Ihara Takatada, who had been inspired by
American cowboy movies and had previously been an instrumental member of the first cowboy or western group in Japan, the Chuckwagon Boys. Kosaka was willing to do whatever he could to improve his English and was often asked by White G.I.s from the American South to play their favorite songs. Kosaka would ask the G.I.s to write down the lyrics so he could listen for them on military radio and memorize them for the following week’s show.94
While very proud of his record number of songs recorded in English, over one hundred according to his autobiography, Kosaka and the Wagon Masters decided to sing classic western
92 Kazuya Kosaka, Made in Occupied Japan (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 1990), 219. 93 Kosaka, Made in Occupied Japan, 85-91. 94 Kosaka, Made in Occupied Japan, 111.
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and cowboy songs in Japanese. The Wagon Masters’ best-known song, “Wagon Master,” was
written by Kosaka in English in 1954, increasingly influenced by American country & western
and honky-tonk singer Lefty Frizzell who some suggest Kosaka’s voice sounded similar to.95
Although Kosaka preferred singing in English, the band realized the success that singing popular
American country & western songs in Japanese could usher them. While the Wagon Masters
recorded Elvis Presley’s “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” in 1955, it was their predominantly
Japanese cover of “Jailhouse Rock” in 1956 that took Japan by storm.
Kosaka’s rendition appealed to both young women thanks to his boyish charm and to
young men which gave them a more youthful and energetic image to look to than any of the
previous western groups had offered. By the end of the year, Kosaka was arguably one of the
most famous popular singers in Japan which led to a solo record deal with Columbia Records,
most notably including Japanese covers of cowboy movie songs such as “Kaw-Liga,” “The
Ballad of Davy Crockett,” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Kosaka was asked by Columbia
Records executives to sing a new kayōkyoku (pop ballad) song, “Seishun Cycling” (「青春サイ
クリング -“Youth Cycling”), which he was ambivalent about as it sharply contrasted with his
western image. The song became a nation-wide hit in 1957, elevating Kazuya Kosaka to the status of what arguably can be considered Japan's first pop star. In a proto-Elvis like fashion,
within a year Kosaka was offered movie roles and left the music scene all together to focus on
his acting career.96
95 Toru Mitsui, “Far Western in the Far East: The Historical Development of Country and Western in Post-War Japan,” Hybridity: Journal of Cultures Texts and Identities 1, no. 2 (2001): 65-67. 96 Furmanovsky, “‘Rokabiri,’” 4-5; Furmanovsky, “American Country Music in Japan,” 363-365.
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Figure 12: Kazuya Kosaka, arguably the first J-pop idol. From Postwar Japanese Pop blog.
Bringing It All Back Home: Japanese Country & Western in the U.S.
Kosaka’s departure from the music industry allowed for the rise of rockabilly. While
country & western would no longer be in the spotlight, similar to its backburner placement in the
United States as rock and roll began to emerge, it would remain an influential music style in
Japan for decades and can still be found today. One reason that such a strong interest in western
music and aesthetics may have lasted so long in Japan could have been Rickey Holden’s
performances in Japan, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.97 Between October 1957 and
April 1958, Rickey Holden performed eighteen different times in Japan, from as far north as
Sapporo to as far south as Kumamoto. Holden was an American square- and folk-dance teacher,
researcher, caller, record producer, and author who was born in Tucson, Arizona and learned
97 Danielle Fosler-Lussier and Eric Fosler-Lussier, “Database of Cultural Presentations: Accompaniment to Music and America's Cold War Diplomacy,” version 1.1, last modified 1 April 2015, http://musicdiplomacy.org/database.html.
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ballroom dance in Austin, Texas.98 While not much detail is known about Holden’s sponsored
performances in West, South, and East Asia, one can assume with Japan’s country & western
boom so closely at hand that Holden’s visit continued to inspire Japanese lovers of all things
“western.”
One such country & western holdout was Jimmie Tokita (ジミー時田), one of the
biggest names in Japanese country & western. Born Keisuke Tokita (時田圭介) in Manchuria,
then Japanese-controlled Manchukuo, in 1936, Tokita renamed himself after American country
& western, folk, and blues musician Jimmie Rodgers. Tokita formed his first country & western
band while in high school and was quickly invited to play at American military bases and at
clubs for servicemen. Being born in Manchuria, perhaps it is no big surprise that Tokita became
so enchanted with the symbolism and imagery of the western. According to film studies scholar
Stephen Teo, during the years leading up to World War II, Manchuria was somewhat similar to
the American western frontier and serves as a geographic and cultural parallel in many ways.
The Japanese invasion of Manchuria initiated in 1931, and by 1932 it had become the
Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Manchuria was a relatively barren, desert-like land that
was diverse in the sense that people of many ethnicities lived and labored in the area. It was also
very resource-heavy, which is one of the reasons why imperial and industrial Japan wanted it so
badly, and there was a sense of hegemony of one group, as this was during the height of Japan's
empire, similar to America and its burgeoning imperialism developing with manifest destiny in
the West. Director of the 2008 Manchurian Western The Good, The Bad, The Weird, Kim Jee-
woon has said that Manchuria had always been “a melting pot of all races and various cultures.”
98 Ron Houston, “Rickey Holden,” The Society for Folk Dance Historians (SFDH), last modified 2018, https://www.sfdh.us/encyclopedia/holden_r.html.
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Teo argues that 1930s Manchuria represented “a geographic space in which border-crossing is endemic and imperial-national interests (traditionally involving Russia, China, Japan, and Korea) are intertwined,” much like the American West.99
Jimmie Tokita would become so popular that one of his filmed performances, perhaps
from a program called Tokyo Jamboree, would be shown on mainstream American television. In
1966, Jimmie Tokita and his Mountain Playboys appeared on an episode of The Jimmy Dean
Show with two other Japanese country & western ensembles backing him, Keiichi Teramoto &
Country Gentlemen and Minoru Harada & Wagon Aces, along with female solo singer Chiyako
Saito. Jimmy Dean dubbed this performance the “Japanese Grand Ole Opry.” In this five- minute-long clip, Tokita and the backing bands play two traditional American country & western songs, “Y’all Come,” and “Love Letters in the Sand,” Saito performs “A Dear John Letter,” and the final song is Tokita and Saito singing a duet of “You Are My Sunshine,” all of which are sung in English. In between each song, Tokita gives a bit of commentary, mainly in English but with a bit of Japanese thrown in and does so in the mimicked speaking style of the American
South mixed with the natural twang of his Japanese accent, the accent of which so many
Japanese country & western singers, like Tokita and Kazuya Kosaka, became experts. Laughter from Jimmy Dean’s audience is dispersed through the clip, particularly when Tokita speaks.
Something else significant to note is that while Jimmie Tokita and all of the male performers
were dressed in traditional “cowboy” attire, collared shirts, denim jeans, boots, and cowboy hats,
Chiyako Saito wore a floral, light-colored kimono, still emphasizing her Japanese femininity.100
99 Stephen Teo, Eastern Westerns: Film and Genre Outside and Inside Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2017), 63. 100The Jimmy Dean Show, Episode 80, ABC, February 18, 1966.
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Figure 13: Jimmie Tokita on The Jimmy Dean Show, February 8, 1966. Pre-recorded as part of the “Japanese Grand Ole Opry.” Behind Tokita is a very young Takeshi Terauchi.
Figure 14: Chiyako Saito on The Jimmy Dean Show.
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Conclusion
Why did Americans react so viscerally to the Japanese Grand Ole Opry? After all,
Japanese country & western music was initially crafted with a specifically American audience in
mind. These Japanese country & western performers were not just copying, or “aping,” but were
crafting a completely new musical phenomenon. Why were American G.I.s in Occupied Japan so
enthralled with Japanese country & western music that performers would specifically get invited
to play in clubs whereas a Japanese country & western band performing on a mainstream
American television show was seen as something strange and silly? Alongside of these two
circumstances happening nearly two decades apart from one another, to use the quote once again
from Michael Bourdaghs’ Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-
pop, “A Japanese singing American pop ‘straight’ was certainly acceptable in Japan, but in the
United States, it could only be viewed as an exotic joke.”101 At the same time, while the cowboy
was seen as a symbol of progress and Westernization, and specifically Americanization, in Japan
– even being used up into the Group Sounds era of Japanese popular music by hugely popular
bands such as The Spiders and The Tigers – by the mid-1960s with the rise of rock and roll and
the fall of country music in the United States, the cowboy was now a symbol of the sepia-toned
past to Americans: nothing but old, dusty, and outdated.
While the Japanese cowboy did not gain much popularity in the United States, and
perhaps retained their “inferiority complex to America” like idol Kazuya Kosaka described
himself as having in his autobiography, the fact that the Japanese cowboy even appeared on
mainstream American television is a feat unto itself.102 The image of the Japanese cowboy
101 101 Michael K. Bourdaghs, Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop (New York: Columbia Press, 2012), 100. 102 Kosaka, Made in Occupied Japan, 3.
56 allowed for Japanese musicians to present a masculine image to the United States and to
Americans in Japan, yet one that was locked far away in the distant past. America’s apathetic reaction to Japanese country & western music being presented back in the music style’s home showed Americans’ postwar perception of the Japanese as children who were still immaturely and embarrassingly imitating the previous antics as a cry of attention from their older sibling.
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CHAPTER III: FROM “TRANSOCEANIC MUTILIATIONS” TO “SUKIYAKI”: THE
WILTING OF MASCULINE JAPAN AND THE CREATION OF A POSTWAR
“ORIENTAL EDEN”
In the summer of 1963, the United States finally caught wind of what Japan had been developing in terms of popular music. At the age of twenty-one, Japanese rockabilly singer Kyu
Sakamoto, with a song sung entirely in Japanese that had previously become a hit in Japan, became the number one performer in the United States. Via the complex geopolitical relationship that the United States and Japan were upholding and postwar Americans’ latest obsession with all things “exotic,” a mere decade following the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan a young
Japanese man would become the United States’ most beloved singer. While postwar Japanese performers like Sakamoto would attempt to break into the Western market, the West’s postwar perceptions of Japan and Japanese people would largely influence how these bands would fare outside Japan. Ironically, almost instantaneously after Japan’s defeat in World War II (and the internment of more than one hundred thousand Japanese individuals and Americans of Japanese descent on American soil), the United States embraced yet another of its “Japan crazes” that it would experience since initial contact with Japan.
American “Japan Crazes”
The postwar period’s “Japan craze” was a direct descendent of the Victorian Japan craze that swept the West only about a generation prior to the Second World War. Inspired by the
French Japonisme art movement that was popular during the latter half of the nineteenth century, near the turn of the twentieth century Japanese exhibits at international expositions in the United
States astonished and enchanted Victorian Americans with romantic fantasies of an enchanted land of rice paddies, pagodas, cherry blossoms, gorgeous artisan handcrafted goods, beautiful 58
women, and cute children – an “Oriental Eden.” Travel guides, missionary tales, and stories from
wealthy European and American travelers “depicted Japan as small, childlike, and feminized.”103
A contemporary American historian, Henry Adams, referred to Japan as a “toy-world” in which people lived in “doll-house[s].” Around the same time, Americans and Europeans began to most closely associate Japan with handcrafted, porcelain dolls. These dolls, often called “Jap dolls” or
“Jappies,” were initially meant for little girls to play with but became immensely popular among
Western women who would purchase them as souvenirs or receive them as gifts and utilize them as décor. These porcelain Japanese dolls became so popular that they appeared in advertisements, illustrations, children’s books, and other forms of popular culture in the United
States. They became so pervasive during the Victorian era that they influenced not just how
Japanese women and children were seen by Americans at the time but how Japan and Japanese people were perceived as a whole.104 Post-World War II Americans did not simply pull their
fantastical perceptions of Japan and the Japanese from out of thin air. Their thoughts and
assumptions were left over from the Victorian dollhouse days where Japan itself was seen as a
diminutive toy-land and the Japanese people were relegated to the role of miniature, decorative
playthings.
The Shibui Craze
Japan and Japanese culture as décor physically manifested itself in postwar America
through a fad engendering the shibui aesthetic. Acting as a chronological extension of the
racializations against the Japanese that were dominant in American society during the war, or as associate professor of history at Upper Iowa University Meghan Warner Mettler phrased it,
103 Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 21. 104 Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 23.
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“ignorant and duplicitous at best, maniacal and sadistic at worst,” America’s postwar obsession with shibui allowed for Americans to “hold race-based assumptions [about Japan and Japanese individuals] without appearing to be racist.”105 America’s fascination with shibui facilitated the
postwar transformation of the culture of Japan, Japanese people, and Japanese culture in the
American imaginary as being submissive, feminine, unchanging, and doll-like.
Shibui is an adjective that quite literally means an astringent or bitter taste, but by 1960 it
became popularized by “experts and tastemakers” who adapted it to represent their consensus on
how Japanese culture and aesthetics were to be portrayed in America. Shibui came to represent a
“particular, minimalist Japanese aesthetic” that was often translated as “tastefully austere” or
“beautifully imperfect.”106 The shibui aesthetic became most popular among the postwar
American upper-middle class through ikebana (flower arranging), bonsai, Japonesque (or
generally “Oriental”) architecture in homes and gardens, calligraphy, and Zen Buddhism. Mettler
argues that these traditions appealed to postwar American consumers because they were “exotic
exports from a culture newly rediscovered and... could reflect and reinforce [postwar
Americans’] own middle-class values.” This was largely because Japanese and, in general,
“Oriental” art and culture were interpreted as simplistic and honest and “could encourage the
qualities of humility and personal restraint.”37 Mettler adds that Americans also “embrace[d]
shibui culture because it appeared both foreign and familiar, ancient and modern, distinctly
Other... this image of Japanese culture as undeniably foreign yet still recognizable coincided
perfectly with the way policymakers wanted the American public to view the people of Japan as
well.”107 American interest in the shibui aesthetic shifted the view of Japan from “threateningly
105 Mettler, How to Reach Japan by Subway, 12-13. 106 Mettler, How to Reach Japan by Subway, 10. 107 Mettler, How to Reach Japan by Subway, 11.
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hyper masculine to serenely feminine.”108 Perhaps purposefully, many of the cultural phenomena
that became popular as a part of the shibui craze, such as interior decorating and flower
arranging, were typically feminine pursuits anyway.
The Wilting of Masculine Japan
During the war, as described in chapter one, almost every Western representation of the
Japanese depicted them as homogenous beings: not only were they treacherous, cunning, and
vile sub-human beasts, but the Japanese were also almost exclusively male - the military
uniform-wearing “Jap beast.” Postwar journalists realized that the stereotype of the Japanese as
“little yellow beasts with buck teeth and glasses” needed to be counteracted, and this was largely
done by utilizing images of beautiful women or cute children.109 One of the many ways this was
accomplished was through a series of semi-pornographic cartoons that were first published in the
Far East edition of the Navy Times. Illustrated by Bill Hume, a navy officer who was stationed in
Japan during the Occupation, Babysan was the Euro-American soldier's fantasy of a Japanese
woman: a pin-up girl who had nothing but undying loyalty to her G.I. boyfriend.110 In the 1958
Jerry Lewis film, The Geisha Boy, the adorable and helpless orphaned boy Mitsuo appears much
more often and stands in stark contrast from his aunt’s intimidatingly tall boyfriend, Ryuzo, a
Japanese baseball player.
In cases where Japanese culture and people could not be feminized, they were aged.
While samurai movies and Zen Buddhism became popular outside of Japan and in the West
during the postwar period as well, the masculine attributes of these portions of Japanese culture
were safely locked away in Japan’s distant, Edo-era past. “As relics of a bygone era,” these
108 Mettler, How to Reach Japan by Subway, 13. 109 Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 27. 110 Bill Hume, Babysan: A Private Look at the Japanese Occupation (Tokyo: Kasuga Boeki K.K., 1953); Bill Hume, Babysan’s World: The Hume’n Slant on Japan (Ruthland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1956). 61 samurai and Buddhist holy men played into the “oriental monk” trope, becoming the passive and compliant male counterpart to the submissively accommodating geisha, portraying Japan as the wise but weakened old man whose strength and capability lay behind him.111 It was this preconceived notion of Japan that informed U.S. State Department’s “Japan hands” as they approached Japanese culture “as continuous and unchanging” and presumed “that the way
Japanese people thought and behaved in the 1950s was the same as they had thought and behaved in the twelfth century, always according to the same timeless patterns.”112 Therefore, the American public perceived Japan similarly. These depictions of Japan as feminine, weak, and unchanging would influence how postwar Japanese popular musicians would be seen by the
West and would affect their presence on the global market.
111 Mettler, How to Reach Japan by Subway, 15. 112 Mettler, How to Reach Japan by Subway, 7.
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Figure 15: Jap Beast and His Plot to Rape the World, 1942. Two Japanese soldiers stand over a White woman groveling on the ground, potentially about to hit her in the head with the butt of their rifles.
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Figure 16: The cover of Babysan: A Private Look at the Japanese Occupation. From 1953, this was one of the first published collections of Bill Hume’s comics about Babysan, every Allied soldier’s dream girl during the Occupation of Japan. Notice the complete reversal of the male gaze from the Jap Beast publication above.
Setting the Stage: The American Occupation
The United States began its postwar occupation of Japan on August 28, 1945, after Japan
had surrendered and Emperor Hirohito accepted the terms of the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration in
which President Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill agreed that Japan would
unconditionally surrender, lose its empire, pay reparations, disarm completely and permanently,
and that “stern justice” would be served to the war criminals.113 Less than a month later, General
Douglas MacArthur arrived in Tokyo and set several strict laws that limited interactions between
American GIs and Japanese civilians. General MacArthur did not just wish to instate American
ideals of liberty and democracy and only have a military occupation of Japan, he also wanted an
113 “Potsdam Declaration,” Birth of the Constitution of Japan, National Diet Library, Japan, last modified 2004, https://www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/c06.html. 64
occupation that would specifically affect Japanese life and society. MacArthur wished for Japan
to become “rendered a peaceful, democratic, law abiding nation” which would be done by
“eradicating the very roots of militarism that had led it so recently to war,” and thus, Japan was
to become strongly influenced by American values and culture.114
During the occupation of Japan, SCAP knew the power public media had and used it to
disseminate the ideals the United States believed the Japanese needed to embrace. This power would predominantly rely upon the radio. According to music historian Alexandra Day Coyle,
SCAP knew from a Japanese report that had come out in 1947 entitled “Radio in Japan: A
Report on the Condition of Broadcasting in Japan” that Western music had already outweighed
Japanese music in popularity before the war and SCAP “began to utilize the radio as well as
other forms of media to push forth their agenda and the Americanization of Japan.” The Japanese
were exposed to American jazz, but not necessarily black aesthetic jazz; instead, “it was white
jazz that had been seen as purely American.”115 This jazz would be one of the many forces
utilized for the Americanization of Japan. By the time the American occupation of Japan ended,
the Japanese were already quite accustomed to American music and culture.
The Development of Rock and Roll in Japan
The American Occupation of Japan lasted until April 1952. During this time, Japanese jazz, blues, and country & western ensembles were beginning to form. Just four years following the end of the Occupation, in February 1956, Elvis Presley released his first number one hit single, “Heartbreak Hotel.” As a result, rock and roll exploded all over the globe, and Japan would be no exception. Within that same year, Japanese singers were already recording and
114 John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 76. 115 Alexandra Day Coyle, “Jazz in Japan: Changing Culture Through Music,” eScholarship@BC: 30, accessed February 15, 2017, http://dlib.bc.edu/islandora/object/bc-ir:104170. 65
releasing their own English and Japanese-language versions of Presley’s newest hit. These early
Japanese rock and roll recordings, which mixed the already-popular Japanese music genre of enka with American rock and roll, managed to hold on to some remnants of Japanese culture, particularly the Japanese language. Almost immediately, Japanese singers recorded and released their own English and Japanese language versions of Presley’s newest hit, and Japanese takes on
Western music genres led to stardom and “pop star” status in Japan. By the first few years of the
1960s, at least twenty different Japanese artists vied for the title of “Japanese Elvis.” General
Douglas MacArthur’s usage of Japanese radio and public media to Americanize Japan during the occupation would shape Japanese popular music indefinitely while Americans’ preconceived notions of Japan and the Japanese would affect how these performers would be perceived.
Postwar Musical Exotica
Ironically, while American music was becoming popular in Japan and Japanese rock and roll began to develop, musical exotica began to fill the ears and homes of postwar Americans.
Although it existed prior to the postwar period, “exotica,” named after the 1957 Martin Denny album of the same name, is a novelty, kitschy music genre that was popular on the cusp of the late 1950s and into the mid-1960s, but quickly faded into obscurity. Musicologist Phil Ford explains that exotica “sounds like movie music without the movie, using familiar items… to depict imaginary places, paradisiacal or at least laden with desire,” although the music is often
“dirtied with growls, chirps, mutters, and screams” to add ambient effects and immerse the listener in an exotic setting.116 Although “a list of exotica destinations might include an Arab
bazaar, a lost jungle city, the American mean streets, Atlantis, or the moon,”117 there were “three
major sub-sets of musical exotica - often used in various combinations with each other:
116 Ford, “Taboo,” 108-109. 117 Ford, “Taboo,” 110.
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Orientalism, the Hawaiianesque, and Afro-tropicalism.”118 Exotica is considered a “dark
primitive motif” that stood out “against the ‘waxy blue-white’ of the ‘shining Cold War iceberg.’”119 According to Martin Denny, often called the father of the genre himself, exotica is
“a combination of the South Pacific and the Orient… what a lot of people imagine the islands to
be like… it’s pure fantasy though.”120 According to Ford, exotica is blatantly “orientalist…
whether or not the places it envisions are literally oriental, or even belong in the real world.”121
Ironically, Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto was lucky enough to hit rising stardom just as the
United States was entering its exotica phase. While “exotica implied a non-Western other, it
likewise implied a listening subject - the suburban American,”122 the same listening subject
bound to become Kyu Sakamoto’s American fanbase.
Kyu Sakamoto
Prior to becoming a one-hit wonder in the United States, Kyu Sakamoto (坂本九) was a rockabilly and enka performer in Japan. Sakamoto debuted as a rockabilly singer in 1958 at the age of sixteen when he joined The Drifters (not to be confused with the American doo-wop group of the same name), a rock band/comedy group that was derived from two different
Japanese country & western bands, the Mountain Boys and Tokyo Western Boys. Sakamoto’s big break came when he sang at Western Carnival, the annual music festival that was held at
Nichigeki Hall in Tokyo, in 1958 and received the newcomer’s award. However, Sakamoto would soon leave The Drifters for Danny Iida and Paradise King. In August 1960, they released
118 Philip Hayward, Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999), 7. 119 Ford, “Taboo,” 108. 120 Amy Thyr, “Exotica for Modern Living,” Ultra Swank, last modified July 2, 2011, https://www.ultraswank.net/music/exotica-for-modern-living/. 121 Ford, “Taboo,” 110. 122 Ford, “Taboo,” 110.
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the song “Kanashiki Rokujyussai” (“Sad Sixty-Years-Old”) which became a hit. Paradise King would soon release several other songs that would become popular, and Sakamoto managed to obtain a record deal from Toshiba Records, thus leaving Paradise King for a solo career.
Sakamoto’s solo career took off when he was given the love song “Ue o Muite Arukō,” (「上を
向いて歩こう」 - which can approximately be translated to “I Look Up As I Walk”), written by
Rokusuke Ei and Hachidai Nakamura. Sakamoto first performed “Ue o Muite Arukō” on the variety television show Yume de Aimashō (Meet Me in My Dreams) on August 16, 1961. It became a huge hit and then was released on red vinyl on October 15. It would remain the best-
selling record in Japan for three months, until January 1962. Sakamoto was just nineteen years
old when “Ue o Muite Arukō” was recorded and became a hit in Japan.123
It was Louis Benjamin, an executive of the British record company Pye Records, who visited Japan in 1962 and heard Sakamoto’s recording of “Ue o Muite Arukō” on the radio. He enjoyed Sakamoto’s ballad so much that he had Kenny Ball’s orchestra, Kenny Ball and His
Jazzmen, record an instrumental Dixieland jazz version. Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen’s version would reach number ten on the U.K. pop charts the following year. Yet, Benjamin decided that
“Ue o Muite Arukō” would be too difficult for English speakers to pronounce and remember, so he decided to rename the song “Sukiyaki” after the beef dish he had enjoyed while in Japan.
Sukiyaki was somewhat familiar to English speakers due to its popularity with Allied soldiers who had been stationed in Japan during and following World War II. After Kenny Ball and His
Jazzmen’s instrumental version of “Sukiyaki” became such a hit in the U.K., the recording label
123 “Kyu Sakamoto,” Wikipedia, accessed April 22, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyu_Sakamoto.
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His Master’s Voice released Sakamoto’s original version, which would become the record
company’s sixth-most sold record of all time.124
It was supposedly a disc jockey in Washington state, Rich Osbourne, perhaps of KJR in
Seattle, who came across Sakamoto’s original version of the song and first played it on air in the
United States in April 1963 under the title of “Sukiyaki.”125 As soon as the song finished
playing, in an Elvis-like fashion, questions and requests flooded into the station. By the
following month, radio stations around the nation had picked it up and were playing it as well,
first and primarily along the West Coast.126 Capitol Records would take on the American release
of “Sukiyaki,” and it quickly became a hit. On June 15, 1963, “Sukiyaki” hit number one on the
Billboard Hot 100 charts in the United States, just two months after it was introduced to
American airwaves.
Cold War Orientalism and Kyu Sakamoto’s Popularity in America
The Orientalization and general exotification of Sakamoto began once Louis Benjamin
decided to release “Ue o Muite Arukō” under the name of “Sukiyaki” and with his decision to
release an instrumental jazz version first, rather than Sakamoto’s original. This Orientalization
would continue, including how some continental European releases of “Sukiyaki” were entitled
“Unforgettable Geisha Baby.”127 The Orientalization and exotification of Sakamoto would hit its
height surrounding his popularity in the U.S. and his visit there in the summer of 1963. Prior to
and during this visit, American media portrayed Sakamoto as all of the “Oriental” characteristics
listed above – particularly as irrational, backward-looking, childish, and feminine. American
124 Wikipedia, “Kyu Sakamoto.” 125 Channel 95, “KJR Fabulous Fifty Survey,” 1963. 126 “Japanese Disc Becoming Hit,” Shin Nichibei, May 3, 1963, 1. 127 “Kyū Sakamoto,” Wikiwand, accessed January 11, 2021, https://www.wikiwand.com/fi/Ky%C5%AB_Sakamoto.
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publications announcing Sakamoto’s popularity and arrival in the United States had no lack of
remarks on either his youth or apparent femininity. Some noted that Sakamoto’s face was “pock-
marked with the pimples of adolescence” and referred to him as slim and graceful, as in a
celebrity profile in the August 3, 1963 edition of the Shin Nichibei, a Japanese-American newspaper based in Los Angeles at the time.128 A harsher interpretation of Sakamoto that
highlights his apparent femininity comes directly from a column from the July 4, 1963 edition of
the Los Angeles Times. The singer of “Sukiyaki” is referred to as “the ‘delightful Japanese girl
singer.’” While the author of the column tells readers that he may be able to hook them up with a
date with the performer, he includes “but I thin[k] you’d be disappointed. It is Kyu Sakamoto,
who happens to be a 20-year-old boy,” yet continues to “insist he SOUNDS like a girl. And who
can denote sex in Japanese names,” anyway?129
Sakamoto was often shown in traditional Japanese garb, a kimono and geta (wooden
sandals), on many American and Western album covers, advertisements, and various other
promotional materials. A photo of Sakamoto in traditional dress showed up in a promotional
article for Poise, the new “magazine for Young Women,” in the Los Angeles Times, underneath a
photograph of Doris Day holding a box of Happy brand laundry detergent.130 The juxtaposition
of Sakamoto in a kimono and geta beneath Doris Day holding a modern American luxury like
boxed laundry detergent nearby not only caught readers’ eyes but played on the postwar tropes
of Japan and Japanese people as exotic and decorative, yet outdated and undeveloped.
128 “Kyu Sakamoto Profiled,” Shin Nichibei, August 3, 1963, 1. 129 Art Ryon, “The Affluent Boxboy Puzzle,” Los Angeles Times, July 4, 1963, 36. 130 Richard Ballarian, “May We Introduce Our… No, Your New Magazine Poise,” Los Angeles Times, August 25, 1963, 416.
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Figure 17: From the Los Angeles Times, Doris Day and Kyu Sakamoto.
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The height of Sakamoto’s celebrity, at least in the eyes of American fans, was when he
appeared on The Steve Allen Playhouse on August 13, 1963, the same evening he arrived in Los
Angeles. (The episode would air two weeks later on August 27, when Sakamoto was no longer in
the United States.) Sakamoto was excited to be on the program, but he knew that there was a
possibility that he could end up being stereotyped on the show, so he wanted to take the
opportunity to at least somewhat educate his American audience about Japan and its people and
culture and to show that he was just a normal, twenty-one-year-old guy visiting the United
States. Of the appearance, Sakamoto stated:
I’m only going to be there [in America] for a very short time, but I still want to introduce
properly, in my own way, “Japan.” For example, for my appearance on The Steve Allen
Show, my costume hasn’t been decided on yet, but if they tell me to wear a chonmage
[topknot hairstyle] or something, I plan to turn them down flat. Because I want to show
them me just as I am, a completely ordinary visitor. In a foreign country where all they
know about Japan is Fujiyama, geisha, and sukiyaki, I’d like to use this chance to get as
many people as possible to change their way of thinking, even if it’s just a little bit.131
Sakamoto appeared on The Steve Allen Playhouse, not dressed in a kimono and geta or with a chonmage, but in a light-colored, Western suit with a tie and a handkerchief in the pocket, similar to what Steve Allen was wearing on the program, and with an “overgrown crew cut, hang[ing] low and untamed on his forehead.”132 However, Sakamoto was still portrayed rather
131 Michael K. Bourdaghs, Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop (New York: Columbia Press, 2012), 85. 132 “Kyu Sakamoto Profiled,” Shin Nichibei, August 3, 1963, 1.
72 awkwardly when he was on the program. Since he did not speak any English, although there were two translators present, the talk show portion of the show seemed almost more like a show- and-tell of Sakamoto, and a bit of fun is poked at the Japanese language and the language barrier in general. After a few moments of somewhat awkward silence, Allen asks Sakamoto to tell a
Japanese joke, which he did, and laughed heartily. It is difficult to find footage where the punchline Sakamoto repeats and laughs at several times is translated, so it makes it seem like he was laughing at something completely indescribable - awkwardly laughing away at nothing - seeming childish, backward, and irrational to an audience who could not speak or understand any
Japanese. Even a journalist for the Shin Nichibei reviewed Sakamoto’s appearance on The Steve
Allen Playhouse and admitted that, “I was up till 11:15 p.m. to see how the popular singer would appear on television. The interpreters had a difficult role. The language barrier made it impossible for the puns.”133 Yet, Sakamoto enjoyed his appearance on The Steve Allen
Playhouse as he was able to just be himself (and wear what he wanted), and it helped him cement his presence in the international entertainment market and outside Japan in general.134
133 Saburo Kido, “Observation: Japan Week,” Shin Nichibei, August 31, 1963, 1. 134 The Steve Allen Playhouse, Episode 274, NBC, August 27, 1963.
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Figure 18: The Japanese cover of 「上を向いて歩こう」juxtaposed with the American cover of “Sukiyaki.” Notice that “Sukiyaki” is misspelled and further bastardized to “Sukiyaka” on this Capitol Records pressing.
Japanese Rockabilly as “Threateningly Hyper Masculine”
A couple of simple question must be asked about Kyu Sakamoto’s popularity in the
United States: how and why? How and why was he able to become not only a hit, but literally the biggest hit during the summer of 1963, a period of time that was and is still considered the height of “classic Americana?” Why was Sakamoto’s Japanese love ballad, rather than any of his rockabilly numbers, or any of the myriad of American covers or Japanese originals crooned by performers attempting to become the Japanese Elvis, the one that broke out of Japan and was able to become a number one hit in the United States. 74
Figure 19: The Sannin Rokabirī Otoko, the Three Rockabillies. From left to right: Keijiro Yamashita, Mickey Curtis, and Masaaki Hirao. Just five years before Sakamoto’s rise to American stardom, the American public was
given what was probably its first look at Japanese rock and roll through a very mainstream media
outlet. In 1958, Time magazine published an article on Japanese rockabilly highlighting the
sannin rokabirī otoko, literally Three Rockabilly Men, or the Three Rockabillies, Masaaki Hirao,
Keijiro Yamashita, and Mickey Curtis (the son of an English father and an English-Japanese mother), the top three contenders in the competition of who could be considered “Japanese
Elvis.” The article, entitled “Rittoru Dahring,” which mocks how Japanese performers would pronounce The Diamonds’ rockabilly classic “Little Darling,” opens comparing the “pious
Japanese” who were celebrating springtime by “making the traditional round of Buddhist temples and tombs of their ancestors,” to modern “lowteen” girls (about thirteen to sixteen years
old) who were celebrating by screaming and swooning over their favorite rockabilly idols: Hirao,
Yamashita, and Curtis. The article insists that these rokabirī otoko learned their art from the
great Elvis Presley himself. However, many of the covers had gone through “transoceanic
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mutilations”: “Love Me Tender” became “Rub Me Tender” and “Little Darling” became “Rittoru
Dahring.” The article concludes with older Japanese critics calling these rockabilly singers
“lacquered monkeys” whose singing is “apelike mumblings,” a direct descendant of World War
II’s “jaundiced baboons” and “monkey-men,” and a perfect example of John Dower’s notation that the “Japanese ape” live through (and past) the war “in the imaginations of their Anglo-
American enemies.” 135 A quote from sociologist Hideo Shibusawa: “rockabilly is more like a pathetic distortion of religion than an outlet for sex. Rockabilly singers are the preachers of a strange new faith; the lowteens are the faith’s blind worshipers.”136 Although the Japanese were
perhaps no longer the ferocious apes of World War II, this Time article displays the continuation
of the monkey/ape trope applied to the Japanese, this time in the form of copying, or “aping,”
American rockabilly performers.
Rockabilly is a quintessentially American style of music, art, and fashion. Rockabilly and
its related imagery draw on a very specific ideal of American masculinity. American rockabilly
was “not only racially exclusive, but also almost exclusively male,” and is still remembered as
such.137 Elvis Presley is the icon that even today, sixty-five years after his debut, is still the
pinnacle of American machismo. So, was there something inherently threatening about Japanese
rockabilly? Did postwar Americans potentially see a direct, chronological correlation between
these Japanese rockabilly idols and the vicious, savage, oversexed “Jap beast” of the war years?
Would Japanese rockabilly inhibit Japan’s postwar changeover from “threateningly hyper
masculine” to “serenely feminine”?138
135 Dower, Embracing Defeat, 213; John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 116. 136 “Rittoru Dahring,” Time, April 14, 1958, 30. 137 Bourdaghs, Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon, 101 138 Mettler, How to Reach Japan by Subway, 102.
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One American cover performed by Japanese rockabilly artists that became a huge hit in
Japan was Elvis’ “G.I. Blues” - no real surprise since most of these musicians found their most
stable incomes performing at clubs on American military bases. One of the artists who did one of
the most well-known Japanese covers was Kyu Sakamoto himself. However, according to
Bourdaghs, no matter how popular these translated covers may had been at American military
bases,
A Japanese singing American pop “straight” was certainly acceptable in Japan, but in the
United States, it could only be viewed as an exotic joke... In the United States,
Sakamoto, the Japanese rockabilly singer of “G.I. Blues” could only produce laughter -
laughter in the Bergsonian sense of a technique for the violent disciplining of anything
that might jam up the smooth functioning of the social machinery.139
Yet in Japan, unlike in the United States, Sakamoto was very closely identified with Elvis, one of
many performers in the running for the title of Japanese Elvis, as mentioned earlier. Bourdaghs
states that “within the Japanese market, Sakamoto was able to perform the masculine role of an
American soldier, but to achieve success in the West… he had to take on a more feminized,
nonthreatening ‘cute’ role, more like a JAL [Japanese Airlines] stewardess than an American
GI.”140 Essentially, Sakamoto had to “accept the notion embedded in ‘G.I. Blues’ that Elvis
occupie[d] the dominant center of the world, in terms of both popular music and geopolitics.”
139 Bourdaghs, Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon, 100; Henri Bergson was a French philosopher of the early twentieth century who in his Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic discusses that rigidity and unawareness produce a comic effect. In the case of such rigidity, laughter becomes punishment and a way to correct and hopefully eradicate these inflexible, rigid individuals and situations. 140 Bourdaghs, Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon, 99.
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Besides, an overly masculine Japanese man dressed up in military uniform in the fashion Elvis
exemplified in his “U.S. Male” style during the “G.I. Blues” era would not have fared very well
with an America that had just seen the bombing of Pearl Harbor less than twenty years earlier.
Conclusion
After his summer of fame wore down a bit, through Capitol Records Sakamoto released
“Shina No Yoru” (“China Nights”) as Capitol had told him in a bit of Orientalist irony that if he
could produce two more hits, he could get a star outside of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in
Hollywood. Unfortunately, “Shina No Yoru” would only peak at number fifty-eight on
September 21, 1963.141 Regarding “Shina No Yoru,” the same reporter who reviewed
Sakamoto’s appearance on The Steve Allen Playhouse in the Shin Nichibei stated, “something
seem[ed] to be missing compared to the recording which became an international hit.”142
Sakamoto would never get his star on Hollywood Boulevard, and he would be forever relegated
to a one-hit wonder who enjoyed a summer of American pop star status.
Kyu Sakamoto was a near-perfect figure for the postwar United States to take advantage
of during the post-Occupation period. “Ue o Muite Arukō” was first recorded when Sakamoto
was just a teenager. When he visited the United States to be on The Steve Allen Playhouse, he
was still a non-threatening twenty-one-year-old. Utilizing Sakamoto’s image as a kimono-
wearing ballad/kayōkyoku singer, rather than as the rockabilly performer he initially was in
Japan, stripped him of any possible aggressiveness that Americans may have seen him as having.
With “Sukiyaki,” Sakamoto was essentially performing a rehabilitated “Japanese-ness” for the
141 “China Nights (Shina No Yoru),” Kyu Sakamoto Chart History, Billboard, accessed December 2, 2018, https://www.billboard.com/music/kyu-sakamoto/chart-history/hot-100/song/573827. 142 Kido, “Observation,” 1. 78
postwar United States Sakamoto was being used by the American media both economically and
politically.
However, America’s love for Kyu Sakamoto was real. Not only was Sakamoto invited onto The Steve Allen Playhouse, he was also invited onto The Ed Sullivan Show, but unfortunately had to decline as it conflicted with his schedule since he was filming a movie back in Japan. In his celebrity profile in the Shin Nichibei, Sakamoto is compared to other, Western
“dreamboat” celebrities who were currently making teenage girls swoon, including Elvis Presley,
Tommy Steele, Paul Anka, Bobby Darin, and Fabian.143 He was also listed several times as one
of the many “hot” celebrities who would be covered in the new Poise magazine for teen
girls/young women that was coming out in 1963, along with Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, and
Sandra Dee, just to name a few.144 Kyu Sakamoto became a household name in the United
States, but only for a short summer. It was the geopolitical relationship the United States and
Japan were in following World War II, and specifically postwar Americans’ interest in the
“exotic” and “Oriental,” that allowed for Sakamoto’s minute in the limelight. Although
Sakamoto would never make it past one-hit wonder status in the United States, he would go on to
become a famous personality in Japan until his death in the infamous Japanese Airlines flight in
1985 that killed five hundred and twenty individuals, posthumously transforming Sakamoto into
a Japanese Buddy Holly figure. Sakamoto was not only able to assert himself in the face of a
post-World War II, Orientalist United States, he was a significant figure in early Japanese rock and roll and popular culture as a whole as he was not only able to break into the American
market but became an international superstar in his own right. Kyu Sakamoto paved the way for
143 “Kyu Sakamoto Profiled,” Shin Nichibei, August 3, 1963, 1. 144 “Poise Debuts in The Times on Sunday,” Los Angeles Times, August 21, 1963, 2.
79 other international teen sensations in the United States, even including The Beatles, who would also be on Capitol Records, and symbolized Japan’s unprecedented economic and cultural rise during the postwar era.
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CHAPTER IV: “WHOM ARE THEY FOOLING?”: JAPAN’S BOOMING POSTWAR
ECONOMY AND PERCEPTIONS OF ELEKI & GROUP SOUNDS BANDS AS
IMITATORS OF WESTERN CULTURE
During the mid-1960s, surf and beat music would explode onto the scene in
Japan. Simultaneous with Japan’s postwar economic recovery, the genres of eleki and Group
Sounds and the ideals surrounding these two genres reflected this economic upturn. Heavily influenced by Western bands that performed a variety of genres and subgenres of rock and pop,
these eleki and Group Sounds bands tried their hardest to break into markets in the West with a
combination of covers and original work. However, Japan and Japanese people had long been
seen as incapable, and since at least the opening of Japan to the West, as mimics and imitators of
Western culture. Unfortunately, many of the eleki and Group Sounds bands that attempted to break into the Western market were viewed through this historical lens. They were labeled as nothing but lousy imitations, literal personifications of the sea of quickly and cheaply manufactured bric-a-brac that was being produced in Japan for Western consumption as Japan's postwar economy began its unprecedented climb.
Japan’s Industrial Westernization in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
As mentioned in chapter three regarding the West’s Victorian era Japan craze, even during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Japanese were seen as producers of souvenirs, trinkets, and curios, unable to produce anything practical or of real value. As
Japan ascended to the position of a world power at an incredible rate during the late nineteenth century, they looked to various Western nations for inspiration. Japanese nobles began to sport
Western-style fashions and in 1890 the Meiji Constitution was established, which a 1945 Guide to Japan prepared for U.S. forces described as “a hermaphroditic creature” 81
with “Prussian tyranny as its father, and British representative government as its mother.”145 As the government and elite of Japan began to westernize, so did the tastes of ordinary Japanese citizens. This phenomenon doubled down after the Occupation. In 1926, 96% of Japanese cereal consumption was rice, but by 1956, that percentage had fallen to 81.5% and bread now made up
6.9% of the nation’s cereal consumption.146 By 1956, 3.8% of the tea consumed in Japan was
Western-style black tea as opposed to Japanese-style green; 24.1% of alcoholic beverages were
Western (beer and whiskey) as opposed to sake and shōchu; and 85.6% of clothing consumption
was Western-style clothes.147
According to Kurihara Akira, 1955 was the year that marked the beginning of “mass
culture” in Japan. Full of accelerated technological innovations and with real consumption per
capita starting on its skyward journey, the Japanese government claimed in 1956 that the postwar
period was over (the same year that Kazuya Kosaka released his cover of “Jailhouse Rock”).148 It
was by this time that Japanese individuals had been introduced to the American middle-class ideal of consumer luxuries and electric appliances. The goal of the Japanese middle class during the late 1950s and early 1960s became owning a telephone, a refrigerator, and a Japanese-style bath. This midcentury standard was furthered codified and disseminated via visual media in
Japan.149
While Japan was beginning to not only adapt to but embrace American- influenced, postwar mass consumerism, the United States still largely perceived the Japanese as enemies who remained treacherous and largely incapable of doing or producing anything on their
145 Guide to Japan (CINCPAC-CINCPOA Bulletin No. 209-45, September 1, 1945), 35. 146 Charles Yuji Horioka, “Consuming and Saving,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 274-275, table 10.5. 147 Horioka, “Consuming and Saving,” 276-277, table 10.6. 148 Marilyn Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 247; Horioka, “Consuming and Saving,” 263, table 10.2. 149 Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture,” 249.
82 own without somehow copying or bastardizing everything in their path. While the Japanese genres of country & western and rockabilly were a bit rough around the edges due to evolving during and right on the cusp of the Allied Occupation, eleki and Group Sounds were two of the first major genres of Japanese rock and roll that developed after the Occupation.
The Typhoon: Eleki and the Rise of Japanese Surf
Following the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers’ attempts to Americanize Japan via popular audio and visual media during the
Occupation, Japanese popular music would ebb and flow with American popular music trends, often with the initial wave arriving a tad later than it started in the United States. As with
American rockabilly, the short-lived popularity of Japanese rockabilly would soon give way to the new and exciting, sunshiny sound of surf music. The eleki buumu (“electric boom,” which comes from エレキギター, ereki gitā - the Japanese pronunciation of “electric guitar,”) sparked when The Ventures visited Japan in 1962. By the time they returned in 1965 with another instrumental surf rock group, The Astronauts, they had become immensely popular and a household name in Japan.
The new eleki genre primarily consisted of rockabilly bands who kept up with the times by exchanging their acoustic instruments for electric guitars. Since this new genre was largely instrumental, Japanese musicians were not hindered by any language barriers as they were when performing vocal American or British pop music. Therefore, instrumental bands such as The Ventures and The Astronauts became popular in Japan over groups such as The Beach
Boys and Jan & Dean, as these groups were not just heavily reliant on vocals but were influenced specifically by the very African American singing style of doo-wop, a nuance which was not easily translated to Japan. Hundreds of eleki combos would spring up all 83
over Japan. The overwhelming popularity of these new eleki combos was proven by the fact
that Japan produced seven hundred and sixty thousand electric guitars in 1965 alone.150 The
genre of eleki can be thought of as a spectrum on which the ends are represented by Yuzo
Kayama (加山雄三) and Takeshi Terauchi (寺内タケシ). While these two surf rock legends have worked together since 1965 and continue to do so, Kayama tended to conform to more Western ideas of popular music and culture while Terauchi harkens back to traditional
Japanese music and culture more so than his other eleki counterparts.
Yuzo Kayama
Yuzo Kayama is the son of Ken Uehara, a very popular early Showa era
actor who appeared in over two hundred films between 1935 and 1990 and who came to symbolize the concept of the nimaime on film, a term used since the Edo period to describe the handsome male lead in traditional kabuki theater. Kayama followed in the footsteps of his father and started out as an actor. He became a star in 1961 when he played the role of Yuichi
Tanuma in Daigaku no Wakadaishō (大学の若大将 -Wakadaishō at University). The dashingly
handsome Kayama became synonymous with the character Wakadaishō, which translates to
something along the lines of “whiz kid” or “young ace,” and is referred to as “Young Guy” in
English. Kayama took on the nickname of Wakadaishō himself and still uses it to this
day. Daigaku no Wakadaishō would populate seventeen other Wakadaishō films over the course
of two decades from 1961 to 1981 (the last, Kaette Kita Wakadaishō - The Return
of Wakadaishō, took place when Kayama was thirty-four years old, an aging enka performer by
that point).
150 Mark Schilling, “Rockabilly, Group Sounds, & The Birth of Japanese Rock,” The Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture, 1st ed. (New York: Weatherhill, Inc., 1997).
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Kayama formed his eleki group, The Launchers (ザ・ランチャーズ), for fun with a
group of his actor friends in 1962 and began playing covers of The Ventures. Eleki would not stay just a hobby for Kayama. In 1965, Kayama would co-star with Takeshi Terauchi in Eleki no Wakadaishō (エレキの若大将 - Wakadaishō’s Electric Guitar, sometimes referred to as Campus-A-Go-Go in English), the sixth film of the Wakadaishō series. Both Kayama and
Terauchi would act in the film as members of the fictional surf-beat band The Young Beats. The climax of the film features a battle of the bands competition where The Young Beats win against a four-man group in matching suits complete with fake Beatle wigs called The Sharks. While other eleki bands continued to remain predominantly instrumental, The Launchers were unique as Kayama possessed a deep, crooner-esque baritone that could drive teenagers wild (and, due to his upper-class upbringing, a solid grasp on the English language). Kayama seemed to be somewhat of a Western stereotype as he played the role of the hunky pop idol, similar to a post-Army Elvis, yet his baritone voice and addition of enka love ballads into his repertoire has given him the unofficial title of Japanese Frank
Sinatra.151 Kayama was and still remains very much a unique persona in Japanese eleki, even
attracting the attention of The Ventures themselves who presented him with one of their
signature Mosrite guitars and would cover two of his original compositions, “Black Sand
Beach” (「ブラック・サンド・ビーチ」) and “Yozora No Hoshi” (「夜空の星」- “Stars in
151 Schilling, “Rockabilly, Group Sounds, & The Birth of Japanese Rock.”
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Figure 20: Yuzo Kayama performing with The Ventures during their 1965 tour of Japan.
“Let’s Go, Wakadaishō!”: Wakadaishō Films as the 1960s Japanese Middle-Class Ideal
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Japanese mass consumerism was largely
jump started by visual media and particularly American visual media. Initially, this was done
by televising American serials such as I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best as Japanese television ownership jumped from less than 1% in 1956 to almost 50% in 1960.152 By the mid-1960s, the
middle-class ideal was starting to be fed to a younger audience. The Wakadaishō series was extremely popular amongst teenagers and young adults in Japan, and
Kayama’s Wakadaishō films are often compared to Elvis movies or the “Beach Blanket Bingo” genre of American films. The Wakadaishō film series focuses primarily on the antics of Yuzo
Kayama’s character, Wakadaishō, who is a college student during Japan’s economic boom. Wakadaishō is the typical nice guy who not only succeeds academically in
152 Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture,” 248-249. 86
university but also plays and exceeds at a wide variety of (predominantly Western)
sports while remaining dedicated to the girl he is romantically involved with, Sumiko. However,
while Wakadaishō’s life is full of Western-inspired, young adult pursuits, he remains dedicated
to his family as he lives at and works in his widowed father’s sukiyaki restaurant that the family
has owned since the Meiji era. When not out playing sports, chasing after Sumiko, or working in
the family restaurant, Wakadaishō spends his time eating pork buns with his elderly grandmother
who acts as Wakadaishō’s confidant, supporting and assisting him through his cheesy, postwar problems.153
Figure 21: Yuzo Kayama and Takeshi Terauchi in Eleki no Wakadaishō. In this battle of the bands scene, Takeshi Terauchi is. second from the left. Next to him is Yuzo Kayama, second to the right. Eleki no Wakadaishō, the most popular and well-known film of the Wakadaishō series, is a wonderful look into what Japan, and more specifically what Japanese teenagers and young adults, saw as ideally middle class in 1965. Wakadaishō not only attends university but can afford to wear the black gakuran school uniform and is the captain of the university’s American football team. He also owns a small red convertible that he drives himself and his friends around in and an electric guitar with an amp that he plays at home and during the battle of the band
153 エレキの若大将, directed by Katsuki Iwauchi (1965; Tokyo, Japan: Toho Co., Ltd., 2020), DVD.
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competition. His friends who join him to create the surf-beat band The Young Beats, including Takashi, Takeshi Terauchi’s character, have electric guitars and amps at their disposal as well. The battle of the band contest they enter is televised, in which everyone at home, including Wakadaishō’s grandmother, sits in the Japanese seiza style on the floor around their
home’s television set to watch The Young Beats’ eleki concert. Wakadaishō’s love interest
Sumiko works in a record store which seems to be placed in a Western-style, indoor
mall. Wakadaishō lives the perfect middle-class Japanese lifestyle in Eleki no Wakadaishō,
which the music genre, especially due to its reliance on the electric guitar, continued to
push. However, it was Takeshi Terauchi, the surprise co-star
and eleki ally of Wakadaishō in Eleki no Wakadaishō, who took eleki in a completely
different direction.
Takeshi Terauchi
Takeshi Terauchi (寺内タケシ), famously known for his band The Blue Jeans (ザ・ブ
ルー・ジーンズ, probably the longest running eleki band in Japan), went much harder against
the Western grain than did the charming actor-musician Kayama. Terauchi started out in country
& western as a member of Jimmie Tokita’s Mountain Playboys. In June 1964, Terauchi and the
Blue Jeans, a former rockabilly band, released Korezo Surfing (This Is Surfing), the first surf music album in Japan.154 Terauchi and his Blue Jeans (or “Terry and Blue Jeans” as they
were often referred to) may had been a tad more risqué than Kayama, doing songs like “Dark
Eyes,” a shamisen-infused, eleki cover of an old Russian folk song called “Black
Eyes.” Terauchi and the Blue Jeans devoted an entire album, Let’s Go Eleki-Bushi (レッツ・ゴ
154 Schilling, “Rockabilly, Group Sounds, & The Birth of Japanese Rock.”
88
ー・エレキ節), to playing traditional Japanese melodies in the eleki style, complete with the
album cover picturing the entire band dressed in traditional Japanese attire while holding electric
guitars. On the exact opposite end of the spectrum, Terauchi also seems to be a pioneer of the
sub-subgenre of tsugaru rock, which refers to the tsugaru-shamisen style of traditional
Japanese music, in which Terauchi would play surf music on a shamisen and other traditional
Japanese instruments. Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys has even called the Blue Jeans’ 1966
Golden Album the greatest instrumental record of all time.155 However, Terauchi, like the other greats of Japanese rock, was not immune to the changing tides of American popular music patterns which influenced Japan’s. Terauchi jumped ship in 1966 to create a new band, The
Bunnys (ザ・バニーズ), that would appeal to a younger audience as the coming of the new
Group Sounds genre, influenced by the legendary British Invasion and the emerging California
Sound, would soon drown Japan in an even larger typhoon than the eleki buumu did.
155 Philip Brasor, “Mad About Deke-Deke-Deke,” Japan Times, August 7, 2008, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2008/08/07/music/mad-about-deke-deke-deke/.
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Figure 22: The cover of Takeshi Terauchi and the Blue Jeans’ Let’s Go Eleki-Bushi.
Operation Z: Group Sounds as Japan’s Answer to the British Invasion
The eleki buumu may have looked like the pinnacle of Japanese rock and roll, but that
was only because The Beatles had yet to reach Japan. Many rockabilly and eleki bands that had not yet transformed would once again hang up their previous instruments and related costumery to accommodate the newest invasion from the West. The term “Group Sounds” (commonly abbreviated to GS) was coined by eleki star Yuzo Kayama.156 One rumor suggests that this
term developed out of a discussion on live television between Kayama and Jackey Yoshikawa,
leader and drummer of The Blue Comets, concerning some Japanese speakers’ trouble
pronouncing “rock and roll.” However, both the Japanese media and fans alike would lovingly
adopt the newly coined term “Group Sounds” just as quickly as the new sound itself would
explode.
156 Derek Norcross, “Youth Notes: Japan Rocks Out,” Oakland Tribune, April 27, 1969, 212. 90
In June 1966, The Beatles played Budokan Hall in Tokyo and caused a teen sensation.
While in Japan, The Beatles were treated like absolute royalty - they stayed in the penthouse
of the Capitol Hotel Tokyu and were protected by an entire platoon of Japanese military guards
at nearly all times. As in the West, many Group Sounds bands were already-formed music
groups who had been in the scene for a while, some since the time of country & western and
rockabilly, but remodeled themselves to be comparable to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones,
The Monkees, The Beach Boys, and other infinitely popular American and British pop groups.
Japanese groups would be no different as “most adopted the longhaired Mod look… heavy gold
chains, long velvet jackets, frilly shirt fronts, and knee-high lace-up boots.” This was seen
most vividly in The Spiders and The Tigers, the two biggest Group Sounds bands, but literally
hundreds if not thousands of Group Sounds bands would pop up all over, the Japanese equivalent
of the garage rock boom that took place in the United States around the same time.157
The Spiders
The Spiders (ザ・スパイダース) were Japan’s premier Group Sounds band, often
considered the Japanese Beatles. The Spiders were formed in Tokyo in 1961 by
drummer Shochi Tanabe (田邊昭知) as a club band who performed in jazz kissaten (coffee/tea shops) and at American military bases, similar to how many other Japanese bands of this time period got their start. The earliest evolution of The Spiders mainly started as a backing band for other performers, such as on Yuko Oka’s “Sixteen Cubes of Sugar” in 1961 and Chiyako Saito’s
“Sea of Heartbreak” in 1962 (the same Chiyako Saito whose performance would get shown on The Jimmy Dean Show in 1966 alongside of Jimmie Tokita). In 1962, The Spiders gained three of their permanent members. Takayuki Inoue (井上堯之) would leave a jazzy vocal and
157 Schilling, “Rockabilly, Group Sounds, & The Birth of Japanese Rock.” 91
dance trio called Three Jets to join The Spiders as a singer. Katsuo Ōno (大野克夫) joined after leaving a country & western ensemble called Gary Ishiguro and Sands of West where Ōno became known for his steel guitar work, sometimes backing Kazuya Kosaka. Masaaki Sakai (堺
正章), a former child actor, also joined that year.
Kunihiko Kase, a friend of both Yuzo Kayama and Takeshi Terauchi and who would go
on to form the popular Group Sounds band The Wild Ones, joined for a few months in
1963 and then left. Mitsuru Kato (加藤充) and Hiroshi “Monsieur” Kamayatsu (かまやつひろ
し) both joined as permanent members in 1963. Kato joined from the same country &
western ensemble as Ōno. Kamayatsu’s father Tib was a Japanese-American jazz musician and
lounge singer born in Los Angeles. Kamayatsu became involved in country & western and
rockabilly in Japan, including with Mickey Curtis, and had appeared at previous Western
Carnivals. The Spiders’ Group Sounds era line up would be completed in 1964 when eighteen- year-old Jun Inoue (井上順) joined the band and Takayuki shifted to playing guitar. The
Spiders’ permanent seven-man line-up consisted of Jun Inoue and Sakai as lead singers,
Takayuki Inoue on lead guitar, Kamayatsu on rhythm guitar, Kato on bass, Ōno on keyboard, and founder Tanabe on drums.
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Figure 23: The Spiders. From left to right: Mitsuru Kato (bass), Katsuo Ōno (keyboard), Jun Inoue (vocals), Shochi Tanabe (drums), Masaaki Sakai (vocals and flute), Takayuki Inoue (lead guitar and vocals), Hiroshi “Monsieur” Kamayatsu (rhythm guitar and vocals). Once The Spiders’ line-up was complete, they started out as an eleki band. In their early days, The Spiders performed alongside Western greats who toured Japan including Peter &
Gordon, The Animals, The Honeycombs, The Surfaris, and The Ventures and The Astronauts
when they returned to Japan as a household name in 1965. 1965 was a big year for The Spiders
as some songs were released on Crown Records, most notably their first single “Furi Furi,” and
an EP entitled Liverpool Sounds, cementing The Spiders’ spot as Japan’s premier beat band.
They also started a contract with the British company VOX to use their amplifiers anywhere in
the world.
The Spiders’ rise to stardom would begin early in 1966 when they played alongside of
The Beach Boys in January when they were on their Japanese tour. By February, Philips
Records, still a Dutch company at the time, was releasing some of The Spiders’
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singles internationally. In March “Furi Furi/Little Robby” was released in the Netherlands,
“No No Boy/Bitter for My Taste” was released in the United States, and a single and a small
EP containing four songs was released in Australia, but unfortunately none of these became hits abroad. In April 1966, The Spiders released their first full-length album Album No.
1 which contained all original compositions, some in English, some in Japanese, and some in a combination of both. Album No. 1 became the first beat album, utilizing the “Liverpool Sound”
(though Kamayatsu has referred to The Spiders’ twist on it as the “Tokyo Sound”) and is still considered the first true rock album in Japan. Following the release of their first album, The
Spiders began to establish their own production agency, Spiduction, with leader Tanabe as president, and they played at that year’s Western Carnival.
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Figure 24: An advertisement of The Beach Boys playing in Japan with The Spiders listed as the opening act, January 1966.
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In June 1966, The Beatles played in Tokyo at Budokan Hall, and the Group Sounds wave
officially swept over Japan. The Spiders took advantage of the environment that The Beatles had
left in their wake and released Album No. 2, which completely differed from Album No. 1. This
album was completely covers, the first side being nothing but Beatles covers and the second
being Animals, Chuck Berry, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Dave Clark Five covers, all primarily in
English. While the cover of Album No. 1 had The Spiders dressed in casualwear, Album No. 2’s
cover pictured the band in matching gray suits that echoed The Beatles’ infamous collarless suits
that were designed by Pierre Cardin. In September 1966, Philips released “Yuhi Ga Naiteiru” (「
夕陽が泣いている」) in Japan and an English language version under the name of “Sad
Sunset” throughout Europe and Southeast Asia. In October 1966, The Spiders would head out on their three-week tour of Europe as a promotional for Philips International and to visit Philips’ headquarters in Amsterdam.
Let’s Go, Spiders!: The Spiders’ European Tour
On October 24, 1966 at 10 p.m., The Spiders departed Haneda Airport in Tokyo on a
KLM Royal Dutch aircraft for Amsterdam. When they arrived the next day on October 25, about one hundred teenagers were awaiting them at the airport. The Spiders were welcomed with open arms in the Netherlands. One Dutch newspaper, Het Vrije Volk: Democratisch-
Socialistisch Dagblad (The Free People: Democratic-Socialist Newspaper), ran an article that included a large photograph of the band and let its readers know that The Spiders initiated their
European tour in Amsterdam and that the polite boys would be returning later in November to play in Scheveningen and Zandvoort and be on the television show Fanclub. According to this article, The Spiders’ tour in Europe was somewhat of a trade, since Philips’ records of Malando, 96
a Dutch orchestra leader, had become so popular in Japan.158 The Spiders appeared on a Dutch variety show called Uitgeslapen, and another newspaper, De Volkskrant, reported how Hans
Zoet, the host of the show, introduced them on the show: “Ladies and gentlemen, The Spiders
are seven quick little Japanese guys of such a size that two of them could fit in a suitcase with
a little good will.”159
Figure 25: The Spiders in Amsterdam. The Spiders left the Netherlands after two days for their round-trip tour of Europe where
they would be in Paris from October 27 to October 30, Rome from October 31 to November 2,
Hamburg from November 3 to 5 (where they played at the legendary Star Club, where The
Beatles got their start), Copenhagen on November 6 and 7, London from November 8 to 10, and then back to Amsterdam from November 11 to 13. Unfortunately, a Daily Mirror article
158 Ben Bunders, “The Spiders,” Het Vrije Volk: Democratisch-Socialistisch Dagblad, October 29, 1966, 9. 159 “De Televisie en de Bezwaren,” De Volksrant, October 29, 1966, 27.
97
reported that The Spiders, “Japan’s answer to The Beatles,” received a very “un-Beatle-like reception,” as only three fans showed up to greet them at the London airport, but apparently the
seven lads were not too worried about it and wholeheartedly embraced being in the heart of mod
London.160 Supposedly, The Spiders appeared on Ready, Steady, Go! alongside of the Spencer
Davis Group and The Spiders gifted them some Yamaha guitars and VOX amplifiers that they
had brought with them but could not bring back to Japan due to customs. Another rumor abounds
that when The Spiders were on their way back to Amsterdam from London, a man in Heathrow
Airport approached Kamayatsu and asked if they were The Spiders. Shocked, they turned around
to find that it was Keith Moon of The Who asking.
Figure 26: The Spiders pose outside of the legendary Star Club in Hamburg, Germany. When The Spiders returned to the Netherlands from November 11th to 13th to appear
on Fanclub which would be broadcasted the following week on the
160 “Japan’s Spiders Fly In,” Daily Mirror, November 9, 1966, 5.
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18th, Limburgsch Dagblad added a very informative note to their television schedule introducing
The Spiders and how they transformed the Liverpool Sound into the eleki sound, leading to not only the acceptance but the success of beat music in Japan, and that their own Tokyo Sound has gained some popularity in the West, which their relationships with Peter & Gordon, The
Animals, The Honeycombs, and The Beach Boys could attest to.161
The Spiders returned home to Japan on November 14, 1966. While on tour in Europe,
The Spiders had received a call from a staff member telling them that “Yuhi Ga Naiteiru”/“Sad
Sunset” was becoming a big hit in Japan. When The Spiders’ plane touched down at Haneda
Airport, they were met with hundreds of screaming fans. According to bassist Kato, The Spiders assumed that a famous actor must have been landing at the same time as them, but when they
started departing from the plane, they realized that the mob was for them. The Spiders’
popularity in Europe, primarily the Netherlands, helped sow the seeds of Group Sounds’
dominance in Japan. Unfortunately, and ironically for The Spiders, while “Sad Sunset” was the
beginning of the Group Sounds boom in Japan, it was also the beginning of the end for The
Spiders’ international popularity.162
161 “Vanavond op uw Scherm,” Limburgsch Dagblad, November 18, 1966, 9; translation of Dutch articles provided by Shaydon Ramey. 162 “ザ・スパイダース,” Wikiwand, accessed February 10, 2021, https://www.wikiwand.com/ja/ザ・スパイダー ス.
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Figure 27: Europa no Spiders: The Spiders in Europe.
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“Sad Sunset”: The Spiders’ Attempt to Break into the American Market and the
Orientalization of Group Sounds in the United States
The Spiders returned to Japan and throughout late 1966 and 1967 released more singles, a handful of more albums (including The Spiders Meets The Savage, a compilation with another eleki/Group Sounds band, The Savage), and even began appearing in their very own
Beatles and Monkees-inspired movies. The band itself and every one of its seven individual members would have their own official fan club in Japan, including a fan-run zine. In June of
1967, The Spiders left on their two-week American tour of Hawaii. Not much is known about their time in Hawaii. Newspaper articles from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu
Advertiser advertise the same show that The Spiders played at the Honolulu International Center on June 23. The article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (next to an advertisement for Dick Dale and
His Del-Tones) tells its readers that The Spiders were Japan’s “favorite ‘eleki’ group” and defines eleki as “the Japanese phrase for rock ‘n’ roll.” A short history of The Spiders’ birth in kissaten and their relationship with Western groups is also included.163 The article
in the Honolulu Advertiser includes a photograph of The Spiders and introduced the members of
the band (incorrectly listing Tanabe’s given name as Akitomo, perhaps as an incorrect reading of
the kanji of his name, and Kato’s given name as Mitsuro) and describes their performance at the
international center as a “dance for teenagers.”164 The Spiders seemed to primarily spend their
tour of Hawaii relaxing and recharging. They would return to Japan after an uneventful tour with
no real chance of breakthrough into the American market.165
163 Dick Gima, “Japan’s ’Spiders’ Due in Tomorrow for Center Show,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, June 19, 1967, C-3. 164 “Plenty of Music in the Air Here,” Honolulu Advertiser, June 23, 1967, B-4. 165 Toshio Nakamura, “GSの時代の幕開けを告げる「夕陽が泣いている」の大ヒット。それはスパイダース にとって終わりの始まりだった!?,” Music Calendar, last modified September 15, 2015, http://music- calendar.jp/2015091501; Toshio Nakamura, “本日10月24日は、ザ・スパイダースのヨーロッパ・プロモーシ ョン・ツアーがスタートした日,” Music Calendar, last modified October 24, 2017, http://music- 101
Figure 28: The Spiders as seen by Hawaiian newspaper readers. From the Honolulu Advertiser. It seems that but one article appeared in mainland American newspapers a year after The
Spiders’ attempt to break into the United States. Entitled “Japan Flips for Rock ‘N’ Roll,” this
1968 article seems to be almost a lament about how young Japanese girls prefer to chase after their supposed gender-neutral rock idols rather than talk tea ceremony, flower arranging, or dressmaking with their mothers. After noting that most of the fans of these groups were adolescent girls in their young teens, the author cites a Japanese psychiatrist who commented,
“These girls aren’t ready yet for a strong masculine image. That’s where the long-haired rock and roll groups come in. With their dazzling outfits, use of cosmetics, and unbelievable hairdos, the boys are more neutral and easier for the girls to identify with.” The author of this
calendar.jp/2017102401; Tsuyoshi Sato, “1966年にザ・スパイダースが出演したイギリスの人気テレビ番組 「レディ・ステディ・ゴー」,” Tap the Pop, last modified April 15, 2016, http://www.tapthepop.net/extra/44719; Tsuyoshi Sato, “スパイダースとビートルズに出会ったかまやつ ひろしの快進撃は27歳になると同時に始まった!,” Tap the Pop, last modified March 18, 2017, http://www.tapthepop.net/story/59138.
102 article also makes it seem that many male Group Sounds bands regularly wore miniskirts, perhaps a grossly misplaced reference to one GS band called The Cougars who often dressed in red kilts and Roman-style sandals as part of their costumes.166 Most Group Sounds bands wore standard mod outfits with bowl cuts and wore no more cosmetics than The Beatles were seen putting on in their film A Hard Day’s Night. Many of these characterizations written about
Japanese rock bands would not be out of place in American newspapers describing Elvis Presley or The Beatles just a few years earlier. This article’s unjust feminization and exotification of
Group Sounds bands, unfortunately probably most mainstream Americans’ exposure to the genre at the time, still contains the same Cold War Orientalist feelings that led to the feminization and Orientalization of Japanese rockabilly in Time Magazine and then Kyu Sakamoto in mainstream American media during his reign as the number one singer in the United States just five years prior.
Made in Japan
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, imported Japanese products became common in
American five-and-dime stores as the United States became Japan’s biggest overseas market during its economic recovery since the United States did not want Japan turning to communist
China. At the same time, most of Western Europe, particularly Great Britain, had enacted quotas against Japanese imports. Due to the influx of American currency into Japan, employment soared, industrial production resumed at a rate greater than it had ever before, and Japan’s stock market, education system, agricultural sector, and health care standards revived as well. As a result, Japan produced higher quality products, such as household goods, textiles, and, later, consumer electronics, appliances, and automobiles, yet continued to offer them at
166 Jean Pearce, “Japan Flips for Rock ’n’ Roll,” Baltimore Sun, April 24, 1968. 103 cheaper prices than American or European producers would. This led to what one Newsweek article from 1960 called a “deluge” of Japanese products “flood[ing in] from the
East,” inviting comparisons to early twentieth century fears of the wave of the “Yellow
Peril.” One umbrella manufacturer in 1958 revived wartime hatred of the Japanese as they felt their business was being attacked by Japanese competitors “Pearl Harbor fashion.”167 Perhaps this is why The Spiders fared so well in Europe over the United States – Europe did not have to worry about a “musical Pearl Harbor” like the United States would.
Thankfully, however, most of the press surrounding Japanese imports during the 1950s and 1960s was not as jarring or racially insensitive and tended to focus on and resurrect the prewar image of a diminutive and harmless Japan that made cheap, insignificant products. A survey of American consumers conducted in 1960 by a private nonprofit group consisting of both Japanese and American businessmen called the U.S.-Japan Trade Council found that
Americans considered Japan an exporter of “toy goods.” American consumers believed that
Japanese products, even more expensive items like sewing machines and radios, were inferior to
American equivalents. However, this survey also found that Americans were beginning to warm to Japanese products. 1960 was also the year that marked a turning point for Japanese manufacturing as this was the decade that Japanese cameras, and later other electronics, became significant in the American market.168 Perhaps ironically, it was Jun Inoue of The Spiders who became the celebrity spokesperson for Konica cameras and started the still well-known
167 “Made in Japan: The Deluge,” Newsweek, August 1, 1960, 65; “Textiles: Flood from the East,” Newsweek, July 2, 1956, 66; “When Goods from Abroad Hurt Businesses at Home,” U.S. News and World Report, March 7, 1958, 43. 168 Megan Warner Mettler, How to Reach Japan by Subway: America’s Fascination with Japanese Culture, 1945- 1965 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 183-188.
104
trend/meme of East Asians and then others globally making the V-sign/peace sign while taking pictures.169
Conclusion
The genre of Group Sounds is often discounted, and The Spiders are often the butt of the
joke in terms of being considered nothing more than a cheap imitation of the British Invasion,
specifically The Beatles. While The Spiders and other Group Sounds bands definitely did borrow and utilize elements of popular music, culture, and fashion from Western sources, they also blended these with what they knew Japan would find popular, essentially “Japanifying” rock and roll for their own use. The Spiders became the forefront of a completely unique genre and are still regarded as the grandfathers of modern J-pop. The Spiders did in fact start out as a cover band playing in kissaten near American military bases, but many individuals in the West do not
understand that this is where all Japanese popular music since the end of World War II finds its
heritage, as emphasized in Chapter 2 on the development of Japanese country & western. The
idolization of these Group Sounds bands and their individual members (and the sheer amount of
culture, music, clothing styles, films, etc., surrounding these Group Sounds bands, with roots in
American popular culture traditions since the era of Elvis) would allow for rock and roll and pop
music to become a permanent fixture in Japanese popular culture.
It was Americans’ perception of Japanese goods as inferior and Japan’s postwar import
deal with the United States that led to The Spiders’ popularity in Western Europe not translating
to the United States. While postwar Western Europe was not dealing with an influx of Japanese
products flooding their markets from the East due to tariffs and restrictions, and the associated
169 Stephanie Burnett, “Have You Ever Wondered Why East Asians Spontaneously Make V-Signs in Photos?,” Time, August 4, 2014, https://time.com/2980357/asia-photos-peace-sign-v-janet-lynn-konica-jun- inoue/. 105 racialized rhetoric that came with it, the United States was. Americans must have perceived The
Spiders and other Group Sounds bands, along with their British Invasion and California Sound- inspired antics and style, as cheap, insignificant, toy versions of what they already had access to and were producing themselves in the West.
106
CONCLUSION
Racism against Japanese individuals and the exotification of Japan and Japanese culture
did not suddenly appear in 1941, nor did this racism magically disappear following the end of
World War II or the Allied Occupation of Japan. Anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States
and the West during World War II was a product of nearly a century of interaction and
communication between the West and Japan. While perhaps not as harsh or jarring as the blatantly racist propaganda that proliferated throughout American society during the war years,
the West’s distrust of the Japanese remained following the war. While apparent in many avenues
of postwar life, this mentality also permeated the world of popular music.
Postwar Japanese popular music evolved initially as a form of survival in a war-torn and economically unsure landscape. As mentioned in chapter two, a number of postwar popular music performers began their careers out of necessity and the need to access resources: notably food and opportunities to better their English language skills. Reliant upon the approval of
American G.I.s, their primary audience base, Japanese performers at military bases and nearby clubs that catered to G.I.s acknowledged that they had to imitate what their audience already liked. The average American stationed in Japan following the end of World War II did not want to hear traditional Japanese music styles, or really even any music performed in Japanese, so these performers became masters of mimicking what was popular in the United States at the
time.
Unfortunately, this bleak reality of the origins of postwar Japanese popular music was
and continues to be ignored. A direct descendant from the horrendous wartime racializations of
the Japanese, as postwar Japanese popular musicians tried their best to break into markets in the
United States and the West, the old trope of the Japanese as monkeys and apes now took on an 107
additional meaning. The Japanese were “copycats” who were incapable of producing anything authentic or of value on their own. This thought process was reflected not just in how the United
States in the 1950s and 1960s reacted to an influx of Japanese-produced consumer goods, but how it reacted to Japan’s up-and-coming rock and pop stars. In the minds of Americans who were exposed to their music, these musicians were nowhere near as authentic as what the United
States and Britain already had at home: these Japanese performers were simply copying, or
“aping.”
While Japanese performers did their best to imitate Western popular music styles of the
1950s and 1960s, one notable facet is missing which may sometimes make the genres sound a bit flat in comparison to those performed particularly by American groups. The influence of African
American music and singing styles are notably lacking in these Japanese genres - one example
being how American surf music is primarily associated with vocal groups heavily influenced by
doo-wop (The Beach Boys, Jan & Dean) whereas Japanese surf rock, eleki, is mostly
instrumental largely to circumvent the need to be proficient in or sing in English. While African
Americans influenced many of the music styles that arrived in Japan and other parts of Asia,
firstly jazz,170 by the time it reached Japan and was curated by MacArthur during his postwar
occupation, the Blackness of American music had largely been filtered out.
In the discipline of ethnomusicology, new scholarship of approximately the last two
decades on post-colonialism and globalization has been forcing ethnomusicologists to not just
historicize the music and cultures that they study, but to also consider the global market and
170 Andrew F. Jones, “Black Internationale: Notes on the Chinese Jazz Age,” in Jazz Planet, ed. E. Taylor Atkins (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2003,) 225-243.
108
mass media forces that have shaped music around the globe for about the past century.171 When
and if ethnomusicologists look at rock and roll, it tends to focus on the mid-to-late 1970s and
onwards, as it took some countries outside of the Western world, such as China, quite a few
years to accept or absorb forms of rock and pop. Others focus more on the genres of hip hop and
electronica. Yet, Jeremy Wallach acknowledges that authentic rock ensembles, defined as
“electric-guitar based bands who write and perform their own songs,” began to appear in most
places, even outside of the West, by the mid-to-late 1950s.172 Seemingly always the underdog in
ethnomusicology, perhaps the study of global rock and roll music of the immediate postwar
period, from the early 1950s to the late 1960s, will gain more interest as post-colonialism and globalization gain their footholds within the discipline and reveal the interconnectedness that the world has had for several centuries. Since the study of postwar Japanese popular music is so new, there are so many fascinating avenues to take from here in terms of expanding research.
One major shortcoming of this thesis is that it was completed during the COVID-19 pandemic so no physical or international archival research could be completed. As such, this work focuses on how American and Western audiences perceived Japanese popular musicians attempting to become popular in the United States from about 1963 to 1968 by relying heavily upon American and European newspaper and magazine articles that could be found online.
Postwar Japanese popular music genres that were popular before the post-1970 idol boom tend to be considered write-offs in both academic and non-academic circles. While many performers of genres including Japanese country & western, eleki, and particularly Group
171 Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton, “Theories of the Post-colonial and Globalization: Ethnomusicologists Grapple with Power, History, Media, and Mobility,” in Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights, ed. Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 127-128. 172 Jeremy Wallach, “Global Rock as Postcolonial Soundtrack,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research, ed. Allan Moore and Paul Carr (New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 469.
109
Sounds did write their own material and sing in Japanese, they are often ridiculed and remembered as nothing more than weird, exotic imitations of their American and British counterparts. To that extent, the question must be asked: were these postwar Japanese popular music genres forms of cultural appropriation?
To address this question, Occupation-era Japan should be acknowledged as a form of colony of the United States. The term “mimicry,” as defined by Homi Bhabha, is becoming increasingly important in postcolonial theory as it describes the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. During the Occupation, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers
General Douglas MacArthur encouraged Japan and Japanese people to Americanize, and the result was a classic case of colonial mimicry:
When colonial discourse encourages the colonized subject to “mimic” the colonizer, by
adopting the colonizer’s cultural habits, assumptions, institutions and values, the result is
never a simple reproduction of those traits. Rather, the result is a “blurred copy” of the
colonizer that can be quite threatening. This is because mimicry is never far from
mockery since it can appear to parody whatever it mimics. Mimicry therefore locates a
crack in the certainty of colonial dominance, an uncertainty in its control of the behaviour
of the colonized.173
As Bhabha has stated, “mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.”174 Perhaps imitation is
more than just the sincerest form of flattery.
173 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013), 155. 174 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1994), 86.
110
Mimicry as menace can be seen most prevalently in the negative reception of Japanese
rockabilly performers in Time magazine in chapter three. Postwar Japanese popular music was
not simply a cheap, Japanese Monkees-esque knock-off of the West. It was initially an extension of one of the many ways in which postwar Japanese youth attempted to survive and adapt to living in a colonial, Americanized society – Occupied Japan. Mimicry quite literally put food in some performers’ bellies. Once the Occupation ended and Japan began its economic trajectory back onto the world stage, Japanese popular music and its performers adapted. No longer reliant upon the demands of American G.I.s, by the mid to late 1950s Japanese pop music flourished for
Japanese audiences. As time passed and the inspiration from American and British popular music remained, Japanese popular musicians transformed from direct mimics into the “blurred copies” mentioned above, which appeared as threatening when attempting to break into the postwar
West. While postwar Japanese popular musicians did take and exploit elements of American and
British culture, these musicians respected and adored American and British popular music, and that is one of the main reasons why Japanese pop and rock continued after the era of country & western. However, Japanese musicians were also inspired by American and British popular music to further expand traditional Japanese genres, such as Takeshi Terauchi’s and The Swing
West’s development of tsugaru and jongara rock. While perhaps not remembered as such,
Japanese performers of country & western, rockabilly, kayōkyoku, eleki, and Group Sounds who
attempted to break into markets in the United States and the West were inadvertent proponents of
decolonization.
111
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