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Aalgaard MA Thesis Gimme Shelter: Enka, Self and Society in Contemporary Japan by Scott Wade Aalgaard B.A., University of Victoria, 2001 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies © Scott Wade Aalgaard, 2011 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author. ii Gimme Shelter: Enka, Self and Society in Contemporary Japan by Scott Wade Aalgaard B.A., University of Victoria, 2001 Supervisory Committee Dr. Katsuhiko Endo, Supervisor (Department of Pacific and Asian Studies) Dr. Richard King, Departmental Member (Department of Pacific and Asian Studies) iii Supervisory Committee Dr. Katsuhiko Endo, Supervisor (Department of Pacific and Asian Studies) Dr. Richard King, Departmental Member (Department of Pacific and Asian Studies) ABSTRACT This study examines a genre of Japanese popular music known as enka, and the manner in which devotees of the genre and other stakeholders approach and negotiate with it. Previous academic examinations of enka have tended to locate it as a static musical embodiment of nostalgic ‘Japaneseness’. Relying upon field observations and discussions with enka devotees carried out in Tokyo and Fukushima, I argue that enka are in fact intensely ambiguous, and that the genre ultimately serves as a shelter for historically-specific listeners, one that is deeply implicated in the production of subjectivity and the social. Depending upon the manner in which they intertwine with other ‘texts’ in the listener’s life, enka can act as a homogenizing agent, or as a conduit for heterogeneity and movement – or both. This research will contribute to the advancement of our understanding both contemporary Japanese society and the role of popular music within it. Keywords: Popular music, enka, karaoke, society, Japan iv Table of Contents Supervisory Committee……………………………………………………………………………………….ii Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………………………...iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………….…………..iv Acknowedgements………………………………………………………………………………………………v Introduction Roji, Shelter, Consequence……………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One ‘You Don’t Know Me’: Life, Enka and the Unpredictable………………………………………...25 Chapter Two ‘Trapped in an Old Country Song’: Interiority, Enka and the Specter of National Language………………………………………………………………….48 Chapter Three ‘Come In Out of the Rain’: Shelter, Enka and the ‘Communities of the Us’……………….75 Conclusion ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’……………………………………………………………………………106 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………….127 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………………...……………….131 v Acknowledgements This research would not have been completed without the kind assistance and loving support of many. I am indebted to Katsuhiko Mariano Endo, whose patient guidance was instrumental in helping me find my voice and giving shape to my research. Todd Aalgaard and Ryan Johnston provided tireless editorial support, and colleagues and faculty within the University of Victoria’s Department of Pacific and Asian Studies provided invaluable feedback, support and suggestions, both formally and informally. This research would have been impossible without generous financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of Victoria and the Province of British Columbia, and would not even have left the conceptual phase were it not for the kindness and support showed to me by the staff and membership of the Nihon Amachua Kayō Renmei (NAK), and in particular by Mr. Masao Takemoto of the Tokyo Headquarters and the membership of the Fukushima Branch. Finally, I am eternally grateful to my partner Masako and my daughter Sara-Lynne, whose unconditional love and support kept me on track. To all of you, and many more who remain unnamed, I owe the success of this project. Any errors or insufficiencies that remain therein are mine, and mine alone. Introduction Roji, Shelter, Consequence On a cool summer evening in late June, the Susukino intersection on the south side of the northern Japanese city of Sapporo is bustling with intersecting flows of people – bar and club hawkers set to begin plying their trades, hostesses and other employees of the ‘pink’ sector who will soon be filing into the high-rise buildings that are honeycombed with floor upon floor of kyabakura drinking establishments and ‘massage parlors’, flashily- dressed ‘hosts’ who will soon begin soothing the frayed nerves of their female clientele, and, of course, the lifeblood of it all: the teeming masses of heterogeneous humanity – male and female, Japanese and non-Japanese – who flood the district night after night, seeking a momentary escape from the realities of their own day-to-day lives. Susukino is one of those so-called ‘red-light districts’ that is synonymous with neon and drink; indeed, the area survives on little more than its ongoing ability to provide the refuge that its patrons seek. It seems that, despite (or, more likely, because of) the particularly dark economic times that have descended upon Japan, and particularly upon Sapporo and the rest of rural (read: non-Tokyo) Japan, alcohol and its associated trappings remain very much sought-after commodities – although some purveyors now find themselves offering these at a discount. The light changes, and the surging tides ebb for a moment. In the lull, my thoughts turn to the friend that I am to meet here this evening – my oldest friend, born and raised in a small agricultural town just outside of Sapporo proper, and the very embodiment of the heterogeneity that I see swirling all round me. A former high school bad-boy and guitar player in a successful Japanese band, he has lived life to extremes that 2 not many can claim, traveling and living in the world at large and pushing through any boundary that he could see. All grown up now, he itches to continue life on his own terms – but feels, somehow, that he cannot. Now a middle-manager in a medium-sized information technology firm, he has confessed to me more than once of feeling ‘trapped’. The experience of having to shelve recklessness, passion and risk for rational ‘responsibility’ is common enough in contemporary society, perhaps, but my intensely intelligent friend is uncommonly particular in revealing the identity of his jailers – he is trapped, he says, into living life ‘the Japanese way’. “I’m Japanese, you know,” he says. “It can’t be helped.” Lurking behind my friend’s confession is the specter of discursive narrative, that which fuels racialized and culturalized notions of ‘belonging’ and which tempts us to dance at the edge of the gaping yaw of fascism, what Georges Bataille has called that “most closed form of [social] organization.”1 This sort of narrative – what Nakagami Kenji has called the ‘repressive machine’ – seems entirely out of place in the in-your-face complexity of Susukino. Despite the tangible heterogeneity that surrounds me, however, I know the sort of gated, universalized imaginaries haunting my friend – what Sakai Naoki would term a ‘discursive space’,2 a realm of interiority intolerant to the Other and disavowing of heterogeneity – to be lurking, ever threatening, under just the right conditions, to devour the heterogeneous and spiral into out-and-out fascism. These imaginaries are not overtly hostile, coming under the heels of jackboots or at the ends of bayonets; they are rather second-nature, a sort of “cultural unconsciousness”,3 driven not 1 Georges Bataille, trans. Allan Stoekl, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 – 1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 2 Naoki Sakai, Voices of the Past (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 4. 3 See Harry Harootunian, “Review Article: Hirohito Redux”, in Critical Asian Studies 33:4 (2001) 3 by malicious intent but by a drive for shelter, for camaraderie, even as they torment the very people that find themselves clinging to them. They are evidenced in the day-to-day experiences of many, including not the only many residents of this country (Japanese and non-Japanese alike) who have found themselves shut out of ‘Japan’ on the basis of their incompatibility with such narratives, but countless individuals, such as my friend, who find themselves trapped within the very same. This tension between a tangible heterogeneity and the ‘repressive machine’ in contemporary Japan reveals the ambiguity of lived reality so often concealed by discourses of ‘Japaneseness’ and leads us to the type of questions that have haunted me for much of my own life in Japan - questions that have immense ramifications for all of those who make their home here. What sorts of mechanisms serve to facilitate and reproduce realms of repressive narrative? Where can we find what Katsuhiko Mariano Endo has called ‘critical spaces’,4 those zones that potentiate an escape from narrative, the expression of difference, and which foster the capacity to flee the grip of the machine altogether? What are the desires that power it all? And, what potential consequence(s) might all this have for what is loosely called ‘Japanese society’ itself? These are not questions that can be answered by appeals to universalizing notions of ‘Japanese culture’ or ‘Japanese history’ – they can only be addressed by approaching that sphere of nearness which Naoki Sakai would term the realm of the trivial, the mundane, of the “‘us’, who are basically vulgar,”5 and what
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