Changes in a Changeless World
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Changes in a Changeless World Continuity and Discontinuity in Japanese Enka Music Gaute Hellås Master thesis in JAP4591 (60 credits) Asian and African Studies – Japanese Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages UNIVERSITY OF OSLO Spring 2012 ii Changes in a Changeless World Continuity and Discontinuity in Japanese Enka Music iv © Gaute Hellås 2012 Changes in a changeless world: continuity and discontinuity in Japanese enka music Gaute Hellås http://www.duo.uio.no/ Print: Reprosentralen, University of Oslo v Abstract This thesis seeks to investigate changes and continuity in the Japanese musical genre enka. Enka is a form of sentimental ballad music which is said to sing the heart/soul of Japan. An enka song is made to sound very traditional, yet the genre in itself is not that old. The genre was invented during the 1960s, and no song which matches the characteristics of the genre was released before the mid-1950s. Since the songs in the enka genre are made to sound traditional, both on a musical and textual level, it is hard to image that any changes to the genre would have occurred during its lifespan. When one listens to an enka song, this sentiment seem to hold true, since the songs sound old-fashioned, which is fitting for a genre which mostly appeals to an older audience. Nevertheless, as is the case with most forms of art, it is likely that enka songs have been influenced by the time they are written and released in. Furthermore, since Japanese society has gone through tremendous changes since the 1950s, it is hard to imagine that the enka genre has stayed as static as it may seem at first glance. The object of this thesis is therefore to investigate if there have occurred any changes or not in the genre, as well as to analyse any changes discovered. vi vii Table of Contents Abstract.......................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents......................................................................................................................vii List of Figures............................................................................................................................ix Chapter I: Introduction ...............................................................................................................1 1.1 Research Question............................................................................................................2 1.2 Defining enka...................................................................................................................2 1.2.1 Musical characteristics .............................................................................................4 1.2.2 Textual characteristics...............................................................................................5 1.2.3 Possible subcategories of enka.................................................................................6 1.2.4 Former version of enka.............................................................................................7 1.3 The genesis of the word enka...........................................................................................8 1.3.1 Different ways to write the word enka in Japanese..................................................9 1.4 A historical overview of modern enka............................................................................10 1.5 Sources and previous research in the field of enka........................................................12 Chapter II: Analysis of common themes and keywords............................................................15 2.1 Important keywords in enka music................................................................................15 2.1.1 My keywords..........................................................................................................16 2.2 The popularity of tears in enka music............................................................................17 2.2.1 Other keywords connected to weeping...................................................................18 2.2.2 Tears and gender.....................................................................................................21 2.3 Other Keywords.............................................................................................................23 2.3.1 Kokoro....................................................................................................................23 2.3.2 Dreams....................................................................................................................24 2.3.3 Love........................................................................................................................26 2.3.4 Furusato..................................................................................................................29 2.4 Other emotions...............................................................................................................30 2.4.1 Loneliness...............................................................................................................30 2.4.2 Nostalgia and yearning...........................................................................................33 2.4.3 Lingering affection.................................................................................................35 2.4.4 Happiness and sorrow.............................................................................................37 viii 2.4.5 Impermanence.........................................................................................................37 2.5 The crossing of gender lines in enka..............................................................................40 Chapter III: Thematic and textual analysis of the changes.......................................................42 3.1 My keywords separated into half-decades.....................................................................42 3.2 Crying through the ages.................................................................................................43 3.2.1 Sorrow in enka songs..............................................................................................44 3.2.2 Sorrow and lost love...............................................................................................47 3.2.3 Concluding remarks on sorrow...............................................................................48 3.3 Dreams............................................................................................................................49 3.3.1 The lost decade.......................................................................................................51 3.3.2 Dreams in the lost decade.......................................................................................52 3.3.3 The old versus the new dream phase......................................................................57 3.4 Love................................................................................................................................58 3.4.1 Ai............................................................................................................................59 3.4.2 The sudden impact of songs about deep love.........................................................60 3.4.3 The history of songs about short-term love............................................................63 3.4.4 The increases and decreases in popularity of enka songs about love.....................66 3.4.5 Koi, ai and horeru...................................................................................................68 3.5 Loneliness and longing...................................................................................................70 3.5.1 Further shifts in songs about loneliness and yearning............................................75 3.5.2 Changes in songs about loneliness and yearning....................................................80 3.6 Lingering affection.........................................................................................................81 3.6.1 Changes in the miren motif.....................................................................................83 3.6.2 Closing words on lingering affections....................................................................85 Chapter IV: Conclusion and objects for further study..............................................................86 4.1 Changes..........................................................................................................................86 4.2 Minor deviations.............................................................................................................88 4.3 Final remarks..................................................................................................................89 Bibliography..............................................................................................................................91 Appendix: List of songs in the corpus......................................................................................93 ix List of Figures Figure 2.1 Word frequency in song texts..................................................................................16 Figure 3.1 Word frequency in song texts per period of time.....................................................43 Figure 3.2 Proportion of songs about weeping.........................................................................44