Blue Nippon

Atkins E. Taylor Atkins

Description

Japan's jazz community-both musicians and audience-has been begrudgingly recognized in the United States for its talent, knowledge, and level of appreciation. Underpinning this tentative admiration, however, has been a tacit agreement that, for cultural reasons, Japanese jazz "can't swing." In Blue Nippon E. Taylor Atkins shows how, strangely, Japan's own attitude toward jazz is founded on this same ambivalence about its authenticity.Engagingly told through the voices of many musicians, Blue Nippon explores the true and legitimate nature of Japanese jazz. Atkins peers into 1920s dancehalls to examine the Japanese Jazz Age and reveal the origins of urban modernism with its new set of social mores, gender relations, and consumer practices. He shows how the interwar jazz period then became a troubling symbol of Japan's intimacy with the West-but how, even during the Pacific war, the roots of jazz had taken hold too deeply for the "total jazz ban" that some nationalists desired. While the allied occupation was a setback in the search for an indigenous jazz sound, Japanese musicians again sought American validation. Atkins closes out his cultural history with an examination of the contemporary jazz scene that rose up out of Japan's spectacular economic prominence in the 1960s and 1970s but then leveled off by the 1990s, as tensions over authenticity and identity persisted.With its depiction of jazz as a transforming global phenomenon, Blue Nippon will make enjoyable reading not only for jazz fans worldwide but also for ethnomusicologists, and students of cultural studies, Asian studies, and modernism.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Cultural studies
• 20th century
• History of Asia
• Japan
• Jazz

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 06 septembre 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822380030
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

BLUE NIPPON

AUTHENTICATING JAZZ IN JAPAN

E. Taylor Atkins

Duke University Press

Durham and London 2001

BLUE

NIPPON

∫2001 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Typeset in Scala by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Lyrics to ‘‘The Tokyo Blues’’ reprinted with permission of Ecaroh Music. Lyrics to ‘‘Trouble in Mind’’ reprinted with permission of Universal Music Publishing Group.

For the ladies in my life, Zabrina Marie and Gabriella Rose

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

ix

x

i

Prelude: Plenty Plenty Soul

1

1 The Japanese Jazz Artist and the Authenticity Complex 19

2 The Soundtrack of Modern Life: Japan’s Jazz Revolution 45

3 Talkin’ Jazz: Music, Modernism, and Interwar Japan’s Culture Wars 93

4 ‘‘Jazz for the Country’s Sake’’: Toward a New Cultural Order in Wartime Japan 127

5 Bop, Funk, Junk, and That Old Democracy Boogie: The Jazz Tribes of Postwar Japan 165

6

Our Thing: Defining ‘‘Japanese Jazz’’

Postlude: J-Jazz and the Fin de Siècle Blues

Notes

277

References

Discography

Index

357

329

351

221

265

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Signboard for Chigusa, Japan’s oldestjazu kissa.5 2. Dancers sway to the sounds of Metropolitan Isawa and His Light Swingers at one of Yokohama’s many dance halls in 1933. 69 3. ‘‘Taxi dancers’’ await ticket-bearing customers at the Ginza Dance Hall, Tokyo, 1933. 70 4. The multitalented Japanese American jazz entertainer Alice Fumiko Kawabata, 1935. 80 5. Nisei crooner Rickey Miyagawa fronts the massive Photo Chemical Lab (pcl) symphonic jazz orchestra, ca. 1937. 81 6. ‘‘Dai Tokyo no jazo—The Jazz-Band of Tokyo,’’ 1927. 108 7. Professional dancers from Tokyo’s Kokka (National Flower) Dance Hall take a break from military drills with the Patriotic Women’s Association (Aikoku Fujin Kai), 1938. 140 8. Yokosuka commemorates Japanese musicians who entertained U.S. servicemen during the Occupation with three statues. 178 9. Musicians and singers who entertained U.S. servicemen in the Occupation era assemble for a final group picture at their gala reunion party, 1994. 178 10. Lt. James T. Araki in 1948. 181 11. Jammin’ with thegis. 182