Asian Sound Cultures: Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology 9780367698911, 9780367698973, 9781003143772

Citation preview

Asian Sound Cultures

This book examines the meanings, uses, and agency of voice, noise, sound, and sound technologies across Asia. Including a series of wide-ranging and interdisciplinary case studies, the book reveals sound as central to the experience of modernity in Asia and as essential to the understanding of the historical processes of cultural, social, political, and economic transformation throughout the long twentieth century. Presenting a broad range of topics—from the changing sounds of the Kyoto kimono-making industry to radio in late colonial India—the book explores how the study of Asian sound cultures offers greater insight into historical accounts of local and global transformation. Challenging us to rethink and reassemble important categories in sound studies, this book will be a vital resource for students and scholars of sound studies, Asian studies, history, postcolonial studies, and media studies. Iris Haukamp is Associate Professor in Japanese Film at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan. Her research interests include interwar cinema, international co-productions, and local film culture. Christin Hoene is Assistant Professor in Literary Studies at Maastricht University, Netherlands. Her research spans modern and contemporary anglophone literature, with a particular focus on postcolonial literature, sound studies, word and music studies, and queer theory. Martyn David Smith is a historian of modern and contemporary Japan and Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. His recent research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of sound and the history of technology in Japan and Asia and his long-standing research interests cover national identity, nationalism, gender, the mass media, and consumer society in Japan and East Asia.

Routledge Contemporary Asia Series

71. Minorities, Rights and the Law in Malaysia The Politico-Legal Mobilisation of Ethnic Minorities Thaatchaayini Kananatu 72. Hate Speech in Asia and Europe Beyond Hate and Fear Edited by Myungkoo Kang, Mari-Orange Rivé-Lasan, Wooja Kim and Philippa Hall 73. Climate Change Governance in Asia Edited by Kuei-Tien Chou, Koichi Hasegawa, Dowan Ku, and Shu-Fen Kao 74. Historical Narratives in East Asia of the 21st Century Overcoming the Politics of National Identity Edited by Hitoshi Tanaka 75. Memory, Trauma, Asia Recall, Affect, and Orientalism in Contemporary Narratives Edited by Rahul K. Gairola and Sharanya Jayawickrama 76. Transnational Civil Society in Asia The Potential of Grassroots Regionalization Edited by Simon Avenell and Akihiro Ogawa 77. Whole Person Education in East Asian Universities Perspectives from Philosophy and Beyond Edited by Benedict S. B. Chan and Victor C. M. Chan 78. Air Pollution Governance in East Asia Edited by Kuei-tien Chou, Koichi Hasegawa, Dowan Ku and Shu-Fen Kao 79. Authoritarianism and Civil Society in Asia Edited by Akihiro Ogawa and Anthony J. Spires 80. Asian Sound Cultures Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology Edited by Iris Haukamp, Christin Hoene and Martyn David Smith For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Contemporary-Asia-Series/book-series/SE0794

Asian Sound Cultures Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology Edited by Iris Haukamp, Christin Hoene and Martyn David Smith

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Iris Haukamp, Christin Hoene and Martyn David Smith; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Iris Haukamp, Christin Hoene and Martyn David Smith to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of the chapter titled ‘Introducing Asian Sound Cultures’ and Chapters 5, 7 and 10, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The chapter titled ‘Introducing Asian Sound Cultures’ and Chapters 5, 7 and 10 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-69891-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-69897-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-14377-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772 Typeset in Times by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive) Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions

To Olive.

Contents

List of figures x List of contributors xii Acknowledgements xvi Introducing Asian Sound Cultures 1 IRIS HAUKAMP, CHRISTIN HOENE AND MARTYN DAVID SMITH

PART I

The politics of voice

17

1 The phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’: Speech recordings for imperial subjectification and wartime mobilisation in colonial Taiwan and Korea

19

FUMITAKA YAMAUCHI

2 In dark times: Poetic dissonance in the Thai-Malay borderlands 40 NOAH KEONE VIERNES

3 Sonic aesthetics and social disparity: The voice of villains in Ryoo Seung-wan’s Veteran (2015) and The Unjust (2010)

59

JINA ELEANOR KIM

PART II

Modern noise

79

4 Aesthetic ruptures and sociabilities: Tateyama Noboru (1876–1926), quotidian noise, and sōkyoku-jiuta 81 PHILIP FLAVIN

viii Contents

5 The ‘hell of modern sound’: A history of urban noise in modern Japan

101

MARTYN DAVID SMITH

6 Feel the power of my exoticism: Japanese Noise music and claims of a distinct Japanese sound

124

JEREMY CORRAL

PART III

Sound and power

139

7 Listening to the talkies: Atarashiki tsuchi’s (1937) acoustic construction of Japan for western consumption

141

IRIS HAUKAMP

8 Recovering the lost Cantonese sounds in pre-handover Hong Kong: Sinophone politics in Dung Kai-cheung’s ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’ (1995)

162

KA LEE WONG

9 When the looms stop, the baby cries: The changing sounds of the Kyoto kimono-making industry

179

JENNY HALL

PART IV

Technology and imperialism

197

10 Early radio in late colonial India: Historiography, geography, audiences

199

VEBHUTI DUGGAL AND CHRISTIN HOENE

11 (Re)Diffusion of beautiful sound: Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok

220

KORNPHANAT TUNGKEUNKUNT

12 Arranging sounds from daily life: Amateur sound-recording contests and audio culture in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s 240 TOMOTARO KANEKO

Contents  ix

13 The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand: From United States anti-communist weapon to the Phetchabun processional bands’ sound system

257

PIERRE PROUTEAU

Index 280

Figures

2.1 ‘Checkpoint’ (Six-Nature collective, Patani Artspace, 4 August 2019). 51 2.2 Saiburi River, Kuala Kawel. 53 3.1 Spectrogram of Chu Yang speaking ‘We can't have the police displeased’ [경찰이 불쾌 하면 안 되지]. 72 3.2 Spectrogram of Chu Yang speaking ‘Yes, it is my mistake’ [아이, 내가 잘 못 했내]. 72 3.3 Spectrogram of Chu Yang's angry scream ‘I could have really offended the police’ [경찰을 아주 불쾌 하게 할 번 했어]. 73 3.4 Spectrogram of Chu Yang speaking ‘Elder, sir.’ [어르신]. 73 3.5 Spectrogram of Cho T'ae'o speaking ‘You have a very good-looking son’ [아들님이 아주 잘 생겼내요]. 74 3.6 Spectrogram of Cho T'aeo's postlinguistic voice and speaking ‘Driver, sir’ [기사님]. 74 4.1 Frontispiece from Kinkyoku chiyo no kotobuki 琴曲千代の壽, 1843 (Author’s collection. Shōhakutei shujin. ed. 1842. Kinkyoku chiyo no kotobuki. Osaka: Kawachiya Tasuke). 85 4.2 Isochidori tegoto (excerpt) (Kikuoka. 1975. Isochidori, edited by U. Nakashima. Osaka: Maekawa). 87 4.3 Mikuni no homare tegoto (excerpt) (Kikutaka. 1941. Mikuni no homare, edited by U. Nakashima. Osaka: Maekawa: 4). 90 4.4 Gaisen rappa no shirabe: tegoto (excerpt) (Tateyama. 1937. Gaisen rappa no shirabe, edited by U. Nakashima. Osaka: Maekawa Gōmeisha: 3). 93 4.5 Frontispiece from the Ito no shirabe 糸の調べ, 1818 (Author's collection. Nankō O. rev. 1818. Kinkyoku ito no shirabe (zōho). Osaka. Maekawa Zenbei). 94 9.1 Map of Kyoto showing the district of Nishijin and various yūzen workshops. 184 10.1 Reception reports of the ISBS indicating transmission received across various parts of the British Empire in Africa, North America, England, and Scotland. 206 10.2 Mid-shot of village men listening together to a radio set in the mid-1930s. 210

Figures  xi 11.1 Radio and rediffusion broadcasting technology. 223 11.2 Rediffusion coverage area. 224 11.3 Timetable for Rediffusion broadcast. 229 13.1 Twin horn schematics (© Electro-Voice). 259 13.2 An MIT trip showing movies in Nongkhai province along the Lao border in 1964. 261 13.3 The phin prayuk band Samoe Sin, Lomsak district, Phetchabun province. 262 13.4 The phin prayuk sound system. 268

Contributors

Jeremy Corral received his PhD in History, Societies and Civilisations from Inalco (French National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations) in 2021 and is currently a course lecturer at Inalco. In 2016, as a Canon Foundation Fellow, he undertook research about the NHK Electronic music studio at Osaka University of Arts. His research interests focus on Japanese contemporary music history and sound practices in Japan. He is the author of Japanoise: Extrémismes & entropie (2019). Vebhuti Duggal is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi. In her research, she is interested in questions that lie at the intersection of media, music, and sound. Her recent publications include ‘Imagining sound through the Pharmaish: Radios and request-postcards in North India, c. 1955–75’ (2018) and ‘Seeing print, hearing song: Tracking the film song through the Hindi popular print sphere, c. 1955–75’ (Tejaswini Niranjana, ed. Music, Modernity, and Publicness in India. 2020) Philip Flavin is Associate Professor at Kansai Gaidai University. After completing his PhD in Music at the University of California at Berkeley in 2002, he received a Social Science Research Council sponsored post-­ doctorate at the Kyoto City University of Fine Arts where he continued to conduct research in so ̄kyoku-jiuta as well as further his understanding of other genres of Japanese music, in particular, Noh and Chikuzen biwa. In 2006, Philip was invited to participate in a project on the impact of modernity on Japanese music and worked for Monash and Melbourne Universities. Now residing in Kyoto, he continues to perform and write, his recent publications focusing on the newly developing aesthetics of ­sōkyoku-jiuta during the pre-war period, music of the Japanese avantgarde, and translations of contemporary Japanese theatre works. Jenny Hall is a Research Officer at the Japanese Studies Centre, Monash University. Her research is situated at the intersection of Japanese Studies, Fashion and Design Studies, Cultural Heritage Studies, and Anthropology. She was awarded a PhD in Anthropology in 2016 from Monash University. Her first book, Japan Beyond the Kimono: Tradition and Innovation in the

Contributors  xiii Kyoto Textile Industry (2020) expanded upon her PhD research to develop a sensory analysis of the design, production, and consumption of contemporary Japanese apparel created using heritage industry techniques. Her wider research interests include representations of the self, cultural identity, embodied practices, sound studies, and digital ethnographic methods. Iris Haukamp is Associate Professor in Japanese Film at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Her research interests include interwar cinema, international co-productions, and local film culture. In her first monograph, A Foreigner’s Cinematic Dream of Japan: Representational Politics and Shadows of War (2020), she reconsiders the production history of the German-Japanese co-production New Earth (1937) by drawing on newly available archival material in several languages. Her current project focuses on generic innovations in scriptwriting in the mid-1930s, during the historical shift from silent to sound film. Christin Hoene is Assistant Professor in Literary Studies at Maastricht University. Her research spans modern and contemporary anglophone literature, with a particular focus on postcolonial literature, sound studies, word and music studies, and queer theory. Her current work focuses on the depictions of sound and sound technology in colonial literature and on the history of the radio in the context of imperial India. Christin is the author of the book Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature (Routledge, 2015). She has also published essays on soundscapes in postcolonial literature, the Bengali polymath Jagadis Chandra Bose, Bengali science fiction, the colonial politics of science, and music in contemporary literature. Tomotaro Kaneko is Associate Professor in Art History, Art Theory, and Conservation at the Faculty of Arts at Aichi University of the Arts. His field is aesthetics and aural culture, and he is one of the organisers of the Japanese Art Sound Archive. He has published widely on sound, media, and art. His recent publications include ‘Listening to sound patterns: Tony Schwartz’s documentary recordings’ (2018) and (in Japanese) ‘Kosai Hori’s performances in the 1970s: Art after the student movement in the late 1960s in Japan’ (2019). Jina Eleanor Kim is Associate Professor in Korean Literature and Culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Oregon. Her research and teaching interests focus on the cultural and literary history of Korea from the late nineteenth century to the present with a particular emphasis on global and Korean modernisms, urban studies, comparative colonialism, intermediality, and sound studies. She is the author of Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan (2019) and has published various articles on Korean film, literature, and culture, such as ‘Broadcasting solidarity across the Pacific: Reimagining the Tongp’o in Take Me Home and the Free Chol Soo Lee Movement’ (2020). She is

xiv Contributors currently working on a new monograph on a cultural history of radio and auditory texts in modern Korea. Pierre Prouteau received his PhD from Nanterre University in 2021 and is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the research project ‘Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives’ (DeCoSEAS). His main research is on the sound systems in Thailand. Through the prism of audio technology and by studying musical performances, Buddhist, and non-Buddhist rituals, he focuses on delineating Thai and Lao sonic media theory and theories of perception and investigates the functions of sound in society. Martyn David Smith is a historian of modern and contemporary Japan and Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of ‘Sound hunting in postwar Japan: recording technology, aurality, mobility, and consumerism’, Sound Studies 7(1), 2021, and Mass Media, Consumerism and National Identity in Postwar Japan (2018). His recent research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of sound and the history of technology in Japan and Asia and his long-standing research interests cover national identity, nationalism, gender, the mass media, and consumer society in Japan and East Asia. Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt is Assistant Professor in History in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Thammasat University, Thailand. She teaches Chinese ­history, and has published various articles in Thai, Chinese, and English journals. Engaging in a dialogue about China and its relationship with the world, especially Thailand, her work also attempts to bridge the gap between Chinese- and English-language research in the field. Noah Keone Viernes is an Associate Professor in the Global Studies programme. He teaches visual culture and social movements at Akita International University in Akita City, Japan. His writing emphasises the aesthetics of protest in Thailand and appears in a range of journals including New Political Science and South East Asia Research. He is currently completing two projects that include a manuscript about the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and a visual essay about poetry in Thailand’s southern border provinces. Ka Lee Wong is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research concerns critical issues in transnational Chinese media and cultural studies, particularly language politics, internet culture, and censorship. She is currently working on her dissertation which examines the circulation and (re) production of Cantonese popular culture in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Contributors  xv Fumitaka Yamauchi is Professor and Director at the Graduate Institute of Musicology of National Taiwan University (NTU) in Taipei, Taiwan. Working between musicology and sound studies on the one hand, and cultural and postcolonial studies on the other, he studies the music and media history of Korea, Taiwan, and East Asia from a trans-imperial and trans-colonial perspective, addressing their broader relevance to other time-space contexts in global history. He is co-editor of the 2012 special issue ‘Colonial modernity and East Asian musics’ (The World of Music), and of Formations of Phonographic Modernity in East and Southeast Asia: Exploring the Gramophone Industry and Music Genres (under contract).

Acknowledgements

This book, like many of its kind, started out as a conference: a meeting of like-minded people, fruitful discussions, countless cups of coffee, and sushi in the evening. The Sound Culture Studies and Modernity in Asia Conference took place at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies from 14–15 September 2018, and we were amazed by the range of topics and interests and the constructive discussions they engendered. Many thanks to all presenters and participants, and in particular to Professor David Hughes for his wonderful closing remarks. Gathering scholars from all over the globe necessitated planning and funding, and we would like to express our gratitude to the TUFS Programme for Japan Studies in Global Context (CAAS Unit, supported by MEXT), and the Initiative for Realising Diversity in the Research Environment (MEXT Funds for the Development of Human Resources in Science and Technology). Christin would also like to thank the Leverhulme Trust (ECF-2016-362) for funding underlying research and travel and accommodation. The conference would have been impossible without the kind support of Professor Satō Yōko of the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology and Uzaki Yuki and Kikuchi Naoko’s invaluable assistance. Many thanks to our authors who patiently worked with us through several rounds of reviews and adjustments, the situation not having been made easier by the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–) that changed and at the time of manuscript submission keeps changing lives and impacting on plans and schedules. We are also very much indebted to the anonymous reviewers who gave poignant and constructive advice and encouraged us to proceed with this book. Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang and Alexandra Supper gave valuable feedback on earlier drafts of the introduction, so many thanks for that. Emily Pickthall and Andrew Leach at Routledge were wonderful to work with, particularly during the stressful final stage of putting the book together. Finally, we are grateful to the Grants Committee of the University Fund Limburg/SWOL and the School of East Asian Studies, the University of Sheffield for providing open-access funding for the introduction and chapters 5, 7 and 10.

Introducing Asian Sound Cultures Iris Haukamp, Christin Hoene and Martyn David Smith

Sound, modernity, and Asia In this book, we bring together studies on sound in Asia by scholars from various backgrounds, and at various stages of their academic careers, working on and—in many cases—from Asia. By examining the meanings, uses, and agency of voice, noise, sound, and sound technology from across a wide geographical region, the chapters challenge us to rethink and reassemble categories such as sound and power, technology and imperialism, voice and its interrelations with politics, noise and modernity, the relationship between the global and the local in modernity, as well as the dominant binaries of West/ East or North/South, and colonial versus postcolonial. The work presented in this book acknowledges an important juncture in the study of sound brought about by the rapid increase of interest in and publications related to it. Whether we understand sound studies as an academic field or as a tool available to multiple disciplines (Hilmes 2005), research on sound covers numerous fields of research, differing historical and geographical contexts, and the challenging of familiar theoretical concepts (Smith 1994; Smith 2003). In particular, over the last decade or so, the geographical range of sound studies has rapidly broadened, and in this context, this book tackles the urgent question of how we account for the shared experience of the construction of modern sound whilst thinking it through and beyond the point of difference. If sound is a substance of the world, it is also an essential element in how people frame their knowledge of that world (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015, 2). Yet, despite increasing in geographical scope, studies of sound have too often been restricted to comparisons between European countries or between the European experience and that of the United States. Although much work on the West highlights national differences and brings out developments that have taken different trajectories and followed differing chronologies, the conclusions often highlight common ways of hearing, controlling, reproducing, and ultimately thinking about sound that stem from ‘shared similarities’ in experiences of modernity (Morat 2014, 3). This is, of course, as Sheldon Garon has noted (2017), an affliction of the transnational historical project more broadly. Nevertheless, as sound studies become increasingly DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772-1

2  Iris Haukamp et al. consolidated into a field of study, scholars need to be aware that the process of establishing and defining key terms must avoid repeating the historical danger that by ‘imposing categories of meaning particular to Europe’, modern academic disciplines have often rendered ‘all other societies colonies of Europe’ (Conrad 2016, 4). The ‘colonisation’ of the study of sound is evident in the numerous histories of technologies of sound as ‘modern western technology’, and in sonic ontologies and philosophies of sound that privilege an Enlightenment separation of the somatic from the psychological that has in turn relegated aurality behind the intense visuality of modern life and material culture. As Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes argue, research on non-western cultures throughout the twentieth century has been haunted by the positioning of non-western peoples ‘as closer to sound and hearing than their European counterparts’ (2019, 3). Jonathan Sterne’s recognition and problematisation of the ‘audiovisual litany’ (2012, 9) demonstrates the extent to which the relegation of sound and aurality behind the visual in accounts of modernity is imbued with colonial binaries that are cultural prejudices elevated to the level of theory. The identification of the visual as modern and western is maintained by the othering of auditory cultures. Linking modernity with visuality has helped to establish some of the most ingrained cultural oppositions between us and them (Sterne 2012, 9–10). At the same time, the increasing volume of work on sound and auditory cultures means that keywords and approaches to sound in the humanities and social sciences are becoming increasingly standardised theoretical and conceptual tools. Unfortunately, as sound studies begin to take shape as a field, ways of thinking with and about sound articulated by experiences outside the West—including methods and examples that involve challenges to the mode of narrating what counts as a proper sound—are ‘conspicuously absent from the description of its disciplinary formation’ (Ochoa Gautier 2019, 263). And as Ana María Ochoa Gautier warns us, the problem is that the early promise for sound studies of challenging, disrupting, or even dismantling the problematic binaries of the ‘audiovisual litany’ is now at risk of depoliticising the very process of change by a homogenisation of its key theoretical terms. As a discipline, sound studies risks becoming colonised because of the contemporary imperial, neoliberal, institutional structure of academic production, recognition, and citation that articulate the global governance of the capacity to name the emergence of a field (Ochoa Gautier 2019, 262–264). The task facing those who work on or through sound is to shape a field that can remain as open to interpretation and as diffuse in nature and geography as the object of study itself. Asian Sound Cultures adds to a growing body of work, then, that challenges western universalism in the humanities through sound and contributes to the expansion of the cartography of global modernity in sound studies. The contributors to Steingo’s and Sykes’s recent edited collection, Remapping Sound Studies (2019), clearly highlight ongoing issues surrounding regimes of knowledge and the inherent unevenness brought about by a process of

Introducing Asian Sound Cultures  3 modernity with its origins in the West that continues to be reinforced by the neo-liberal academic institutions of the more developed regions of the globe. In the effort to invoke discourses of sound as ‘artefacts of rich and diverse histories of thought’, as well as to attend to the ‘existential and even mundane presence of sound in everyday life’ (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015, 2), our book takes up the challenges presented by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny’s Keywords in Sound (2015), Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan’s Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique (2016), as well as Steingo and Sykes, because the laying out of the terms of debate and the mapping of the ‘shared ground’ of sound studies over the last decade has clearly revealed the exciting prospects inherent in the destabilising and denaturalising nature of sound as an object of study. Yet the presumption of universality has been hard to shake in a field that appears wedded to western intellectual lineages and traditions (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015, 3–7). Much recent work, even if openly challenging the dominance of the West, has only served to highlight those experiences as the point of difference—frequently as the ‘other’ of colonial regimes of knowledge—and further reinforced notions of common ways of hearing, controlling, reproducing, and ultimately thinking about sound that foreground an emphasis on the visual in modernity as not just an accentuated tendency in western conceptions of knowledge, but as a critical element in the constitution of the colonial modern itself (Ochoa Gautier 2015, 13). It is impossible to deny the extent of—or at the very least the desire for—imperial projection through the networks of knowledge and aesthetic influence surrounding music, language, and technologies for example. Ultimately though, the imperial project itself has become the circuit around or against which aurality is seen to be structured, and it has become the hub around which or against which studies of sound in the non-West have too often found their common ground. Attempts to study sound in Asia have often focused on the problem of how to separate local auditory signals from the global circuits within which they resonate. Separating the signal from the circuit has certainly helped to expose the dominance of imperial—and predominantly western—ways of thinking about sound and sound technology, but all too often in favour of a quest for a pure, unadulterated, ‘traditional’ sound that can speak against the western process of modernity. This creates two channels, the indigenous sonic experience or signal that is boosted, attenuated, or interfered with by the process of modernity and the wider, global historical processes and regimes of knowledge within which sound—and specifically modern sound—came to be understood. In everyday life of course, once combined, separating the local from the global requires a great deal of work. Ultimately, like modern life, the sonic takes on meaning not thanks to the triumph or amplification of the global circuitry over the local signal; rather, it is at the point where both come together that sound takes on meaning. The use of US weapons of war to create a new musical instrument and music style in Thailand; the hobby of sound hunting and amateur recording competitions in Japan; the changing sounds of the Kyoto Kimono making industry; radio in late colonial India;

4  Iris Haukamp et al. city soundscapes in film; poetry as dissonance under Thai military rule; voicing bad guys in Korean cinema; and the politics of the phonograph in colonial Korea and Taiwan: the chapters in this volume seek to recover sound as central to the experience of modernity and everyday life in Asia and as essential to our understanding of the historical processes of cultural, social, political, and economic transformation throughout the long twentieth century. Throughout Asian Sound Cultures, we push beyond the binaries of North/ South or East/West by bringing together geographical areas that unsettle unambiguous notions of western colonialism and post colonialism. The countries covered here include China, South Korea, Hong Kong, India, and Thailand, as well as Japan—a highly developed capitalist economy and itself an imperial centre that complicates easy equations between West=Modern, West=Empire, and functions as an important site for the questioning of issues of both modernity and (post)colonialism. The chapters in Asian Sound Cultures tackle the issues of sound as music, modernity as development, or Empire as ‘western/northern regimes’ of knowledge, by mixing much-needed historical perspectives with ethnography, literary studies, film studies, technology, language, and music. Bringing these disciplines to work on and through the study of sound helps to show that interdisciplinarity must be at the heart of sound studies, whether it is seen as an approach or a discipline in its own right. Also, the wide range of case studies in this volume, spanning different geographical spaces and historical periods, amplifies the importance of openness and diffusion as well as convergence and amplification in the study of sound.

The politics of voice The first three chapters address the topic of ‘voice’ from a multiplicity of geographical, disciplinary, and material vantage points. Deciding and defining who can speak and who is being silenced is always a political act, just as much as breaking silences and giving voice to the silenced. As a metaphor, voice is particularly resonant in the context of uneven hierarchies of power, including imperialism and colonialism. In his chapter on ‘The phonographic politics of “corporeal voice”’, Fumitaka Yamauchi focuses on speech recordings for imperial subjectification and wartime mobilisation in colonial Taiwan and Korea. He introduces the concept of nikusei (a term he translates as ‘corporeal voice’) to sound studies and adds an important case study focused on Japanese imperialism. Nikusei was widely used in print across the territories of the Japanese empire during the early twentieth century to advertise recordings of Japanese military leaders, often posthumously. Treated as ‘sacred sounds’, these ‘corporeal voices’ invited, and in effect constituted, devotional listening subjects and called the living to deadly battlefields in the service of Japanese imperialism. The discussion of ‘corporeal voice’ is a meditation on the disembodiment of the voice caused by recording it—more urgently so in cases where, such as this, the recorded voice outlives the corporal body. It thus also becomes a meditation on presence and absence, and the

Introducing Asian Sound Cultures  5 ephemeral nature of the speaking voice versus the material reality of the recorded voice in the physical presence of the recording. Yamauchi also considers what happens when the colonised resist auditory indoctrination by turning a deaf ear to the phonographic voices of Japanese military leaders. In Chapter 2, ‘In dark times: Poetic dissonance in the Thai-Malay borderlands’, Noah Keone Viernes sounds out the political dimensions of the poetic voice outside the Euro-Western world. Focusing on the work of the Thailanguage poetry of Malay writer Zakariya ‘Che’ Amataya, Viernes analyses how Che’s voice resists the dialogic harmony of the state and explores how his voice has thus been able to disrupt, disagree with, and resist the declaration of martial law in the Southern Thai borderlands since 2004. In the dissonant landscape of the Thai-Malay borderland, political division threatens to silence what are perceived to be discordant voices, but the sound of Che’s contentious poetic voice, Viernes argues, marks a space of resistance against the territorial and disciplinary imposition of martial law. As Viernes puts it: ‘There is power in resonance, but also power over others in the reproduction of silence’. In opposition to institutional silencing, Viernes positions Che’s as an alternative and dissonant voice that echoes a long tradition of sound as a form of power politics in the region: from the cymbal that rang in the transition from the fourteenth-century Hindu polity to the fifteenth-century Islamic one, to the gift of ‘royal drums’ (nobat) from one sultanate to another to signify solidarity, to the silencing regime of contemporary martial law. Viernes’s chapter examines the politics of voice—poetic versus military—in a highly politicised and politically fractured region. He explores how the dissenting voice of the poet—and, at times, the crowd—has the potential to challenge not only the authoritarian speak of government and military, but also to unsettle the dominating frame of martial law. The associations and metaphorical richness of the term ‘voice’ in languages other than English and in geographical contexts outside the Euro-Western world explored by Viernes in the Thai-Malay context are also closely listened to by Jina E. Kim in her concluding chapter to this section. In ‘Sonic aesthetics and social disparity: The voice of villains in Ryoo Seung-wan’s Veteran (2015) and The Unjust (2010)’, Kim examines the voice of villains in two South-Korean films. Using an interdisciplinary lens of sociocultural linguistics, sound studies, and the cultural history of Korea, Kim develops the categories of contemptuous sarcasm and indignant sarcasm, which, she argues, are vocal qualities that amplify and earmark the vast social inequalities in contemporary Korean society. Kim thus expands canonical scholarship— such as Edward Sapir’s 1927 pioneering study of ‘Speech as a Personality Trait’—that focus on vocal cues for English language contexts by teasing out the cultural registers and historical experiences that are necessary to contextualise sarcasm in Korean. In doing so, she reveals an unfinished process of decolonisation and highlights the way voice is entwined in crucial networks of power and social relations. In the case of her villains, their sarcastic vocal features become sonic signifiers mediating national anxieties of social inequality that amplify an incomplete process of decolonisation and hint at a

6  Iris Haukamp et al. continuing process of internal colonisation through economic disparity. Through the associations and imaginations of poetic form, the technological platforms and infrastructure of colonial power, and the sound of the bad guys, voice is not just a sonic and material phenomenon but a powerful metaphor that, as the chapters in this section show, is diffuse, ambiguous, and extremely useful in different cultural and historical contexts.

Modern noise Noise is usually defined in negation, as that which is not intelligible, organised, or meaningful sound. As David Novak puts it: a discrete subject in itself, noise resists interpretation. It is the static on the radio; the mass of unbeautiful sounds that surrounds the island of musical aesthetics; the clatter of the modern world that indexes the lost sounds of nature; the chaos that resists social order; the unintegrated entities that exist beyond culture. (2015, 126) But to tell noise apart from these other sounds is a normative position that depends on the listener and their sociocultural context as well as numerous other circumstances. Ultimately, noise does not exist outside an interpretative framework that is itself implicated within hierarchies of power. As the papers in this section demonstrate, the nature of art, the modern versus the natural, chaos versus social order, and nature versus culture are highly normative binaries that are deeply imbricated with the geopolitics of the modern world. R. Murray Schafer’s landmark 1977 publication The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World presents a fixed and natural binary with the technological clamour of modernity drowning out the peaceful keynotes of nature. Although Shafer pressed the need to rescue the sounds of nature from the background cacophony of modern life, as Ari Kelman has noted, it is the background noise that has become the ‘headline act’ for most scholars of sound (2010, 229). And, if noise can take on or shed meaning so readily, it is precisely the soundscape as background noise that makes the concept such a rich metaphor for exploring the multiplicities and intricacies of modernity in Asia. Japan, perhaps more than any other country in Asia, inhabits these complexities. All chapters in this section focus on Japan, which allows the chapters to speak to each other in ways that allow for specificity and depth of meaning. As a colonial power itself, one that, by the 1920s, defined its own modernity, and with a relationship to the West that has historically been defined by extremes, Japan complicates all the binaries of western modernity and imperialism. Listening to the background noise of modernity in Japan brings out the ambiguity, complexity, and inevitability of a global process deeply imbricated in the local. The chapters in this section listen in on the noises of Japan over the span of the last 150 years, a period in which both the

Introducing Asian Sound Cultures  7 country and its noises moved from the pre-modern (Flavin, Chapter 4) to the modern (Smith, Chapter 5) to the postmodern (Corral, Chapter 6). Philip Flavin’s chapter on ‘Aesthetic ruptures and sociabilities: Tateyama Noboru (1876–1926), quotidian noise, and sōkyoku-jiuta’ explores the impact of urban and western noise on pre-modern Japanese musical aesthetics through the works of Tateyama Noboru. Composing at the height of the Meiji Restoration (1868–1912), which saw Japan’s transformation into a modern imperial power that was strongly influenced by the West, Tateyama was the first composer to incorporate western music into Japanese music for the koto, a 13-stringed zither. The music Tateyama turned to in his attempts to modernise Japanese music was the western military march, then part of the western urban sound environment, that embodied a highly politicised referencing of the contemporary West. Flavin discusses this innovation in terms of a violent aesthetic rupture to the original lyrical sentiment pursued in the Edo period. In referencing the ‘popular’ music of the western military brass band, Tateyama also introduced the real world, replete with political reality and new notions of the disciplined body placed within the larger framework of the nation-state, into what can only be seen as a new nationalist musical genre. Rather than ‘sound’, Flavin thinks of this violence as ‘noise’—a politically charged referencing of the contemporary world that did not exist in pre-modern sōkyoku-jiuta aesthetics. The irruptive impact of these incongruous ideologically laden noises fundamentally changed the sentimental lyric aesthetic of sōkyoku-jiuta through the introduction of ‘urban noise’, and forever changed indigenous Japanese music. As Flavin concludes, the juggernaut of modernity crushed everything in its path, its noise obliterating the ‘sounds’ of pre-modern aesthetics and understandings, but in its tracks, new understandings, new modes of aesthetic engagement, and new understandings of public space sprang to life. In the middle chapter of the trio, ‘The “hell of modern sound”: A history of urban noise in modern Japan’, Martyn David Smith echoes Flavin’s concern with urban noise, and takes us from pre-modern Japan squarely into the modern period. Highlighting particular accents in the discourse about urban noise that reverberate throughout the twentieth century, Smith traces the history of urban noise in Japan and concludes that the noise of the modern Japanese cityscape and discussions about it are not new; and neither is the link between a noisy cityscape and a conception of modernity as urban and loud. Like Flavin, Smith suggests that Japanese modernity is negotiated visa-vis the West, but with several caveats. Noise, Smith argues, was understood not as a symbol of modernity or consequence of it, but as a hindrance in achieving it made worse by the Japanese peoples’ supposed lack of civilisation. The issue of urban noise and rapid economic growth allowed for comparisons between Japan and a West that was allegedly more civilised because it was quieter and quieter because it was more civilised. Here, again, the actuality of noise breaks the binary of modernity by being both/and: ringing in modernity (noise of cities, factories, etc.), the clamour of which at the same time marks it as supposedly less civilised than the West. By the 1930s, the ‘hell

8  Iris Haukamp et al. of modern noise’ that had triumphed marked a sonic condition of modernity as an inescapable component of the technology that came with it—and it amplified the problems with the response of the Japanese people to that modernity. Concluding this section, Jeremy Corral’s chapter, ‘Feel the power of my exoticism: Japanese Noise music and claims of a distinct Japanese sound’, takes us from the modern to the postmodern and from noise to Noise music, a musical genre from the turn of this century that is characterised primarily by its blatant lack of traditional musical architecture. Corral’s chapter resonates with Flavin’s discussion (Chapter 4) about the relationship between noise and music but transposes it by a century from the turn of the twentieth to the turn of the twenty-first century and from Japanese musical culture at the brink of modernity to musical late postmodernism. Where the introduction of quotidian noises from the west into Edo-period Japanese music marked the transition from the pre-modern to the modern, Noise music as a term is a postmodern oxymoron that signals its aesthetic core: in its very  ­disregard of traditional musical architecture—melody, rhythm, and ­harmony—Noise becomes music. Corral echoes the earlier discussion of noise as a signifier of alterity. While the sound of Japanese Noise comes to signal ‘Japaneseness’, this identity is primarily defined by its fundamental alterity and exoticism. In reference to Anaïs Fléchet’s concept of double exoticism, which goes beyond the power structures of archetypal colonialist relations, Corral argues that Noise engages in a co-production of alterity in which cultures engage themselves in a process of construction of the other, leading to the constitution of an exoticism reflecting the expectations of both sides. Rather than assuming that there is only one ʻJapanesenessʼ dreamed up by the ‘Occident’, Corral turns our ears and our attention to how Noise music projects various iterations that articulate specific ideas of what is—or what should be—the nature of Japan.

Sound and power Across Asia, as elsewhere, sound is implicated with power. It is important therefore to identify the power structures that impact the meaning of sounds and, vice versa, to accent the ways in which sounds uphold or subvert these power structures. The (de-)construction of power in and through sound is one of the leitmotivs for the three chapters in this section. In her chapter ‘Listening to the talkies: Atarashiki tsuchi’s (1937) acoustic construction of Japan for western consumption’, Iris Haukamp uses sound as an umbrella term to discuss film sounds, including music, noise, and voice. Ka Lee Wong, in her chapter on ‘Recovering the lost Cantonese sounds in pre-handover Hong Kong: Sinophone politics in Dung Kai-cheung’s “The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street” (1995)’, discusses the sounds of Cantonese as a silenced language. And in the concluding chapter of this section, ‘When the looms stop, the baby cries: The changing sounds of the Kyoto kimono-making industry’, Jenny Hall listens in on the sonic environment of the kimono-making

Introducing Asian Sound Cultures  9 industry in contemporary Kyoto. The polyphony explored in this section emphasises a central conundrum at the heart of this book: sound, like Asia, defies definition in isolation. Instead, sound gains meaning only in context, both conceptual and geographical. As Porath points out, one group’s meaningful sound might be another group’s meaningless noise, ‘unrecognizable and semiotically incomprehensible’ (2019, 6). In order to make sense of sound, then, the chapters in this section listen carefully to the particular cultural, historical, political, and geographical strata of power and hierarchy in which these sounds are produced and in which they become meaningful. It is precisely this polyphony of meaning—or rather: sound’s ability to mean differently according to different contexts—that renders sound so useful in exploring power relations and modernity in particular. More specifically, Haukamp’s careful analysis of sound in the co-produced film Atarashiki tsuchi (New Earth aka Die Tochter des Samurai, 1937) reveals how Japan is sonically constructed for western audiences, which in turn emphasises the underlying imbalance regarding cultural power and authority at work in the project. Haukamp’s analysis of selected music, noise, and voice throughout the film accentuates that the major messages are actually encoded on the film’s soundtrack. When it comes to international encounters, Haukamp argues, sound can play a crucial role in representing cultures—to indicate cultural difference or cultural affinity. Yet, the reception of these sounds also lays open cultural biases as well as issues regarding the acoustic representation of others for context-dependent purposes. The context, in this case, was mainly western—German, to be specific—and the other created by this context was Japan. Albeit Germany and Japan were at that point in history both colonial powers, the colonial trope and binary opposition between visuality ascribed to the West and aurality to the rest determined the readings of the film. Sound in the film is thus implicated in racial, political, economic, geographic, and cultural hierarchies of representation between Japan and the West. Messages of value to the topical discourse are transmitted to the German audience via noise-free dialogue, in an Orientalist tradition; at the same time, the film’s music underscores Japanese nationalism. Japan, after all, was an empire, with its own imperial aspirations and sounds that functioned to uphold imperial power. Haukamp thus emphasises how sound in the film provides different layers of meaning for different audiences. In the second chapter of this section, Ka Lee Wong discusses how Hong Kong Chinese writer Dung Kai-cheung historicises a fictive Cantonese soundscape with the aural memory of a neighbourhood in ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’ (1995). Wong reads Dung’s Cantonese soundscape as a literary form of sonic resistance against the existing hegemony which maintains who is audible and who is not in pre-handover Hong Kong. She explains that in Hong Kong literature in Chinese, writing in Cantonese is rare, because convention demands that regional expressions, like the ones in Cantonese, are to be ‘translated’ into the so-called ‘literary language’ shumianyu (書面語). Cantonese, while being the spoken vernacular in Hong Kong, has thus been largely muted. As Wong argues, using Cantonese to emphasise Cantonese

10  Iris Haukamp et al. identity in Hong Kong can therefore be read as the unwillingness to being absorbed and assimilated into either the British colonial or the mainland Chinese culture. At the heart of Wong’s chapter—and of Dong’s short story—is therefore the intersection between language and political power: the political power to silence language, and the power of language to resist that silencing. Making use of the Sinophone theories put forward by Shih Shumei (2007) and combining them with recent discussions on sound studies, Wong discusses how Dung evokes an alternative way to recover the aural history of Hong Kong in Cantonese in the short story: through textually simulating a sonic restoration of the lost orality of a Hong Kong Cantonese singing tradition, nanyin (南音), Dung gives voice to the Hong Kong Sinophones to tell their own stories in Cantonese, which, for most local people, is their mother tongue. Wong’s chapter exemplifies that to write sound into literature is to create a paradox: after all, the written word cannot sound out sound. Sound is thus contained within the text and transcends it at the same time. This creates a tension of representation, whereby the written presence of sound in text signals its absence as sound. This tension between presence and absence opens up creative spaces within the text for the representation of marginalised identities that are traditionally defined through their absence from—and their silencing by—written history (Hoene 2015, 3). In the case of Dung’s short story, his Cantonese soundscapes echo the historical silencing of local people’s actual lived experiences in Cantonese. In her chapter on the changing sounds of the Kyoto kimono-making industry, Jenny Hall listens to the locals’ accounts of their lived experiences and effectively deconstructs western-centric assumptions about sound vis-àvis noise, the passivity of participants, and the private as a place to retreat from the public. Hall’s chapter focuses on the ways in which technological change, in particular mechanisation and digitisation, has altered the sonic environment of the Kyoto kimono-making industry in order to highlight and address debates in sound studies concerning ‘presumptions of universality’ (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015, 7); the romanticisation of sounds of nature over urban ‘noise’ (Plourde 2014); and the representation of the state as ‘having the power to produce, authorise, or condone loudness and to coerce silence’ (Quintero 2019). Listening to the sounds of the kimono-making industry in contemporary Kyoto allows Hall to understand this sonic environment and the people who make it on their own terms and ‘prior to and different from their engagements with Western notions’ (Steingo and Sykes 2019, 21). As Hall emphasises in reference to Gould, Chenhall, Kohn and Stevens (2019), the ‘Japanese interdisciplinary field of acoustic ecology (oto no kankyō) or soundscape studies (saundosukēpugaku) predates much of the sensory turn in Western academia’ (246). Therefore, there is a wide body of existing local knowledge and scholarship, which provides an alternative understanding of urban sonic environments that in turn challenges entrenched western dichotomies such as nature/urban and public/private. Moreover, Hall’s interviews with weavers and dyers in Kyoto emphasise that individuals continually sound out their sonic environments and compose their sense of

Introducing Asian Sound Cultures  11 identity and community accordingly, which contradicts the common perception of the Japanese public as ‘passive and unable to resist or “assume control” over such urban noise’ (Plourde 2014, 71). Ideas about which sounds are appropriate, both in time and space, are changing with technology, and Hall’s careful ethnographic research shows how the weavers and dyers continually negotiate and contest their sonic environments.

Technology and imperialism Much of the early work in sound studies was carried out by academics interested in technology, media theory, and communication. Numerous studies of sound technologies like the telephone, radio, phonograph, loudspeaker, and even the Walkman have centred on a technological determinism that has too often structured an understanding of the technology around certain generalised observations about modern sound whose cultural specificity is rarely recognised; the increasing privatisation of the neoliberal listener (Hagood 2019); the privatisation of the listening experience; or the increasing mobility of sound and music (Steingo 2019, 41–44). Many accounts of the interplay between sound and technology outside the West focus on the ways in which new technology, largely developed in the West, has been adopted, adapted, and refined within different—because ‘other’—social and cultural contexts of the non-West. In this section, the chapter by Duggal and Hoene takes up the ambiguity of radio. By focusing on the early years of the radio in late colonial India, Duggal and Hoene move the debate away from the examination of documents created by state and radio officials to examine the debates around radio in the The Times of India and The Indian Listener, one of the earliest broadcasting trade publications in India. They show how the decade before the official establishment of All India Radio in 1936 was central to the development of the radio and its audiences. In doing so, Duggal and Hoene expose the ways in which radio, as a then-new sound technology, was received and explored by the urban elite and rural audiences alike. By focusing on this period, Duggal and Hoene amplify early practices of radio listening in India and accentuate the various ways in which the technology impacted perceptions of space and place beyond the geopolitics of empire and across the rural/urban divide. This, in turn, enables Duggal and Hoene to tune in to the specificity of the experience of Indian sonic modernity via the radio. The sonic modernity broadcast via the radio was not only marked by the technological dimension of the object itself, but by the effect it had on audiences and on broadening people’s imagination of space and place. The chapter allows us to understand early radio in colonial India as a sound event: the radio became a small-scale everyday media object and technology through the way in which it structured knowledge through sound. Duggal and Hoene build on David Arnold’s (2013) emphasis on ‘small everyday technologies’ such as sewing machines and bicycles as critical tools in Indian technological modernity.

12  Iris Haukamp et al. In her chapter ‘(Re)Diffusion of Beautiful Sound: Chinese broadcast in postwar Bangkok’, Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt shows how the radio encompassed the ambiguity of modernity in Thailand, a country which did not experience colonisation by western powers as it began its process of modernisation, but became gradually drawn into Cold War binaries. Tungkeunkunt emphasises that the development of the radio went along with urban development and played a crucial role in shaping sonic experiences. In the context of a Cold War battle for hearts and minds, the radio was considered more trustworthy and able to reach a larger audience than any other mass medium, and Rediffusion became a tool to effectively counter communist propaganda. The service was known in Thai as ‘song siang thang sai’ (‘transmitting sound by wire’), a name that referred to the technology used, and in Chinese as ‘Li de hu sheng’ (‘beautiful sound’), which referred to the impression it aspired to convey. Although the Thai state used Rediffusion to communicate with the Chinese communities, the emergence and influence of the service went beyond partisanship and propaganda. In a certain sense, it did achieve the aims of the state as it became a crucial part of Chinese life, especially in Bangkok. Nevertheless, as the chapter shows, Chinese women could learn basic notions and Chinese traditions while listening to Gua Ceh and Chaozhou opera programmes from home. Radio dramas offered insights into Chinese classics and modern literature for a minority community that often lacked literacy in Thai and Chinese. Even for Mandarin pop music, its mission was not only to entertain but also to promote Chinese songs worldwide, connecting the Chinese community in Thailand to a global diaspora through ‘circuits of listening’ that, as Andrew F. Jones has shown, help to trace the contours of the ‘fractured topography’ of the global 1960s (2020, 6). Tungkeunkunt makes clear that Rediffusion’s origins in colonial Britain at the start of the twentieth century and its role in assimilating Thai Chinese communities in Bangkok from the mid-1950s on, demonstrate how sound technologies move across, within, and in competition or complicity with existing social topographies. Tomotaro Kaneko’s contribution moves on to the 1970s to examine the rise in popularity of sound recording competitions in Japan. Audio manufacturers, audio magazines, and broadcasting stations began to sponsor amateur sound-recording (namaroku) contests. Through a survey of these contests, the chapter explores the significance of a new sound culture that emerged prompting people to record their own musical performances, conversations, and environmental sounds, including the sound of steam locomotives, festivals, or the natural environment. By the end of the 1960s, audio equipment was the most desired consumer durable among young Japanese, FM radio began regular broadcasting, and ownership of cassette recorders became widespread bringing alternatives to the pursuit of high-fidelity sound reproduction to Japanese audio culture. By focusing on a representative amateur recording contest that had no genre restrictions and produced LPs of its ­winning works, Kaneko encourages us to listen in to the everyday of 1970s Japan as it became an important source of inspiration for amateur creativity.

Introducing Asian Sound Cultures  13 The availability of the technology, the time and effort required to make the recordings, and the desire to search out, capture, or create sound all point to important social and economic changes in Japan. The chapter makes clear the importance of questioning constructionist views of technology and listening to and through the tape-recorder. But it also amplifies the need for a refusal to subscribe to any predetermined distribution of the senses—including any static idea of what counts as ‘sound’ or ‘listening’, because the entries varied widely and the act of questioning such terms was in itself central to Namaroku culture. The final chapter takes us back to Thailand to examine the popular musical co-optation of a tool of US anti-communist warfare. The twin horns that are the focus of Pierre Prouteau’s chapter were originally used to broadcast ideological propaganda in the context of the global struggle against communism. After the US military officially departed Thai soil, the central government continued to battle communist insurgents. Prouteau draws out the journey of the twin horn from imperialist tool of propaganda to its current popularity as the centrepiece of bands performing the musical genre of phin prayuk. The chapter reveals the technology as an instrument of double-folded imperialistic dynamics: weaponised by the United States in Thailand and used in the service of internal colonialism by the Thai state. At the same time, because Thai/US propaganda made use of regional music and made equipment available to musicians, local music genres such as molam gained amplification through the technology and evolved alongside it. Once the battle between the Thai state and the insurgents in Phetchabun province was over, the twin horn technology used to spread propaganda in the context of the Cold War was adopted by the local musical genre of phin prayuk, peculiar to the districts of Lomsak, Lomkao, and Muang. Tracing the circulation of this model of loudspeaker and the discourses it triggered, the chapter makes abundantly clear the malleability of sound technology. The horn played a central role in the Thai adoption of electrical sound amplification and aided the emergence of a new sound-system culture-specific to Thailand, one in which regions outside the Thai capital played an important role. Local internationalism becomes evident here because the sound technology was made available through US anti-communist warfare and then locally adapted, transforming the work of, and transformed by, the local musicians who add them to their bands.

Asia as method, or: Why listen to Asia? As scholars with an interest in sound working in various disciplines, we have tried, in this book, to listen for the inflections driven by the sonic regimes imposed by a global process of change and transformation across Asia. Yet if, to take the twin horns as a sonic metaphor, one channel blasts the deep link to a process of imperial domination that we cannot escape, the other channel tells us that it is impossible to ignore the local context. We must listen to both together in order to appreciate the importance of sound for

14  Iris Haukamp et al. understanding modernity not just in Asia, but to better understand how the shared experience of the construction of modern sound can take us through and beyond the point of difference and help to maintain a field that is as open to interpretation and as diffuse in nature and geography as the object of study itself. As noted above, part of the task facing sound studies is to resist structurisation around western ways of perceiving and understanding sound whilst being aware of the contemporary regimes of knowledge production that remain centred on a neo-liberal, western dominated academic industry. Shifting the axis of sound studies from West-East to North-South (Steingo and Sykes 2019) is a start, but, as with projects that pursue decolonisation by provincialising Europe, the danger is in leaving the frame intact (Sakai and Morris 1997) or throwing it out altogether. Key concepts and ways of thinking and speaking about Asia canonised in western academic institutions have begun to be decolonised or destabilised over the last several decades. The process of deconstructing the West has been central to the move to decolonise Asian studies. Yet, attempts to provincialise Europe have recently been brought into question as a convoluted process that may loosen but not necessarily change ‘the structure of the dialogue’ (Chen 2010, 219), and the challenges faced by Asian studies in recent years resonate with the debates that now animate sound studies. As Naoki Sakai has argued in relation to the East/West dichotomy, if the West lacks unity through provincialisation, it cannot then be the ‘other’ of Asia. If the assumed unity never existed and Europe is provincialised, then the frame for both universalism and particularism is no longer legitimate (Sakai and Morris 1997; Chen 2010, 218). Rather than continuing to fear reproducing the West as the ‘other’ of Asian studies and sound studies, it might therefore be more productive to posit the West as bits and fragments that intervene in local social formations in a systematic, but never totalising, way (Yoshimi and Calichman 2005). The local formation of modernity carries important elements of the West, but it is not fully enveloped by it. As Carol Gluck has argued, just as Europe once served as the explanandum that generated theories of modernity, the worldful of modern experiences can do the same today: ‘[i]nstead of applying the pile-up of past theories to explain such experiences, we have the opportunity to use such experiences to explain modernity. We can, in short, generate new theories from these histories’ (2011, 679). After all, the ‘sound of modernity has always been integral to modernity itself’ (Cullen Rath 2008, 431) and across Asia modernity sounds different. In this book, we examine how thinking about sound and Asia together brings out an international localism (Chen 2010) that better recognises the ambiguity of modern sonic categories in order to better grasp sound’s ‘specific cultural formations’ (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015, 6). We hope the book foregrounds the need to be open to a multiplicity of voices, respects the local, but does not mobilise the resources of ‘tradition’ simply for the sake of opposing the western domination of sound studies. Ultimately, Asian Sound Cultures shows that the diverse historical experiences and rich

Introducing Asian Sound Cultures  15 social practices of Asia can be mobilised to provide alternative horizons and voices for the exciting and vibrant field of sound studies. Tokyo–Maastricht–Sheffield, 2021

References Arnold, D. 2013. Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimpirialisation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Conrad, S. 2016. What is Global History? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cullen Rath, R. 2008. ‘Hearing American History’. The Journal of American History 95(2): 417–431. Garon, S. 2017. ‘Transnational History and Japan’s comparative Advantage’. The Journal of Japanese Studies 43(1): 65–92. Gould, H., R. Chenhall, T. Kohn and C. Stevens. 2019. ‘An interrogation of sensory anthropology of and in Japan’. Anthropological Quarterly 92(1): 231–258. Gluck, C. 2011. ‘The end of elsewhere: Writing modernity now’. The American Historical Review 116(3): 676–687. Hagood, M. 2019. Hush: Media and sonic self-control. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hilmes, M. 2005. ‘Is there a field called sound culture studies? And does it matter?’. American Quarterly 57(1): 249–259. Hoene, C. 2015. Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Jones, A. F. 2020. Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kelman, A. Y. 2010. ‘Rethinking the Soundscape’. The Senses and Society 5(2): 212–234. Novak, D. and M. Sakakeeny. 2015. Keywords in Sound. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morat, D. 2014. Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th and 20th Century Europe. New York: Berghann Books. Novak, D. 2015. ‘Noise’. In Keywords in Sound, edited by D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny, 125–138. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ochoa Gautier, A. M. 2015. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Columbia. Durham: Duke University Press. Ochoa Gautier, A. M. 2019. ‘Afterword: sonic cartographies’. In Remapping Sound Studies, 261–274. Durham: Duke University Press. Plourde, L. 2014. ‘Distraction, noise, and ambient sounds in Tokyo’. In Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan, edited by C. Stevens and J. Hankins, 71–88. London and New York: Routledge. Porath, N. 2019. Hearing Southeast Asia: Sounds of Hierarchy and Power in Context. Copenhagen: Nias Press. Quintero, M. 2019. ‘Loudness, excess, power: a political liminology of a global city’. In Remapping Sound Studies, edited by G. Steingo and J. Sykes, 135–155. Durham: Duke University Press. Radano, R. and T. Olaniyan. 2016. Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

16  Iris Haukamp et al. Sakai, N. and M. Morris. 1997. Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sapir, E. 1927. ‘Speech as a personality trait’. American Journal of Sociology 32(6): 892–905. Schafer, R. M. 1977. The Tuning of the World. New York: Knopf. Smith, M. 2003. ‘Making sense of social history’. Journal of Social History 37(1): 165–186. Smith, S. 1994. ‘Soundscape’. Area 26(3): 232–240. Steingo, G. and Sykes, J. 2019. Remapping Sound Studies. Durham: Duke University Press. Steingo, G. 2019. ‘Another resonance: Africa and the study of sound’. In Remapping Sound Studies, edited by G. Steingo and J. Sykes, 39–60. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sterne, J. 2012. ‘Sonic imaginations’. In The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne, 1–17. New York: Routledge. Yoshimi, T. and R. Calichman. 2005. What is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi. New York: Columbia University Press.

Part I The politics of voice

1 The phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’ Speech recordings for imperial ­subjectification and wartime mobilisation in colonial Taiwan and Korea Fumitaka Yamauchi Introduction Nikusei, lit. ‘corporeal voice’, is a Japanese-made sinographic neologism that was widely used in print across the territories of the Japanese empire during the early twentieth century.1 The birth of this notion was in large part due to the introduction and domestication of sound reproduction technology in Japan proper, and the imperial Japanese recording industry was among the key actors to produce and promote it. As scholars of sound studies have shown, the recording industry stressed worldwide the fidelity and immediacy of recorded sounds that were in effect disembodied and dislocated in such a way as to obscure ‘schizophonic soundscapes’ that the industry actively participated in forging (Thompson 1995; Sterne 2003, chap. 5). The corporeal voice has a certain semantic affinity with the real voice in English. What distinguishes them is that the latter can be more easily relegated to the metaphysical realm of subjectivity and spirituality (Weidman 2015). I will, therefore, write corporeal voice while meaning something that can be better represented by the expression ‘(corpo)real voice’. One characteristic of Japanese imperial discourse was that the notion of corporeal voice became entangled with the mobilisation of corporeal bodies for wartime efforts. Even more specifically, this idea was closely associated with that of nikudan, lit. the ‘corporeal bullet’, and hence with the corpse on the battlefield. The notion of corporeal voice was thus most effectively used for advertising recordings, posthumously in particular, of the voices of gunshin or ‘gods of war’. Two prominent examples were General Nogi Maresuke and Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō. The first portion of this chapter examines how their recordings were sanctified in the 1930s. As a phonographic resurrection of the incorporeal dead, the corporeal voice invited and in effect constituted devotional listening subjects with its agentive aura, calling the living to deadly battlefields in the context of Japanese militant imperialism. The latter portion of this chapter then examines sound recordings waxed by Japanese military officers during their tenures as Governor-Generals of Taiwan and Korea, with a focus on recordings of political speeches from the late 1930s. There are four such recordings in total: Kobayashi Seizō’s ‘Addressing the islanders’ (To ̄min ni tsugu, 1938) and ‘Addressing the youth’ (Seinen ni tsugu, 1938) for Taiwan, and Minami DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772-3

20  Fumitaka Yamauchi Jirō’s ‘Displaying the state’s total power’ (Kokka so ̄ryoku no hakki, 1940) and ‘Instructions for the nation on the home front’ (Jūgo kokuminkun, 1941) for Korea. These recordings were all tied up with imperial Japan’s policies of so-called ‘imperial subjectification’ (kōminka) and wartime mobilisation in Taiwan and Korea that were accelerated by the 1937 outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. There is virtually no existing study on these recordings because of the national framing of historical concern in postcolonial East Asia. Japanese specialists of records have rarely paid sufficient attention to records that were made outside Japan proper, not to mention recorded political speeches. Given postcolonial conditions of scholarly concern, meanwhile, Korean and Taiwanese scholars have attended and listened to recordings of colonised peoples, rather than those of colonisers, in order to restore their agency in history. And besides, the recorded speeches concerned here are all quite limited in length. With proper contextualisation though, they offer insight into Japanese imperialism and colonialism and their auditory dimensions. Paying attention to the different contexts of the two colonies, this chapter explores how these recordings were planned, how these top rank officers performed in studios, what textual and performative dimensions of their speeches were like, how the Japanese and vernacular press dealt with their records, how colonised peoples turned their attention—or a deaf ear— to the recorded voices, and how all these processes of voicing and listening were played out against the phonographic silence of the very centre of the empire, the Emperor.

The corporeal voice of a war god On 15 October 1909, a 60-year-old soldier made a recording rather accidentally at the time. The performer was Nogi Maresuke (1849–1912), the Army General famous for the Siege of Port Arthur—or Ryojun in Japanese. On this day, he was at Kudan Kaikōsha in Tokyo where he hosted a meeting to arrange a ceremony for the three-hundredth anniversary in 1911 of the death of the feudal lord Katō Kiyomasa (1562–1611).2 Accompanied by his father who had connections with Nogi, a young man named Yuji Keigo brought in a strange device that he said to be his own invention—a recorder. Yuji asked General Nogi if he could record a single word. Nogi agreed and said, ‘It sounds like fun. Let’s make a recording together’ (Ogasawara 1930; Asahi News [hereafter AN], 19 December 1930). Yuji used an ordinary room at Kaikōsha as a temporary studio—or it should be more precise to say it was a ‘field’ recording, although the notions of studio and field are now often considered incommensurable. There Nogi recorded the simplest sentence that one could imagine: ‘I am Nogi Maresuke!’ Yuji Keigo had an important hand in the domestication of sound recording technology in Japan proper (Kurata 1979, 112–114; cf. Iizuka 2012), and this recording of Nogi’s voice was synchronous with that process and the establishment of the first Japanese record company in 1910 (Nihon Chikuonki Shōkai 1940, 5).

The phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’  21 Listening to the recording, there is a sense of modesty that is lost in translation. General Nogi uses the most respectful forms of I (watakushi) and to be (dearimasu), as if he is speaking to the public or a superior officer. He also sounds like he is almost shouting. This may well have been a result of Yuji’s instructions. Certainly, in the early days of acoustical recording, one often had to speak loudly into a horn so that the stylus could penetrate the waxed plate. General Nogi made this recording three years before he committed suicide, together with his wife, due to a deeply felt grief over the Meiji Emperor’s death in 1912. The short self-introduction thus became his last recorded words. Since his recording was not made for commercial purposes, it was not publicised at the time and fell into oblivion for two decades. It was in 1930 that Nogi’s recording came into the limelight. Yuji, now as old as Nogi was at the time of recording, had long kept the original disc. Ogasawara Naganari, one of the attendants who witnessed Nogi’s recording session, was aware of Yuji’s preservation and informed Japan Victor, one of the major record companies in imperial Japan (Kurata 1979, 389). Victor managed to bring the old recording back to life, and when Nogi’s record hit the market in December of 1930, Victor resorted to a powerful notion that would remain in the Japanese lexicon ever since: nikusei, or the corporeal voice. The record was thus entitled ‘Nogi Maresuke’s corporeal voice and reminiscences about it’ (Victor 51571). Victor also described the process of restoration in this way: ‘the scientific power that Victor boasts in this [phonograph] world has successfully restored the corporeal voice of General Nogi [that he recorded] while living’ (Kurata 1979, 389). The corporeal voice here signified a voice that was real and alive despite the fact that Nogi’s recording was in effect at least doubly mediated—a copy of a copy. A major problem for repackaging was that a sample of self-introduction for only three seconds was far too short to fill a side of a record. Victor thus sought to amplify the worth of this fragment by means of recreating phonographically an aura or the phonographic here-and-now of the recording event. The company asked Ogasawara to offer, as a curtain raiser, a recorded narration about what he witnessed two decades previously. In his narration, Ogasawara gives the listeners a caution right before Nogi’s voice is played back to enhance the sense of excitement: ‘It is such a simple sentence, which will be repeated twice, so please pay attention and do not miss it. Now, the corporeal voice of the General comes out’. Fully dramatised, General Nogi’s phonographic resurrection was announced to the public in December 1930. The press responded with great excitement, running headlines such as ‘General Nogi’s corporeal voice resurrected/played back (saisei)’ (AN, 19 December 1930); ‘The voice of a war god (gunshin) finally came out’ (Yomiuri News [hereafter YN], 20 December 1930). Yomiuri News also reported that Victor regarded the disc of a three-second sample as a ‘historic national treasure’ (rekishiteki kokuho ̄), and after recapturing the voice the company dedicated it to Nogi Shrine and decided to donate the profits (YN, 20 December 1930).

22  Fumitaka Yamauchi The notion of corporeal voice was an offspring of the age of sound reproduction technology. It started to appear in print sporadically from the beginning of the twentieth century. Initially it could be taken to refer to a wide variety of vocal productions that were independent of sonic mediation, such as a Western-style singing voice (YN, 29 May 1912; AN, 3 June 1921; YN, 7 November 1924; Baba 1925), shōka or singing education (Satō 1916), Japanese traditional performances (YN, 4 January 1926), enzetsu or political speeches (Miki 1924), audience cheering (AN, 7 June 1909), public voice announcements at train stations (YN, 27 October 1921), and so forth. It became more generalised quite quickly, however, as the notion to be used in cases in which the voice was described as if it were immediate although it was actually being mediated through a variety of sound reproduction technologies such as radio, telephone, the talkie, and the phonograph. Importantly, it was the consecration of the corporeal voices of ‘war gods’ such as Nogi that would deeply contribute to this semantic transfer and the wide dissemination of the notion in dominant discourse. Such dissemination was made possible by its symbolic entanglement with warfare in the 1930s, particularly with yet another important notion that General Nogi had a hand in articulating: nikudan, the ‘corporeal bullet’.

Echoes from the Russo-Japanese War The notion of nikudan emerged in the Russo-Japanese War through Nogi’s tactics for the Siege of Port Arthur. This war was arguably the first time when many of the bodies of soldiers were used as if they were literal bullets or bombs for military operations on battlefields. This concept became widespread through the autographic story Nikudan (Corporeal Bullets, 1906) written by Sakurai Tadayoshi (1879–1965), who was one of only a few soldiers who miraculously returned from the toughest battles under Nogi’s command. Sakurai retold a key moment in which the notion was first crystallised at the time of the first suicidal attack: if we could not utilise our firearms, our only and last resource was to shoot off human beings, to attack with bullets of human flesh. With such unique weapons, corporeal bullets, the consolidated essence of Yamato Damashii [the national spirit], how could we fail to rout the enemy? (Sakurai 1906, 141) Corporeal bullets were never silent on battlefields. They shouted a ‘war-cry’ (kansei), which Sakurai took, together with ‘the bayonet’, as the two key elements that would lead to ‘final victory’. Here he quoted what an English correspondent said: ‘The war-cry of the Japanese Army pierced the hearts of the Russians’ (Sakurai 1906, 214).3 In November 1929, Victor produced a set of two records featuring the story of Nikudan (Victor 50988). Categorised as ‘a portrayal of a military event’ (gunji byo ̄sha), the records employed sound effects simulating actual

The phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’  23 battles to dramatise the narration (Kurata 1979, 427). Then in the same year as Nogi’s recording was published, Sakurai himself retired from military service. The following year, the ‘Major General corporeal-bullet (nikudan shōshō)’, as Sakurai had become nicknamed, set out for lecture tours in Japan proper. The press closely followed and reported that he deeply impressed the audience everywhere he delivered an impassioned speech (netsuben) (YN, 3, 7 February 1931). The climax of Sakurai’s touring lectures was a playback of Nogi’s corporeal-voice record. Sakurai’s speech served in this regard as an extensive curtain raiser for this phonographic performance, just as Ogasawara’s explanation was on the record. We can get a sense of what his speech was like through a shorthand note of a lecture that Sakurai delivered on 9 March 1935 at Osaka Asahi Hall to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Russo-Japanese War. There he described the power of corporeal bullets as the ‘human power [that] brought to an end the World War [One]’. Sakurai said, ‘how great the power of the human soul, that is, of the human body could be in hours of war’, hence blurring the division between the soul and the body. He praised this human power against and above the power of ‘scientific weapons’ (kagakuheiki) such as the airplane, the tank, and poison gas that were widely used in the First World War (Sakurai 1935, 41). The irony is that this was in sharp contrast with the way Victor advertised its restoration of Nogi’s recording in terms of ‘scientific power’. The nikudan spirit was indeed inherited and put into practice again and again in the context of war as Japan advanced on the Chinese continent after the Manchurian Incident in July 1931. The first major example was the Shanghai Incident in the following year. In the initial battles, the Japanese army could not get into a Chinese district protected by barbed-wire fences. To find a way out of the impasse, three Japanese soldiers sacrificed their lives by breaking the fences with bombs—the Japanese press of the time enthusiastically reported the incident this way. They thus became known as ‘three corporeal-bullet heroes’ (nikudan san yu ̄shi). Numerous recordings were made to commemorate their heroic deaths, including ‘Song of the Three Corporeal-Bullet Heroes’ (Columbia 26830) sung by Chiang Wen-yeh (Kō Bun-ya), the first Taiwanese musician who signed a contract with Japan Columbia and later became famous as a composer, receiving an honourable mention at the Berlin Olympic composition competition in 1936. After the posthumous release of Nogi’s recording, yet another major war hero who also fought in the Russo-Japanese War became the centre of attention: Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō (1848–1934). At the time, Tōgō was Known as the last person all major record companies hoped to record. It was reported that ‘if the Admiral’s records were released, it would be a tremendous surprise for the phonograph world’ (AN, 25 December 1930). He was thus variously called the ‘silent hero’, the ‘silent Admiral’, and the ‘serious and quiet Admiral’. His phonographic silence amplified the public’s desire to hear his voice. At the end of 1931, the year when Sakurai toured with Nogi’s ­corporeal-voice record, Tōgō finally agreed to make a recording. It was the

24  Fumitaka Yamauchi Ministry of the Navy that ordered Victor to record the Admiral’s voice (YN, 27 July 1934). At the time, NHK was in preparation for a series of programmes to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of the bestowing of the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors. One of the most heavily advertised events was Tōgō’s public address over the airwaves, which NHK managed to schedule on 4 January 1932. Tōgō’s recording was made just in case the 83-year-old could not make it live on air (AN, 28 December 1931). On 27 December 1931, the crew were invited to Tōgō’s house. Again, it was a form of field recording, which was technically troublesome. For instance, since waxed plates for recording were easily breakable, the crew each put two of them in a custom-made case and carefully transported them all in a specially cushioned truck; and after turning the living room into a makeshift studio, they had to keep the waxed plates warm by using wooden boxes (Utasaki 1998, 179, 181). When everything was ready, Tōgō appeared in formal dress. He then bowed deeply before the microphone and stood stiffly at attention before starting to narrate his speech. Victor’s chief recording engineer in charge, Kusunoki Tetsuhide, later recalled this recording experience as ‘an unforgettable memory’ because of the highly solemn atmosphere—he was as nervous as when he recorded foreign artists while on their Japanese tour, such as the Russian bass Fyodor Ivanovich Chaliapin (Utasaki 1998, 179). Tōgō did, meanwhile, deliver an address on the day of broadcasting, and this was also captured on record. Then about one year later, on 18 February 1933, he made his third and last recording. This time he recorded what was by then a legendary speech that he had made at the end of the Russo-Japanese War: ‘Remarks at the dispersal ceremony for the combined fleet’, the concluding remarks of which were particularly well known: ‘The ancients well said: “Tighten your helmet strings in the hour of victory”’.4 Listening to this last recording, Tōgō sounds like he had some difficulty reproducing what he had delivered himself some 28 years before. His elocution is not ideal—maybe because of his age and the elaborative style of the draft that is full of kanji compounds. Tōgō would stop at a word and go again, and he even coughs at the end of the A-side. His reading style is reminiscent of a Buddhist monk, sticking to one pitch and inserting a lower one at the beginning or the end of a long phrase or a sentence. These are the traces that would have reminded contemporary listeners of his humanity despite his god-like status at the time. It was after Tōgō’s death in 1934, however, that his recordings were first made public in a consecrating manner. This sanctification was done around a posthumous elevation of Tōgō’s recording as a precious corporeal voice. To commemorate this war hero, several events were planned and there were a series of radio programs replaying Tōgō’s recordings. Victor finally put the products on the market, advertising that they were ‘records on the level of a national treasure’ (kokuhōteki reko ̄do) and that ‘frequent access to Tōgō’s corporeal voice’ would ‘contribute to the amplification of the spirit of the imperial way (kōdō) and further boost the morale of the nation’ (YN, 27 July 1934). The company also donated 28,000 copies to the Ministry of Education

The phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’  25 for distribution to schools all over the country (Kurata 1979, 384). The following May, ‘a record of the corporeal voice [of the Admiral made] while in life’ was broadcast (AN, 30 May 1935). This consecration reached a peak when Victor ‘dedicated the “voice” of the sacred commander (seishō)’ to Tōgō Memorial Hall in early 1940. And the press used the notion of ‘sacred sound’ seion or Om to describe Tōgō’s corporeal voice (AN, 23 June, 28 August 1940). The publication of Nogi’s and Tōgō’s corporeal-voice records triggered a search for other war gods’ corporeal voices. One such example was General Oyama Iwao, one of their major comrades from the Russia-Japanese War, whose voice was reported to have been inscribed on an old cylinder of an unusual size and was now attracting keen attention (AN, 16 January 1935). The popular interest in Nogi’s and Tōgō’s recordings also led to the mass production of speech recordings of other political and military figures. It was against such a backdrop that some top-rank officials of the Japanese colonies started to record their speeches.

Admonishing the Taiwanese islanders and youths: Kobayashi Seizō In 1936, an Admiral and a General on reserve duty assumed the positions of the Governor-General in Taiwan and Korea: Kobayashi Seizō (1877–1962) and Minami Jirō (1874–1955). Their appointments, followed by the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937, signalled the beginning of a new phase in the colonial policies known as ‘imperial subjectification’ (kōkoku shinminka) and wartime mobilisation. Since the 1920s, the colonial governments in both Korea and Taiwan had often emphasised the so-called ‘extension of the interior [Japan proper]’ for imperial integration and assimilation and promoted it as a form of ‘cultural rule’ (bunka seiji). Kobayashi and Minami, while breaking away from such previous regimes, continued to pursue, and in effect intensify, such an assimilative integration between metropole and colony under the slogans of ‘Japan-Korea Unity’ (naisen ittai) and ‘Japan-Taiwan as One’ (naitai ichi’nyo). If assimilation was previously considered the responsibility of the colonial government to ‘extend’ what were regarded as civilisational and cultural aspects of Japan proper to the colonies, it was now imposed as the responsibility of colonised peoples to transform themselves into ‘imperial subjects’ (kōkoku shinmin, or simply, ko ̄min), to become ‘true Japanese’ (Ching 2001, 97). The pretext was one of accomplishing ‘racial equality’ while in reality keeping various forms of differentiation and discrimination between coloniser and colonised. Kobayashi’s administration signalled a partial return to the initial stage of colonial rule by military commanders in Taiwan. Among those previous commanders was none other than General Nogi. His connections with Taiwan dated back to the very outset of colonisation in 1895. Nogi was one of the military commanders committed to fighting the tough anti-Japanese resistance and was later appointed as the third Governor-General (1896– 1898). The reinstalment of military rule in 1936 brought historical echoes of

26  Fumitaka Yamauchi Nogi’s era in Taiwan (Miyagawa 1936; Watanabe 1940). When an old inscription was discovered in Taiwan in 1940 that led to a debate over whether it was Nogi’s handwriting, Kobayashi asked an expert to appraise it as his ‘genuine writing’ (shinsho) and thereby ordered the Government-General Museum of Taiwan to display it in public instead of preserving it in storage, so that the general public could ‘remember the General’s heroic air (shōgun no eifū)’ (Sakagami 1940, 4). Moreover, the Admiral-turned-Governor-General had long expressed the deepest respect for Admiral Tōgō (Kobayashi 1934, 1935, 1981 [1943]). His nomination in effect reflected the geopolitical significance of Taiwan as a key naval base for the empire’s ‘southward expansion’ (nanshin). In April 1938, prompted by a situation in which the Second Sino-Japanese War had been more prolonged than initially believed, Kobayashi decided to make a recording on the occasion of the start of the new academic year. Accordingly, the Government-General of Taiwan (GGT) required Taiwan Columbia Sales Company in Taipei to arrange a recording session. This company then asked Japan Columbia, the headquarters in Japan proper, for technical assistance. As a result, a recording crew led by the chief engineer Hiyama Tamotsu left Kobe for Keelung on 28 March (Taiwan Daily News [hereafter TDN], 26 March 1938). Upon arrival, the crew turned the main restaurant of the Governor-General’s residence into a temporary studio. On 1 April, as scheduled, Kobayashi entered the restaurant-turned-studio and made recordings of two speeches (TDN, 2 April 1938). He became the first Governor-General of Taiwan on active service to dub his own voice. Moreover, he became the first top-rank officer of the Japanese colonies to make a recording in a colony. Hiyama, meanwhile, took advantage of his visit and stayed for a month and a half until mid-May, adding a repertoire of local music to the catalogue of the company (Wang 2013, 44–45). One of Kobayashi’s speeches is entitled ‘Addressing the islanders’ (Columbia 80404). It is built on a four-part structure, which largely corresponds to the number of paragraphs in the printed version (Shinmin 3-1, May 1938, n.p.). Two parts are distributed over each side of a record. The introduction refers to the main concern of the time: the prolonged Second SinoJapanese War and the resultant emergency situation. Here Kobayashi mentions the financial pressure that the imperial Japanese economy is facing because of ‘war expenditure’. Quoting the Minister of Finance’s assessment, however, he stresses that ‘given the present economic strength of our country, there is no need to worry’. The second part opens with a contradictory conjunction and thus functions as a logical turn. Here comes his first point: ‘since a country’s economic strength is based on the economic strength of every citizen, it would be incoherent (tsujitsuma ga awanai) if a citizen does not understand the financial economic measures that the government tries to implement nor earnestly cooperate on them’. On the B-side, Kobayashi shifts his focus to the issue of cooperation in ‘our actual life’ (wareware no jisseikatsu). The third part is about ‘negative aspects’ of cooperation, that is, ‘austerity and frugality’. He warns the islanders not to waste necessities such as cotton, wool, iron, and petroleum, as they are also important munitions

The phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’  27 for warfare. The fourth and last part concerns ‘active aspects’: ‘to increase actively the production of necessities’, such as gold, iron, copper, petroleum as well as pulp, and industrial salt. He concludes with ‘Since the current Chinese Incident [Second Sino-Japanese War] is an unprecedented great work (ko ̄ko no taigyo ̄) to accomplish the founding ideal of our nation (chōkoku no riso ̄), [we] should be all united and equipped with a brave spirit to face the difficulties’. ‘Addressing the youth’ (Columbia 80405), meanwhile, is only half as long and thus accommodated on a single side of a record. At the beginning, Kobayashi plays a phonographic trick to give listeners a feeling of being at a live performance by speaking as if he knew in advance where they would listen to his speech: ‘now you may be in school, or in a workplace, or at home’. Then in the following part, he introduces three points that he thinks are the major merits of youth: ‘innocence’, ‘passion’, and ‘active and progressive ideas’. His first point is that young men should be proud of these merits and should therefore be ‘determined to sacrifice yourself as the salt of the earth’. Then he accuses the enemy: ‘the neighbouring country China excludes, resists, and disdains our country’ and, moreover, is now ‘adopting communism that greatly destroys the peace of human beings’. In consequence, he states that ‘[t]his holy war intends to right these wrongs’. Then he returns to the issue of youth and addresses their responsibility for taking charge of making Japan more prosperous: If a country wishes to prosper, those who come late have to be greater than those who come earlier. If a son stays on the same level as his father, it is just to maintain the status quo. If a son is inferior, the family becomes smaller, so does the country. He concludes with a statement urging them ‘to be faithful and upright subjects (chūryōnaru shinmin) of the Emperor’. The GGT Secretary Nakamura Hiroshi revealed beforehand that Kobayashi’s speech records would be distributed to local offices of the major cities, towns, and villages all over Taiwan. At the same time, they would be sold by Columbia to the general public (TDN, 2 April 1938). From the end of May, Columbia started running advertisements (TDN, 28 May; 11 June 1938)—indicating that the entire process of production from recording through pressing to packaging was completed rather quickly. The Columbia ads featured the records in a conspicuous fashion, together with a photo of Kobayashi posing in formal military dress. The ads as well as the labels of the records clearly indicated that each record was a ‘GGT production’. Columbia defined them as ‘state-policy records’ (kokusaku reko ̄do), to which ‘five million islanders must listen’ (TDN, 28 May 1938). They were a rare case in which the GGT directly intervened into the production of phonographic records for political purposes. Even so, they still had to go through the record censorship that started in 1936 for Taiwanese records—on each of their labels was the mark of ‘submtd’, namely submitted to the censoring organ in Japan

28  Fumitaka Yamauchi proper (on record censorship, see Yamauchi 2011, 2014). For the recording session, Kobayashi prepared drafts, one of which is seen in a studio shot (TDN, 2 April 1938). Neither of his two speeches, therefore, is so much an oral performance as a formalised way of ‘reading-as-speaking’ in public. It is ancient in the sense that it inherits the long tradition of ‘reading along and aloud’ rather than ‘reading alone in silence’. At the same time, it is modern in the sense that public speech was a new practice introduced to Japan in the wake of the Meiji Restoration. Translated as enzetsu—lit. performing speech—political speech was closely tied up with the written, particularly the newspaper. Initially, enzetsu was none other than a newspaper article read aloud (Shimizu 2000, 34–35). In addition, many early enzetsu speakers were not from Tokyo, resulting in ‘speaking in a written style’ that was somehow trans-dialectal (33–34). Listening to the two recordings, Kobayashi does not have a specific accent, although he is from Hiroshima. His diction is clear enough to grasp the content. At times, however, he inserts idiomatic phrases in kanji that are not immediately understandable without a contextual understanding of the political vocabulary of his time such as ‘unprecedented’ (ko ̄ko) and the founding of the nation (chōkoku). It would therefore be useful for a listener to have a draft while listening, and Columbia sold the records together ‘with manuscripts’ (genko ̄ kōbon tsuki) (TDN, 28 May; 11 June 1938). Also of interest is the style of address adopted in Kobayashi’s ‘youth’ speech. This is the only known case in which a Governor-General of the Japanese colonies did not use the polite form of address but instead a more imperative tone that an old man would employ as he spoke to a young man; major examples include ending forms such as dearu and naranu instead of desu or dearimasu. This style would reduce the distance created by formalities while at the same time enhancing the authoritative characters of the speech. Two months after Kobayashi recorded his ‘youth’ speech, his Chinese counterpart Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) likewise issued a statement with an almost identical title, ‘Addressing the youth of the whole country’ (gao quanguo qingnian shu) (Shen Bao, 17–19 June 1938). In this statement, Chiang, in the capacity of the leader of the Three Principles of the People Youth Corps, insisted on an urgent need for the youth’s adaptation to ‘wartime total mobilisation’ (zhanshi zongdongyuan). The Japanese press immediately reported Chiang’s statement with keen attention (AN, 18 June 1938). Now China and Japan were competing to mobilise the youth for their military operations and total war purposes. By 1940, the war had become far more prolonged, as Chiang succeeded in securing support from major allies such as the USA and the UK. Imperial Japan gravitated to Germany and Italy, which were already engaging in war in Europe. When Japan eventually signed the Tripartite Pact in September 1940, and the establishment of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei Yokusankai) and the new order regime (shintaisei) immediately followed, Kobayashi regarded such a move as ‘unconstitutional’ and thus resigned from the position of Governor-General (Kobayashi 1981 [1943], 80). His counterpart in Korea, by contrast, stayed in

The phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’  29 office and immediately initiated the establishment of a correspondent new order system in the colony, setting up a context in which he engaged in his own recording projects.

Mobilising for the new-order regime in wartime Korea: Minami Jirō On 6 June 1941, at 10.30 am, Minami Jirō was nervously waiting in the reception room on the ground floor of the record company Teichiku in Seoul. He was eventually guided to the second-floor recording room where a microphone was already set up on a desk. Minami sat down, put on his reading glasses, and opened a draft. Immediately a crew member cautioned, ‘please do not make any noise with the papers, sir’. Minami anxiously asked if he could try a page or so beforehand. After the first test, he listened back to the recording and said, ‘my voice sounds a bit hoarse (shagarete iru) from a cold’. Then he attempted the first take for the A-side. It took him ten seconds longer than permitted, so he used a small pen and modified the draft on the spot. The second take was a success. He then continued to make recordings, taking a total of 40 minutes to complete all sides (Keijō Daily [hereafter KD], 8 June 1941). This was not Minami’s first recording experience. In 1932, four years before he was appointed Governor-General of Korea, and on the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident, he had dubbed a speech entitled ‘The JapaneseRussian War and the Present Incident’ (Nichiro sen’eki to konjino jihen, Polydor 1156–1157). The issue of his records was contemporaneous with the recording of Nogi’s corporeal voice being repeatedly played by Sakurai on tours and the release of the ‘Song of the three corporeal bullet heroes’ sung by Chiang Wen-yeh. These all referred to the Russo-Japanese War and its corporeal-bullet spirit as key reference points for understanding the contemporary Japanese war with China. Minami’s second recording, made in Tokyo in late 1940, was planned as part of the announcement of establishing the new-order regime in Korea (KD, 19 December 1940). For this purpose, he used all forms of sonic media, ranging from radio (KD, 16, 18, 28 December 1940) to the talkie (KD, 18 December 1940). Entitled ‘Displaying the state’s total power’, his recorded speech made a direct reference to the establishment in October of the Korean Association for the Nation’s Total Power (KANTP), which corresponded to the Imperial Rule Assistance Association in Japan proper. The title of the speech referred to ‘the state’s’ while the KANTP referred to ‘the nation’. This was not a typo, but reflected a situation in which the two were often simply jumbled up in dominant discourse. Minami’s ‘total power’ speech starts with an assessment of the contemporary international situation. Imperial Japan was engaged in the ‘great work of securing the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and constructing a new world order’. Then comes a turning point in the speech, which concerns the impact of the Tripartite Pact earlier in 1940. Minami mentions that he understood the Tripartite Pact of 1940 as ‘making ever more important the

30  Fumitaka Yamauchi responsibility of Japan as the leader of East Asia’ and ‘acknowledged a need to organise a new order regime [the KANTP] in order to enhance the total power of the nation’. He insists that this is a bottom-up movement vis-à-vis the GGK’s top-down politics, and therefore they ‘advance like the two sides of the same coin’. On the B-side, Minami offers a crucial caveat that ‘this movement is not a political movement but a movement for practising the way of the faithful and upright imperial subject (chūryō naru kōkoku shinmin dō)’. He further adds: ‘Its ultimate goal is to attempt to unite national thoughts, to train all citizens, and to develop and enhance productive power, thereby to achieve the Japan-Korea Unity and complete a fully armed country (kōdo kokubō kokka)’. The last part touches on the determination required of ‘imperial subjects’ in which he includes himself: ‘In sum, we imperial subjects should be grateful (kangeki) for the honour of assisting the completion of the glorious sacred work and overcome with an indomitable spirit any difficulties and disturbances that might lie ahead’. Minami’s ‘total power’ records (Columbia A-631) were put on the market in December 1940. It was reported that 2,900 to 3,000 copies were already on their way from Japan proper to Korea, and a record would be priced at 1.30 yen (Maeil News [hereafter MN], 18 December 1940; KD, 19 December 1940). Given the fact that Minami could have recorded it only after the establishment of the KANTP in October, the whole process of production was just as quick as Kobayashi’s precedent. Columbia emphasised on the label that it was a ‘special production’ (tokubetsu seizō). A Maeil News reporter wrote that ‘this passionate and energetic (yŏl kwa him i kadŭk ch’an) record will leave listeners a deep impression (kip’ŭn kammyŏng)’ (MN, 18 December 1940). About half a year later, Minami made his last recording mentioned above. This time it was planned as a special record for celebrating the fourth anniversary of the Sino-Japanese War Memorial Day (Chōsen 314, July 1941: 68–69). Minami’s speech, entitled ‘Instructions for the Nation on the Home Front’ (Jūgo kokuminkun) was a response to the famous ‘Instructions for the Battlefield’ or the Senjinkun military code. The latter was publicised in the name of Tōjō Hideki on 8 January 1941. Immediately in the next month, Japan Victor issued a set of three records (Victor X-10–12), for which Tōjō himself was the narrator. The issue of the senjinkun records was yet another trigger for the major transformation of the Japanese recording industry as an even greater number of records capitalising on wartime themes started to pour onto the Japanese market (Kurata 1979, 440). The media in Japan proper followed suit and invited readers to write ‘Instructions for the nation on the home front’ that were considered supplementary to the senjinkun (Bungei Shunjū 19(3), 1941; Kakusei 31(5), 1941). In addition, there were individuals who publicised their own ‘Instructions’ (Kawade 1943). Minami, then, fed into this trend with his own version (Chōsen 314, 1941: 68–69; Keijo Ihō 236: 2–5). Minami’s ‘home front’ speech begins with praise of the achievements of the Japanese imperial army against China, also mentioned by Kobayashi in his ‘youth’ speech. What is new here is his reference to the ‘hostile acts (tekisei kōi) of the UK and the USA’, which ‘not only add pressure from all

The phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’  31 directions but also dare to support Jūkei [Chongqing, the Nationalist Government]’. He believes that these ‘hostile countries underestimate the true strength of Japan and blindly suppose that they can easily defeat Japan with economic pressure’. ‘This is a big mistake’, he continues, ‘and they don’t know that the current national strength is three times stronger than that of the prewar’. Here comes a turning point, in which he urges citizens ‘not to be intoxicated with the wartime mood or be off guard spiritually as they ease their mind or feel weary of the prolongation of the incident [Second SinoJapanese War]’. He concludes this part with a famous quotation from Tōgō’s aforementioned speech: ‘Tighten your helmet strings in the hour of victory’. On the B-side, he divides the world into two camps—‘the Western side’, where Germany is working together with Italy to fight against the UK and the USA, and ‘the Eastern side’, where Japan is fighting against China backed up by the UK and the USA. It is his world view that ‘after the Manchurian Incident, one country’s concern can, directly and indirectly, affect the whole world’; and therefore, the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War in Europe ‘should not be considered dualistic (nigenteki) but monistic (ichigenteki)’. He warns the citizens that they ‘should never have a sense of dependency on Germany and Italy’, since Japan must take charge of ‘constructing a new world order based on the Tripartite Pact’. In the last part, he comes to the real point: the attitude of people on the home front should be ‘the same as that of the officers and soldiers of the imperial army who are fighting on battlefields’, since ‘the front line is the extension of the home front, while the home front is a base for the front line’. The record company Okeh, the Korean counterpart of Teichiku at the time, put the records (Okeh K5037-5038) on the market in July 1941 (KD, 15, 19 July 1941). The company categorised the speech as kunwa or an ‘instructive talk’. Keijō Daily described the speech as ‘invaluable words (kichō na kotoba) for propelling total power’ (KD, 8 June 1941). It was also the ‘penetration of the voice [of the Governor-General] through the streets’ (koe no gaito ̄ shinshutsu), which was ‘expected to spur understanding of the current situation among the general public’ (KD, 6 June 1941). A few common features stand out in Minami’s two recordings: His diction is not very clear due to his birthplace (he was born in Kyūshū but mostly grew up in Tokyo), age, or other factors. This is particularly the case when it comes to the distinction between the vowels I and E, such as shiishin for seishin (spirit), kyōeku for kyōiku (education), seishiki for seiseki (grade), etc. Some of his readings of kanji words are ambivalent or even wrong, such as misoyū for mizou (unprecedented), hassoku for hossoku (inauguration), dendō for dentō (tradition), and—even one of the most crucial notions—shintaihei for shintaisei (new-order). And when he stresses a word with the consonants R or L, which are conflated in Japanese, he tends to use the rolled R, such as arayuru (all), sukoburu (extremely), onore (oneself), and many usual and adjectival verbs that end with the sound of ‘ru’, giving the impression that he strains himself or puts on airs for a formal speech. Regarding the ‘home front’

32  Fumitaka Yamauchi speech, for which both the written and recorded versions are available, he changed some formal classical expressions such as neba (ought) and sen (will do) to more oral equivalents nakereba and shiyou—a major contrast with Kobayashi’s ‘youth’ speech in which he would employ the former set of expressions. These changes may make the recorded version less imperative than the written one; the key message, however, is still the same: a strong call for self-sacrifice for the nation as equated with the state.

Calling the living to battlefields in the empire of silence I have so far examined the production and content of the speech recordings made by four top-ranking military officers. The last two sections turn to dimensions of reception, thereby exploring the relationship between their corporeal voices and associated modes of listening subjectivity and aurality against the ‘background silence’ that the epicentre of the empire—the Emperor—had solemnly kept emitting until the very end of the empire itself. At the start of the twentieth century, numerous young people in Japan proper volunteered to be ‘corporeal bullets’. Their war cries on deadly battlefields, however, left almost no phonographic mark. Survivors were motivated to speak for them after returning alive. In the preface of his Corporeal Bullets, Sakurai told his readers the words that he would shout on battlefields to stimulate the soldiers under his command: ‘Beneath this your elder brothers’ ashes are buried! Above here your comrades’ spirits must be soaring, unable to find an eternal place of rest! Men die, but their souls do not perish. Your comrades in the world beyond are fighting with you in this great struggle!’ (Sakurai 1906, 4). Throughout the early twentieth century, the living were urged to learn to hear and listen to the physically inaudible yet still commanding voices of the dead, thereby cultivating a devotional and transcendental mode of listening. Meanwhile, the voices of some chief military commanders such as Nogi and Tōgō were, if only fragmentarily, preserved on records. Their recordings were posthumously treated as precious ‘corporeal voices’ and consecrated as ‘historic national treasures’ and ‘sacred sounds’. Their phonographic traces became the most real and vivid part of the memento mori of their heroic commandership that would be recalled and listened to by those who were interpellated as devout listening subjects. For such listeners, the content of a recorded corporeal voice was secondary to its phonographic presence itself— as the enthusiastic responses to Nogi’s three-second self-introduction on record testify. Even more to the point, such recordings could be treasured, rather than being played back, as physical reminders of the solemn taciturnity for which war gods were often known and by which a sense of awe was evoked. After all, the Japanese empire was dominated by the significant silence of its centre, the Emperor, whose voice was strictly prohibited to be heard in public. His calculated ‘muteness’ generated a commanding presence in the age of phonographic reproduction, constituting a specific type of aurality and subjectivity. ‘How grateful (arigatai) I would be if I were given a

The phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’  33 chance to hear the [divine] voice (okoe) of His Majesty the Emperor’—a schoolgirl wrote when his narration was left silent on a live broadcast in 1940 (Takeyama 1998, 13). Imperial subjects were prompted to keep their ears open to a silence that was almost otherworldly. To develop an aurality that resonates wholeheartedly with the sacred and inviolable reticence, as well as the voiceless cries of the dead, a part of which were brought back to the phonographic present by the corporeal voices of war gods, constituted the auditory definition of who ‘true Japanese’ ought to be. In the Japanese colonies, ‘imperial subjectification’ policies since the late 1930s were promoted as offering colonised peoples a real chance to become ‘true Japanese’ in the name of ‘racial equality’—a hypocritical slogan in which they were allowed to be only incompletely Japanese, and at the expense of their political rights and cultural identities. A key criterion for the extent of such painful transformation was the willingness and readiness to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the imperial country and the Emperor. In auditory terms, becoming a real imperial subject entailed becoming a specific type of listening subject: one who could respond faithfully to a siren call to death— to be used and shot as ‘corporeal bullets’ in the hour of emergency. It is just such an attitude of self-sacrifice that Kobayashi and Minami glorified in their recordings as the cornerstone of the founding spirit of the empire. In his ‘islanders’ speech, Kobayashi made a concluding remark that Taiwanese ‘should not be blinded by self-interest (shiri shiyoku) nor lead an idle life, and moreover should have the determination to sacrifice everything for the sake of the Emperor’s country’. In his ‘youth’ speech, he admonished the Taiwanese youth: ‘be determined to sacrifice yourself as the salt of the earth’ and ‘be faithful and upright subjects of the Emperor’. In his ‘total power’ speech, meanwhile, Minami referred to the ‘essence of the Japanese spirit’, which he believed lay ‘in abandoning oneself and identifying oneself with the Emperor, thereby devoting oneself heart and soul to serving to the State’. Towards the end of his ‘home front’ speech Minami summoned spirits of the dead in his reference to ‘the sacrifice of the precious lives of tens of thousands of people’, thereby insisting that ‘what Japan needs now is not a single hero, but a million, ten million heroes of spirit and driving force’.

Cultivating a deaf ear in the shelter of the silenced The extent of success in evoking pious listening, however, is open to question. While it is hard to gauge exactly how their records were received, there is no indication that they were commercially successful or enthusiastically listened to. A record review, for instance, indicates the unpopularity of Kobayashi’s speech records even among Japanese residents in Taiwan. The 8-page review, after introducing a number of new releases from all major companies for July 1938, mentions them as ‘extra releases’ (rinji hatsubai) briefly in one sentence at the very end (Taiwan Fujinkai 5(7), July 1938, 104). There is also no evidence that Columbia eagerly advertised Minami’s ‘total power’ records in 1940. Okeh did run small advertisements featuring Minami’s ‘home front’

34  Fumitaka Yamauchi records a few times in July and August 1941, but soon switched to different formats in which a popular song was featured, and Minami’s speech was instead moved to the left edge in an even smaller font (MD, 9, 13 October; 17 November 1941). The overall treatment was, therefore, not so much one of exceptional corporeal voices. As time went by, the voices of top-rank officials in the colonies could be more often heard on various occasions and through different sonic media, losing their aura in the process. After all, Kobayashi and Minami were still alive and lacked the commanding presence of those dead commanders who could spur the living on to battlefields. Moreover, in their recordings, they spoke in the Japanese language. While it was designated the ‘national language’ (kokugo) and was promoted as the key element for becoming ‘true Japanese’, the use of it resulted in the inability to reach out to a wider audience in colonial societies. The vernacular presses in Korea and Taiwan thus largely remained silent on the recordings. Moreover, by the time Minami declared the establishment of the new order in late 1940 and recorded his ‘total power’ speech, he had already shut down and silenced the Korean vernacular press including Chosŏn Daily and Tong-a Daily. It is thus likely that colonised peoples turned a deaf—or dead—ear to these phonographic voices. Considered from the standpoint of the colonised, this is the specific manifestation of a colonial aurality that had emerged under Japanese rule. It is a self-protective mode of ‘deafness’—conceived here not so much as a loss but as a gain (Mills 2015, 45)—cultivated to detect and prevent political noises from intruding into the auditory sphere or lifeworld of colonised peoples. Such a shelter resulted in a significant lack of what I would call ‘popular resonance’ regarding colonial dominance. These auditory notions could better articulate what has previously been discussed in terms of the limited extent of cultural hegemony that Japanese could secure in the colonised societies (Shin and Edson Robinson 1999, 6–9). Sound recordings including the examples discussed here could be an important indicator of popular resonance due to the conditions of the recording industry operating under colonial rule, where there existed a significant crack between the orientations of state power and the industry— one that was deeper than political-economic accounts of culture industries in capitalist metropolises would generally suppose. The recording industry was first and foremost a capitalist enterprise to maximise profit by catering to the demands of the listening public. As such it could excavate vernacular voices and sonic differences in a given society as much as they would work well—I have considered this point under the rubric of ‘phono-capitalism’ (Yamauchi 2023, forthcoming). Such a capitalist logic, however, could conflict with the guidelines of colonialism designed to keep the target society in harmony with an imperial order. Such was the case with Japanese colonialism in that the latter emphasised the notion of assimilation (dōka) that compromised c­ ultural difference, although in reality this notion was full of contradictions and ambivalences (Komagome 1996). The result was that while the colonial government rarely made a direct intervention into the

The phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’  35 production of gramophone records, it monitored the industry through administrative procedures such as a record censorship (see Yamauchi 2011, 2014 for details). The popularity of a record, therefore, can be taken as a meaningful barometer of often unspoken popular resonance, if its production and circulation were never free from social mediations and manipulations. The Second Sino-Japanese War and the following ‘emergency situation’ (jikyoku) did affect the default state-industry relationship. The recording industry across imperial Japan had accordingly started to produce warthemed records—a specific context in which Kobayashi’s and Minami’s speeches were dubbed. Such records, particularly those of ‘military songs’, proved to be a huge success in the Japanese-language market. Even in such a changed context, however, products of this line were hardly successful outside Japan proper. In Korea, the making of military songs in the Korean language was attempted, but they were unpopular and soon discontinued. In Taiwan, such production in the vernacular itself was not forged. The local managers of the record companies were not willing to make such records just because they knew they would not sell well. It was only after 1942, and after the release of Minami’s third speech records, that the production of military songs was forcefully accelerated in Korea, while in Taiwan the production of gramophone records itself was already virtually discontinued. Under such circumstances of attempted auditory indoctrination, unpopular records become as revealing as popular ones: they signify the presence of silent or silenced refusal by colonised subjects to accept the accelerating policies of imperial subjectification and wartime mobilisation. Kobayashi’s and Minami’s speech records were particularly significant among others since they were exceptional cases in which the top figures in the colonial administrations directly involved themselves in the production of sound recordings. The war machine that these military-officers-turned-Governor-Generals built up, however, did operate to transform colonised peoples into ‘imperial subjects’ who would sacrifice their life for the sake of the imperial wars. It is during the tenure of Kobayashi and Minami that the wartime recruitment of the Taiwanese and Korean youth started (Miyata 1985; Chou 2003). In late 1937, Kobayashi began enrolling Taiwanese as supply carriers for the military (gunpu) and soon added to them interpreters of Hokkienese, Cantonese, and Mandarin. In Korea, Minami installed an even more powerful recruitment system in May 1938: the Army Special Volunteer program. An equivalent was introduced in Taiwan in 1942, and the Navy Special Volunteer systems were implemented simultaneously in Korea and Taiwan in 1943. Such a wartime construction initiated by Kobayashi and Minami was powerful enough to transform a certain portion of the colonial youth into military ‘volunteers’. It is essential to note, however, that their ‘spontaneity’ itself was in large part a result of systemic and institutional coercion and terror of the time (Matsuda 2011, 220; Chou 2003, 70–72). Under a severer wartime censorship, public discontent could be expressed only secretly and fragmentally

36  Fumitaka Yamauchi through channels such as pieces of graffiti and word-of-mouth rumours, which were partially captured in police documents (Miyata 1985; Kawashima 1989). The unpopularity of the recorded corporeal voices of the GovernorGenerals who built up the very wartime systems was an even more silent expression of such silenced rejection.

Conclusion In May 1942, right before leaving Korea after a tenure of six years, Minami disclosed a plan to introduce general conscription to colonial Korea. After 1944, this was enforced in Korea and then in Taiwan. Although Kobayashi had already left Taiwan by then, his echoes could still be heard when the slogans of ‘addressing the youth’ and ‘addressing the islanders’ were shouted for wartime mobilisation (Taiwan Sōtoku Kanbō Jōhōka 1943, 20–28; AN, 27 and 29 November 1944). Conscription was promoted as a final step for the realisation of ‘racial equality’ and was indeed implemented in exchange for suffrage in the Imperial Diet—although imperial Japan was defeated before substantiating such political rights (Asano 2008, Part V). The colonised, then, were not allowed to live as Japanese (citizens) but only to die as Japanese (imperial subjects) (Ching 2001, 4). Towards the end of the Second World War, countless soldiers in the Japanese empire, including Korean and Taiwanese, were used as ‘corporeal bullets’. This time their resultant deaths were collectively granted a new beautiful name: ‘jade self-destruction’ (gyokusai). Calls of the dead, phonographically enshrined in the corporeal voices of war gods, begged the living not to make their deaths in vain, driving them to repay the dead with their own deaths. Such a chain of calls and responses constituted a core part of Japanese militarism and imperialism. It was the ‘jade-sound’ (gyokuon), the voice of the Emperor Hirohito aired on 15 August 1945, that brought an end to war and ‘jade self-destruction’ attacks. Although his narration of the Imperial Rescript on Surrender was known as the ‘jade-sound broadcast’, it was actually recorded in advance on the previous night after Japan officially accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. It was, therefore, the first sound recording of the Emperor’s voice in Japanese history (on the sharp contrast with other major cases, see Blake 2004). When he thus broke silence, his subjects felt deeply impressed by and thankful for His voice itself, and soon stopped fighting—if few of them could understand the content that was full of highly elaborative kanji compounds in a written style. This is how the ultimate phonographic politics of the supreme corporeal voice has typically been told in postwar Japan. It has recently become clearer, however, that such a story is the core part of a larger myth regarding what is known as the End-of-War Memorial Day (shūsen kinenbi) (Satō 2005)— where the source of this acousmatic voice transfigures into a divine symbol of peace. The truth is that even among Japanese, the reaction was mixed, including a widely believed rumour that it should be the Emperor’s final call for stimulating his subjects to engage in do-or-die ‘jade self-destruction’ as

The phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’  37 corporeal bullets (Kawashima 1989, 290). Needless to say, the magic of the phonographic ‘jade-sound’ did not work so effectively on colonised peoples, whose resilient ‘deafness’ had already become quite impenetrable. Their previously unvoiceable discontent and refusal soon rose above the threshold, manifesting themselves in both Taiwan and Korea in distinctive fashions: in the former a surface calm prevailed, mixed with a deeply felt sense of expectation and uncertainty regarding the arrival of a new regime, whereas in the latter outcries of joy of independence or manse would echo throughout the peninsula before morphing into war cries over its North-South partition (Katō 2009). This is no surprise, in that the unheard records of the GovernorGenerals’ corporeal voices had already well captured the underground signals of lack of popular resonance years back.

Notes 1 Presently this notion is widely used in Korean (read yuksŏng) while rarely in Chinese. 2 Katō is also well known in Korea as a senior commander in the Imjin War (1592– 1598) against Korea. 3 Sakurai’s book was translated into several foreign languages. For an English translation from the same period, see Sakurai (1906). In this version, nikudan was translated as the ‘human bullet’. In this paper I consulted this English version while making revisions to better reflect the original terminology—the representative example being the corporeal bullet. This modern neologism in kanji in Japanese, meanwhile, found its way across East Asia as well, particularly in Korea where it was read yukt’an and is still used in the same sense. In Chinese, meanwhile—read as roudan—it was not widely used. 4 The remarks were translated in other languages including English by Theodor Roosevelt. See ‘President lauds Togo as a model for us’, The New York Times, 28 February 1906.

References Newspapers and periodicals (language, place) Yomiuri News (Yomiuri Shimbun) (Japanese, Japan) Asahi News (Asahi Shimbun) (Japanese, Japan) Bungeishunjū (Japanese, Japan) Kakusei [The Purity] (Japanese, Japan) Keijō Daily (Keijō Nippō) (Japanese, Korea) Maeil News (Maeil Sinbo) (Korean, Korea) The Official Gazette [of the Government-General of Korea] (Kanpo ̄) (Japanese, Korea) Chōsen (Japanese, Korea) Keijo Ihō [Seoul Bulletin] (Japanese, Korea) Chosŏn Daily (Chosŏn Ilbo) (Korean, Korea) Tong’a Daily (Tong’a Ilbo) (Korean, Korea)

38  Fumitaka Yamauchi Taiwan Daily News (Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpō) (Japanese, Taiwan) Shin Min (Japanese, Taiwan) Taiwan Fujinkai (Japanese, Taiwan) Taiwan New People News (Taiwan Xinminbao) (Mandarin Chinese/ Hokkien, Taiwan) Shen Bao (Chinese, China) The New York Times (English, the USA) Asano, T. 2008. Teikoku nihon no shokuminchi hōsei: hōiki tōgō to teikoku chitsujo. Nagoya: Nagoya University Press. Baba, J. ed. 1925. Sakkyoku no shikata. Osaka: Osaka Kaiseikan. Blake, E. C. 2004. Wars, Dictators and the Gramophone 1898–1945. York: William Sessions. Ching, L. T. S. 2001. Becoming ‘Japanese’: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chou, W. 2003. ‘A comparative study of the imperial subjectification movements in Taiwan and Korea’ (Chinese). The Age of ‘Umi Yukaba’ [If I Go Away to the Sea]: Collection of Writings on Taiwanese History in the Late Japanese Colonial Period, 33–76. Taipei: Yunchen Wenhua. Iizuka, T. 2012. Rekōdoman no seiki. Tokyo: Aiikusha. Katō, K. 2009. ‘Dainihon teikoku’ no hōkai: higashi ajia no 1945 nen. Tokyo: Chūkō shinsho. Kawade, H. 1943. Ko ̄shu ̄ shikon. Tokyo: Kenkōsha. Kawashima, T. 1989. ‘Gyokuon hōsō chokugo no kokumin ishiki’. Meiji University Graduate School Bulletin 26: 283–298. Kobayashi, S. 1934. ‘Tōgō gensui o tsuioku shite’. In Admiral To ̄go,̄ edited by NHK Osaka Central Station, 115–125. Osaka: NHK Osaka Central Station. Kobayashi, S. 1935. ‘Tōgō gensui wa ikanishite kaku idaito nararetaka?’. In Collection of Writings of Respect and Admiration for Admiral Tōgo,̄ edited by Imperial Japanese Naval Academy, 61–70. Tokyo: Dainihon Tosho. Kobayashi, S. 1981 [1943]. ‘Mōroku shi’. In Memorandum of Admiral Kobayashi Seizō, edited by T. Itō and M. Nomura, 73–81. Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha. Komagome, T. 1996. Shokuminchi teikoku nihon no bunka tōgō. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Kurata, Y. 1979. Nihon rekōdo bunkashi. Tokyo: Tokyo Shoseki. Matsuda, T. 2011. ‘Sōdōin taisei no keisei to tenkai’. In Colonial Korea: Its Realities and Steps for Liberation, edited by K. Cho, 210–232. Tokyo: Tōkyōdō shuppan. Miki, R. 1924. Daiyūben kandō no hiketsu. Tokyo: Taishibō. Mills, M. 2015. ‘Deafness’. In Keywords in Sound, edited by D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny, 45–54. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miyagawa, J. 1936. Kobayashi so ̄toku, nazeni bukan sot̄ oku o yok̄ yū shitaka. Taipei: Taiwan Jitsugyōkaisha. Miyata, S. 1985. Chōsen minshū to ‘kōminka’ seisaku. Tokyo: Miraisha. Nihon Chikuonki Shōkai [Nitchiku Phonograph Co.] ed. 1940. Nitchiku sanjun̄ en shi. Tokyo: Nihon Chikuonki Shōkai. Ogasawara, N. 1930. Narration in the 78 rpm Record ‘Nogi Maresuke’s corporeal voice and reminiscences about it’ (Victor 51571-A). Taiwan Sōtokufu Kanbō Jōhōka [The GGT Secretariat Information Section]. 1943. Waga chōhei seido. Taipei: The Government-General of Taiwan.

The phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’  39 Sakagami, F. 1940. Taiwan so ̄toku Nogi Maresuke shotoku no utsushi. Taipei: The Government-General Museum of Taiwan. Sakurai, T. 1906. Nikudan: Ryojun jissenki. Tokyo: Eibun Shinjisha. [English version: Sakurai, T. 1907. Human Bullets: A Soldier’s Story of the Russo-Japanese War. Translated by M. Honda. Edited by A. Bacon. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.] Sakurai, T. 1935. ‘Nikudan’ go sanjūnen: Nichiro senbotsu no omoide. Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha. Satō, K. 1916. ‘Nikusei kyōju to gakki kyōju.’ Kyo ̄iku Kenkyū 158: 223–225. Satō, T. 2005. 8 gatsu 15 nichi no shinwa: shu ̄sen kinenbi no mediagaku. Tokyo: Chikuma Shinsho. Shimizu, K. 2000. ‘Yang Qichao to “teikoku kanbun”: “shinbuntai” no tanjō to Meiji Tōkyō no media bunka’. Ajia Yūgaku 13: 22–37. Shin, G. and M. Edson Robinson eds. 1999. Colonial Modernity in Korea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Sterne, J. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Takeyama, A. 1998. Gyokuon hōsō. Tokyo: Banshōsha. Thompson, E. 1995. ‘Machines, music, and the quest for fidelity: Marketing the Edison phonograph in America, 1877–1925’. The Musical Quarterly 79(1): 131–171. Utasaki, K. 1998. Shōgen: nihon yōgaku rekōdo shi—senzen hen. Tokyo: Ongakunotomosha. Wang, Y. 2013. ‘Sounding Taiwanese: A preliminary study on the production strategy of Taiwanese records by the Nippon Phonograph Company’ (Chinese). Minsu quyi [Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore] 182: 7–58. Watanabe, M. 1940. Taiwan to Nogi taishō. Taipei: Taiwan Jitsugyōkaisha. Weidman, A. 2015. ‘Voice’. In Keywords in Sound, edited by D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny, 232–245. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yamauchi, F. 2011. ‘Policing the sounds of colony: Documentary power and the censorship of Korean recordings in the age of performative reproduction’. Musica Humana 3(2): 83–120. Yamauchi, F. 2014. ‘Higashi ajia no bunsho kenryoku to onsei media no shokuminchi kindaiteki hensei: kanbunmyaku no seijibunka to teikoku nihon no Chōsen rekōdo ken’etsu’. Toȳ o ̄ bunka kenkyu ̄jo kiyō [The Memoirs of the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo] 165: 1–122. Yamauchi, F. 2023 (forthcoming). ‘Introduction: Phonographic modernity and audible history in East and Southeast Asia’. In Formations of Phonographic Modernity in East and Southeast Asia: Exploring the Gramophone Industry and Music Genres, edited by F. Yamauchi and Y. Wang. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

2 In dark times Poetic dissonance in the Thai-Malay borderlands Noah Keone Viernes

Introduction Around four years ago, I assigned a collection of poetry called No Women in Poetry by the Thailand-based Malay-Muslim poet Zakariya ‘Che’ Amataya for an undergraduate course called Politics and Society in Southeast Asia. I assigned the poems because they provide one of the most visible expressions of the Malay-Muslim voice inside Thailand, as Che’s ascendancy as a nationally recognised poet coincided with the rise of violence and the deployment of approximately 70,000 Thai soldiers to the southern Thai border provinces where he lives. Che is a longtime friend, and I see one of the collection’s opening pieces, ‘Journey of a Poem’, as simultaneously grappling with the intentionality of poetry and a desire to align the solitary poet with a politics of solidarity. Poetry journeys alone, Inspiring me to reach out to the people Travelling the road of life Where hope remains high Even when my poetry is sad and full of darkness (Amataya 2010, 11) The darkness of poetry is inspired by the trajectories of Muslim youth along the Thai-Malaysian border who are overwhelmingly perceived as possible insurgents. The poetic voice, on the other hand, opens a venue of defiance to this dominant image. But I am not a sniper I have no gun; I have no bullets Just a pencil and paperI merely scribble and arrange characters That stream forth from emotions But I have already laid to waste the infantry In countless numbers; countless indeed If you don’t believe it, count their corpses Piled high in my heart DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772-4

In dark times  41 Many may wonder How brutal and ruthless I must be Without the slightest mercy But I swear I don’t enjoy depriving anyone of life Yet I wish I were a sniper (Amataya 2010, 87) In the convention of ‘reader-response criticism’, I called on students to express their reactions to the literary text. One American student responded that the poems would have more force if they were soundtracked to music. I emailed Che about the experience, and he said, ‘Poetry is already music’. I moved to spend more time with Che in his home province of Narathiwat, along the border, to better understand his musically inflected vision of poetry as it relates to a politics of sound I articulate below. His relationship to home is often highlighted in a meticulous reorganisation of texts as verse, which broadens the context of ‘voice’ in a region mired by political conflict and martial law.1 Passing from checkpoint to checkpoint in a militarised borderland of regulated speech, he constantly reiterated the negative potential of poetry alongside the possibility of aural connection. This ongoing conversation draws parallels between sonic approaches in ethnomusicology (Feld 2012), new media studies (LaBelle 2018), and an understudied yet persistent feature of sound in political theory. In his reference to the sonic dimensions of power in classical Greece, R. Murray Schafer writes that Socrates measured the size of the political community according to the distance that its sounds travelled (Schafer 1977). In the Politics, Aristotle emphasised music as a function of state education. And this question of whether music can lead to ‘the alleviation of past toils’ or connect ‘pleasure or pain’ (Everson 1996, 201) to the experience of everyday life prompts my investigation about poetic interventions in the resonances of state domination. In this chapter, I locate poetic disagreements within what Jacques Rancière (2004a) calls dissensus, since his alternative approach to the political raises a central critique about ongoing policies in Southern Thailand where Che lives and works. The Thai state’s distinction between historic claims and regional sovereignty relies on a visual and discursive link between ethnic Malay difference, Islamic religious practices, and a rise in insurgent activity. In dominant approaches to political division in the south, the state brokers the possibility of resolution only through a convergence of voices (i.e., dialogue) among recognised political actors. But the 2014 Thai coup d’état can be seen as the cause of the continuation of conflict in the border areas, because the military government turned towards nationwide resolutions rather than the question of ‘self-determination’ for the Southern provinces under martial law (see Bodetti 2019). The dialogic approach often results in the failure to hear unofficial voices as possible manifestations of the political. The dehumanisation of communication thereby recirculates in the materialisation of ‘noise’: explosions, fear,

42  Noah Keone Viernes and the dynamic of being heard in a landscape that is perpetually unstable. Where noise is an ontological ground for knowledge about the so-called ‘Deep South’ landscape and the positioning of people and things across it, the harmonious possibility of agreement is offset in what Michel Serres (2007) calls static and interference. The state is not exceptional for its ability to propel noise into a landscape, but for its claim as the dominant mode of attenuation through harmonious consensus with actors of its choosing. Historically, as Kofi Agawu observes, political intervention in an indigenous polity functions through the occupation and re-appropriation of its ‘prosody’ (2016, 336). I will reinforce the point below in what Thongchai Winichakul (1994) describes as the state’s attempt to circumscribe ‘dead space’ (1994, 96). A poet, on the other hand, redistributes sound (to borrow the form of politics that Rancière calls disagreement) as a restoration of voices to the common space of politics. As an example of a ‘resonant politics’ in the martial law provinces, the chapter raises the following question: how does Zakariya’s contentious poetry think through this dissonant landscape, and what is the impact of political division on the attempt to make political voices audible? To answer the question, I draw upon the presence of sound as it shifts between textual and acoustic space, from poetic verses to performance art and music videos. I argue that the dissonant poetics of these provinces function as a space of resistance against the territorial and disciplinary imposition of martial law since 2004.2

Voice and political subjectivity I first met Zakariya Amataya, better known among friends as Che, in 2008 at a writer’s commune in Bangkok called Suan Ngeun Mee Ma. This space is a strange respite from urbanisation where trees, picnic tables, and several apartments for resident artists facilitate a gathering place beneath a growing canopy of riverside condominium skyscrapers. At times, Suan Nguen Mee Ma is serene and perfectly matched for meditative writing, at other times it becomes a dissonant space of dissent—such as in June 2015 when young students of the New Democracy Movement waged opposition to the 2014 coup only to be dragged away by soldiers. For a decade leading up to that moment, many ‘new wave’ Thai writers emphasised the polyphony of voices in the immediate landscape of the previous 2006 coup d’état. In this postcoup period, political division and failed elections spiked amid intermittent protests and states of emergency. Some works of the period, such as Uthis Hemaemool’s 2006 novel Mirror Reflection, beautifully orchestrated the polyphony by immersing the protagonist within a playlist of songs and political events as a self-proclaimed ‘metronome’ (Hemaemool 2006, 205). The musicality of the novel calibrated the dissonance of time and the unlikely possibility of synthesis. We can see this metronomic function in more recent films, like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s short film ‘Song of the City’ (2018), from the omnibus feature Ten Years in Thailand, where a marching band plays the Thai national anthem slowly and out-of-sync.3

In dark times  43 In 2004, as Thai protests were met by military crackdowns and martial law, especially in Bangkok and the Muslim-majority provinces, Che and a community of filmmakers and writers became increasingly outspoken. In the age of social media capture, these artists would observe the accumulated structure of partitions in highly mediated memories of brutality. In video captures of the 2004 Tak Bai Massacre, for example, 78 Muslim protestors were stacked in an undersized military transport vehicle where they suffocated to death. Underscoring the lack of voice in a dire situation, only soldiers and official organisations are allowed to speak. In amateur video captures, young shirtless Muslim men are bound and interrogated. Relatives cry nearby as their sons and brothers are led away. Soldiers stationed there from other parts of Thailand say, ‘Where are you from, Malaysia? Can he even speak Thai?’ Apichatpong Weerasethakul revisits photographs of the Tak Bai massacre in the exhibit ‘Photophobia # 1-4’ (first showcased at Kyoto City University of Art in 2013). Pimpaka Towira’s feature-length film, Island Funeral (2015), likewise engages the martial law border provinces as a juxtaposition between sound design and the experience of the region’s eerie political landscape. In the film, a tropical gothic narrative of ghosts and unburied bodies floats across the disorientations of four characters from Bangkok, who attest to the unresolved haunting that accompanies their arrival in the Southern border landscape. The ethereal postrock soundscape heightens a perplexity of space for characters estranged from their distant relatives. Yet the music also invites the audience to experience layers of silence amid the region’s history of rupture. This is where I position Che, as a voice and an alternative disposition of the political in an ocean of national noise that rings so loud that the primary challenge is to personalise alternative experiences of it. His poetry and participatory ethos express and challenge a contemporary martial law aesthetics in Thailand, and in him I attempt to access voices in the landscape of the everyday South. I am reminded of Hua Hsu’s (2019) observation about sound: ‘Sound, after all, is a form of community—a physical force that passes through us, even if we try to shut our ears. It binds and connects us, even if we don’t hear it’. Addressing a sonic community entails rethinking any process of resolving political conflict as much as it relates to who speaks, what people say and how they say it. But what form does sound take when people cannot speak? We could also consider the limitations and possibilities of a community of resonance within what Brandon LaBelle (2018) calls ‘sonic agency’, in which he emphasises ‘the hearing that is the basis for an insurrectionary activity, a coming community’ (2018, 4). How, in other words, does sound itself adapt as a mode of empowerment? To arrive at hearing as agency, LaBelle moves through a genealogy of sonic power that connects Hannah Arendt’s pluralisation of the polis as ‘spaces of appearance’ to Ettiene Balibar’s concept of ‘anarchic non-citizenry’ that addresses the diversions of voice when dominant forms of publicity are occupied. Perhaps LaBelle’s most relevant analogy for Che’s poetic life is that ‘lyrical coalitions’ and ‘unlikely publics’ build towards a transnational ethics of ‘bordering’. Che, a Bangkok-based new wave writer of the 2000s, moved

44  Noah Keone Viernes back to his hometown of Narathiwat along the Southern Thai-Malay border in 2015. The return home signalled a departure from the continuity and concentration of literary voices in the capital city. The most acclaimed Thai poets, from Sunthorn Phu (1786–1855) to Angkan Kalayanaphong (1926– 2012) to Naowarat Phongpaiboon (b. 1940), write in the meter of accepted chantalak (prosody), which instils a line of continuity between the classical royal court in Bangkok and the dominance of a well-educated elite. The latter two writers supported the conservative Peoples Alliance for Democracy, or Yellow Shirt movement, that called for and praised the 2006 coup d’état against the neoliberal populism of Thaksin Shinawatra with right-wing nationalism. Unlike the ideological affiliations of other writers, Che uses klorn pao (free [empty] verse) as a political and aesthetic intervention into the dominant conventions of Thai poetry. But there are other significant factors that underlie his uniqueness. Thai is Che’s second of four languages that include Melayu, Arabic, and English, and he is inspired just as much by Sufi mystics—from which Islam in Southeast Asia evolved—as he is by contemporary Western and North African writers, such as Ahmed Bouanani. Since 2004, Thai newspapers, cinema, television, and social media utilise the Thai language term for ‘risk’, a homonym for voice, to characterise a precarious ‘Deep South’ region where there is a suspension of constitutional protections and an expanded military presence. The intersection of border and martial law deserves some attention here. On the one hand, martial law is the ambiguity of statements filtered through the changing logic of states. Giorgio Agamben sees these legal ‘states of exception’, enunciated as martial law in the Anglo-Saxon context, as fluid like a border; and such a border threatens the fixed expectations of states where law, ethnic categories, and statistical norms form a bulwark against difference. In Thailand, the Southern border forms the backdrop for the declaration of martial law due to rising insurgent violence as noted. At the same time, the disappearance of community leaders and those appointed to speak on behalf of others (such as human rights lawyer Somchai Neelaphaijit) thwarted appeals to dialogue through the usual channels.4 Martial law materialised in the legitimation of interrogation, torture, impromptu military courts, the multiplication of checkpoints to accord with the perpetual act of remapping boundaries, and the changing system of announcements that filtered through new auditory channels. There is power in resonance, but also power over others in the reproduction of silence. Over the past four years, I’ve attempted to document Che’s transition back to his home region and consider how politics and poetry relate. Che’s impact on the people that surround him is far-reaching. Our early audio recordings of conversations about poetry, family history, and the 2016 constitutional referendum shifted to a documentary film project, which then began to take shape as a visual poem of selected works assembled across the textual fragments of the state as they resonate in the martial law provinces of the Thai-Malaysian border. When he moved home to Narathiwat after three decades in Bangkok, Che’s polyphonic life and work began to burrow a new tunnel into the region’s underground corridors of sound.

In dark times  45

This is not the ‘deep south’ Che’s home in the southern Thai border provinces is like a lap-dissolve of imagery (e.g., Thailand’s 1914 martial law decree that today allows for a massive military occupation) mapped onto everyday perception in the present. The people here have lived with martial law longer than the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, and there are many parallels to the militarisation of Mindanao in the Philippines—or even Morocco’s attempt to prevent a referendum on autonomy in ‘southern’ provinces it has claimed since 1975. In Thailand, the prior sultanate probably considered itself a Northern region of the Malay world before being annexed to Siam in the 1909 Anglo-Siamese Treaty. Under Siamese control—which was never absolute—the new region was envisioned as seven units ruled by four rajas. In modern times, sovereignty was never certain, but the rulers, Francis Bradley writes, projected their power symbolically by resounding and maintaining the nobat, or ‘royal drums’ (Bradley 2016, 23). Sound has long been central to power politics in the region. The gift of nobat from one sultanate to another also functioned as solidarity. Seizure of the nobat signified the sacred aura known as ‘daulat’. Bradley’s references to sound work as an analogue to the Siamese colonisation and acculturation that invade his articulation of indigenous and sacred space. Here, the space of sound is more material than Western conceptions of bounded geographic territory. This orchestration recalls an even older narrative that describes the introduction of Islam to the area. Ibrahim Syukri’s contested History of the Malay Kingdom of Patani suggests that the transition from the fourteenth-century Hindu polity to the fifteenth-century Islamic one begins with the ring of a cymbal (Syukri 1985). After the 1932 revolution ended Absolute Monarchy, Siamese administrative control over the former Malay sultanate was revised into the three provinces as mapped today. Pre-1909 versions of the map appear frequently in the provinces as visualisations of a prior temporality: for example, in the office of Pattani community activists Saiburi Looker, or in the background of a local café.5 Historically, this process of postcolonial repartition is an intervention into the fluidity of prior global networks by the modern Thai state. The pre-state sultanate functioned across trans-continental networks that reached the shores of Ryukyu and Ming-era China and reverberated in the texts of Jawi communities in the Arabspeaking world over centuries (Bradley 2008). With the collusion of Siamese and British colonial networks, these indigenous spaces were recorded in metropolitan Bangkok, thereby dissipating the transnational reach of prior voices. Thongchai Winichakul advances a crucial sonic analogy: The grid of the modern mind renders the unfamiliarity of the indigenous polity and geography more familiar to us by translating them into modern discourse […] Their voices have not been heard. It is as if they occupied a dead space with no life, no view, no voice, and thus no history of their own. (Winichakul 1994, 96)

46  Noah Keone Viernes A sultanate becomes a territory through a series of cuts and reconnections in the formulation of the modern political body that Thongchai calls the ‘geo-body’. The geo-body lives only through the production of dead space and, more literally, through surges of brutal violence. This is because the geobody is constantly challenged by the redeployment of dissenting voices (and this is where I am thinking about the variety of sounds in the region and the images that accompany them). The state prefers the loudest opposition, for instance, the insurgency as a pretext for justifying the moderation of noise. In this sense, poetry is not a petition but a more literal experimentation in the politics of voice. In voice, Che’s free verses seem to imbue living noise into a space of death and the silencing regime of martial law. From film representations to fluctuating body counts of the region to Che’s better-known early poems like ‘Will Bombs Fall on my Playground’ or ‘I Wish I Was a Sniper’, the concept of a dead space pushes against the map. But I also wonder whether poetry as a voice can rethink and reassemble the parts of a community fragmented by violence. Musicologist R. Murray Schafer formulates the concept of the acoustic community from Plato’s classic dialogue, The Laws, which imagines the perfect political accord in 5040 inhabitants. This is because, Socrates thinks, a total of 5040 possible voices is the greatest number that can exist within a single range of hearing. But the deeper you delve into Plato’s formulation the more people are bound by a hierarchy of appropriate vocal expression. Not only does the singing and dancing of this community take place under the surveillance of sober authorities, but the kinds of songs expressed are regulated to a particular genre— here Socrates cites Egypt. Similar concerns show up in Book VII of Aristotle’s Politics, right before his discussion of music. Aristotle calls for the moderation of voices so that the polis can be balanced: ‘For who can be the general of such a vast multitude, or who the herald, unless he have the voice of a Stentor’ (Everson 1996, 173). Aristotle did not live in a world of microphones but did acknowledge the off-screen voices of those who cannot partake in the conversation among citizens, including women, slaves, and farmers (among others)—which, signalling a dominant direction in political theorising, he calls ‘the means’ for the happiness of citizens. Unfortunately, the strangers and foreigners that line the ports of the Greek city-state remain partitioned from the city by walls and ‘laws that pronounce and determine who may hold communication with one another, and who may not’.6 There are people, voices, and natural ‘soundmarkers’, but we know nothing about the range of systems that make sound. Here, as in Plato, the poet is a diversion from politics. These earlier connections between sound and political community are fundamental for imagining the development of political representation as voice in the shift from the ideal to the practical. As these classical conceptions were reborn in the time of Machiavelli’s paranoid realism and then in the aesthetics of the modern nation-state, the form of a republic was forced to confront noise. Niall Atkinson raises an interesting juxtaposition between R. Murray Schafer’s acoustic fidelity of the rural and the Futurist engagement with

In dark times  47 noise of the early twentieth-century European city. Atkinson writes that the distinction depends on sound’s relationship to ‘the relentless power of mechanical reproduction’ (Atkinson 2013, 58). If we embrace the times of the political, we must also engage the transformation of acoustic collectivities. Atkinson is interested in the renaissance framing of sound because writers of the period saw the acoustic and social dynamics of the civitas as interconnected. In this ‘republic of sound’, key Florentine artworks and texts helped to articulate the relationship between the places of community (i.e., the piazza) and ‘collective self-governance’ where order was displaced by the multiplicity of life in the public square. In the city, a popular poet was a ‘noise making machine’ but also a ‘civilizing’ voice (Atkinson 2013, 62). The city could be ‘a harmonious work of art and a discordant dynamic clatter of conflict and commerce’ (Atkinson 2013, 69). Not only did the piazza […] nourish the city, but it also communicated spatially how people ought to behave as a political community. Even the disruptive power of murder could be contained by the stubborn refusal to interrupt the practices of daily life, to remain in the square, to continue to sing and counter the momentum of the internecine violence that could plague Italian cities. (Atkinson 2013, 69) Somehow, this image opened a beautiful referent to life under martial law in Thailand: the stages of performance, the circulation of media, the dialogue between the insurgency and the current military-appointed government; all of which required the auditory manifestation of speech. A voice might diverge from the controlled dialogue of official representations only to the extent that it can be heard. As with the republican vision of the piazza, the best analogy for this relationship in contemporary sonic terms is the microphone. In fact, the mobility of a microphone trumps the delimitations of public space under martial law while enabling the reproduction of voice in a diversity of media formats. In this multimodal sense, Che speaks as a movement beyond space. His anarchic aesthetics build a collective site of aural occupation beyond the borders of the state. We are not talking about harmony but about dissonance. His poetic defiance is orchestrated in the following unpublished poem from March 2015, entitled ‘One Day’: In the world of the people A tumultuous voice from the back of the throat waits beyond the moat A whisper That resounds throughout the cave In the echo an exit opens

48  Noah Keone Viernes where the path splits so suddenly that the whole mountain might explode And on that day The whisper becomes a bell Struck loud and incessantly deafening the other sounds (Amataya, Z., 2015, personal communication, 23 March. Translated by Noah Viernes.) One day, the subterranean voices of the cave will be heard from the castle since walls reverberate voices in a multiplicity of harmonics and resonant echoes. The power of states and police orders, Rancière argues, manifests itself as ‘a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise’, whereas the political voice ‘re-partitions’ this regime in disagreement and the emergence of new modes of visibility and resonance (Rancière 2004b, 13). In the journey of free verses and syllables amid sound, these disagreements find routes beyond the restrictions of martial law.

From voice to dialogue In places without voices, the mediums of expression shift. With the ascendancy of Siamese colonisation, Malay Muslims like Shaykh Dā’ūd bin ‘Abd Allāh al-Fatānī (1769–1847) were connecting their experiences of the Middle East with the nineteenth-century textualism that, Bradley writes, ‘gave Islam definitive ascendancy’ in Patani (Bradley 2016, 22). Here, Bradley echoes James Ockey’s (2011) treatment of the transnational mobility of the former Malay sultanates that underlie the convergence of local and global narratives. Stories of Mecca involved entire lives spent abroad engaged in creative writing and hadith (interpretations) of the Koran. This historic legacy of writing continued into the 1940s as political movements abroad—sometimes connected to the modernisation of Islam—began to materialise in the Southern push for autonomy inside Thailand. Petitions were printed and circulated as a form of collective resistance. The most memorialised of these political voices is Haji Sulong, who in 1947 pleaded for self-determination in a document called Seven Points for Southern Autonomy. Sulong later disappeared while in police custody, further alienating the national dialogue-based reform movement and perhaps reinforcing the power of the written word. My first trip to the martial law provinces in August 2015 was occasioned by a local commemoration of the disappearance of Haji Sulong for which Che wrote and recited a poem at the ramshackle entrance to Sulong’s aged wooden home: But the home within remains steadfast If the foundation perseveres and maintains its course Through the whole of the village

In dark times  49 Where the voice of scriptural recitation resounds far and wide If we believe that tomorrow retains the brightness of the sun Death is just a temporal moment of life, The breaking point of a traveler who enters the moment of realisation That here, at this point, the long travail has not yet come to an end (see Viernes 2016, 152) Appointed to name the commemorative event, Che titled it ‘That those without tombs might everywhere find their cemetery’. Che’s voice resonated throughout the space of the Sulong estate, where hundreds gathered to commemorate the anniversary of his death. Poetry seemed to revive this regional legacy in the return of a political appeal through poetry. On that evening, cameras, sliders, and microphones blended with stringers, journalists, other media representatives, NGO workers, former insurgents, and security personnel. Sulong’s modernist push for political reform in the late 1940s reappeared, in the present, as a decentred and depersonalised configuration of aurality. From large-scale events to everyday conversation, voices circulated amid an impromptu infrastructure of martial law. The visibility of checkpoints between Hat Yai and Narathiwat, where I have filmed brief glimpses of Che’s political poetics since 2015, is both eye-catching and off-putting. The bright lights of the security cordon radiate against the darkness, like a film set. And as with a film set, there is an integrated system of recording that embeds surveillance and voice within a hierarchy of visual and auditory channels. The checkpoints filter entry and exit to and from the militarised interior, to slow movement to the pace of mounted security cameras and soldier eyes. Suspicious individuals can be stopped, searched, and interrogated. Voice is central, as what people say as they pass through the checkpoints is carefully managed by soldier-orchestrated conversations. In a gendered regime of profiling, young Muslim men are primary targets of interrogation across hundreds of checkpoints, but everyone is a likely target of a short dialogue that filters the speed at which people are granted movement across the checkpoints. If the militarised regulation of space seeks to shine a light on their opposition, poetry is a literary mode of encryption that repackages language so as to restore mobility. Drivers and pedestrians must respect the military presence by slowing down or halting at each temporary border. The soldier’s line of questioning always changes. Sometimes they inquire about destinations and home villages—especially in relation to the mapping of ‘red zones’ that draw suspicion of links to the ongoing insurgency. Recently, they ask about the occupation of the driver—which complicates the lives of those individuals whose line of work does not quite fit into the lexicon of a military vocabulary. Against common discourses of liberalism that champion a state’s ability to facilitate rational debates among its citizens, a checkpoint dialogue is always one-sided. In foundational texts that highlight the centrality of dialogue, a voice always carries the promise of contentious argumentation without the

50  Noah Keone Viernes consequence of violence. In ironic fashion, Socrates, the protagonist of Plato’s Republic, always wins the debate—except in his final public trial as  a defendant against the state. The democratic potential of any dialogue  must be called into question. In Che’s poem ‘I See Myself ’, fragmentation provides the condition of possibility for disconnection and reconnection: Even without certainty of the future What is there in proximity Is like reflections off pieces of glass Where the broken whole has shattered If there is some imagination left Beyond visions of a time to come The here and now radiates in our eyes (Amataya 2017) This 80-line free verse poem was written as a performance installation for the opening of ‘Patani Semasa’ at Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum (17 July 2017–14 February 2018). And even though it was written in the traditional Arabic transcription of Melayu, called Jawi, and printed on a translucent white cloth draped across the museum’s largest wall, Che had something different in mind for the performance. As a crowd gathered for the reading, the poet was nowhere to be found. Instead, only an imagined figure built of wood was posted in front of a wall-sized poem written in the indigenous Jawi script. From the poem, the poet emerged with poster board signs written in Thai so that fragments of the poem could be read aloud by the audience. The reading of the crowd is a collective starting point for the reassembly of the fragmented voice, but also for the silencing of subjectivity through the organisation of voice under martial law. An analysis of the shift in languages, however, from the installation to the poster board placards, visualises the conversion of words into sound. In the checkpoint system, dialogue is an imagined connection, but one that reinforces the command of some bodies over others in the form of microlevel interrogations. Zakariya’s poetry turned increasingly towards martial law’s aesthetic assemblage, where checkpoints regulate mobility and voice and soldiers with an arsenal that includes DSLR cameras. Poetry raises voice against the ‘soft interrogation’ that sometimes takes the form of a line-up and sometimes escalates towards more severe forms of detainment. In some cases, these checkpoints became the raw material for films and art exhibitions as ‘reflections off pieces of glass’. In one example, titled ‘Checkpoint’ (SixNature Collective), local residents are converted into the mobile checkpoints as zoning cones are placed over bodies to undermine both voice and vision (Figure 2.1). In the pacification of subjects into docile bodies that neither see nor hear, the impromptu structure of martial law helps to maintain the fiction of an epistemological high ground.

In dark times  51

Figure 2.1  ‘Checkpoint’ (Six-Nature collective, Patani Artspace, 4 August 2019). (Photo courtesy of Patani Art Space).

The microphone ‘They exchanged fire with rifles and M-79 grenade launcher for about a half hour’, Dusadee said. ‘The attackers finally retreated into the darkness.’ (Ismail and Ahmad 2018) An exquisite field of black envelopes us More terrifying than its guiding light (Amataya 2017) We agree somewhat and obey a lot. For we are afraid, afraid of the dark. (Serres 2007, 124) The acousmatic is fundamentally based upon conditions of the unseen, of not looking, or looking elsewhere, into sound, and at times, even total darkness—a listening in the dark. (Labelle 2018, 33) The population of Thailand is around 69 million, far exceeding Plato’s demographic ideal of 5040. If this ideal was superimposed onto the three Southern provinces, everyone would be dead, for the ideal is slightly less than the 7000 who have been killed in the conflict since 2004, or the 12,500 who have been injured, and much less than the near 70,000 soldiers stationed in the martial law provinces (Macan-Markar 2018). But no less interesting is the possibility

52  Noah Keone Viernes of 5040 people coming into contact with a given voice over the course of several events. Che’s poetry spans two poetry collections, hundreds of unpublished poems, national literary tours, local workshops, and—in a recent case—a reading for Pattani’s reception of the now-defunct Future Forward party (one of the nation’s largest opposition parties). His activities inspire others into productive collaboration, and much of his current aspirations seem to move towards the audition of a Deep South voice at the expense of producing work under his own name. Much of his current work involves editorial duties for much younger local writers, especially in the formation of a new grassroots literary journal called The Melayu Review. Deflecting a nationally recognised persona onto those who cannot speak becomes his mode of ‘listening in the dark’ (Labelle 2018, 33), but also a technique of amplification. How does voice operate in ways that contravene the military occupation of dialogue in alternative sites of collective occupation? Can, in the Rancièrian line of inquiry, the amplification of poetry’s voices repartition state distributions of the sensibility? Here, the microphone is a significant analogy for social relations as an ontology that thinks through the amplification of voice and the technologies that link a field of relationships together. This non-human apparatus is what Serres refers to as a ‘quasi-object’. A microphone, I was warned in 2015, could pick up frequencies beyond our own range of hearing and/or understanding, and even be used as evidence to incriminate residents in emergency spaces. On the other hand, if a system is governed, as Serres suggests, by the moderation of signals—or the circulation of messages based on the regulatory position of senders and receivers—the microphone is no less a significant mode of restoring noise to disrupt networks of domination. The microphone captures the feedback of otherwise clean categories, statistical values, and rigid documentation that build a collective yet silent set. For instance, Thailand’s National Statistics Office—here sourced by Narathiwat Provincial Health Office—lumps death by ‘suicide, homicide’ in one category and ‘accident, event of undetermined intent’ in another.7 On one hand, the problematic statistical summaries conceal the scales, participants, and perceptions of violence. But more importantly, these numbers then become the final resting place for bodies deprived of voice. Numbers do not represent everyone because the count is designed to dispense with voice. Put another way, those who die during martial law interrogations go unrecognised in a conversation about the legitimacy of the occupation. Andrew Harding illustrates how this lack of ‘accountability’ institutionalises silence into a ‘technique of government’ (Harding 2010, 299). The communicatory apparatus of a state is thereby managed through the filtering of environmental noise. But noise resurfaces in the feedback of violence, the speech of wounds, and the amplification of the poetic voice. On 11 August 2018, we decided to film Che’s poem ‘I see myself’ (Amataya 2017), about the multiplicity of Thai-Malay Muslim identities struggling to anchor themselves against the flux and indeterminacy of martial law violence. As darkness fell on the mountain pass of the elevated town of Si Sakhon (locally referenced as Kuala Kawel), Che and his close friends

In dark times  53

Figure 2.2  Saiburi River, Kuala Kawel. (Photo by author).

brought me to an island in the middle of the Saiburi river as the sun set behind them (Figure 2.2). The backdrop was far different from the opening of the Patani Semasa exhibit at Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, where the poem was first read one year earlier. At Maiiam, Che did not read it, but divided it into placards he held up for the audience to read. The demonstration conveyed the silencing of voice, but also the placard was both a sign of protest and the collective possibility of amplification in reading along. Here in the middle of a river, one year later, Che’s friend Najib stepped towards a microphone raised to connect this temporary sandbar with the amplified body in space. A wooded canopy of fury in the shrieking wind A whistling reverberation fills the mountain pass Some of us enter the trees to find ourselves But find neither self nor others Some are transfixed by the luminous blur of the city Only to discover Alienation swallows the crowd Of people with shattered hearts. The sun set behind him as we recorded the scene. The sounds of the first evening prayer entered the soundscape alongside the sonic drift of children playing on the shore, but he continued reading. He, like Che and others beside me on the sandbar, spoke of the alienating forces of Bangkok where they felt like strangers. Each of them returned home to the border region to challenge a new sphere of darkness. The flow of the river and the entrance of sonic layers into this visual frame materialises in counterpoint to the implementation of martial law. In ‘Report

54  Noah Keone Viernes from A Partitioned Village’, Che emphasises the rigid territorialisation of space: ‘We’ve cordoned off the village/ Down to the birds, grasshoppers, and the ants./ No one will slip past our enclosure/ As we lock down every square inch’ (Amataya, Z., 2019, personal communication, 15 September. Translated by Noah Viernes). The poem was first performed publicly in October 2018 at Khonkaen Manifesto (curated by Thanom Chapakdee), in a collective space aiming to resist a development model that emphasised the militarisation of the Thai periphery (Art4d 2019). The poem had thereby moved beyond the regional context of its narrative and was later published in the inaugural issue of the Bangkok Literary Review (Amataya, 2019, 51). Here we can emphasise voice in the ontology of the microphone as a quasi-object, such that voice lends towards amplification beyond the existing territorialisation of bodies. Finally, I would like to emphasise the depersonalisation of speech, and the removal of the intersubjectivity that dialogue requires, in order to amplify voices of resistance in Thailand’s martial law provinces. In the first half of 2019, activists, event organisers, and creative thinkers came together to plan a week-long event called ‘Pattani Decoded’. Whereas much of the event carried a ‘design’ aesthetic of art installations, DJs, and renovated urban structures, Che unveiled a new performance called ‘I See You’ that aimed to recover the voice of a local man who recently died in military custody. Whereas the poem matches the description of Abdulloh Esormusor, who died following his detainment in July of 2019, the voice of the poem might accord with any of the 54 men who died in military custody since 2014. In the performance, the poet takes the microphone and begins to read: ‘I see you’ in repetition, somewhere between the hip hop intonation of ‘I see yo’ and the ‘ICU’ acronym for the intensive care unit where Abdulloh Esormusor died of injuries sustained during the period he was detained. In this performance of ‘I See You’—and in reference to the poem ‘I See Myself’ addressed above—Che’s friend Nagib approaches the stage and, playing the role of a soldier, he performs known forms of torture: he places a plastic bag over the poet’s head and dumps water over his enveloped body. Then, with head, hands, and microphone beneath the bag, Che begins to read: ‘To this row of white rooms/ The smell of ammonia permeates the air/ The vital signs monitor reverberates/ Amid quickened protocols and shouts/ I am stuck to this bed’. Sounds surround him, but the audience knows that he is a comatose body, silent and nearing death. Another voice in the narrative, that of the soldier, stakes a claim to the record: ‘I see you, the suspect/ Accused of criminality/ You are, thus, being interrogated/ We will question, we will ask/ Until you surrender and submit yourself/ Into a comprehensive confession’ (Amataya 2019). Finally, the third voice of the narrator enters: And so the scapegoat suffers With their head bagged to cut off oxygen Prevented from all breathing Until the mouth opens To leak out

In dark times  55 Moribund life in death There are also many other methods Used in torturing victims Into a coerced confession Such as the victim’s mouth with water Bucket after bucket, over and over Until choking in one’s own dread Who can endure this? A body is not brick and mortar To be struck with force! Left unconscious. You see me Without scars Without the marks of torture I see you too! (Amataya 2019) The poem thus ends with Che’s invitation to solidarity built around the manifestation of solidarity, where collectivity resonates in those who see and hear each other there at that moment. But the poem relies on the reclaiming of voice in the darkness of disappearance. A dialogue assumes a conversation between official parties, but the presumption of agreement and accord does not work in absence of relevant voices. ‘I See You’ de-centres voice to amplify those who can no longer speak. A more thorough analysis of Che’s poetry is perhaps compromised here in favour of an expanded consideration of voice in the Thai-Malay border provinces. But his own restructuring of narrative voice, since his move back home in 2015, signals a more confrontational turn towards the recovery of political voice in local space. Whereas his two published collections comprise an intertextual interplay between solitude and collective identity amid a global post-9/11 surge in violence, newer compositions are directed towards local events and more concretely aligned with the friends that surround him. This, I believe, is a testament to the impact of environment on subjectivity but also a confirmation of this section’s underlying claim. The microphone, as a quasi-object, is an auditory analogue for envisioning a micro-level manifestation of the political. This quasi-object is also a material means for the amplification of voice beyond the repressive structure of martial law.

Conclusion Noise disrupts but also imputes movement into the system. In this sense, the dissonant voices of poetry are a non-violent signal amid other versions of protest under martial law. Noise is not static nor a form without language, but one of many partitions of the sensible in the movement of messages through unofficial channels in the South. During the Constitutional

56  Noah Keone Viernes Referendum of 2016, seven bombs were detonated the night before votes were cast to deliver the insurgency’s message of opposition to the ongoing state of constitutional suspension under martial law. Though other bombs were set off as far north as Hua Hin, the local detonations were not meant to injure but to deactivate the power grid. Without power and light, Che’s Narathiwat village spent that evening in darkness, but the transmission of noise was clear: any participation in the Referendum was tantamount to the continuity of darkness under the martial law regime. Whereas a range of messages resound along the communication of recognised and unofficial political actors, a microphone raises awareness to the dynamic range of an environment. In the summer of 2017, we drove to the border town of Sungai Kolok where the military presence is pronounced. Soldiers zoned the central urban area block by block as armoured vehicles entered the wide-angle view of my camera lens while we stopped at the traffic light. We planned to film a discussion about borders between Sohbree, a local filmmaker, and Che. But as we began our discussion outside along the Ko Lok River near the Joh Kaseng Pier, the sound of motorcycles, trucks, and the background resonance of construction often brought the conversation to a halt. They spoke intermittently between the surges of noise surrounding the border. What they were saying about the daily fluidity of people that frequently cross the border also materialised in the movement of noise into the camera’s microphone. I overlooked this low-frequency resonance since Richard Humphries, in his photobook Kingdom’s Edge, also takes a series of images here. So captivated by the precision of his visual framing, I failed to consider the sounds within it. In Thailand’s martial law provinces, sound is distributed across a dark world of signals replaying the continuity of violence and repression. Meanwhile, idealised images of community (not unlike Plato’s pretension for hierarchy) play out in the form of dialogue, whether in the discursive engineering of checkpoint conversations or in the possibility of a meeting between recognised political actors. Poetry does not promise an end to existing hierarchies, but instead amplifies the resonance of place as voices otherwise lost in the noise of disconnection. In this sense, Che was right. ‘Poetry is already music’—an organisation of parts into a political sense. It is neither dialogic nor dominated by the ordered intersubjectivity of states. As poetry flows through instruments, cables, and recording devices, it channels the re-versification of martial law where the impromptu sense that security checkpoints confer is re-partitioned in the multiplication of voices.

Notes 1 One evening, he translated Pink Floyd’s ‘Mother’ into Thai and choreographed a scene to reenact the song as a conversation between two Muslim children. 2 The 1909 Anglo-Siamese treaty marked the border between Thailand and Malaysia. 3 The national anthem plays in all public spaces in Thailand at 8am and 6pm every day.

In dark times  57 4 Specifically, I’m referring to the October 2004 events at Tak Pai but also, that same year, the so-called ‘insurgents’ that were shot inside the region’s oldest and most revered mosque (Horstmann 2007, 145). 5 Such a representation appears in the Thai film Island Funeral (Pimpaka Towira 2015). 6 In the Illiad, a Stentor is said to carry the combined vocal density of 50 men. Or we could say that ‘a Stentor’ is an amplifier, which Aristotle sees as an intervention in the equilibrium of a self-sustaining state. In contemporary rock speak, the ideal political community has no amplifiers, only acoustic guitars (Everson 1996, 173). 7 My example comes from the National Statistics Office Thailand, Table 5.3, ‘Causes of Death’, Narathiwat, 2014–2015. Accessed from http://service.nso. go.th/nso/nso_Benter/project/search_Benter/23project-en.htm

References Agawu, K. 2016. ‘Tonality as Colonizing Force in Africa’. In Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, edited by R. Radano and T. Olaniyan, 334–356. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Amataya, Z. 2010. No Women in Poetry. Translated by C. Preeyaporn and Sunida Supantamart. Bangkok: 1001 Nights. Amataya, Z. 2017. ‘I See Myself’, on translucent wall-size white fabric. Patani Semasa exhibition at Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum, 19 July 2017, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Amataya, Z. 2019. ‘Report from a Partitioned Village’. Translated by Noah Viernes. Bangkok Literary Review 1(51). Atkinson, N. 2013. ‘The Republic of Sound: Listening to Florence at the Threshold of the Renaissance’. I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16(1/2): 57–84. Art4d. 2019. ‘Khonkaen Manifesto’. Art4d. 24 January. https://art4d.com/2019/01/ khonkaen-manifesto-2018#more-21039. Bodetti, A. 2019. ‘Thailand’s Quiet Crisis: “The Southern Problem”’. The Diplomat, 12 July. https://thediplomat.com/2019/07/thailands-quiet-crisis-the-southern-problem. Bradley, F. R. 2008. ‘Piracy, Smuggling, and Trade in the Rise of Patani, 1490–1600’, Journal of the Siam Society 96: 27–50. Bradley, F. R. 2016. Forging Islamic Power and Place: The Legacy of Shaykh Da ̄’ūd Bin ‘Abd Allāh Al-Fatānī in Mecca and Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Everson, S. 1996. Aristotle: The Politics and The Constitution of Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feld, S. 2012. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, 3rd ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harding, A. 2010. ‘Emergency Powers with a Moustache’. In Emergency Powers in Asia: Exploring the Limits of Legality, edited by V. V. Ramraj and A. K. Thiruvengadam, 294–313. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hemaemool, U. 2006. Krajok-ngao Ngao-krajok. Bangkok: Wee Kluay. Horstmann, A. 2007. ‘Violence, Subversion, and Creativity in the Thai-Malaysian Borderland’. In Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge, edited by P. K. Rajaram and C. Grundy-Warr, 137–158. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hsu, H. 2019. ‘The Noises we try not to hear’. The New Yorker, 31 May. https://www. newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-noises-we-try-not-to-hear

58  Noah Keone Viernes Ismail, M. and M. Ahmad. 2018. ‘Bomb Blast Injures 4 People in Thailand’s Deep South’. Benar News, 28 December. https://www.benarnews.org/english/news/thai/ thailand-insurgents-12282018152554.html LaBelle, B. 2018. Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. London: Goldsmiths Press. Macan-Markar, M. 2018. ‘Thai junta’s rush to end southern insurgency leaves villages smoldering’. Asian Nikkei Review, 12 February. https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/ Thai-junta-s-rush-to-end-southern-insurgency-leaves-villages-smoldering Ockey, J. 2011 ‘Individual Imaginings: The Religio-nationalist Pilgrimages of Haji Sulong Abdulkadir Al-Fatani’. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 42(1): 89–119. Rancière, J. 2004a. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, J. 2004b. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum. Schafer, R. M. 1977. Soundscapes: The Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. Serres, M. 2007. The Parasite. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Syukri, I. 1985. History of the Malay Kingdom of Patani. Athens: Ohio University. Viernes, N. 2016. ‘The Poetics of Recording: Zakariya Amataya in Thailand’. Journal of Narrative Culture 2(2): 145–159. Winichakul, T. 1994. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

3 Sonic aesthetics and social disparity The voice of villains in Ryoo Seung-wan’s Veteran (2015) and The Unjust (2010) Jina Eleanor Kim

Introduction Villains can tell us much about the current state of society’s moral compass. In fact, cultural producers have often found ways to deal with society’s anxieties by propagating a certain villain or enemy figure in order to either bolster nationalism or incite a critique of social ills. In other words, the construction of the villain figure in literature, media, and even in social reality is historically contingent, referring to specific conditions that reflect different fears within the society and culture at the time of their production. Filmmakers often construct villainous characters following racial, class, and gender ideologies and their representational conventions. These representational ideologies have been strongly linked to the villains’ visible signifiers, but what often gets overlooked is the voice of the villains and the ways villainy is also mediated through voice and sound.1 Within the study of sound and film, the study of voice, in particular, has received little scholarly attention; probably due to the complexity one faces in analysis. As Michel Chion writes, voice is ‘elusive’, and thus difficult to pin down (1999, 1). Similarly, other theorists have shown that voice is complex precisely because ‘voice is both a sonic and material phenomenon and a powerful metaphor’ (Weidman 2015, 232), and it is powerful because ‘all of our social life is mediated by the voice’ (Dolar 2006, 13). Despite the complexities that voice presents, scholars from multiple disciplinary backgrounds have long ventured into and offered influential methodologies for analysing voice.2 Not surprisingly, the majority of the works on the cinematic voice are situated in the West. Hamid Naficy’s An Accented Cinema (2001), on the other hand, does take up films by diasporic and exilic filmmakers from the developing countries to demonstrate a certain kind of aesthetics emerging from the experiences of displacement. Yet Naficy’s ‘accent’ does not refer to sound or voice per se but is deployed as a broader trope for exploring these films’ thematic concerns and visual styles in relation to the films of one’s homes—both the home left behind and the adapted home (2001, 23). Whereas scholarly works on East Asian and Korean cinema have been expanding rapidly in the recent decade, the study of sound and voice in Korean cinema still remains an extremely under-explored area. This chapter examines the voice in Korean film, focusing on the voice of DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772-5

60  Jina Eleanor Kim villains, through an interdisciplinary lens of sociocultural linguistics, sound studies, and the cultural history of Korea. I explore in this chapter the voice of villains in Ryoo Seung-wan’s (1973–) Veteran (Pet’erang 2015) and The Unjust (Pudang kŏrae 2010) and ask what vocal quality amplifies the symptoms of what Jin-kyung Lee has described as the prevalence of representations of ‘post-developmental condition’ in South Korea (2019, 17). Ryoo is one of South Korea’s most interesting and successful film directors today, and his films are well known for their visually stimulating choreographies; thus, the director has garnered the title ‘The Action Kid’ from film critics such as Kim Yŏng-jin and Darcy Paquet. If his earlier films such as Crying Fist (Chumŏgi unda 2005) and The City of Violence (Tchakp’ae 2006) showed off masculine strength through fistfights and male bonding, Ryoo takes a turn with The Unjust and Veteran where he brings greater attention to contemporary social issues such as bureaucratic corruption and social inequality which centre on a number of different villains. In fact, Ryoo’s The Unjust and Veteran, which respectively topped the domestic film ticket sales in the year that they were released, set an important trend in featuring villainous law enforcement officials and CEOs in film and television dramas as emblematic of the tremendous privilege they wielded while abusing ordinary Korean people.3 Instead of focusing only on the visual grammar of Ryoo’s films, this chapter examines the vocal quality and vocal style of his villainous characters to see how the sonic aesthetics of contemporary Korean crime, thriller, or action films, which frequently present incompetent law enforcers, nefarious conglomerate owners as well as power-driven prosecutors, allow us to understand the state of contemporary South Korean society that would otherwise not be made clear. More broadly, by framing Ryoo’s films with sound studies and calling for new ways to conceptualise the often-taut relationship between the audio–visual and representation–indexicality, we can work through the ways sound can lead us to modes of analysis that are not otherwise possible with visual analysis alone. What follows then is the exploration of the ways in which the constructions and representations of the archetype of the villain not only highlight the broader range and depth of new trends in Korean cinema, but also call for new ways to conceptualise voice and sound and their representations in the society at large—a society that is currently highly volatile due to economic disparities, social inequalities, and political instability that has left the people cynical and distressed and without either a hero or a cathartic resolution.

The five bandits’ villainy endures in South Korea While there is a long list of scholarly works on the construction of villains and their characteristics in Western literature and media (Charney 2012; Gills and Gates 2002; Mortimer 1992; San Juan and McDevitt 2012), I take my cue from a well-known Korean poem ‘Five Bandits’ (Ojok) by Kim Chiha (1941–2022). ‘Five Bandits’ was published in the May 1970 issue of the

Sonic aesthetics and social disparity  61 journal Sasanggye (The World of Thought) in the midst of the politically repressive Park Chung Hee regime (1961–1979), which privileged rapid industrial modernisation and economic growth above all else as a form of decolonisation and development. Kim was arrested and imprisoned for this poem as well as other works of poetry in the context of his broader anti-government activities. In this epic narrative poem (tamshi) written in the style of p’ansori—a traditional Korean oral performative genre that is usually full of sarcasm and satire—the speaker names and describes the five ‘bandits’ or the villains of South Korean society during the two decades after the Korean War (1950–1953). These villains are the ConglomerApes (plutocrat or tycoon), AssemblyMutt (assemblymen, politicians), TopCivilSerpent (civil servant, including prosecutors and judges), General–in–Chimp (military officials), HighMinisCur (state ministers). The description of the first thief, the ConglomerApe, shows that he is so rich that he is covered with money from head to toe. Moreover, he is callous, unsightly, penurious, miserly, and prone to debauchery: The first thief comes forward, ConglomerApe’s his name. Wearing clothes made of money, the hat on his head made of money, the shoes on his feet made of money, the gloves on his hands made of money […] All the girls he’s bred he blithely offers to guys in power as mistresses, night snacks, gathers their whispered information, makes winning bids, buys up land cheap, secures a kickback when roads are built, at a cost of five won he swindles his way to thousand-won jobs, pays his workers in nothing but promises. (Kim J. 2015, 95–96) The third villain, the TopCivilSerpent, looks intimidating and honourable in outer appearance, but his teeth are rotting because he is easily sweetened up by all the baited bribes he has imbibed. He acts like a law-upholding man, but any law can be bent with the right amount of money handed to him: TopCivilSerpent comes forward. His body shaped like a rubber balloon, eyes like those of a venomous snake, corpse-like, blue, rigid flesh, with tightly clenched lips, he’s obviously a clean-handed official. Bring him any kind of sweetener, he solemnly shakes his head: We do not like sweeteners, of course, just so, indeed. But only look behind his back. He’s wearing another face there. He stares nimbly around on this side, stares glibly around on that […] To high-ups, he’s a fawning spaniel, to low-downs, he’s a brutal hound; he takes his cut of public money, solicits bribes. (Kim J. 2015, 96–97)

62  Jina Eleanor Kim The other thieves also abuse their power, engage in rampant corruption, and exercise inexcusable violence. The poem fiercely bellows out these qualities as being ubiquitous in postcolonial Korean society, and the poet uses satire and hyperboles to hurl a sharp political critique. A half-century later, although many aspects of Korean society and politics have been reformed, just as many aspects have endured. Kim Chiha’s pointed criticism of 1970s Korean society as dominated by the five villains still largely applies today. The same five groups continue to control the majority of the resources while the ordinary people continue to fall into deeper disadvantage. In recent years, the revelation of the widespread abuse of power by the rich and powerful reached its apex with the Korean Air Nut Rage (ttangkkong hoehang) in 2014, the mishandling of the entire rescue process during the Sewol Ferry sinking (2014), Ch’oe Sunsil-gate that eventually led to the impeachment of Park Geun-hye (2017), and most recently the scandal surrounding Cho Kuk and his children who are accused of having falsified their academic records and received unprecedented preferences in college and medical school admission (2019).4 The polarisation and inequality have become so apparent that it has led to the coining of new popular terms such as the kŭm sujŏ (gold spoon) to refer to the ‘haves’, and hŭk sujŏ (clay spoon) to refer to the ‘have nots’; where the dominant sentiment in contemporary Korean society is that those born with the hŭk sujŏ will never be able to overcome their disadvantage however much they aspire to it (Kim 2017). It is difficult to identify if the exact nature of wealth and corruption has changed from the 1970s to the present. However, as Jin-kyung Lee has shown in her analysis of contemporary South Korean television dramas, ‘post-developmentalism is an ever-renewing, revitalised, and readjusted version of developmentalism’ (2019, 19) that has its roots in the colonial era as well as in the 1960s–1970s. In this sense, South Korea’s post-developmentalism also squarely points to its still unfinished decolonisation process and the newly forming internal colonisation practices. What does seem to characterise the historical moment that brought forth Nut Rage, Sewol Ferry Disaster, Ch’oe Sunsil, and Cho Kuk is that wealth increasingly seems to be manifested as an overwhelming sense of entitlement—of being above the law and possessing the license to limitless abuse of power because they know that the working class will be powerless to do anything, especially to gain social mobility and wealth parity to resist or overturn the status quo. Against this kind of backdrop, South Korean filmmakers are increasingly engaging with the subject of corruption scandals involving powerful conglomerate owners, their hereditary heirs, and other power holders. In the twenty-first century, representations of nefarious tycoons and corrupt politicians and law enforcement officials have come to dominate Korean cinema and television serials.5 That is, the cultural producers situate the ConglomerApe or chaebŏl— large vertically and horizontally integrated companies that are family-controlled—and their cronies, such as the double-dealing law enforcers, as the ultimate villains. These villains are constructed as the embodiment of the abuse of power who rigorously ensure, by any means, that their privileged status

Sonic aesthetics and social disparity  63 continues and their wealth remains solely within their close circle of family and associates.6 The visual images of these characters and the narrative structure of films have been effective not just in critiquing contemporary Korean neoliberal society, but also in stimulating genre films, especially crime, thriller, and action films. In fact, Kyu Hyun Kim, through close analysis of the mise-en-scène, fight sequences, and plot in films such as No Blood, No Tears (P’ido nunmuldo ŏpshi, 2002) and The Unjust, aptly argues that Ryoo’s films are a ‘form of Asian neonoir’ and, more specifically, a Korean neo-noir in which the director creates ‘unique patterns of engagement with postwar Korean modernity’ (2015, 109– 110). Yet, by focusing only on the visual grammar, the analysis neglects the sonic and in particular the voice. Following the French film theorist Michel Chion, who asserts that cinema is a ‘vococentric or, more precisely, a verbocentric phenomenon’ (1994, 5), this chapter argues that in Ryoo’s Veteran and The Unjust, one of the most prominent characteristics of villains is their voices and more specifically their expressions of sarcasm. Furthermore, by centring sonic practices and audibility, my attempt to listen to sarcasm is also a way to elucidate the ways sound is entwined in crucial networks of power and social relations and ultimately also subject to ideological formations. Filmic texts provide an ideal space for this kind of study since feature films arrange the context in which professional actors attempt to create the most ‘natural’ utterances that could persuade the viewers to perceive certain vocal cues. In the following sections, I identify the voice of a villain based on previous research on vocal stereotypes and vocal cues to personality, using two characters from Ryoo’s films. I borrow the auditory labels from John Laver’s oftencited work, The Phonetic Description of Voice Quality (1980), which fills in the once impressionistic phonetic observations (e.g., harsh) with physiological traits. For example, Laver correlates harsh voice quality with tense voice, which is ‘described as having a higher degree of tension in the entire vocal tract as compared to the neutral setting. At the laryngeal level, adductive tension and medial compression are thought to be particularly implicated’ (Gobl and Chasaide 2003, 195). The harsh voice quality usually correlates to vocal expression of communicating anger (Laver 1980; Cummings and Clements 1995), which tends to signal a ‘negative state’ to listeners. Further studies have shown that listeners perceive and classify harsh and tense voice quality as conveying ‘negative moods such as annoyance, irritation, and hostility’ (Ladd et al., 1985). Sarcasm, ‘a sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter gibe or taunt’ is also associated with the negative stance of the speaker. Sarcasm is communicated through a combination of semantic and prosodic elements of speech (Rockwell 2000a, 488). In various studies, it has been found that in sarcastic utterances, the rate of speech slows down (tempo), intensity (amplitude) increases, loudness is heightened, and the pitch becomes more monotonic or lowered. These have served as important acoustic cues for listeners who are able to perceive sarcasm (Rockwell 2000b; Cheang and Pell 2008; Peters and Almor 2017). Notably, the term sak’aejŭm (sarcasm) is a neologism in Korean that appeared first in the 1936 edition of the Modŏn Chosŏn oeraeŏ sajŏn (Modern Korean Foreign Language Dictionary). It defines sarcasm as ‘[s]atire,

64  Jina Eleanor Kim sneering criticism, ssaet’ayŏ. Modern Korean: Satire, a criticism said with stealthy ridicule, saet’aiŏ’ (The Academy of Korean Studies 2019).7 The term entered Korea during the Japanese colonial period along with a flood of other loanwords and neologisms that began circulating in discourse, literature, and everyday use and then acquired new meanings in new contexts. Although it is a loanword, sarcasm is certainly not uncommon in Korean language usage. Due to differences in cultural registers and historical experiences, however, sarcasm in Korean might not exactly correspond to the studies mentioned above which focus on vocal cues for English language contexts. I turn to contemporary Korean cinema to explore the sound of sarcasm and voice of villains.

The Unjust and Veteran In both The Unjust and Veteran, under-appreciated cops Ch’oe Ch’ŏl-ki and Sŏ To-ch’ŏl (both played by actor Hwang Jung-min) pursue justice and attempt to fight corruption against the powerful state bureaucratic system and corporate world only to see their efforts largely foiled due to forceful adversaries. They must not only bear the peer-pressure from the mighty social organisations they work within, but they are also confronted by formidable foes: the ambitious public prosecutor Chu Yang (Ryoo Seung-bum) in The Unjust and the abusive third-generation chaebŏl Cho T’ae-o (Yoo Ah-in) in Veteran. Chu Yang and Cho T’ae-o represent the elite in Korean society, but are also depicted as egotistical and entitled. They are graduates from prestigious domestic and international universities which place them in an exclusive social position while also allowing them to be part of the important social (alumni) groups in which the closely knit in-group members help, promote, and protect each other. Chu hails from the same top law school as many of his colleagues in the prosecutor’s office where the alumni connections allow them to form and practice an obligatory comradery. It is generally accepted that only the top-notch students are able to pass the national bar exam, thus Chu being a prosecutor already signifies his social position and access to resources. Furthermore, his father-in-law is a preeminent lawyer, who likely has served as a prosecutor when younger, and has connections to influential people from the very top of the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office and the corporate world to the lower ranks in the provincial offices. As a result, Chu has crucial allies even if he makes major mistakes. Cho, likewise, has a Harvard University diploma hanging on his office wall, showing that his wealth was enough to have him gain admission to one of the most prestigious and expensive universities in the world. Moreover, just as wealth and legacy likely made it easier for him to gain admission to Harvard, he did not have to demonstrate his competence for managerial skills to have been appointed as a director (shilchang) of Sinjin Corporation at a young age. Cho T’ae-o, after all, is the grandson of Sinjin’s founder. Similar to Chu, Cho’s family, with their connections to high-ranking law enforcement officials including the police and prosecutors, has the ability to bail him out from whatever trouble he gets into. Both of these characters’ ch’ulshin or background and connections are not only linked to the way their privileged and entitled qualities are

Sonic aesthetics and social disparity  65 constructed, but both of them are persistently derisive, mocking, and acerbic in their speech and intemperate in their emotional expressions. Examining the two characters’ speech using Praat speech analysis software, I argue that the pervasive sarcastic vocal features lend great weight in creating iconic villainous figures. In turn, the sarcastic vocal features can become the sonic signifiers of villains in Korean film noir in mediating national anxieties of social disparity. Contempt and sarcasm Ryoo Seung-bum’s (1980–) charismatic performance as Chu Yang expresses both the sense of entitlement and the insecurity of a rising, young prosecutor who must win at all cost; especially against a lowly police captain Ch’oe Ch’ŏl-ki, who did not even graduate from the Police Academy, or the T’aekyŏng (TK) Group chairman Kim Yang-su, who has been gifting Chu with luxury watches, rounds of golf, and expensive meals in return for lighter charges on illegal business transactions and tax evasion. There are two scenes that are particularly informative in demonstrating Chu’s smug, contemptuous attitudes towards the police and chaebŏl. These scenes also show how, what I am calling, contemptuous sarcasm constructs and enhances the villainous character. First, although Ch’oe Ch’ŏl-ki and Chu Yang have never met, they were already working against one another, because Ch’oe had arrested Kim Yang-su for corruption while Chu had worked to set him free. The prosecutor had already found the police captain to be an obstructionist when he happens to hear from his paralegal that the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency has initiated an internal investigation on Ch’oe Ch’ŏl-ki, which was a set up by the higher-ups to coerce Ch’oe to take charge of turning up, even if it required fabrication, a suspect for a series of murders that even the President of the country had demanded be solved. Ears perked, Chu asks the paralegal for Ch’oe’s file. When the paralegal replies that ‘[a]s far as an internal investigation is concerned, the police feel, how should I say, displeased [if an outside organisation sniffs around]’, Chu flies into a furious rage and voices his contempt (13:00–13:59)8: Chu: Ah, what’s to be displeased about? Paralegal: But we have to think about our relationship. Chu: The police is displeased? We can’t have the police displeased. I almost made a huge mistake, my fault. Good for you for pointing that out. I, a mere public prosecutor, almost upset the police! A disastrous oversight on my part! What was I thinking?!? Don’t do anything that might displease the police! In fact, get their fucking permission before you do anything! Listen to me carefully! Treat someone nice once and they walk all over you. Worry about their feelings and you won’t get any work done. Understood? Chu’s near one-minute tirade, which intensifies until he is screaming and thrashing his arms, discloses his attitude towards the police as being beneath the prosecutor’s office. Sarcasm peppers his diatribe; what he says and how he

66  Jina Eleanor Kim says it are incongruous. The spectrograms of the clauses ‘We can’t have the police displeased’ (Figure 3.1 Appendix) and ‘I almost made a huge mistake’ (Figure 3.2 Appendix), show the pitch of his voice is low while the intensity of his word phonemes is more or less evenly spaced out. While Chu is talking in this scene, he is sitting down in front of his computer, and in fact, part of his mouth is even covered by the computer screen obscuring his utterance. On the other hand, later in the same scene when he is saying almost the same sentence about the police being displeased in Korean, the spectrogram shows much higher peaks in pitch. This is when Chu is pacing around his office, screaming, and expressing outright anger, while the earlier sentence, uttered in a lower pitch, shows that he is expressing the similar semantic content but in a different mode (Figure 3.3 Appendix). Therefore, the lower pitch indicates not mollification of anger, but repression of anger. He begins his tirade by mocking the police and then rapidly becoming infuriated by what he thinks is a direct insult to his own higher social status. A second scene that demonstrates Chu’s contempt takes place during a dinner meeting with Kim Yang-su. While eating a fancy Japanese dinner hosted by Kim, they discuss Kim’s recent business failing. Once again, Chu becomes enraged and raises his voice during the conversation, forcing even the multi-millionaire to cower and back-pedal his demands (–1:28:37 to –1:26:57).9 Kim: I should get you something nicer. I want to open my wallet more than I open my mouth. But I can’t do that with an empty wallet. If only you acted faster […] I would have own [sic] that bidding, now it’s going to be Jang’s building. Chu: It breaks my heart, too. Kim: Ch’oe Ch’ŏl-ki got me behind bars right before the bidding. I’m not doing this out of a personal grudge. For you to perform the stately duties well, you need supporters like me. Chu: I’ve been keeping my eyes on him, too. What is this for? You’re still so strong in the field. And you’ve got staying power. You can put up other good buildings. Kim: Don’t be ridiculous! Do you know how much I put into that project? I wake up screaming at night, wondering if I should have backed Ch’oe Ch’ŏl-ki instead. Chu: That’s enough, old man. Maybe we had too many private dinners that you forgot who I am. Shall we go back to my office and continue this conversation? Do I have to tear you into pieces before you remember who I am?! Right before Chu says his last lines, he cuts Kim’s dialogue short and slams his chopsticks down on the table demonstrating not only his irritation but his authority over Kim. Chu’s contempt for the chaebŏl owner is best exemplified when he calls Kim Yang-su, ŏrŭsin (elder, sir)—a respectful nomenclature used to call the elderly, someone else’s father/mother or grandfather/mother,

Sonic aesthetics and social disparity  67 or teacher.10 In other words, ŏrŭsin is a term used to express deference and respect and is an honorific term of address in Korean, but the way Chu calls Kim ŏrŭsin is nothing but disrespectful. The spectrogram shows the pitch very low, almost as if he is whispering, and the intensity of his phonemes dips quite drastically when he utters sin (Figure 3.4 Appendix). The duration of the last phoneme is unusually prolonged taking up approximately 64% of the length of the utterance. All of these characteristics lead to producing a vocal cue that conveys not only disrespect but more precisely a sarcastic stance towards the older Kim Yang-su. Here Chu Yang addresses Kim with the honorific form only because Korean social hierarchy conventions demand it of him. But the ways in which he voices the addressee with consistent low pitch, dipping intensity, and longer holding of the final honorific marker all add up to producing the sound of false respect which combined with the honorific lexical term itself effectuate the vocal cue of sarcasm. Chu Yang, in both cases above, expresses contemptuous sarcasm towards the police and the chaebŏl. Despite being older and more experienced in their professions than Chu Yang, captain Ch’oe Ch’ŏl-ki and tycoon Kim Yang-su are objects of contempt in Chu’s mind because he believes that they are subordinates to him in social status. The film deftly shows the antagonistic relationships between these social groups. Instead of collaboration, there is often tension and hostility built between the prosecutor’s office and the police agency that is engendered and amplified by various unequal social structures that already undergird Korean society. Furthermore, from the perspective of the elite prosecutor Chu, even the rich chaebŏl is unbefitting for he is only a temporary purse string. Sarcasm in The Unjust, therefore, is not presented as satire or meant to be humorous. Instead, it is terse, caustic, and meant to diminish the addressee. Through the prosecutor Chu Yang’s character and his vocal cues, the film staunchly critiques the vainglorious qualities prevailing within the highest echelon of law enforcement. The film produces contemptuous sarcasm as a model for how sound and voice are significant components for understanding contemporary Korean society’s established social structures that safeguard the powerful and elite law enforcement sector, and the unease that is felt by outsiders. Indignation and sarcasm If in The Unjust the prosecutor Chu Yang could be seen as the ultimate villain who expresses his contempt towards the police and chaebŏl through sarcastic voice, then in Veteran, the main villain is a third-generation chaebŏl who ruthlessly demonstrates his indignation towards not only the law enforcement but especially the working class. Yoo Ah-in (1986–) expertly portrays Cho T’ae-o as an abhorrent character.11 From Cho’s first appearance in the film where he is partying in an exclusive nightclub, the veteran cop Sŏ To-ch’ŏl realises that there is something unseemly behind Cho’s well-dressed, slicked-back hairstyle and his boyish, handsome face. Cho is smiling and seems friendly enough but sniffling excessively, a sure sign, as Sŏ suspects, that he is abusing drugs. The lavish party is obviously being hosted by Cho, who is officiating an arm-wrestling match

68  Jina Eleanor Kim between two of his security guards, yelling in English ‘Ready! Fight!’ and continuing to hoot loudly to cheer on the fight. When he realises that the person he had placed the bet on is not winning, he screams ‘Ya!! [Hey you] This isn’t fun!’, as he intentionally places his cigar tip on the neck of the opponent so as to hurt him and make him lose. Cho then turns to lightly remark in Korean, It’s just for fun!. As the sequence continues, Sŏ comments that he thought a chaebŏl would ‘party somewhat differently’. To this remark, Cho flashes a smile, pauses, utters a questioning ‘Oh?’, calmly gets up and then violently shoves ice down the shirt of a woman sitting next to him. He then smears cake all over her face, only to turn around to throw and shove food into the mouth of another woman. His sarcastic question ‘Should chaebŏl play like this?’ and his evil snickers of ‘he, he he’ are squarely aimed at Sŏ. This opening scene serves as an important pattern that the film follows in constructing Cho as a villain. It combines Cho’s acts of despicable violence with his utterances that are full of snickers and exasperations, which constitute what I am calling indignant sarcasm. In addition to the introductory sequence described above, the other decisive sequence that features Cho’s villainous qualities occurs between 00:36:31 and 00:42.35. These six minutes are difficult to watch and listen to, as they provide the audience with a full sense of Cho’s pure cruelty and entitlement. Cho orders his underlings to bring the long-haul truck driver Mr. Pae (Jung Woong-in) and his son up to his office so that they could ‘take care of the situation internally’. In his office, he appears to be accommodating and sounds like he is interested in hearing Pae’s complaints. But the situation is set up so as to make Pae and Chŏn, the subcontractor, box while Cho watches from the sideline. Cho is irritated and angry that an insignificant truck driver like Pae would take up his precious time and demand 4.2 million won backpay (which was roughly around $4000 in 2015), merely pocket change for the wealthy heir. He laughs, cheers, and yells as if he is watching a spectator sport while Chŏn is beating Pae to a pulp. Most deplorable of all, Cho grips Mr. Pae’s school-aged son in a headlock, forcing the child to directly watch his father getting battered and bloodied so that he can see ‘how hard his father works to make money’.12 In this sequence, Cho’s utterances escalate gradually into full-blown out indignant sarcasm. In the first scene, he makes some petty small talk: ‘You have a very good-looking boy there. Can’t be using such rough words in front of him, can you? Did you have lunch?’ Yet, even these small talks are tinged with sarcasm. Cho is starting to threaten Pae via his son. The young boy is far from being good-looking or well-kempt. Instead, he looks as though he has been following his father around, wearing very plain, cheap clothes. When making a comment about the young boy, Cho’s speech is slower and he elongates the word ‘very’ (aju) to emphasise the adverb (Figure 3.5 Appendix). The vowel a in aju is at a slightly lower pitch while the whole word ‘aju’ has a greater intensity (amplitude) than the word ‘good’ (chal). Korean syntax ends the sentence with a verb, and here the predicate ‘is’ (-neyo) is extremely elongated taking up almost half of the 1.95 seconds. After making a flippant comment about Pae’s son, the next phrase, ‘Did you have lunch?’, comes perfectly timed and paced. Asking if Pae had lunch is spoken much faster, knowing that he did not have lunch; but Cho is neither

Sonic aesthetics and social disparity  69 expecting an answer nor does he really care whether Pae has eaten or not since they are uttered with insincerity and false politeness. Overall, this sequence places Cho in control and sets up the conversation (00:36:29–00:42:33)13: Cho: It is a difficult time for everyone. Every year, they say this year’s flu is the worst one ever, and the economy is the worst one ever. Did that kill me? I’m not dead. Hey, you want that, don’t you? So, how much is the backpay? P: To start with … C: Sit down please. P: Just the total, just the total. … C: 4.2 million won? Oh my, driver… sir. You know the grindstone’s handle? It’s called a pestle. You try to grind something but the handle falls out. Just like that. It’s quite dumbfounding. You can’t do the work just because of the stupid handle. That’s how I feel. I’m at a loss. [After boxing stops.] Ooh auuoh, Look at yourself. And for pocket change? Ahyu ch’am oh dear. Driver, sir. I put some on top of the 4.2 million won you’re owed. Buy some cookies for your son and some bandages for yourself. This puts an end to the matter, agreed? Cheer up. Cho’s speech is noticeably linked by intentional pauses between phrases and sentences to slow down his speech overall. These pauses give the false effect of Cho being a reasonable person—pausing to select his words or being thoughtful and interested in listening. However, the pauses are usually preceded or followed by rhetorical questions, with either the pitch decreased for confirmation or raised to express astonishment. Overall, Cho’s conversation with Pae shows no significant rise in pitch; unlike Pae, who expresses frustration and genuine anger, which is demonstrated by higher pitch and intensity, Cho’s speech is more or less monotonous. This is comparable to Chu Yang’s utterances in The Unjust where he says that they cannot possibly displease the police (see Figures 3.1 and 3.3 Appendix). When they are genuinely angry and yelling, the pitch and intensity amplitude are visibly higher and undulated, while in sarcastic speech, the acoustical cue is at lower pitch although amplitude may vary, creating a monotonous or ‘tight’ sound. It is this type of voice quality that resonates with deception of true intent. It becomes apparent that Cho is repressing his indignation in his speech and in this repression, the attitude of sarcasm surfaces most clearly. This is very similar to the ways Chu Yang repressed his contempt for the police in The Unjust. Furthermore, as described by Mladen Dolar (2006), paralinguistic interjections or pre- and postlinguistic voice, such as sighs, inhalations, and laughs are also plentiful in the above scene. Interestingly, Cho is the only character making them. In the first 2:20 minutes of the same scene, Cho makes ten audible interjections. In his analysis of popular culture texts for children, such as Disney films and Japanese anime, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen

70  Jina Eleanor Kim notices that a laugh signals the villain’s plan to do evil things, and thus ‘evil laughter’ often marks the ‘antisociality of fictional villains’ (2018, 1215). Antisociality, however, seems to be a broad category that could include other characteristics such as insincerity, duplicity, arrogance, and sarcasm, among others. Vocalised evil laughter ranges from snickers and howls to cackles, screeches, and sighs. Similar to sarcasm, the issuer of evil laughter aims to express a negative attitude close to scorn. In so doing, the subject also places themselves in a superior position to instil fear. Unlike Disney characters, the evil laughter of the villains in Ryoo’s Veteran and The Unjust is less black and white. In fact, Cho T’ae-o’s instances of evil laughter are neither loud nor high pitched. Several of them are isolated inhalations that could be interpreted as laughs or snickers. Others, however, are sighlike, vocal prosodic elements that are incorporated into or superimposed onto the speech utterances. This is most apparent when Cho addresses Mr. Pae after hearing that he is owed 4.2 million won ($4,000) instead of 420 million won ($40,000,000). There is a sigh of inhalation, a puff of air blown out, and then Cho says, ‘Driver, sir’ (kisanim). During the utterance of kisanim and especially at the end syllable nim (an honorific marker), one can hear a snicker that is attached to the syllable sa where the a vibrates and continues on to the final vowel-consonant which elongates the nim even more. As KjeldgaardChristiansen (2018) and Podesva and Callier (2015) illustrate, following the pioneering study of Edward Sapir’s 1927 ‘Speech as a Personality Trait’, voice may also be considered as a form of gesture. Cho’s voice registers a pervasive sarcastic attitude, and his postlinguistic voice of sighs and snickers expresses indignation, exasperation, and false respect, just like Chu Yang’s utterance of ŏrŭsin. Cho’s snickers trump the superlative honorific ending nim, thereby amplifying Cho’s indignation towards Pae (Idemaru et al., 2019). The stark mismatch between the semantic meaning of honorific ‘driver, sir’ and his vocal quality produces the sound and attitude of sarcasm (Figure 3.6 Appendix). The sarcastic vocal cues along with vocal qualities help to render Cho as an extremely unlikeable character. This negative voice lends itself remarkably well to creating a villainous character who lacks any kind of empathy, especially for the less economically privileged. Having the young chaebŏl heir constantly speaking in a sarcastic stance, he emerges as the epitome of a spoiled brat concerned only with competing with his siblings for control of the family’s company and wealth. In presenting this abominable character, Veteran presents a particularly perturbing story of upper-class entitlement and the far and deep reaches of corporate power and interest in Korean society that enables chaebŏl owners and their heirs to behave repugnantly and still escape all consequences simply because they have the wealth to do so. Veteran brings to the surface the extravagant lifestyle and indulgent ways of the moneyed which the ordinary people are not entirely privy to. Furthermore, the film suggests that for the ordinary working-class Koreans, even if they are not acquainted with a member of a chaebŏl family, they have experienced the expansion and intrusion of conglomerates’ power, both in very concrete and invisible ways. Simply put, this is not the outcome of modernisation as promised by the postwar Korean

Sonic aesthetics and social disparity  71 state, with big business supposed to help the people achieve social and economic parity. Instead of reaping the riches that President Park Chung Hee (r. 1961–1979) and his successors—both progressive and conservative—had promised, the majority of the Korean working class has been experiencing even steeper social and class stratifications, while only the tycoons and the elite-educated prosecutors have become wealthier and more powerful. Although the chaebŏl figures are usually cast in their material luxury to visibly mark their wealth, in Ryoo’s Veteran, the indignant sarcastic voice of chaebŏl becomes a more prominent trait for mediating social relations and earmarking the vast inequality in contemporary Korean society.

Conclusion Film is not limited to the study of visuality and narrative but is, in fact, being studied as a medium that brings together multiple sign systems and their interactions within a given story-telling space and time. As the preceding analysis has made clear, sound, and in particular the voice, play a crucial part in the construction of meaning in film. This chapter presented an exploratory study of the voice of sarcasm in Ryoo Seung-wan’s films in relation to contemporary South Korean society. Although pitch can vary in sarcastic expressions in English, the villainous characters in Ryoo’s films have lower pitch, whereas their expressions of genuine anger result in louder and higher pitch and intensified amplitude. Similar to the slower tempo in English speakers’ utterances, there is a noticeable slowing in Korean which creates a sense of exaggeration to heighten the sense of contempt and indignation the speaker has for the addressee. One of the unique ways that villains expressed sarcasm in both The Unjust and Veteran is the usage of Korean honorific terms. The mismatch between the semantic meaning of honorific address such as ŏrŭsin and kisanim and the ways these words are uttered produces acoustic cues similar to other sarcastic utterances. This intensifies the effect of false respect both Chu Yang and Cho T’ae-o demonstrate towards their addressee while buttressing their own elite, privileged socioeconomic status on to the addressee. Ryoo Seung-wan’s villainous characters are constructed through sarcastic voice and effectively capture the contemporary South Korean social soundscape, which rings with anxieties about the growing social and economic disparities. In short, cultural producers like Ryoo through their filmic innovations provide a critical voice to respond to the social and historical context of Korea that reveals the need for empathy and equity especially in the twenty-first century that is continuing to experience ever more heightened vacuity due to Korean society’s inability to reform the Five Bandits.

Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge and thank Producer Kang Hye-jung, Director Ryoo Seung-bum, and CJ Entertainment for their permission to use The Unjust and Veteran for this essay. I am grateful to Brother Anthony for the permissions to use his translation of Kim Chiha’s poem. My thanks also go to Soonjin

72  Jina Eleanor Kim Lee, Jinsoo An, Joseph Jeon, Kelly Jeong, and Kaori Idemaru for their respective expertise and guidance at various stages of this work. My gratitude to the editors of this volume Iris Haukamp, Christin Hoene, and Martyn Smith and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, comments, and editing.

Appendix: Spectrograms (Blue line maps pitch. Yellow maps intensity.)

Figure 3.1 Spectrogram of Chu Yang speaking ‘We can’t have the police displeased’ [경찰이 불쾌 하면 안 되지].

Figure 3.2 Spectrogram of Chu Yang speaking ‘Yes, it is my mistake’ [아이, 내가 잘 못 했네].

Sonic aesthetics and social disparity  73

Figure 3.3 Spectrogram of Chu Yang’s angry scream ‘I could have really offended the police’ [경찰을 아주 불쾌 하게 할 번 했어].

Figure 3.4  Spectrogram of Chu Yang speaking ‘Elder, sir.’ [어르신].

74  Jina Eleanor Kim

Figure 3.5 Spectrogram of Cho T’ae’o speaking ‘You have a very good-looking son’ [아들님이 아주 잘 생겼네요].

Figure 3.6 Spectrogram of Cho T’aeo’s postlinguistic voice and speaking ‘Driver, sir’ [기사님].

Notes 1 Asian villains in English language media, for example, are perpetually constructed as ‘foreign’ through their heavily accented and grammatically broken (English) speech. 2 Jacques Derrida’s Voice and Phenomenon (2011) tackles the relationship between logocentricism and phonocentricism; Roland Barthes in Image–Music–Text (1977) famously coins the phrase ‘the grain of the voice’; Mikhail Bakhtin’s

Sonic aesthetics and social disparity  75 Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1984) introduces heteroglossia; Julia Kristeva’s Desire in Language (1980) approaches voice through feminist criticism; Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More (2006) uses psychoanalytic approaches. 3 The Unjust, released on 28 October 2010, sold 2,751,185 tickets until 13 January 2011. It was ranked as the seventh most popular Korean film in 2010 despite its relatively late release. Veteran garnered the most ticket sales (13,414,200) in 2015 and was the highest revenue grossing (105.2bn) film of that year beating out even the Avengers: Age of Ultron (10,494,499). For further statistics see https://koreanfilm.org. For The Unjust and Veteran, Ryoo received the Best Director recognition at the Blue Dragon Award Competition in 2011 and 2015, respectively. Ryoo also received the 2016 Paeksang Arts Award for directing Veteran. 4 Each of these incidents would require a much longer explanation than I am able to provide here. The Korean Air Nut Rage was instigated when the daughter of Korean Air’s president—and herself being a vice-president, underlining the problem of nepotism—flying in first class insisted that nuts need to be served on plates (or bowls) rather than in their original bag. She verbally and physically abused the flight attendants for their putative incompetence, and the airplane had to return to the gate. In the Sewol Ferry Sinking, the owner’s mismanagement of the ferries’ physical upkeep and the incompetence of the ferry crew and government rescue team led to the death of more than 250 children from a provincial high school. Ch’oe Sunsil, a close unofficial advisor to President Park Geun-hye, was found guilty of intervening in state affairs and bribing chaebŏl to support her daughter’s equestrian career. Cho Kuk was appointed Minister of Justice by President Moon Jae-in in September 2019, but Cho resigned from his post on 14 October 2019. His appointment had roused strong opposition from university students, professors, and the Chayu Han’kuk Party (the then main opposition party), who allege that Cho and his family have engaged in multiple unethical activities that privileged their children’s education opportunities. Cho belongs to the generation that has currently taken up leadership positions in various sectors of Korean society, including business, politics, law, and education. Many, however, have become critical of this generation for their politics without coherent policy as well as the hypocritical stance in maintaining their privileged status for themselves and their children. Many, on both the right and far left, were also critical of Moon Jae-in administration that appeared to be applying the very same authoritarian and repressive methods as the previous conservative administrations that they had critiqued and toppled in order to preserve their own power. 5 Some recent films are Ton ŭi mat (Taste of Money), Pot’ong saram (Ordinary Person), Naebujadŭl (Inside Men), and Kŏmsa hoejŏn (A Violent Prosecutor). Examples of recent television series are Ton kkot (Money Flower), Mubŏp pyŏnhosa (Lawless Lawyer), Takt’ŏ p’ŭrijŭnŏ (Doctor Prisoner). 6 Conglomerate owners are not always represented as villains in Korean film and television. TV dramas also feature the male heir of a chaebŏl as the ‘Prince Charming’ figure, albeit a bit initially immature and picky, who nevertheless falls in love with the ‘Cinderella’ character. 7 http://waks.aks.ac.kr/rsh/?rshID=AKS-2012-EAZ-3101 8 Transcript from The Unjust DVD, Pathfinder Pictures, 2012. 9 Transcript from The Unjust DVD, Pathfinder Pictures, 2012 (plain text from Pathfinders DVD subtitles; italicised my own translation). 10 On the DVD, the term ŏrŭsin is translated as ‘old man’. See also Brown (2013, 181), who discusses the ways in which honorifics themselves can communicate sarcasm within a known social relationship. 11 For the purpose of this chapter, I will focus on the characters in these films. It would also be helpful to listen to Yoo Ah-in’s and Ryoo Seung-bum’s voices and performances in other films in which they have starred for comparative analysis. For other films starring Yoo Ah-in see Burning (2018) Dir. Lee Chang-dong, or

76  Jina Eleanor Kim Punch (2011) Dir. Lee Han; for films starring Ryoo Seung-bum see Radio Dayz (2008), Perfect Number (2012) Dir. Bang Eun-jin, Berlin File (2013). 12 Because this study focuses on the voice of villains, it does not discuss other sound in the film. But I would like to point out the interesting way classical music soundover is inserted in this fight scene to mute the child’s crying. 13 English subtitles from Veteran on Amazon Prime Video. Although the subtitles are not entirely accurate, they provide sufficient accuracy for English viewers to understand the film. In this scene, the word ‘very’ [aju] was left out of the subtitles, which amplifies the sarcasm in Cho’s voice.

References ̆ The Academy of Korean Studies. 2019. ‘Han’guk kundae sin’ŏ DB’. Accessed November 4, 2019. http://waks.aks.ac.kr/rsh/?rshID=AKS-2012-EAZ-3101 Bakhtin, M. 1984. Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barthes, R. 1977. Image–Music–Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. Brown, L. 2013. ‘Mind your own esteemed business: Sarcastic honorific use and impoliteness in Korean TV dramas’. Journal of Politeness Research 9 (2): 159–186. Charney, M. 2012. Shakespeare’s Villains. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press. Cheang, H. and M. Pell. 2008. ‘The sound of sarcasm’. Speech Communication 50: 366–381. Chion, M. 1994 [1990]. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Chion, M. 1999 [1999]. The Voice in Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Cummings, K., and M.A. Clements. 1995. ‘Analysis of the glottal excitation of emotionally styled and stressed speech’. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 98(1): 88–98. Derrida, J. 2011. Voice and Phenomenon. Translated by Lawrence Larlor. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Dolar, M. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press. Gills, S. and P. Gates. 2002. The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Gobl, Ch. and A. Chasaide. 2003. ‘The role of voice in communicating emotion, mood and attitude’. Speech Communications 40(1–2): 189–212. Idemaru, K., B. Winter, L. Brown and G. Oh. 2019. ‘Loudness trumps pitch in politeness judgments: Evidence from Korean deferential speech’. Language and Speech. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830918824344. Kim, H. 2017. ‘Spoon theory and the fall of a populist princess’. The Journal of Asian Studies 76(4): 839–849. Kim, J. 2015a. ‘Five bandits’. Translated by Brother Anthony of Taize. Manoa 27(2): 94–104. Kim, K. 2015b. ‘The true colours of the ‘Action-Kid’: Seung-wan Ryoo’s urban film noir’. In East Asian Film Noir: Transnational Encounters and Intercultural Dialogue, edited by C. Shin and M. Gallager, 109–124. London: I.B. Tauris. Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J. 2018. ‘Social signals and antisocial essence: The function of evil laughter in popular culture’. The Journal of Popular Culture 51(5): 1214–1233.

Sonic aesthetics and social disparity  77 Kristeva, J. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press. Ladd, D. R., K. E. A. Silverman, F. Tolkmitt, G. Bergmann, and K. R. Scherer. 1985. ‘Evidence for the independent function of intonation contour type, voice quality, and F0 range in signaling speaker affect’. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 78(2): 435–444. Laver, J. 1980. The Phonetic Description of Voice Quality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, J. 2019. ‘Changelings and Cinderellas: Class in/equality and social im/mobility and post-developmentalism in contemporary South Korean television dramas’. In Gender and Class in Contemporary South Kora, edited by H. Y. Choo, J. Lie, and L. Nelson, 16–36. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Mortimer, J. 1992. The Oxford Book of Villains. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Naficy, H. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Peters, S. and A. Almor. 2017. ‘Creating the sound of sarcasm’. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 36(2): 241–250. Podesva, R. J. and P. Callier. 2015. ‘Voice quality and identity’. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35: 173–194. Rockwell, P. 2000a. ‘Actors’, partners’, and observers’ perception of sarcasm’. Perceptual and Motor Skills 91: 665–668. Rockwell, P. 2000b. ‘Lower, slower, and louder: Vocal cues of sarcasm’. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 26(5): 483–495. San Juan, E. and J. McDevitt. 2012. Hitchcock’s Villains: Murderers, Maniacs, and Mother Issues. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press. Sapir, E. 1927. ‘Speech as a personality trait’. American Journal of Sociology 32(6): 892–905. Weidman, A. 2015. ‘Voice’. In Keywords in Sound, edited by D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny, 232–244. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Filmography Burning (Pŏ’ning). 2018. Dir. Lee, Chang-dong, South Korea: CGV Art House. Crying Fist (Chumŏgi unda). 2005. Dir. Ryoo, Seung-wan, South Korea: Showeast. City of Violence (Tchakp’ae). 2006. Dir. Ryoo, Seung-wan, South Korea: CJ Entertainment. ̆ X). 2012. Dir. Bang, Eun-jin, South Korea: CJ Entertainment. Perfect Number (Yonguija ̆ Punch (Wan’dugi). 2011. Dir. Lee, Han, South Korea: CJ Entertainment. ̆ 2008. Dir. Ha, Ki-ho, South Korea: Sidus Pictures Radio Dayz (Ladio teiju). The Unjust (Pudang kŏrae). 2010. Dir. Ryoo, Seung-wan, South Korea: CJ Entertainment. ̆ The Berlin File (Perullin). 2013. Dir. Ryoo, Seung-wan, South Korea: CJ Entertainment. Veteran (Bet’erang). 2015. Dir. Ryoo, Seung-wan, South Korea: CJ Entertainment.

Part II Modern noise

4 Aesthetic ruptures and sociabilities Tateyama Noboru (1876–1926), quotidian noise, and sōkyoku-jiuta Philip Flavin

Introduction The Meiji Restoration (1868–1912) was a remarkable period during which the new government promoted profound changes in nearly every aspect of Japanese culture in the name of modernisation. All these changes were based on western models: the military government (bakufu) was supplanted with a constitutional monarchy, mandatory public education, again based on western models, was introduced; universities were established where scholars pursued western philosophy and argued for its implementation in the arts. With the permeation of these new ideologies into society at large, the Japanese attitude towards and understanding of their own culture changed and evolved. This bourgeoning culture influenced traditional Japanese musicians, who in being exposed to western music were forced to reconsider and reappraise their art in the light of the newly introduced musical genres for the first time in centuries. The first to respond to the impact of modernisation were the sōkyoku-jiuta musicians, sōkyoku-jiuta being a chamber music for koto and shamisen that originated in the early Edo period (1600–1868). At this time, the professionally recognised musicians comprised a distinct social group defined by gender, physical disability, and membership to a guild: all were blind, all were male, and all belonged to the Tōdō-za, a ‘guild’ established in the ­mid-thirteenth century.1 Blindness in Japan, as in many other cultures, was a formidable social obstacle, and the blind were long seen as lesser, or at best indeterminate figures. While they may not have been ‘slaves’ or ‘untouchables’, for the most, their social status would have been extremely low. At the same time, however, the pre-modern Japanese believed that blindness endowed them with unique abilities; they could communicate with the gods and thus function as intermediaries between the worlds of the supernatural and the human. Both male and female blind served as shamans, this setting them beyond the pale of humanity. Beginning in the fourteenth century, the blind were associated with heikyoku, the musical recitation of the Heike monogatari as they accompanied themselves on the biwa, a four-stringed lute performed with a large plectrum. DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772-7

82  Philip Flavin Scholars have suggested that these performances also served to pacify the spirits of the Heike that had perished in the Genpei War (118–1885), the function of the blind musicians as shamans remaining unchanged. With the fading of heikyoku’s popularity in the sixteenth century, the musicians turned to the newest instrument to enter Japan, the shamisen. In the seventeenth century, they also appropriated the koto, an instrument associated with the aristocracy and Buddhist clergy, and quickly paired the two instruments in an ensemble format and composed new works and absorbed works from other popular genres into what is now known as so ̄kyoku-jiuta (see Flavin 2010). By the late eighteenth century, the musicians had produced a body of works that transformed sōkyoku-jiuta into a selective music designed for a well-educated, well-heeled consumer base: the urban elite. The appeal of this music lay in an aesthetic that resonated with the urban upper classes by both drawing upon classical poetics associated with the aristocracy and the presence of the koto, an instrument with unquestionable ‘snob appeal’, with the shamisen, the latest instrument to enter Japan, and associated with popular culture. They organised and shaped this music into an inherited tradition with clear lineages and pedagogical systems of immense cultural value. As the possessors of a highly desirable body of music, anybody desiring this knowledge could only access it through the medium of the blind body in which it resided.2 The Meiji period was unquestionably a catastrophe for the musicians. The newly formed government abolished the Tōdō-za in 1873 with the release of the mōkan haishirei (Abolition of the Blind Guild), which dissolved the guild and brought an end to all government funding. The social turmoil of the early Meiji period also precipitated a rapid decline in the number of students, another important source of income (see Nakashio 1973). The financial stability they enjoyed during the Edo period vanished as did the culture that supported this music. In an attempt to generate lost income, the musicians responded to modernity in three distinct ways. One group turned inwards, to the past, and reinterpreted their tradition as ‘tradition’. They ceased to be producers of new musical works and, sprinkling their repertoire with the dust of nostalgia, became instead the preservers of an imagined past, polishing and refining performance, whilst emphasising and romanticising the authenticity of their respective lineages. In a highly idiosyncratic response, the second and much smaller group produced a body of neo-romantic works that I believe can be interpreted as a melancholic critique of modernity. The third group of musicians discarded tradition in the fevered pursuit of modernisation/westernisation in the production of new works that shunned pre-modern understandings of composition. Ideas taken from western music were introduced, new instruments created, new ensemble formats modelled after the western orchestra were fashioned, which resulted in the birth of the Movement for New Japanese Music (Shinnihon ongaku undo) in the 1920s.

Aesthetic ruptures and sociabilities  83 All these responses, even the nostalgic repositioning of sōkyoku-jiuta as ‘tradition’, are characterised by changes in ‘sound’. Kawase Satoko (1873–1957), despite being one of the twentieth century’s great performers and preservers of the pre-modern repertoire, nevertheless modified both the jiuta shamisen and its bridge so that the instrument was more suitable for the modern performance venue of the western stage. Suzuki Koson (1875–1931) modified string gauge, strings tension, and the thickness of the koto plectra in a highly individualistic and romantic response to modernity. In the 1920s, Tateyama Noboru (1876– 1926), a seminal figure in the modernisation of Japanese music, effected ground-breaking changes in compositional practice, and also attempted a radical modification of the koto by changing the strings from silk to metal. Miyagi Michio (1894–1956), the ‘father of modern koto music’, furthered Tateyama’s innovations, and also designed new instruments: a 17-string bass koto, an 80-string koto, and a larger kokyū.3 These changes in sound initiated a unique Japanese musical modernity in which pre-modern understandings of music, most notably sōkyoku-jiuta, were permanently altered, and lost. Here, I use ‘sound’ in a broad sense to indicate the ‘sounds’ or ‘timbres’ produced by scales, as well as the ‘sounds’ produced by instruments both old and new. This chapter focuses on Tateyama, and his composition, Gaisen rappa no shirabe, as it represents a radical shift I have explored elsewhere but have come to rethink in a new light after reading sound studies works. I earlier argued that Tateyama’s works represent a transitional phase in the modernisation of Japanese music and that he never fully overcame the challenges presented by the incorporation of Western musical language into music for the koto, a genre with a self-sufficient aesthetics that makes the type of modifications he attempted extraordinarily challenging (Flavin 2010). I still believe this to be true, but with new understandings offered by recent works in sound studies, I have come to see Tateyama’s modifications as a much more violent irruption of Japanese aesthetic traditions and that the outrage his works elicited from contemporaries reflect a visceral awareness of the violence he visited upon this music. This violence lies in his having referenced ‘popular’ music: the music of the western military brass band. He introduced the real world, replete with political reality and new notions of the disciplined body placed with the larger framework of nation-state, into what can only be seen as a new nationalist genre. Rather than ‘sound’, however, I think of this violence as ‘noise’, a politically charged referencing of the contemporary world that did not exist in pre-modern sōkyoku-jiuta aesthetics. In this chapter, I attempt to view the implications of this new ‘noise’ from a stance that probes the aesthetic implications of the implied violence and its role in the formation of a new sociability. In doing so, I draw upon Attali’s work and the work of others as they reflect the changes that took place in Japanese culture after Tateyama’s compositions. The irruptive impact of these incongruous ideologically laden sounds fundamentally changes the sentimental lyric aesthetic of sōkyoku-jiuta through the introduction of ‘urban noise’, and forever changes indigenous Japanese music.

84  Philip Flavin

Aesthetic beginnings and the culture of sentiment: Endless melody, and the pre-modern understandings of musical meaning The so ̄kyoku-jiuta composers were not seeking an aesthetic autonomy but were instead participating in the construction of a musical culture specifically designed to appeal to a specific social class: the urban elite with the financial means and education to appreciate musical works that encouraged contemplation, reflection, and aesthetic judgement. Correctly speaking, sōkyoku-jiuta is not a single genre, but a collection of different genres for koto or shamisen or both instruments, all of which were preserved and transmitted by the blind musicians. This collection includes a wide gamut of different types of works: everything from popular tunes from the kabuki theatre, comic works that parody Buddhist ritual, to the great chamber works of the Edo period.4 Of these, tegotomono is the genre immediately germane to this discussion as, by the late eighteenth century, it had become the primary genre of composition and continued to be so until the beginning of the Meiji period. I believe this can be accounted for by the presence of extended instrumental interludes, or tegoto, that encourage the listener to engage with the music at a deeper level.5 In reviewing the musical changes and developments that take place in tegotomono, it is clear that these musical interludes were the focus of the composer’s creativity for this is where change, and occasionally pronounced change, occurs. Today, tegotomono remain the most commonly performed pre-modern works, their continued success lying in the challenges the instrumental interludes still present to the listener. Judgement is passed on whether the piece is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, the ability to judge formed through ‘education’ in the genre: historical knowledge, and the ability to recognise musical ingenuity and creativity. By the end of the eighteenth century, the blind musicians had established a genre that shares characteristics with the western concept of art and had become the music of the urban elite. This implication that tegotomono somehow resemble western art music is, of course, highly problematic. It would seem to position this repertoire within a highly Europe-centric framework that subscribes to a universal concept of art based on Kantian aesthetics and ideas of the sublime, the transcendent, and the good: a value system that emphasises the listener’s experience. It also suggests that there is an autonomous connection between tegotomono as art and aesthetics. Another question raised is the meaning of ‘art’, again highly troublesome as it appears to adhere to the belief that artwork possesses the ability to express emotions, to imitate or represent something beyond the work, to elicit sensory experiences that can be judged aesthetically, and that artwork possesses formal elements worthy of contemplation and reflection. Most of this is, of course, impossible. The concept of ‘art’ did not exist in Japan until the introduction of western philosophy. And it was only after much scholarly debate that the two words now used to indicate ‘art’, bijutsu and geijutsu, were finally coined.6 Neither was there a general concept or word for ‘music’ in pre-modern Japanese, this also was formed during the Meiji period.7 The one quality from the list above I believe all tegotomono possess that contributes to the formation of what I see as resembling the

Aesthetic ruptures and sociabilities  85 western concept of ‘art’ is ‘formal elements’; these are judged aesthetically and this judgement requires critical engagement on the part of the listener. The fundamental structure of tegotomono is a tri-part of maeuta—tegoto— atouta, or ‘front song’—instrumental interlude—‘after song’. As a distinct genre, they appeared in the late eighteenth century, and are associated with the works of Minezaki Kōtō (active late eighteenth century). The tegoto are usually longer than the length of the combined vocal sections and clearly the focus of the compositions. This can be expanded to two, and occasionally, three tegoto, the length of these works ranging from twelve minutes to over half an hour. Hirano has argued that the early tegotomono were compositions solely for the shamisen, and that the koto was an option in performance. Thus, when performed with the koto, the koto part was improvised and followed the melody as the shamisen. With the developments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—particularly kakeai, the exchange of extended melodies and melodic fragments between the two instruments—the koto part comes to occupy an increasingly important role making the ­performance of the later tegotomono impossible without the presence of a second instrument.8 This new importance of the koto transforms the aural aspect of tegotomono performance from one in which the primary focus is the shamisen to one in which both instruments play an equal role. This in turn suggests a change in the prestige level of tegotomono as a genre: it now has greater snob appeal as the koto, the instrument of the aristocracy, is now essential (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 Frontispiece from Kinkyoku chiyo no kotobuki 琴曲千代の壽 (Shōhakutei shujin. 1842). (Author’s collection).9

86  Philip Flavin Sōkyoku-jiuta is characterised by a sentimental aesthetic that invites sensory experiences and expresses emotions in the cultural context of the urban elite as they sought to define themselves, this aesthetic drawing upon Japanese poetics. The sentimental lyricism of the sōkyoku-jiuta texts and their focus on emotional states are inevitably framed within Japanese poetics. They thus rely upon a highly predictable lexicon of natural images established with the Kokin waka-shū, the seminal anthology of Japanese poetry commissioned by Emperor Daigo (r. 897–930) during the Heian period (794– 1185). This poetics uses the seasons and associated images to create a psychological framework that reinforces emotional content: in sōkyoku-jiuta this is invariably the bittersweet emotion of failed romance articulated through the female voice. There is nothing resembling violence, death, or dramatic action. As Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241), an extremely influential waka poet from the late Heian early Kamakura periods, wrote: ‘No matter how frightening a thing may be, when one writes about it in Japanese poetry, it must sound graceful and elegant’ (Shirane 2012, 8). Many of the texts also reference classic poetic and literary works and create romantically charged scenes that echo with nostalgia for an imagined earlier age. Even those texts that reference contemporary culture alone are infallibly sentimental with visions of the erotically tinged idealised romance of the floating world, visions that promote a longing for that which can never be. The lyrics for Kikuoka Kengyō’s (1792–1847) Isochidori are representative: Isochidori Beach Plovers utatane no / makura ni hibiku / ake no kane The pillow of my uneasy doze rings with the bell at dawn ge ni mama naranu / yo no naka o / nani ni tatoen / Asukagawa To what can I compare this world over which I truly have no control? In Asuka River,10 kinō no fuchi wa / kyō no se Yesterday’s deep pool is today’s shoal. kawari yasuki o / kawaru na to / chigirishi koto mo / itsushika ni and the pledge we took to never change despite the uncertainties of life has at some point mi wa ukifune no / kaji o tae / ima wa yorube mo / shiranami no drifted, and now I am afloat, a rudderless boat with no direction, and like the white waves, with nowhere to go. tegoto sao no shizuku ka / namida no ame ka / nure ni zo nureshi / nuregoromo

Aesthetic ruptures and sociabilities  87 Are they drops from a pole? Or is it a rain of tears that drenches my robe, through and through. mi ni shimu kesa no / urakaze ni / wabi tsutsu naku ya / iso chidori In the chill coastal wind of morning that pierces my body, the beach plover cries in despair. (Kikuoka 1975)11 As can be seen, the text is suffused through with a gentle and graceful melancholy that follows established poetic precepts. This graceful elegance extends to the melodic and rhythmic structures as well, and notably in the tegoto. Musically, tegotomono are characterised by long, wandering, ‘endless’ melodies that lack clear thematic development. By ‘endless’ melody, I mean that they flow from one to the next, the connection between them seemingly arbitrary; they meander through time with no clear direction and are occasionally punctuated by semi-cadential gestures. These melodies as not based on anything from the real world and thus utterly abstract (Figure 4.2). The overall atmosphere of tegotomono is forged through the relationship between the vocal sections and poetic images that linger through the instrumental interludes. These lingering images are created through textual caesura, lines that in Japanese poetics are complete, yet incomplete, and allow multiple meanings to seep through the tegoto to the atouta through puns.13 The last two lines of the maeuta for Isochidori, for example—ima wa yorube / shiranami no—which, if literally translated mean, ‘as for now, the aimless white waves’, contain a pun in the word shiranami, which plays upon the meaning of the negative form of shiru, ‘to know’, or shiranu. Shiranami thus has the simultaneous meaning of ‘white waves’ and ‘to not know’. Shiranami ends with the possessive particle ‘no’, and the meaning of ‘white waves’ continues through to the first line of the atouta, sao no shizukuka ka; the line then being shiranami no sao no shizuku ka, ‘the drops of the pole in the white waves’. The musical settings for the vocal sections show surprisingly little change from the beginnings of the tegotomono genre through the end of the Edo period. The vocal line is central and supported by the instruments. The

Figure 4.2  Isochidori tegoto (excerpt) (Kikuoka 1975).12

88  Philip Flavin effect of most of the tegoto is one of a gentle, even melancholic, if nonetheless profound beauty. A final quality to the aesthetics of tegotomono, and jiuta shamisen music in general, that must be discussed is the significance of the distinct resonances of the three most commonly used tunings for the instrument—honchōshi, niagari, and sansagari—all of which were infused with ‘meaning’. I am not suggesting that any of the tunings used in jiuta had concrete meaning, but rather that they served to elicit in the listener a set of images or associations. By the end of the eighteenth century, this aspect of musical meaning that played a vital role in the interpretation and understanding of this music had been established. Yokoi Yayū (1702–1783), a poet, a haibun author, a scholar, and a member of the military class, offered the following observations in a brief essay entitled Ongyoku-setsu, in his Uzura-goromo, a collection of humorous essays. Honchōshi, to draw an analogy, is much like an upper-class woman with her hair down and wearing a long, formal, overgarment. Niagari resembles a woman with her hair done up in the latest style, dressed in a garish manner, and thus presents a truly confusing appearance. Sansagari is serene, gentle, and tranquil, much like a woman with the most sophisticated and unobtrusive use of make-up, wearing a shigoki-obi. Those with erotic thoughts shed tears at these places and begin promoting loose behaviour. Those with taste listen with pleasure but have no desire to sing on their own as this would be unbecoming. (cited in Flavin 2016)14 If Yayū’s observations reflect Edo-period understanding, this knowledge, this ability to identify tuning was an essential aspect of musical understanding and played an important role in the formation of an interpretive framework. It was thus a crucial aspect of sōkyoku-jiuta aesthetics. Isochidori, for example, begins in niagari, modulates to sansagari for the tegoto, and finally to honchōshi for the atouta, the different tunings creating a progression of different resonances, each with associated images.15 By the early nineteenth century, the noted tegotomo composers—notably Matsu’ura Kengyō—had fully explored the possibilities available through modulation, and therefore tuning and resonance, in their works, which suggests that they saw this as an integral quality of their music, and also that their audience would have understood the aesthetic implications. The collapse of the Tokugawa bakufu and later abolishment of the Tōdō brought an end to the cultural milieu that supported this music and its aesthetics.

Early Meiji composers and change The oral history of the blind musicians holds that with Meiji government’s abolishment of the Tōdō, they entered a period of extreme financial hardship. In order to bolster their flagging incomes, they turned to a genre of

Aesthetic ruptures and sociabilities  89 popular music known as minshingaku and popular ideology to initiate changes they believed would generate new sources of income. Minshingaku has a chequered history in Japan but refers to two different eras during which Chinese music entered the country. Mingaku, ‘music of the Ming’, came to Japan during the early Edo period from southern China, primarily Fujian Province, and shingaku, ‘music of the Qing’, also from southern China, arrived during the later Edo period (Li 2012, 50–61). This music was sporadically popular during the Edo period, but notably so during the early Meiji period at which time it enjoyed a boom. The scale used in minshingaku was, of course, Chinese, and lacked the minor seconds that distinguish the scale used in sōkyoku-jiuta.16 The musicians turned to this and created a new scale without minor seconds, and thus devoid of the implied sensuality of the original scale, this new scale was seen as more appropriate to the new, westernised prudish morality of the era. In a similar vein, they avoided the shamisen and its association with the Edo-period popular culture and the sensuality of the ‘floating world’, and began composing solely for the koto, the aristocratic origins of the instrument making it morally acceptable whilst also tapping into the new public presence of the emperor and nationalisation of court culture. They also avoided the sentimental erotically tinged texts of the Edo period in favour of new texts that reflected the new government-promoted ideologies of emperorism, nationalism, militarism, modernisation, and more. The text for Kikutaka Kengyō’s (1838?–1888) Mikuni no homare, the first of the ‘new pieces’ for two koto, is a representative example. Mikuni no homare The Glory of the Empire Kami no yo no, hikari kawarade hi no moto no, ge ni arigataki ōkimi no mukashi ni kaeru matsurigoto, The Age of the Gods and the never changing light of Japan, in true gratitude the emperor returns to the ancient rites, hina mo miyako mo akiraka ni, osamaru miyo no Akitsunokuni, country and city alike are clearly governed in this reign from Akitsunokuni, mizu to uo to no kimi to tami water and fish are the lord and his people, (tegoto) kotokuni kakete majiwari mo, nao toshigoto ni hirakeyuku, tami yutaka naru toyotoshi ni, exchange with foreign countries develops with each passing year, the people are blessed each year with riches, kami no megumi no arawarete, as the blessings of the Gods appear, miíitsu wa tsukiseji na, kuni no hikari wa taeseji na. the imperial authority shall never fail, and the light of the country never vanish. (Kikutaka 1941)

90  Philip Flavin The changes the early Meiji composers effected on both text and scale bring the Edo-period sentimental aesthetic to an end with one notable exception. They made no change to the structure of tegotomono or the sōkyoku-jiuta melody. The new works all have tegoto that continue to be characterised by the long flowing melodies without thematic content that wander aimlessly through time. The other musical occurrences—chirashi and kakeai—also remain unchanged (Figure 4.3). This lack of change, I believe, preserved one aspect of the original sentimental aesthetic—engaged listening that required aesthetic judgement—and continued to provide the early Meiji listeners with similar challenges. This has allowed the performances of the earlier pieces to survive into the present era. Of the large number of pieces produced during the Meiji period, some 2,000 works, the only compositions that continue to be performed with any regularity are those produced by this first generation, the rest having been discarded (see Nakashio 1973). In 1896, Tateyama Noboru brings whatever remnants there were of the pre-modern aesthetic to an end with Gaisen rappa no shirabe: While the majority of those who engaged with noise sought to eliminate it, some were stimulated more creatively by the sounds that surrounded them. The modern soundscape was filled with music as well as noise … both jazz musicians and avant-garde composers redefined the meaning of sound and the distinction between music and noise. (Sterne 2012, 121) Born in 1876, Tateyama Noboru is the first significant Meiji-period sōkyoku-jiuta composer, and very much a child of the times. According to Nakashima, Tateyama’s engagement with contemporary culture was based on a genuine curiosity with the new: Tateyama was completely fascinated with the newest and latest developments, and focused much of his energy on this music, the predictable or inevitable results being works derived from military songs and devoid of minor seconds: it was music that would immediately please people (Nakashima 1930, 7, cited in Flavin 2013, 148–149)

Figure 4.3  Mikuni no homare tegoto (excerpt) (Kikutaka 1941, 4).

Aesthetic ruptures and sociabilities  91 Tateyama was not alone in his engrossment with military marches. Nakashima notes that, [i]t was an era when Western music was perceived as the lively rhythms [buka buka don don] of [the bands] as they passed through streets, or the bands that performed for the opening of a store or shop. [Western music] was still very unformed and immature, and a curiosity or novelty for the general public. If a marching band appeared, children would follow behind for six or seven blocks, marching to the music. Even adults would appear in the doorways to view the procession as it passed. (ibid.) Nakashima’s accounts are fascinating for several reasons: the first is that marching bands were a ‘curiosity’, and that this curiousness, when re-contextualised and transferred to the koto and the chamber, immediately pleased people. From the passage above, the public’s fascination with marching bands clearly lies more in their ‘novelty’ rather than a ‘popularity’ per se. Rather than any appreciation of the rhythms or melodies of the music, the public’s interest derives from exoticism. Their appeal, as Hosokawa has also noted, arose from their ‘gigantic sound’ and ‘awful strange(ness)’ rather than any pleasure taken in the musical content (1992, 13). How then to account for ‘music that would immediately please people’? The answer to this, I believe, lies in his second observation: that children would follow behind marching to the music and that even adults would appear at the doorways to watch. This is perhaps the most significant in that it implies that what attracted the public was spectacle: the disciplined and militarised male body. This spectacle clearly resonates with the political ideology of the time: nationalism, and the giddy joy the Japanese populace experienced at their internationally recognised success in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). It is this excitement that Tateyama introduces into sōkyoku-jiuta and ‘immediately pleased people’. There is no greater effect on the collectivity of members than that created by moving ceremonies, reiterated rituals, striking political symbols and the music and images of choreographed mass gatherings, especially when these are linked to the ideology of the nation: nor is there any more powerful means of binding the members of a community, and separating them from outsiders. Their value to nationalists has been incalculable. (Smith 2009, 51) The power and pleasure of this spectacle lies in its choreography, in this instance, uniformed male bodies moving in unison to rhythm through public space. Some of the excitement generated by the spectacle of the march assuredly lies in its clear otherness. As Abe notes, the disciplining of the body through synchronising to a steady beat was a fundamentally new idea in Japan (2018, 41).17 This is unquestionably true. The choreography for those

92  Philip Flavin pre-Meiji dance forms invested with greater cultural value gives the impression that the performers drift in an out of an awareness or acknowledgement of rhythm. The more ‘artistic’ they are, the more divorced the choreography is from rhythm. The movements of shimai, the dance of the nō theatre, for example, are primarily choreographed to follow text, with occasional moments when the dance synchronises with the rhythmic cycles. The same holds true with buyo ̄, the dance forms associated with kabuki. Those moments in which the dancers do work with rhythm tend to be when they stamp their feet, a gesture long associated with rhythms of shamanistic ritual in Japan. While violence certainly exists in pre-modern Japanese theatre, neither of these earlier theatrical dance forms, however, is imbued with the immediate political violence of the Western military march. The spectacle of the march as it wends its way through neighbourhoods becomes a ritualised moment, an instance in which ‘the horn emerges as a derivative form of violence masked by festival’ (Attali 1985, 124). And indeed, in 1896, Tateyama composed Gaisen rappa no shirabe (The Bugle’s Valiant Return) (Figure 4.4), the first work in traditional Japanese music to incorporate ideas from Western music, and a work in which images of the ‘horn’ figures prominently. As can be seen, the structure of the melodies in the tegoto are utterly different from those seen in the Edo and early Meiji period works. The long melismatic lines have been replaced with short clipped motivic gestures that reflect their origin in the march and suggest a new rhythmic regularity and stability, which in turn promote a somatic response in the body of the listener. In introducing melodies based on thematic ideas from military music, Tateyama opens a new sonic world, a new music with a new syntax, and new modes of listening. It would have been impossible to ignore the images associated with this new musical syntax: synchronised male bodies and contemporary politics both of which symbolised violence. The introduction of military music would also have challenged the listener with the metrical implications of the new melody and the clarity of antecedent consequence structures. The aesthetic codes of the Edo-period sentimental aesthetic have been shattered, transfigured through the external noise of the outside that overflows with violence rather than idealised romance, with ritualised spectacle rather than contemplation, with politics rather than poetics. [A] noise that is external to the existing code can also cause its mutation. For example, even when a new technology is an external noise conceived as a reinforcement for a code, a mutation in its distribution often profoundly transforms the code. (Attali 1985, 35; italics in the original) It also allowed for the growth and exploration of a new music, and new forms of sociability.

Aesthetic ruptures and sociabilities  93

Figure 4.4  Gaisen rappa no shirabe: tegoto (excerpt) (Tateyama 1937, 3).

New sociability: The outside has been brought inside The thrill of the implied volume of quotidian noise and politically charged sound muffle and mute what remained of sōkyoku-jiuta’s sentimental aesthetic and its intimacy. The musical language of the Edo period has been replaced with the new. As Voeglin has observed, ‘noise does not have to be loud, but it has to be exclusive: excluding other sounds, creating in sound a bubble against sounds, destroying sonic signifiers and divorcing listening from sense material external to its noise’ (2010, 43). This is indeed what happens in Tateyama’s recontextualisation of military music. The political implications of military music on the koto—music originally intended for the sounds of brass and percussion instruments is now realised through the sounds of silk strings, and images of outdoor urban politically laden spectacle are now transported to the chamber. The result is a hybrid schizophonia created ‘through different politics and aesthetics of sonic transformation and mixing—from avant-garde to different forms of the popular, from the mainstream to the countercultural’ (Ochoa Gautier 2012, 391). The juggernaut of modernity has crushed everything in its path, its noise obliterating the ‘sounds’ of pre-modern aesthetics and understandings, but in its tracks, new understandings, new modes of aesthetic engagement, and new understandings of public space spring to life. During the Edo period, the communicative space of performance was what Ikegami describes as an ‘aesthetic public’, a ‘sphere of interaction where cultural activities take place’ (Ikegami 2005, 7). These spaces were vital as sites where people gathered in the interactive process of artistic production. They were distinct or separate from the social order. It was here, in these largely unregulated private spheres of communication, that those aspiring to newly forming concepts of gentility, civility, and cultural standards were socialised (Figure 4.5). ‘People explored horizontal and voluntary ways of associating and found genuine joy in immersing themselves into aesthetic group activities while thus escaping from the tedium and the constrictions of the hierarchical feudal states structures’ (ibid., 9). The frontispiece illustration depicts the Edo-period performance space, very different from the western theatre with its curtains, lights, proscenium, and seats. Despite the casual seating of the ‘audience’ around the temporary stage upon which the musicians sit, most are clearly engaged with the performance. This audience, however, is not a general public per se, but comprised

94  Philip Flavin

Figure 4.5  Frontispiece from the Ito no shirabe 糸の調べ (Nankō 1818). (Author’s collection).18

primarily of people studying sōkyouku-jiuta, an ‘educated’ cultural elite in the pursuit of the intense aesthetic experiences afforded in these spaces. With Tateyama’s introduction of urban ‘noise’, this communicative space acquires a new immediateness as a node of political discourse that changes its sociability, this change marking the end of Edo-period aesthetics and their pursuit by an educated elite. While the previous generation of composers had changed the lyrics to reflect more contemporary concerns, the contents nonetheless can be viewed as more generalisations on the attributes of the new Japan rather than conveying any immediate political reality. Musically, the changes are similar: the instrumentation and scale have been changed to accommodate the new ideology and prudery surrounding the shamisen and the miyakobushi onkai: the melodic structures, however, remain unchanged. When combined, the results are unquestionably different, but nevertheless maintain an intellectual distance. Tateyama’s referencing of urban noise and lyrics addressing this reality elicited an instantaneous emotional response in his audience. Nakashima Utashito (1896–1979) remarked that the immense popularity of his works was such that rooms were rented specifically for the performance of his compositions to which audiences brought food and drink. Nakashima also noted that their conduct at these performances was ‘undesirable’ and that these concerts had acquired a questionable reputation (1930, 10). Regrettably, this all he says and how their behaviour was undesirable can only be surmised. My suspicion is that the public’s profound awareness of this change combined with drink may have led to a hitherto unknown ‘boisterousness’ in their engagement with the newly politicised music. What is nevertheless clear, however, is that the former aesthetic public has transformed into a politically charged space with new modes of sociability. Whether or not Tateyama intended to ‘awaken sympathy in the listeners (or to use) music (as) a means to “create” an unconventional, “generally human”, “unalienated” sociability and commonality’ is unclear, but there is no question that he undertook these innovations with a clear political intent (Dalhaus 1989, 71). Deeply disturbed by the inroads Western music had made into Japanese culture, he sought to confront them by transforming the koto and its music into something capable of withstanding this onslaught:

Aesthetic ruptures and sociabilities  95 Over thirty years ago, believing that I should adapt to the changes and currents of the day, I composed new works and created new tunings … Many of the people involved with koto instruction in some way [would agree] that because the koto has such a long history in Japan as a chamber instrument, regardless of how much other instruments may advance or change, there is the belief that no other instrument can intrude into its realm. This is a narrow view, however, expressed by those people who have not considered music in a philosophical vein and remain ensconced within the narrow confines of the koto world. Because koto music is ‘ancient elegance’ there is the perception that it is unnecessary to prepare for the prevention of other instruments invading [this realm]; however, the vessel into which we place koto music, that is to say, the Japanese house, has undergone extraordinary transformations. If we do not strengthen our defence of ‘ancient elegance’, the koto, which is feeble, will gradually weaken. Should this happen, even something as expensive as the piano, which also has the additional drawback of being impossible to move, will predominate, which is only natural. I have come to the conclusion that we will experience the fate of being driven from the Japanese house. This reminds me of my experiences twenty years ago, a time when I began experimenting with new tunings and new compositions. These have become, however, stop-gap measures and are now commonplace occurrences or hackneyed, and the demand for the piano has increased. (Tateyama 1976, ‘koto gakki no kairyō nit suite’, 1976 (1922)) Tateyama’s imbuing his compositions with the noise of political reality— musical motifs and gestures from Western military music—was an extraordinary accomplishment in that they announce the decline of Edo-period musical practice and the public’s understanding and consumption of sōkyoku-jiuta. Tateyama’s compositions also spawned a feverish movement in which other sōkyoku-jiuta composers devoted themselves to the creation of similarly nationalistic works that were avidly consumed by the Meiji-period audiences. Kikutake Shōtei (1884–1954) openly celebrated the annexation of Korea in his Shintamigusa Nikkan gappei no kyoku and the Japanese conquest of Qingdao in Chintō kachidoki. Kikuzuka Yoichi (1846–1909) composed similar works in praise of Japan’s acquisition of colonial territories, the Japanese military, and the emperor. Equally important is that many of these works were now performed in the new western concert hall, further distancing the Edo-period aesthetic public.

Concluding observations Tateayama’s popularity was brief. Even before the war, his works had come to be perceived as somewhat old-fashioned, the success of the music produced by the following generation of composers affiliated with the Shin-nihon

96  Philip Flavin ongaku undo ̄ rendering his compositions outdated. Most of Tateyama’s works then vanished during the post-war period, the blatant nationalism and militarism making performances impossible under the Occupation Forces. Now seen as transitional, they are nonetheless invaluable as they illustrate the ideological struggles surrounding the westernisation of Japanese music, these struggles being a node in which many different pre-existing ideas—concepts of music, sociability, aesthetics, performance spaces, perceptions and understandings of composition, politics, and much more—collapse, but are then ‘uprooted from their context only to reassemble with other heterogeneous elements to form new assemblages’ (Campbell 2013, 39). In this uprooting, sōkyoku-jiuta underwent a profound series of transformations, took new directions and meanings that continued to evolve throughout the twentieth century. One transformation is the appearance of those musicians who reinterpreted or reinvented the sōkyoku-jiuta tradition as ‘tradition’ in a Hobsbawmian sense. Many of the sōkyoku-jiuta genres—shamisen kumiuta, koto kumiuta, nagauta-mono, jōruri-mono, for example—come to be associated with a handful of musicians and seldom performed. Shamisen kumiuta, once a requirement for professional status for the musicians and commonly known, become the province in which Kikuhara Kotoji (1878– 1944) and his daughter, Kikuhara Hatsuko (1899–2001) reigned supreme. Tomizaki Shunshō (1880–1958) and his successor, Tomiyama Seikin (1913– 2008), laid claim to jōrurimono and sakumono. In doing so, they invest new meanings in these repertoires, and transform them into esoteric bodies of knowledge to which they alone have access due to the ‘purity’ of their musical lineages. They have become nostalgic symbols of musical authenticity, this authenticity now having a newfound validity in a rapidly modernising Japan where the past was vanishing at breakneck speed. These musicians have become those that preserve, polish, and refine the repertoire, and in doing so, transform them into fixed bodies: there is now only one way to perform these works. Change is forbidden. They have become the National Living Treasures of the post-war period that embody the traditional Japanese arts. A second group of musicians discards tradition in the continued pursuit of the musical modernity Tateyama envisioned. The shift in aesthetic understanding effected by Tateyama’s introduction of urban noise pushes this group towards an increased reliance upon western compositional technique in their search for the ‘modern/western’, and the music of the past loses its value as a site of artistic production. At the same time, however, their reliance upon western compositional technique removes the taint of Tateyama’s urban noise, and the now entirely westernised melodies, once again completely abstract and therefore free of political implication, push aesthetic consumption back towards an engaged listening in which judgement is passed on the quality of a work. The basis of judgement, however, has been formed from a new westernised and modernised aesthetic stance in which the

Aesthetic ruptures and sociabilities  97 sentimental lyricism of the Edo period has no place and is no longer fully understood. The ideological struggles that allowed for the modernisation/westernisation of Japanese music have been forgotten as has the impact of these struggles on musical aesthetics and understanding. At best, Tateyama’s works are now seen as a necessary, if negligible step in the progression towards a music that ‘breathes the ideology of democratic institutions, rationalism, the Enlightenment, should one choose to believe these are universal and predestined stages through which all cultures pass’ (McClary 1985, 156). Today, the pre-modern understanding of sōkyoku-jiuta has been replaced by twentieth-century modernity, these ideological structures are now seen as ‘unchanging’. The canon of pre-modern music for traditional Japanese instruments has been largely reduced to tegotomono. The fate of the Meijiperiod works is considerably grimmer. Outside a handful of compositions, the works produced before Miyagi have been omitted from the canon, and Miyagi’s opus is now considered to signal the beginnings of Japanese musical modernity.

Notes 1 As a distinct political entity, the To ̄do ̄-za most likely formed during the mid-Kamakura period (1185–1333) when groups of blind men organised to establish a monopoly over the performance of heikyoku, the recitation of the Tales of the Heike to the accompaniment of the biwa, a four-stringed pear-shaped lute played with a large wooden plectrum. 2 Abe’s observation that the strangeness of the chindon’ya musicians ‘indexe(s) something out of the ordinary, both spatially and temporally: they are out of time, and out of place’ also holds for the sōkyoku-jiuta musician. (2018, 68). The blind inhabited a liminal space between past and present through their preservation of this knowledge. 3 The kokyū is a three-stringed bowed lute. 4 The musicians composed most of sōkyoku-jiuta, but there are some genres, popular narrative genres such as Handayū-bushi and Shigetayū-bushi, that they absorbed and fortunately preserved as they have otherwise vanished as independent genres. 5 In pre-modern Japan, instrumental music was limited to a handful of genres, such as gagaku and shakuhachi honkyoku. Within sōkyoku-jiuta, there are two other genres—danmono and kinutamono—that are entirely instrumental; however, the number of danmono and kinutamono is extremely small in comparison to tegotomono, which form the largest body of works in sōkyoku-jiuta. 6 Even today, there is no one word that means ‘art’ in Japanese, and the two words are still somewhat vague in meaning. Bijutsu usually refers to the fine arts, and geijutsu commonly indicates the performing arts, but a geijutsu daigaku ‘university of the arts’ normally has courses in both the plastic and performing arts. 7 The names for musical genres, of course, existed; however, there was no word that indicated musical activities as a whole. One possible reason for this may be the rigid connection of musical genre with class. 8 Should the koto not be used, it is also common to have a second shamisen part that would provide the koto’s missing melodic gestures.

98  Philip Flavin 9 The romantic view of aristocratic culture can be seen in this frontispiece, an illustration of two court ladies performing koto and biwa (a four-stringed lute), from the 1843 Kinkyoku chiyo no kotobuki, a collection of so ̄kyoku-jiuta lyrics. 10 There are similar puns throughout the text, such as the one imbedded in Asukagawa, ‘Asuka River’. The characters are normally 飛鳥川, but it can also be written with the characters 明日香川, the meaning of which is ‘River of tomorrow’s scents’, asu meaning ‘tomorrow’. 11 Unless indicated, all translations are by this author. 12 The most important expected musical events in nineteenth century tegotomono are kakeai and chirashi. Despite kakeai being the exchange of melodic material, they are moments of musical stasis. The forward drive of the heterophonic melodies is replaced by melodies that circle the same fundamental tones. Ingenuity is expected and kakeai are often the defining moments of tegoto. Chirashi are sections used to mark different sections of the tegoto—the middle and the end being the most common—whilst also creating musical interest through rhythmic and melodic change. A section of the tegoto will come to a full cadence at which point the chirashi enters with a pronounced shift. Rather than what appears to be a 2/2, each beat is clearly articulated and shifts to what appears to be 4/4. The pitch in the score above follows contemporary practice with D as the standard fundamental (Kikuoka 1975, 11). (All transcriptions are by this author.) 13 This aesthetic is also seen in Japanese calligraphy. In waka, for example, the calligrapher may not execute each line according to poetic divisions, but for a visual balance that emphasises the poetic content. 14 These three tunings are found in all shamisen genres. If D is taken as the fundamental, honchōshi would be D G D, niagari would be D G C, and niagari would be D A D. 15 Scholars have yet to fully address these tunings outside of identifying when they appeared. There is only one scale in sōkyoku-jiuta, perhaps facilitating other means of sonic interpretation to develop. Indeed, how the blind musicians understood ‘scale’ is of immense interest as they only used names for different the tunings: there was no name for the scale during the Edo period. Uehara Rokushirō (1848–1913) was the first to name the scale, miyako-bushi onkai, in his 1895 Zokugaku senritsu-kō 族楽旋律考. That they understood they were working with a collection of notes is clear as can be seen in their compositions, again notably tegotomono, as they frequently modulate, the scale shifting much in the same way a diatonic scale moves by fifths. Rather than scale, the distinct resonances that arise through the ‘sound’ of the open strings of the different tunings came to be imbued with ‘meaning’. 16 If the miyako-bushi onkai is built from D, it would be D, E-flat, G, A, B-flat, and D: two perfect fourths separated by a major second (D and G, A and D), the lower note of each fourth followed by a minor second (E-flat and B-flat). The two minor seconds are what create the distinctive sound of the scale and were perceived as ‘erotic’, even ‘pornographic’, in the early Edo period when this scale first appeared. 17 In a series of fascinating articles, Fukushima has illustrated the difficulties the Japanese encountered in coordinating physical movement with the rhythm of marching bands and the struggle to discipline the body (Fukushima 1996a, 1996b). 18 The inscription to the upper right reads, saraekō no zu ‘illustration of practice’. The illustration, however, is of what would now be considered a ‘student recital’. The two students, the woman playing the koto and the man on the shamisen, are performing with their ‘teacher’, the blind male, on the kokyū, a three-stringed bowed lute.

Aesthetic ruptures and sociabilities  99

References Abe, M. 2018. Resonances of Chindon-ya: Sounding Space and Sociality in Contemporary Japan. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Attali, J. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Campbell, E. 2013. Music After Deleuze. London, New York: Bloomsbury. Dalhaus, C. 1989. The Idea of Absolute Music. Translated by Roger Lustig. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Flavin, P. 2010. ‘Meiji shinkyoku: the beginnings of modern music for the koto’. Japan Review: Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies 22: 103–123. Flavin, P. 2013. ‘Tateyama Noboru: Osaka, modernity, and bourgeois musical realism for the koto’. Music, Modernity and Locality in Prewar Japan: Osaka and Beyond, edited by A. Tokita and H. de Ferranti, 135–156. London: Routledge. Flavin, P. 2016. ‘Ura and omote: the two faces of chaondo’. Osaka: Ōsaka Keizai Hōkadaigaku Ronshū. Fukushima, K. 1996a. ‘Bakumatsu no yōshiki kofu’. Ongaku bunka no sōzo ̄ 2. Tokyo: Ongaku bunka sōzō. Fukushima, K. 1996b. ‘Fu wa shita yori miru beshi’, Ongaku bunka no sōzo ̄. 3. Tokyo: Ongaku bunka sōzō. Hosokawa, S. 1992. Chindon-ya: Japanese Street Music. Translated by Kevin and Hiroko Quigley. In liner notes, Tokyo Chindon 1: 73–88. Ikegami, E. 2005. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kikutaka K. 1941. Mikuni no homare, edited by U. Nakashima. Osaka: Maekawa. Kikuoka K. 1975. Isochidori, edited by U. Nakashima. Osaka: Maekawa. Li, C. 2012. Taiwan beiguan yu Riben qingyue de bijaio yanjiu. Taibei: Guoli Taibei Yishudaxue. McClary, S. 1985. ‘Afterword: The politics of silence and sound’. In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, edited by J. Attali, 149–160. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Nakashima, U. 1930. ‘Ko Tateyama Noboru o omou’. Seiha 31: 8–11; 32: 8–11; 33: 8–10; 34: 6–9. Osaka: Maekawa. Nakashio, K. 1973. ‘Meiji shinkyoku ni tsuite’. In Kikkawa Eishi sensei kanreki kinen ronbun-shū: Nihon ongaku to sono shūhen, edited by F. Koizumi et al., 189–206. Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomosha. Nankō O. rev. 1818. Kinkyoku ito no shirabe (zōho). Osaka: Maekawa Zenbei. Ochoa Gautier, A. 2012. ‘Social transculturation, epistemologies of purification, and the aural public sphere in Latin America’. In The Sound Studies Reader, edited by J. Sterne, 388–404. New York: Routledge. Shirane, H. 2012. Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts. New York: Columbia University Press. Shōhakutei shujin. ed. 1842. Kinkyoku chiyo no kotobuki. Osaka: Kawachiya Tasuke. Smith, A. 2009. Ethno-Symbolism and Nationalism: A Cultural Approach. New York: Routledge. Sterne, J. ed. 2012. The Sounds Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Tateyama, N. 1937. Gaisen rappa no shirabe, edited by U. Nakashima. Osaka: Maekawa Gōmeisha.

100  Philip Flavin Tateyama, N. 1976 [1922]. ‘Koto gakki no kairyō ni tsuite’. Sankyoku 5: 14–15. Voeglin, S. 2010. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York, London: Continuum.

5 The ‘hell of modern sound’ A history of urban noise in modern Japan Martyn David Smith

Introduction The contemporary Japanese city soundscape is loud. It consists of unending announcements at railway stations, talking ATMs and escalators, loops of ads and jingles in department stores, supermarkets, and shopping arcades; the loudspeaker-wielding trucks of right-wing groups, carts selling everything from sweet potatoes to screen doors and even petrol; police and politicians with megaphones; constant warnings about the dangers of riding on the bus or train; and the sirens, car horns, and rumble of traffic and pedestrians found in any contemporary cityscape. Philosopher and contemporary antinoise campaigner Nakajima Yoshimichi (1996) is merely the loudest proponent of the idea that the Japanese people are oppressed by—or, in his term, pickled in—the constant noise of everyday life. For Nakajima, there is a crippling passivity and ignorance at the core of Japanese peoples’ relationship with urban noise. Many scholars, musicologists, and musicians have also seen a cultural propensity in Japan to passively accept noise in public spaces. The idea that Japanese people perceive sound differently from ‘westerners’ has informed much of the scholarship on sound and music in Japan, often drifting into the realms of the cultural essentialism typified by Nihonjinron (theories of Japanese-ness). Noisiness may be socially unacceptable, but it is still understood as being tolerated by the Japanese as a basic feature of their ‘sound saturated society’ (Novak 2015, 132).1 Many scholars have argued for a contemporary Asian city soundscape that favours the boisterous, vigorous, and energetic in contrast to the West’s ‘quest for oases of calm’ (Chenhall, Kohn and Stevens 2021, 26–27). Recent research, however, shows that sound in contemporary Japan clearly sits at the centre of an ongoing battle over social and cultural propriety, individual belonging, and the politics of public space (Hankins and Stevens 2013). Thanks to this challenging of the presumption that Japan is somehow unique or special with regard to sensitivity to sound, it is becoming clear how the sensory experience of noise in Japan informs and transforms the ways in which people actively listen, not just to music, but to the sounds of the everyday. And there is a growing volume of work, in English and in Japanese, that analyses the differing genealogies, embodiments, manifestations, and theorisations central to the field of sound DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772-8

102  Martyn David Smith studies (Yoshimi 1995, Edwards 2011, 89–102; Dolan 2008, 662–690; Kreutzfeld 2006, 88–99; Plourde 2019, 1–14; Novak 2008, 15–34; Abe 2018; Hayshi and McKnight 2005; Service 2018; Manabe 2015; Yasar 2018). If, as Steingo and Sykes have recently noted, it is important that scholars investigate ‘diverse sonic ontologies, processes, and actions’ (2019, 4) to better understand core components of the history of sound in global modernity, then that work is well underway for contemporary Japan. Still, what little research has been done on the history of noise as an urban problem in Japan prior to the 1970s has often focused on complaints about the noise of US military bases and concerns around aircraft noise (Igarashi 1993; Cox 2013). As this chapter shows, a longer historical perspective on discussions and debates over noise in urban Japan highlights continuities and similarities as much as contingency and diversity. The problem of urban noise in Japan has a history. Far from passively accepting or culturally embracing noise, the Japanese have long struggled with the definition, ­measurement, and control of unwanted sound, even if these efforts appear in vain from a contemporary perspective. Since at least the 1870s, debates and ­discussions created sonic ontologies and produced similar processes and actions, at similar moments, as in the cities of Western Europe or the US. Noise came  to be seen in tandem with other modern social problems, but unlike in Europe at the same moment, these debates were not necessarily connected to ­anti-urban or anti-modern discourses (Payer 2007; Mansell 2017). From the late nineteenth century to the late 1970s, noise and the idea of the ‘modern’ soundscape also worked within a feedback loop that amplified politically driven debates about the nature of ‘modernity’ and the meaning of ‘civilisation’.2 In Japan, rather than a pathological aspect of the process of modernity, noise often became an indication of the low level of civilisation and enlightenment of the people and exposed the nagging need to ‘catch up’ with the West and the necessity of expert intervention. This chapter traces some of those debates to better understand the process through which the noise of modern technology was constructed as an urban problem that gave way to the noise of people and everyday life by the late 1970s. The first section will examine how the physical sound, or sonic ecology, of Japan’s cities changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and outline some of the responses to that transformation. Authorities’ concern for noise stemmed from an overwhelming fear of embarrassment in the eyes of the Western powers, as the Meiji Restoration sought to transform the country into a modern nation-state as quickly as possible. This paternal approach to urban noise mainly targeted the lower classes and, in step with a growing intellectual discourse, framed the Japanese people as backward and unsuitable for civilisation. Although during the 1910s and 1920s, middle-class citizens did take up moral cleansing and prompted cultural reform movements, such as those against prostitution and for temperance, urban noise failed to become a rallying point for citizens’ movements. In most Japanese cities, the main cause of complaint was increasing traffic rather than the noise of that traffic. Dealing with this required top-down expert interference and

The ‘hell of modern sound’  103 regulation raising questions about the nature of urban noise itself. I then go on to discuss the pressing problem of definition that arose by the late 1920s as groups of scientists, engineers, and acousticians began to come together to try and find ways of dealing with the problem of noise. Through their debates, noisy neighbours, street noise, or the noise of people going about their daily business came to be understood as ‘urban music’ and was disregarded in favour of a focus on traffic, transport, and civic construction projects. The lack of popular, citizen-driven anti-noise movements like those that formed in Europe and the US at the same moment took the problem out of the hands of the individual. Social or individual responsibility for urban noise in Japan was muted in favour of modern technological solutions to a problem of modern technology. The final section outlines the re-emergence of the problem of city noise in the early post-war years and highlights the connections to the early 1900s. By the late 1950s, the noise from individuals going about their everyday lives in the city was increasingly recognised as a problem that was refocused as one of personal and social hygiene best solved by individuals, society, and the state working together. Still reverberating throughout these debates, however, was the belief that the difficulty of dealing with urban noise was at its root a problem with the backwardness of the Japanese people. The solution to the ‘barbarism of civilisation’ lay in their eventual enlightenment.

The changing ecology of sound An 1817 ordinance applying to the whole city of Edo (Tokyo) stated that noisy disturbances, kensou (喧噪), should be sorted out amicably by the people involved. Kensou mainly applied to public unrest, fighting or general boisterousness. Mostly related to human or animal noise, kensou could be dealt with through amicable agreement; it did not usually require the intervention of the authorities and was not considered in relation to its effects on health (Sueoka 2007, 77–78). After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the new national government’s immediate concern was catching up with the ‘Great Powers’; a task which involved unleashing the potential of the Japanese people through western style education, government, and the promotion of culture. The new leaders believed that the great nations of Europe relied on the resourcefulness of their populations and hoped to create a community of loyal, self-actualised, dutiful national subjects. Unfortunately, they also believed that the Japanese people were simply not that sophisticated. Their craftsmen were ignorant of modern machinery, merchants chased petty profits instead of focusing on world trade, farmers lacked independent thinking, and the former samurai class was ignorant of modern statecraft and warfare (Ravina 2017, 149–150). Creating a sense of public order and civilised values that would be acceptable to western sensibilities and ridding the country of the barbaric customs of the past required a more centralised system for dealing with immoral or illegal behaviour and different definitions of what constituted both. In Tokyo, an 1879 ordinance added a prohibition against singing,

104  Martyn David Smith dancing, or playing music after midnight, and otherwise disturbing sleep, to already banned behaviours such as urinating in the street, mixed bathing, or displaying tattoos (Sueoka 2000, 208). As in Victorian England (Picker 2003), the notion of noise here mainly targeted the sounds of the lower classes-street musicians and performers, as well as Kabuki theatres. By many accounts, the sounds of everyday life in nineteenth-century Japan were not well-suited to refined European sensibilities (Naito 2005; Yasar 2018, 59–68). British traveller Isabella Bird complained of the high-pitched whining of voices in the street, the discordant sounds of the shamisen, Noh chanting, and the thud of Taiko drumming. Whilst Bird’s neurotic whingeing about noise may well have been a reflection of deeper psychological, orientalist, and blatantly British Victorian concerns with perspective (Holt 2017), she, like many other Westerners visiting Japan in the late nineteenth century, nevertheless conjured a soundscape still largely dominated by organic noise. After the restoration of 1868 though, the government instituted a process of industrialisation and modernisation that rapidly transformed the social, economic, and political nature of the country. Environmental pollution quickly became a serious concern for the Japanese people but was generally viewed as an unfortunate sacrifice to be made in pursuit of nation building projects central to the process of modernisation. The emphasis on designing Japan’s urban spaces around transportation as a bringer of prosperity and an indicator of a city’s commercial and economic vitality, for example, lauded roads and streets as an index of civilisation and modernity; so much so that street improvement became central to Japan’s urban construction projects in its colonies (Gun and Townsend 2019, 19). By the early twentieth century, the authorities had begun to recognise and take action to tackle smog, chemical, and industrial pollution problems arising from industrialisation and mass production (Miyamoto 2013). Yet the process of modernisation also dramatically changed the sonic ecology of Japan’s cities, and soon made clear the need for new ways of understanding, discussing, and dealing with noise. It took less than half a century for factories, trains, buses, trams, cars, motorcycles, telephone, radio, pneumatic drills, and steam hammers to begin to drown out the more organic sounds of everyday life that disturbed Bird’s orientalist quest for peace and tranquillity. As the landscape became industrialised, mechanised, and increasingly dominated and dictated by modern forms of transportation, the sounds heard, and their volume and consistency, contributed to the emergence of a sonic ecology very different from that of Edo-Period Japan.3 The density of Japan’s pre-Meiji urban spaces—Edo was the most populated city in the world by the 1700s—meant that the presence of people, traffic, transport, and construction was a constant feature. Nevertheless, from the late 1800s rickshaws, horse- and ox-drawn wagons, pull carts, and pedestrians quickly came to compete with bicycles, trams, trains, automobiles, and motorbikes as transportation moved from the river to the roads. If, as Emily Thompson claims (2002, 1), a soundscape is both a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment, then from

The ‘hell of modern sound’  105 the early 1870s, the physicality of Japan’s urban soundscape was fundamentally transformed. Gradually, the pernicious and violent effects of modern, machine-made noise on human health, and the need to use modern technology to adapt the environment to reduce it, increased the influence of acoustical experts, engineers, and scientists. But the battle over the perception of the noise of modernity in Japan nevertheless continued to work on the Meiji-era assumption that the Japanese people themselves lacked the required level of civilisation to understand the need for quiet. In the 1870s, kengou (喧囂), which, like kensou, marked noise as an organic problem, was increasingly being used in complaints about ‘the wild uproar and pandemonium of public bathhouses’ and the noise made by night soil collectors—still associating noise and boisterousness with the lower classes. However, in May 1878, the Osaka authorities noted that kengou was becoming increasingly related to issues of public health, as were the increasing number of complaints about vibrations (chikyou 地響) from people living next to metal works and smithies (Koyama 1973, 282–283). From the start of the Meiji period (1868–1912), the Osaka authorities had noted the need for regulations targeting factories (Sueoka 2000, 212). Over the following decades, the noise caused by civil engineering projects increasingly impinged on the environment of everyday life, as city planners rebuilt large areas of Japan’s major cities, laying concrete foundations, building subways, and dreaming up various modern cityscapes. By the 1920s, Osaka was the sixth largest metropolis in the world. Modern transportation increased the population densities of both Tokyo and Osaka, and, with the appearance of trams, trains, and taxis, the problem of traffic noise came to be understood as one of the biggest threats to the lives and health of urban residents. As once formerly cobbled roads were tarmacked and rubber tyres began to become commonplace, the use of car horns and bells increased. These could be essential to the prevention of fatal accidents, and their excessive use was even actively promoted by the authorities in Amsterdam (Jacobs 2012, 305–321). Nevertheless, in Osaka, they contributed to what one newspaper described as a ‘hell of modern sound’ that had given birth to the ‘scream of civilisation sickness’ (Kotsu hanka ga unda bunmei-byo no himei’, Osaka Asahi Shimbun, 2 February 1929 reprinted in Koyama 1973, 349). By the start of the Showa period (1925–1989), the organic basis for the noise problem had been drowned out by modern urban lifestyles. The number of automobiles, trucks, and motorbikes on the streets of Osaka grew from 39 in 1915 to 6,886 in 1935. In Nagoya by the mid-1930s, the 2,000 cars on the roads jostled for space with countless bicycles, 809 ‘automatic bicycles’, and no less than 26,630 hand-pulled carts. Various vehicles competed for space on narrow and winding streets designed for pedestrians (Gun and Townsend 2019, 21). The noise was impressive, and loud internal combustion-powered vehicles, combined with rough road surfaces and rudimentary driving etiquette, served to amplify the problem (Hanes 2016). In 1929, the November 9th edition of the Osaka Asahi newspaper explained how the city’s main street, Sakaisuji, was the source of a disorderly,

106  Martyn David Smith untidy ‘symphony’ at rush hour when 7,000 vehicles streamed through the area as ‘the sandbags were lifted, and all kinds of wheels stampeded forth like a torrent’ (Osaka Asahi Shimbun 9 November 1929, reprinted in Koyama 1973, 349–351). At those times, Sakaisuji became more than simply a bustling street and far from melodious. The cacophony caused a ‘sorrowful cry’ to ‘well up inside’, as shopkeepers and pedestrians took their lives into their own hands simply going about their daily business. ‘Born of the bustle of transportation’, the ‘scream of civilisation sickness’ had forced 450 residents along Osaka’s main street to petition the prefectural government to do something (Koyama 1973, 349). The petition outlined the lethal nuisance caused by traffic, particularly for school children, and called for limits on the speed of cars and bicycles as well as the provision of clearly marked pedestrian crossings. The banning of bulky delivery bicycles or tricycles and rules to stop empty taxis driving around small areas were also necessary. The petition reflected a very real concern with the physical presence and violence of modern transportation because the immediate danger to life lay in the very real prospect of being run over. Yet, of the 13 points noted in the petition, seven concerned the problem of noise. By adding these seven articles on noise, the authors aimed to bring about salvation from the ‘hell of sound’ (onkyo jikoku) (Koyama, 1973, 349). They recognised the biological, affective nature of modern noise. The indescribably unpleasant cacophony of blasts and sirens from vehicles dashing down the road was making the people who lived and worked around Sakaisuji, particularly those who worked on the upper floors of adjacent high-rise buildings, sick from nervous exhaustion. The Sakaisuji petition sought to combat this, requesting devices to reduce sound levels from automobiles, motorbikes, and even bicycles. Residents urged the authorities to consider ways to reduce noise from exhaust pipes, bells, and horns. Indeed, it was imperative to ban any continuous and unnecessary sounding of horns, the petition noted. Outside certain areas, this should be banned altogether, and the tone of car, train, and bicycle horns should be changed to make them more pleasing to the ear. The local police inspector saw excessive noise as a clear side effect of the development of a traffic culture in the city but warned that the increased sounding of horns and bells was not necessarily a bad thing. Mr Oda, of the traffic safety section of the local government, saw the physical danger posed by traffic as more important than the noise emanating from it. Changing the sound of the horns would cause all sorts of problems over how to distinguish different vehicles. Restricting their use could well lead to an increase in traffic accidents. At the end of the day, the noise problem was likely more to do with the fact that a lot of horn blowing was unconscious and ‘even in jest’ (Koyama 1973, 349). Despite the Osaka Mainichi newspaper labelling the city’s noise ‘the barbarism of civilisation’ (Osaka Mainichi Shimbun 9 October 1931, reprinted in Koyama 1973, 354–356), this idea that the Japanese were profligate with their noisemaking connected the problem to a broader issue with the Japanese people’s adaptation to modernity rather than the process itself. For many commentators, educating the

The ‘hell of modern sound’  107 Japanese people in the correct ways of making modern noise was an essential, though difficult task. In this context, the class-based prejudices of the discourse on noise developing in the West—that noise was causing the mental and physical breakdown of men who would ‘do lasting work of the greatest public importance as lawyers, social reformers, preachers, journalists, physicians or surgeons’ (Mansell 2017, 36–37)—was transposed in Japan onto the nation as a whole in its quest to catch up with the West. Excessive noise was soon understood as a problem with the supposedly backward nature of the Japanese people, rather than a form of social and environmental pollution that needed to be dealt with in a formal manner. Indeed, the noise along Sakaisuji could also interfere with the correct functioning of modern technology and thus the process of modernity itself. According to the owner of one restaurant on the street, the noise of the traffic was so loud that he had trouble hearing his customers’ orders over the phone and often made simple mistakes that cost him good business (Koyama 1973, 350). The growing consensus was that the problem of city noise (toshi souon mondai) could best be solved if the Japanese people learned to make it in the correct manner. The result of this concern with noise and how to control it was not so much the pathologising of modernity, as in Britain or Europe in the same period, but a concern with traffic noise as uncontrolled interference with the everyday life of the people and, at the same time, one expression of the Japanese people’s lack of ‘civilisation’. Debate and discussion around the problem of noise in Japan was gathering pace by the 1920s. As in Europe and the US at the same time, this idea of noise as ‘unwanted sound’ or interference became common among acoustical engineers and scientists (Bijsterveld 2001, 52). Yet its problematisation in Japan had centred on a lack of civilisation since at least the start of the twentieth century. In September 1902, Mr A. Victim wrote a letter to the editor of the Japan Times regarding the ‘tremendous and unnecessary amount of steamboat whistling’ on the Sumida River in Tokyo. As one of the ‘thousands of innocent people’ disturbed by the whistles, Mr Victim hoped to draw the attention of the proper authorities, whether the harbour police or the city police, to the ‘almost continual howl of that greatest of modern ­nerve-destroying devices the steam whistle in the hands of men who regard it only as a means by which they may gratify their barbaric desire to make a noise’. The writer acknowledged the legal right of the officers in charge of the boats to blow their whistles. It was necessary to avoid collisions and warn ‘some dilatory junk or other vessel’ that it should get out of the way. That was, after all, ‘the rule of the road at sea by all civilised nations’. Yet, whereas ‘other civilised nations’ had ‘long ago stopped all playing with whistles such as occurs every day and every night on the Sumida’, the whistles in Tokyo could be heard every 20 to 30 seconds; ‘[f]or no other reason that anyone can observe, excepting that they like to play with their whistles’ (The Japan Times 1902, 3).4 Mr Victim had undertaken his own (unofficial and unscientific) survey into noise pollution along the river providing the evidence. From around four in the morning, boats blew their whistles on average twice a minute. Between

108  Martyn David Smith three and five in the afternoon, the presence of several boats at a time meant they were even more frequent—‘an average of fourteen times in six minutes’ (The Japan Times, 9 September 1902, 3). This was clearly annoying for all those who lived within earshot of the river, claimed Mr Victim, but it must have been especially distressing for those who lay on their sickbed. Moreover, the cacophony of boat whistles was on top of the sounding of factory whistles at all hours of the day and night, ‘not just once but with a number of prolonged blasts’ that made sleep and repose almost impossible (The Japan Times, 9 September 1902, 3). Mr Victim argued that in other countries, a single blast of the factory whistle was quite enough to ‘remind the most stupid workman’ that it was home time (The Japan Times, 9 September 1902, 3). Yet, from the vicinity of Tsukushima, a man-made island in Tokyo Bay, two long blasts would bellow out at midnight. Then, from four in the morning and throughout the day, various factories competed to blow their horns, each longer than the other. As with the steamboat whistles, this caused very great distress and annoyance to ‘all who have to endure it at all hours of the day and night’ (The Japan Times, 9 September 1902, 3). The letter contrasted an apparently (previously) tranquil and peaceful ‘natural’ city to the threatening nature of the noise made along the river. As with Osaka’s main thoroughfare in the late 1920s, the noise of river traffic destroyed the nerves of those subjected to it, and the cacophony caused by the factories and the boats along the Sumida was ‘out of joint with the ancient repose and general good management of Tokio [sic]’ (The Japan Times, 9 September 1902, 3). Mr Victim believed that the authorities’ attention had not yet been directed to this nuisance but acknowledged that he was not certain to which authority the regulation belonged—the department of Communications, or the Water or Land Police. He nevertheless hoped that ‘the proper officers would take it promptly in hand and […] do all that is lawful to suppress it’. Doing so would earn them the gratitude of ‘many citizens of this old city’. No one could object ‘in the least to the necessary signals of commerce, nor to a reasonable length of factory whistle to call the men together’. Still, Mr Victim found it hard to believe ‘that the Japanese can possibly be so dull as to require three times as many steam whistle blasts, either on river or land, as the men of any other nation’ (The Japan Times, 9 September 1902, 3). The unnecessary, unpredictable, and threatening noises on and around the Sumida River demonstrated an incomplete process of civilisation, according to Mr Victim’s logic. The discourse about Japanese people’s unsuitability to modernity—modern forms of working as well as modern forms of transportation—rang out loud and clear long before the Sakaisuji residents put forward their petition. As elsewhere then, the effects of noise on health, particularly the nervous system, came to underpin anti-noise campaigns from the early twentieth century onwards. Yet, in Japan, this medicalisation of noise carried prejudices of class and rural repose that informed the contrast between ‘civilisation’ and ‘backwardness’ in debates about modernity in Japan: Japanese factory owners and steamboat captains did not understand the need for control over

The ‘hell of modern sound’  109 unnecessary noise, or the threat it posed, and the workers they employed were unable to get the message that it was time to go home. Yet the chaos of modernity also made clear a lack of ‘modern’ forms of authority, such as central control over what happened on the river or over the traffic along Sakaisuji. If the feudal regime had worked within a system of delegation to local authorities when dealing with noise, the modern state needed to establish forms of authority to deal with the noise problem and its threat to health and the (perceived) ancient peacefulness of Japan’s cities. As early as 1902, Mr Victim’s discussion of noise hints at wider debates over the nature, meaning, and threat posed by a process of modernity that originated in the West. As with the bustle of rush hour along Sakaisuji in Osaka more than two decades later, the sound of the whistles on the Sumida was a form of interference; a noise that interrupted the transmission of modernity and signalled a lack of civilisation. The ‘hell of modern noise’ that triumphed by the 1930s then was not only a condition of modernity—an inescapable component of the technology that came with it—but also a problem with the response of the Japanese people to that modernity.

Defining, understanding, and controlling noise Perhaps because the Japanese people were seen as unsuited, or at least not quite ready for civilised modernity, solutions to the serious urban noise problems caused by overcrowding and industrialisation in the 1910s and 1920s involved the increasing engagement of scientists and other specialists rather than being driven by citizens’ movements. In these decades, cities like Tokyo and Osaka became some of the most densely populated cities in the world (Townsend 2014). Although treatment of some of the more obvious environmental pollution problems was bringing faith in scientific solutions into question (Watanabe 2013, 74–75),5 the quest for ways of measuring and ultimately controlling urban noise soon came to incorporate experts in the fields of acoustics, public health, construction, and transportation. As Raymond Smilor (1977) has shown, in the US, a shift in approach to the noise problem occurred around the time of the first world war as citizens’ groups began to wage a legal battle against noise. Nevertheless, during the 1920s, experts, scientists, and managers took over these campaigns and expanded research, experiments, and measurements aimed at examining every aspect of the problem (Smilor 1977, 25). In Japan, it was the scientific and technological prospects for controlling the noise of modern technology that brought the problem to public attention. In 1930, an exhibition was held in Osaka showcasing work that was underway in various fields and introducing the different scientific means of measuring sound and the problem of defining noise. The exhibition included the results of a survey by New York’s Noise Abatement Commission which had measured noise at different locations around the city. The problems plaguing America’s largest city were little different from those highlighted in the petition by the residents of Sakaisuji: screeching brakes, the abuse of car horns, pneumatic drills, as well as the turnstiles in subways

110  Martyn David Smith and train stations (Hirokawa 1979, 279). The New York report made it clear that the noise of machinery now needed to be considered a serious health hazard. The clamour of the city impaired the hearing of New Yorkers and induced harmful strain upon the nervous system that led to loss of efficiency for workers and thinkers and that disturbed everyone’s sleep (Bijsterveld 2001, 53). In Japan, the exhibition raised public awareness and spurred research and investigation into the prevention of city noise but, unlike in the US and Europe where citizen-led anti-noise movements were taken over by the experts, in Japan the driving influence behind the search for solutions to the problem came from experts, scientists, business conglomerates, merchant associations, and the state. Due to the rapid process of urbanisation from the early twentieth century, the problem also became dominated by the issue of traffic noise. At the Osaka exhibition, the city’s architectural association set up a soundproof room and an echo chamber. Ten different kinds of car exhaust mufflers were on display, and the museum’s director had recorded noise levels around several locations using the latest technology to create a database of information that ‘would be of great interest to the people of the city’. The display also included more ‘traditional’ elements of the soundscape: the sounds of animals, folklore, religious rituals, superstition, and those ‘sounds used to sell goods’ (‘Toshi no Souon Shindan ni-ju Kara Akareru Kyomi Bukai Tenrankai’, Osaka Asahi, 12 December 1930, reprinted in Koyama 1973, 351; see also Hanes 2016, 34–35). But it was the problem of the noise of trains, trams, and cars that was taken up as the most pressing. In the Kanto region, private rail companies represented by Odakyū, Tokyo Shiden, Shonan Dentetsu, Tokyo Chikatetsu, Nanbu Tetsudo, and others, met to discuss the problem of train noise and the best way to study it in more detail (Hirokawa 1979, 279–280). The noise created between the tracks and the carriages, different kinds of train whistles, and the acoustics of the manufacturing materials used in the making of carriages made clear the diverse fields within which the problem of sound and noise emerged. The project quickly expanded to include experts from the manufacturing department of Tokyo Imperial University, Tokyo Imperial Aeronautics Research Centre, Japan Electric, as well as a representative from the research division of the railway ministry, and it even included presentations from several biologists interested in the Japanese voice. In 1931, the issue became even more pressing when the government began to promote tourism to overcome economic depression (Hirokawa 1979, 279–280). The promotion of peaceful and relaxing tourism by train was an important impetus for the increasing understanding of—and growing alarm at—the effects of noise on the human body. In October 1931, the Osaka Mainichi newspaper explained that the damage to health had long been ignored, even though the ‘noise of the factory came from the right and, from the left, the roar of traffic’. Noise increased the heart rate, raised blood pressure, could weaken muscles, and even ‘attack you in your sleep’ (Osaka Mainichi Shimbun, 9 October 1931). People needed to be made aware that noise was not only psychological, but also biological.

The ‘hell of modern sound’  111 In 1928, a similar case had been made by the prosecuting lawyers in a Tokyo court case. Representing people disturbed by the constant vibrations of trucks going to and from a book binding factory, they argued that, compared with smoke and river pollution, noise was a relatively recent problem: the special characteristic of noise is that it directly and powerfully gives citizens a sense of being damaged. Unlike water and air pollution, where the problems build up gradually and the cause is often hard to find, there is none of that ambiguity with noise. Noise also seems to be impossible to deal with as it shocks the nerves and destroys everyday life. Physical well-being and sleep are affected, thought, study, work and conversation are impaired. Noise directly causes stress and discomfort in the ordinary activities and very existence of human beings. (Quoted in Koyama 1973, 283–284) By the early 1930s then, concerns over the effect of noise on public health and the prospects for control over sound through the latest technology were clear, but the focus had shifted completely since the early Meiji period. In 1937, thanks to increasing concern over disturbed sleep and study, the Osaka authorities issued the first regulation aiming to control excessive noise from radios, gramophones, and other electrical appliances emanating from the home (Sueoka 2000, 210). Nevertheless, from the early twentieth century, it was the noise of modern machinery-transport, industrial production, and construction that took precedence over the noise of people going about their everyday lives. Bringing experts from various scientific fields and social policy makers together to tackle this problem raised the subject of terminology and further focused the urban noise problem on transport and industrial production. In April 1934, in a special issue of Toshi Mondai (Urban Problems), Fujiwara Kujirou published his seminal study of noise abatement, which included noise data from sound meters. Two years later, the Japan Acoustical Society was established by a concerned group of physicists (Hirokawa 1979, 281– 283).6 By the mid-1930s, the term souon (騒音) was being used in some antinoise ordinances (Sueoka 2000, 213), and appeared regularly in the media. However, since the 1870s when mechanical noise had begun to overtake organic noise as a cause of complaint, the issue of how to define noise from different sources—what was noise—had actually never really been tackled. It was by no means an easy task. In media debate and discussion, the compounds (騒音) (噪音), both pronounced souon, were often used interchangeably to refer to noise. Because of increasing interest in the problem by the early 1930s, there was a lively debate over terminology and the complexity of definition in comparison to English. As various groups began to form to investigate the problem, an agreed definition became necessary if researchers and specialists from different fields were to work towards mitigating urban noise. That definition politicised the issue by separating and then prioritising certain sounds over others.

112  Martyn David Smith In physics, the concept of sound (onkyou 音響) can be ongaku (音楽); referring to melodious sound waves—relatively constant in volume and timing and generally repetitive—this is the compound used to translate the word music. The term souon (噪音) consists of complicated sound waves—they rarely repeat and can change in volume and timing. In physics, this term is restricted to unappealing, unwanted sound and interference: noise. But, taken on its scientific definition alone, souon (噪音) can of course be suitable for discussing the sound of the wind, water, footsteps, and the sounds of daily life in any city (Koyama 1973, 290–292). As the scientists, engineers and acousticians took on the issue in Japan in the 1920s, the term souon (噪音) became the common way of referring to noise. Yet, as physicist Kohata Shigekazu pointed out in the September 1930 edition of the journal Toshi Mondai, the complexities of urban noise were disavowed by the scientific bias of the term. To study the problem using the term souon (噪音), it was necessary to label many of the usual, acceptable, and expected sounds of daily life or the natural world as noise because of their diverse, constantly changing frequencies (reprinted in Koyama 1973, 297–303). It was two months later that architect Satou Takeo sought to remedy this by proposing a different word, 騒音 (still with the same pronunciation of souon), be used to separate city noise from noise in physics and music (Koyama 1973, 290–292). In the compound 騒音, the first character implies boisterous or turbulent; and in contemporary Japan, it refers to noise which violently obstructs peace and quiet, interferes with the transmission of organised sound such as music or conversation, and can damage the sense of hearing and human health. The article argued that making this distinction would help to broaden the terms of the debate and make it easier to distinguish noise that had an unpleasant effect on daily life from the more organic noises emanating from humans, animals, or the natural world (Koyama 1973, 292). A few years later, in 1933, in the September issue of the same journal, Kinichi Hirose proposed kensouon (喧噪音) as another means of solving the problem of definition. Adding the symbol for boisterous, noisy, brawling (yakamashii), used in the Edo and Meiji periods discussed above, the author further stressed that the compound 噪音 did not really imply a boisterous or unpleasant sound: Kensouon (喧噪音) is different from 噪音 (souon). 噪音(souon) is the term for noise constructed through the study of acoustics. It certainly does not refer to unpleasant sound, and 喧噪音(kensouon) is not (meant to imply) 噪音 (souon). From the perspective of acoustics, much of the sound that creates urban noise (Toshi kensouon), can be labelled music (ongaku 音楽) […] The general name given to the problem is mistaken. (Koyama, 1973, 290–292) Hirose wanted to make it clear that the problem to be addressed was ‘city noise’ (都市喧噪音), not ‘city music’ (都市噪音). It was necessary to highlight the unpleasant sounds of urban life, but scientific terminology based on

The ‘hell of modern sound’  113 the nature of different types of sound waves was not enough. In this way, the debates over terminology rendered the problem of noisy neighbours, street noise or the noise of people going about their daily business extraneous to the problem of city noise. Footsteps, singing, music blaring, and tradespeople shouting in the street would not come under the definition of city noise as the scientists shaped it, because these were seen as part of the aesthetic appeal of city life. For those writing in the 1920s and 1930s, the ‘noisiness’ of everyday life that the contemporary philosopher Nakamichi describes in contemporary Japanese cities was not a problem. It was simply ‘city music’. The real task lay in putting the latest technology to use in order to tackle the discordant sounds of transport, civil engineering, and construction techniques—the hell of noise created by modern machinery. The debates during the 1920s and 1930s were certainly lively and important, yet they served to restrict the noise problem to a mechanical, industrial, and scientific one.

Reconstruction and the re-definition of the problem By the late 1930s, domestic concerns about noise came to seem luxurious anyway. Many of the reports and articles drawn up by research groups founded in the 1930s were destroyed during the bombing of Japan’s major cities and, from the late 1930s onwards, scientists, acousticians, and experts on noise and sound were drafted to work with the military, particularly the navy (Hirokawa 1953, 203). In any case, given the stringent living conditions in post-1945 Japan, noise was the least of the problems facing the Japanese people. The need to demolish ruins, rebuild and reconstruct infrastructure, homes, and livelihoods, must have made both urban and rural areas increasingly loud. Yet, the problems with terminology and the pre-war process of addressing city noise as a technical and scientific issue that required expert knowledge to understand, treat, and control had in many ways removed the problem of the noise of everyday life from the realm of social and scientific debate. And the re-emergence of debates over city noise in the late 1940s remained focussed on the environmental impact of industrial noise, construction noise, and traffic noise (Koyasu 1987, 223–234). Some echoes of the early twentieth-century debates remained, however. Not long after the formal end of the US-led occupation in 1952, the noise problem again became linked with doubts over the suitability of the Japanese people for modernity, as the pressing need to overcome the social, political, and cultural baggage of the years of militarism tapped into Meiji era debates about cultural and moral reform. In 1953, the chief of the Acoustical Society of Japan, Koji Sato, set the problem of urban noise within wider issues of the modern development of the country and returned to the theme of comparison with the West. In 1952, Sato had spent three months travelling around Europe and the US. On boarding an aeroplane in Tokyo for the first time since the war, he i­ mmediately appreciated the fact that the soundproofing inside the plane had improved dramatically. Nevertheless, Japanese people’s attitude to noise had not.

114  Martyn David Smith According to Sato, the waiting room at the gate in Haneda airport was ‘always crowded and so very noisy’, in stark contrast to the US and Europe where waiting rooms were bigger but much quieter. In the West, the technology was also better. Although there were constant announcements over loudspeakers about flights, speaker volume was not too loud, and the sound quality was decent (Sato 1953, 206). On arriving in Europe, Sato experienced an ‘eerie, weird silence’ that would unsettle anyone used to the cacophony of Tokyo. The streets were quiet. The noise of three-wheelers or motorbikes was negligible. In Europe and the US, buses were large and sturdy, emitting far less noise than the diesel-powered Japanese type, and the roads were all paved. Trains and trams were also quiet. Indeed, the whole experience of public transport was much quieter than in Japan. But this tranquillity had implications for the unsuspecting Japanese tourist similar to the concern over quieting traffic noise in Osaka back in the 1920s. Sato claimed that trains ‘make no sound when they pull into a station. They also make no noise as they leave the platform, so there is the fear of missing the train’ (Sato 1953, 206). He complained that, at some point without knowing it, the Japanese had become accustomed to diving out of the way of traffic on hearing a horn. The concern for physical safety shown by Mr. Oda in 1920s Osaka had clearly been successful. Yet, in Europe, the quiet made it difficult for Sato to cross the road, because it lulled him into a false sense of security. Unless there was a danger to life, car drivers did not blast their horns: ‘I would step out into the road, only to jump back as lots of cars came past in front of me’. In Japan, Sato argued, cars constantly sounded their horns to shoo people out of the way. The problem of urban noise, when prioritised as a problem of traffic and modern technology, appeared to have been successfully dealt with in Europe and the US. Sato, probably unconsciously, harked back to the debates over ‘city noise’ versus ‘city music’ that had come to the fore in the 1930s.7 He noted that in the West, there was no noise spilling out from radios, gramophones, or record players. Dogs and domestic animals were kept inside the house and there were no advertising announcements. These were the sounds of everyday life disregarded in the 1930s in favour of scientific solutions to the noise made by transport, production, and construction. Solutions to the pre-war urban noise problem required the involvement of experts, and there was little, if anything, the people themselves could do. In the 1950s though, debates began to incorporate the noise made by the people—what some had referred to in the 1930s as ‘city music’. Sato saw that war damage in Japan’s major cities provided a useful opportunity for the development of sound prevention technology. He noted the views of his American counterpart, acoustical physicist Vern Knudsen, founder of the Acoustical Society of America, that because of the lack of war damage the US lagged behind European countries in the implementation of the latest noise reduction technology.8 Sato himself was surprised during his trip to the US to find instruments from the 1930s still being used. He stressed the opportunity for Japan to follow Europe and eliminate noise at its roots by incorporating research on sound into building

The ‘hell of modern sound’  115 regulations as the country was being rapidly rebuilt. Sato argued, as had the organisers of the Osaka exhibition of 1930 and the debates and discussions of the early twentieth century, that technical control over noise would help bring Japan into line with the more modern and developed countries of Europe and the US. At the same time though, he shifted the focus of the debate towards the sounds of everyday life and the people and goods that made them, rather than traffic, transport, and industry. Just a year later, in the same journal, Kaname Kurihara rejected the development of expert knowledge and better use of new technology as the best and only solution to the noise problem, and also shifted the discussion of city noise away from industry and traffic. Kurihara urged a change in the social and cultural, rather than technological approach to the problem of sound. He believed that noise needed to be discussed as both an individual and a social problem. It was subjective. Noise affected each person differently. In contrast to the efforts of scientists and experts working in the 1920s and 1930s, Kurihara believed that the Japanese approached noise as a subjective issue that required an individual solution. He estimated that half of the ‘random noise’ problem was caused by the behaviour of the mass of ordinary people rather than by industry. He believed that the ‘half-hearted’ sound prevention measures being put in place in Tokyo did at least acknowledge that sound could be a social problem, and he recognised that framing the problem was difficult: was it a ‘safety issue, a health issue, a problem of enlightenment, or punishment?’ (Kurihara 1954, 159). Yet, whatever the difficulties in defining the problem of noise—understanding it as a purely technological one or one that could be solved by simply legislating against certain sounds—missed the point. In the 1920s, the petition against the ‘hell of noise’ in Sakaisuji had argued that it was an obstruction, blocking work, destroying the health of those who were sick or injured, and reducing the positive effects of modern technology. Noise was not a symbol of modernity or a consequence of it, but a hindrance in achieving it made worse by the Japanese peoples’ supposed lack of civilisation. Writing a quarter of a century later, Kurihara agreed, and he claimed that the Japanese people were ‘immature and sluggish’ in their understanding and approach to the problem of noise (Kurihara 1954). Although he did not reference the debates of the 1920s, and, like Sato, may have been unaware of them, he believed that blaming the technology that produced noise—or a lack of technological progress in insulating against it—disavowed a deeper problem with the nature of noise itself and the lack of ‘enlightenment’ of the Japanese people. Noise was a thoroughly modern problem that needed to be confronted in the same way as certain communicable diseases (Kurihara 1954). Given that scientists working on research into sound looked at how to suppress or reduce its transmission, Kurihara saw that there was already a connection between their work and that of the doctors who sought to prevent and understand the transmission of disease. By making noise an issue of public sanitation (souon no koushu eisei 騒音の公衆衛生), means of prevention, legal protections, and prosecutions would naturally emerge—as had

116  Martyn David Smith been the case with other industrial diseases. But this required a change in the way noise was thought about. In post-war Japan, Kurihara wanted to promote a discourse that treated noise as an infectious disease. He acknowledged the need for a legal and scientific definition and agreement on the technical measurement of it, but he also insisted that people making random noise should be treated and thought about in the same way as the carrier of an infectious disease: a carrier who did not know they had the disease but happily moved through the city spreading it. In the same way that public health experts treated infectious disease with agreed definitions and measurements, acousticians and specialists in noise control would be able to carry out activities to trace the source of a sound and prevent it at its root, or at least maintain its outburst at the lowest level. Like Sato, Kurihara shifted the debate about urban noise away from the noise of transport, industrial production, and the noise of modern machinery to the noise made by the people going about their everyday lives. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Kurihara argued, it was strange to think that a social understanding of hygiene would become a norm for the masses and achieve significant success in preventing disease. Yet, the concept of public hygiene quickly emerged to construct disease as both a national, public problem and an individual one (Kurihara, 1954). Although Kurihara chose not to reference him, Shimpei Goto’s writings on The Principles of National Hygiene, published in 1889, were central to shaping hygiene as the hygiene of the nation-state (kokka). Yet, while Goto was the first to translate the concept using the compound eisei (衛生), his ideas were deeply tied to the context of imperial nationalism and the nation-state (kokka) as a representation and sublimation of the human body. In the context of early twentieth-century Japanese nationalism, hygiene was an ‘evolutionary force’ that could act on the nation as a whole and ‘manifest itself in the change from ignorance to enlightenment, from shamanistic superstition to sanitation, from treatment to prevention, from prolonging life to enriching life, and from savage to civilised’ (Chung 2014, 444–445). The body of the individual and the national body could be acted upon at the same time through the concept and practical application of public hygiene. Kurihara was writing about urban noise in the post-war period when imperial nationalism and the concept of the national body (kokutai) had been largely discredited and rejected during defeat and occupation. Although the 1950s was a period when concepts and ideas formed in the 1920s and 1930s were being recast in the context of ‘peace and democracy’ (Dower 1999), the goal of achieving a western standard of living through rapid economic growth still leant itself to appeals for the enlightenment of the people by the state. Because the importance of public sanitation was common and deeply ingrained in Japanese society, Kurihara believed that noise prevention—and punishment in case of infringement—would happen logically. In this scenario, scientists, engineers, and experts in acoustics would take the place of doctors and professors of public health and, as Kurihara put it, ‘just as we have infectious diseases determined by law, we could create legal (and hence

The ‘hell of modern sound’  117 illegal) sounds’ (1954, 159). If noise was better understood from a t­ hird-person perspective—that of the victim—and analysed through the analogy of the pathogen, it could be more easily tackled. Unlike in the 1920s, the urban noise problem in post-war Japan was slowly becoming understood as produced, and made worse, by human activity rather than technology—traffic horns, blaring radios, musical instruments, gramophones, dogs barking through the night, and so on. Here the problem went right back to the 1930s discussion of ‘city music’ versus ‘city noise’ and the consequent definition by scientists, because, Kurihara argued, most people had come to think of this kind of noise as the sonic expression of an exciting modern ‘city music’ (1954, 159). The early twentieth-century view of the people as too backward to understand or tackle the problem of noise lingered though. Kurihara’s practical solution echoed the pre-war Japanese state’s, and he complained that the problem with the Japanese people was that they were simply ‘selfish, barbaric, and anti-social’. In this context, appealing to the idea of public morality as the key to noise prevention would be ‘useless and abstract’ (Kurihara 1954, 159). Lack of awareness and concern about noise was due to the very low level of social morals amongst the Japanese. To fix this, Kurihara urged a programme of, what he called, ‘public enlightenment’ linked to the longstanding, and more easily understood, notion of public hygiene. Rather than explaining to the people how many phon a certain sound was, what caused the sound, or what the physiological effects were, the Japanese should be taught that noise is the same as disease, caused and transmitted by humans, and then given the tools to reflect on whether they themselves were a disease carrier. As Kurihara noted, with a physical disease, the person transmitting it usually suffers physically. With ‘random noise’ though, the person making it was usually not suffering from it; indeed, they were quite often enjoying it. Kurihara was confident that once people understood that they were all carriers, or potential carriers, of an easily transmissible disease, they would willingly go and seek out experts for advice and help (1954, 159). The difficulty with this solution was that the appeals to unite individual and national bodies for the greater social good had ceased to have the influence and political impetus they had in the early twentieth century when hygiene became central to everyday life in Japan’s increasingly crowded urban spaces. At the same time, the dominance of experts in the pre-war era had rendered the types of urban noise both Sato and Kurihara discussed as having nothing to do with the people themselves. By the 1950s then, the problem of urban noise had re-emerged within the parameters of earlier discussions that restricted the definition, control over and solution to experts, and pressed the need for the enlightenment of the Japanese people. The issue of urban noise and rapid economic growth again allowed for comparisons between Japan and a West that was more civilised because it was quieter and quieter because it was more civilised. But, by the middle of that decade, the complexities of the definition that Hirose had touched on in the 1930s were back. Distinguishing between ‘city music’ and

118  Martyn David Smith ‘city noise’ had been a job for the experts in the 1920s and 1930s as they developed technological solutions to the problem of the changing sonic ecology of Japan’s urban spaces. But, by the 1950s, the onus was on individuals within society to become aware of their own contribution to the problem and its solution within a renewed sense of national belonging. Although, like earlier commentators, both Sato and Kurihara were concerned that the Japanese people lacked the necessary civilisation to understand and deal with the issue of urban noise, they both saw better education alongside technological transformation as essential and began a shift in the understanding of ‘urban noise’ that would become fundamental to the recognition of the loudness of Japanese cities by the 1980s.

Conclusion By 1981, noise was ‘the most annoying single environmental problem’ in the world (Alexandre and Barde 1981, 166). That year, the OECD noted that in its 24 member countries, total noise emitted, or ‘noise energy’, had doubled since 1960. Over this 20-year period, according to the report, rapid urbanisation, increased personal mobility, and high levels of industrial activity made the use of noisy vehicles and mechanical equipment widespread. In many countries, the noise of everyday life was coming to be seen, by the public at least, as a significant environmental problem. Opinion polls taken by the Japan Environment Agency mirrored findings in France and elsewhere—that noise had become a more serious concern for its citizens than air pollution. In Japan, large-scale human tragedies, such as those at Minamata and Yokaichi, focused activists and eventually government attention on the pressing need to clean up the environment. By the early 1970s, Tokyo and the Japanese archipelago had become infamous, but ideal, case studies for an increasingly global environmental movement (George 2001; Avenell 2017). In the early 1950s, standards had been set for the measurement of noise, and in 1955 some soundproofing of schools and hospitals was undertaken by the government; yet, until the 1970s, there were few national guidelines for dealing with noise as pollution. Between 1971 and 1975, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA established in 1971) set guidelines and standards for road traffic, high-speed train lines, and aircraft noise (Igarashi 1993). The number of original, academic papers published on noise more than doubled, and in 1977, the Japanese Environmental Disputes Coordination Commission began to treat noise separately from industrial pollution. Methods of research and data gathering dealing with sound and sound technology still varied between different cities or regions, and this research was often carried out by private companies within very diverse academic disciplines (Hirokawa 1979). Nevertheless, because noise became uncoupled from the problem of industrial pollution, and as rising population densities changed the sonic ecology of Japan’s post-war cities, noise gradually became associated with daily life. Thanks to this increasing attention, by the time the OECD published its report, 32.5% of the environmental pollution complaints logged by local

The ‘hell of modern sound’  119 authorities throughout Japan concerned noise. In urban conglomerations, such as Tokyo and Kanagawa prefecture, noise grew to account for over half of all pollution complaints (Japan Environment Agency 1983). Most of these complaints related to the noise of the neighbourhood. In the mid-1980s, the Institute of Kanda Soundscape Studies began to explore the ways in which the perception of the soundscape of Kanda in Tokyo had changed in the period after 1945. Founded by Keiko Torigoe, who was deeply involved in the activities of R. Murray Schaffer’s World Soundscape Project and the translator of his book Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, the institute asked senior citizens to describe the sounds they most remembered and associated with the city. The first noted change followed the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 when the city was rebuilt as a ‘modern metropolis’; the development of department stores, the growth of traffic, and an influx of people from the countryside significantly altered the urban landscape and the volume and nature of urban sound. Rapid urbanisation, increased personal mobility, and high levels of industrial activity made the use of noisy vehicles and mechanical equipment widespread and brought a gradual recognition that noise was a problem. As is clear from this chapter, this period saw the beginnings of attempts at defining and dealing with urban noise. In Osaka, the petitioning of local authorities, the organisation of museum exhibitions, and discussions in newspaper articles raised awareness of the problems caused by the changing sonic ecology of the city. The discussions and debates in the media and amongst the experts did not label noise as a necessarily negative result of the process of modernity. Rather they established noise as a problem that highlighted the lack of civilisation of the Japanese people themselves. It could best be solved through the specialist knowledge of scientists and engineers and, in any case, the noise of everyday life in the city was not something that concerned the people themselves. This changed post-war. Writing in the 1950s, commentators such as Sato and Kurihara were shifting their focus to the noise of people going about their everyday lives and, for most of the respondents to Torigoe’s survey, it was during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the period of reconstruction and rebuilding leading up to Tokyo’s hosting of the Olympic Games in 1964, that the contemporary Kanda soundscape—traffic noise, public address systems, electric machinery, and more—originated (Hiramatsu 1993, 135).9 The population increased, entertainment venues thrived, and a popular mass consumer culture flourished. The sonic ecology of Japan was rapidly transformed by increasing traffic, individual mobility, and consumption.10 But, even during the Tokyo Olympics, as Japan prepared to display to the world its unique combination of ‘Western spirit, Eastern Beauty’, the problem of urban noise was discussed in terms of the indifferent, irrational, and barbarous behaviour of the masses.11 The authorities and experts continued to focus their attention on the noise of transportation and industrial production until rapid economic growth came to an end in the early 1970s; and, with the cities yet again lively and over-crowded symbols of modernity, the redefinition of ‘city music’

120  Martyn David Smith as ‘city noise’, with all the implications for urban anomie that that implies, allowed the Japanese to finally appear well and truly ‘pickled in noise’.

Notes 1 David Novak makes this assertion in his excellent entry on ‘Noise’ in Keywords in Sound. I translate the notion of ‘sound-saturated’ as ‘pickled in’ here as it seems closer to Nakajima’s playful if plaintive tone in this instance. 2 See Jacobwitz (2016) for an insightful account of how ambiguous, and indeed frightening, the appearance of new technologies of sound such as telegraph poles could be in this context. Kerim Yasar (2018) provides an outline of the way technologies of sound like the radio, telephone, and phonograph came to mediate everyday sound and bolster the creation of the modern nation. 3 For an outline of the concept of sonic ecology see Atkinson (2007). 4 It is difficult to know whether Mr Victim (clearly a pseudonym) was a westerner resident in Japan or not. The Japan Times was established in the late 1890s by Motosada Zumoto as an English language newspaper that would allow the Japanese to read about and discuss current events in English and participate in the international community. 5 Watanabe (2013) discusses one example from the early twentieth century when, although the state’s agronomic programmes had succeeded in producing bumper crops across one particular region, the pollution of farmland in one area actually led to depleted harvests. There were reports of a growing suspicion of science amongst villagers, most of whom, because of the inability of agronomists to offer a solution, had ‘lost faith in technicians’ (see pp. 80–81). 6 See also, in English, https://acoustics.jp/en/overview/ (last accessed 27 January 2021). Fujiwara’s study is reprinted in Koyama (1973). 7 It is not clear whether Sato had access to, or knowledge of the debates that took place in the 1930s as discussed above. 8 For the importance of Vern Knudsen to the battle against noise in the US see Thompson (2002). 9 The Kanda institute was the forerunner of The Soundscape Association of Japan. 10 See Seidensticker (1991) for an insightful and highly readable outline of the post-earthquake reconstruction. For an account of the re-construction of Tokyo as a “dream modern city” in the run up to the Tokyo Olympics see Smith (2018). 11 Even Shinichi Sueoka ends his quite recent (2000) article on the history of noise regulation expressing his doubts that Japan has achieved the goal of the first antinoise regulation in 1889: preserving the peace and quiet of the night and creating a ‘modern state that is nothing to be embarrassed about’ (2000, 214).

References Abe, M. 2018. Resonances of Chindon-ya: Sounding Space and Sociality in Contemporary Japan. Middletown: Weslayan University Press. Alexandre, A. and J.-P. Barde. 1981. ‘Noise abatement policies for the eighties’. Ambio 10(4): 166–170. Atkinson, R. 2007. ‘Ecology of sound: The sonic order of urban space’. Urban Studies 44(10): 1905–1917. Avenell, S. 2017. Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Bijsterveld, K. 2001. ‘The diabolical symphony of the mechanical age: Technology and symbolism of sound in European and North American noise abatement campaigns, 1900–1940’. Social Studies of Science 31(1): 37–70.

The ‘hell of modern sound’  121 Chenhall, R., Kohn, T. and Stevens, C. 2021. Sounding Out Japan: A Sensory Ethnographic Tour. London: Routledge. Chung, J. 2014. ‘Sovereignty and imperial hygiene: Japan and the 1919 cholera epidemic in East Asia’. In The Decade of the Great War: Japan and the Wider World in the 1910s, edited by T. Minohara, E. Dawley, and Tze-ki Hon, 444–445. Leiden: Brill. Cox, R. 2013. ‘The political affects of military aircraft Noise in Okinawa’. In Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan, edited by J. D. Hankins and C. S. Stevens, 132–159. London: Routledge. Dolan, D. 2008. ‘Cultural noise: Amplified sound, freedom of expression and privacy rights in Japan’. International Journal of Communication 2: 662–690. Dower, J. 1999. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II. London: Penguin. Edwards, J. 2011. ‘“Silence by my noise”: An ecocritical aesthetic of noise in traditional Japanese sound culture and the sound art of Akita Masami’. Green Letters 15(1): 89–102. George, T. 2001. Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Post-war Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Centre. Gun, S. and S. Townsend. 2019. Automobility and the City in Twentieth Century Britain and Japan. London: Bloomsbury. Hanes, J. E. 2016. ‘Aural Osaka: Listening to the modern city’. In Music, Modernity and Locality in Prewar Japan: Osaka and Beyond, edited by H. de Ferranti and A. Tokita, 27–50. London: Routledge. Hankins, J. D. and C. S. Stevens. 2013. Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan. London: Routledge. Hayshi, S. and A. McKnight. 2005. ‘Goodbye Kitty, Hello War: The tactics of spectacle and new youth movements in Urban Japan’. Positions 13(1): 87–113. Hiramatsu, K. 1993. ‘Some aspects of soundscape studies in Japan’. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan 13(3): 133–138. Hirokawa, G. 1979. ‘Wagakuni ni Okeru Reimei’. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan 35(5): 278–291. Hirokawa, G. 1953. ‘Souon mondai ima mukashi’. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan 9(4): 203–204. Holt, J. 2017. ‘Distressed micropsia: Size distortion and psychological disturbance in Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks and in subsequent travel writing on Japan, 1880– 1900’. Studies in Travel Writing 21(1): 47–62. Igarashi, J. 1993. ‘Development of community noise control in Japan’. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan 14(3): 1993. Jacobs, A. 2012. ‘The silence of Amsterdam before and during World War II: Ecology, semiotics and politics of modern sound’. In Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th and 20th Century Europe, edited by D. Morat, 305–321. London: Berghahn Books. Jacobwitz, S. 2016. Writing Technology in Meiji Japan. Boston: Harvard University Press. Japan Environment Agency. 1983. ‘Analysis of environmental pollution complaints in 1981’. Japan Environment Summary 11(3): 1–4. Koyama, H. ed. 1973. Sensen Showa-ki Osaka no kogai mondai shiryo, Kansai Daigaku Keizai Kenkyujou, 1973. Koyasu, M. 1987. ‘Developments in the standardisation of methods for the measurement and evaluation of noise in Japan’. Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan 8(6): 223–234.

122  Martyn David Smith Kreutzfeld, J. 2006. ‘Ishibashi soundscape: Investigating the soundscape of urban Japan’. Studies in Urban Cultures 8: 88–99. Kurihara, K. 1954. ‘Noise and hygienic problems’. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan 10(3): 159–160. Manabe, N. 2015. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music after Fukushima. New York: Oxford University Press. Mansell, G. 2017. The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Miyamoto, K. 2013. ‘Japanese environmental policy: Lesson from experience and remaining problems’. In Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power, edited by I. J. Miller, J. Adeney Thomas, and B. L. Walker, 222–251. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Naito, T. 2005. Meiji no oto: Seiyoujin ga kiita kindai nihon. Tokyo: Chukoshincho. Nakajima, Y. 1996. Urusai nihon no watashi. Tokyo: Kadokawa. Novak, D. 2008. ‘2.5x6 metres of space: Japanese music coffeehouses and experimental practices of listening’. Popular Music 27(1): 15–34. Novak D. 2015. ‘Noise’. In Keywords in sound, edited by D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny, 125–138. London: Duke University Press. Payer, P. 2007. ‘The age of noise: Early reactions in Vienna 1870–1914’. Journal of Urban History 33(5): 773–793. Picker, J. M. 2003. Victorian Soundscapes. New York: Oxford University Press. Plourde, L. 2019. Tokyo Listening: Sound and Sense in a Contemporary City. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Ravina, M. 2017. To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sato, K. 1953. Oubei no souon no jijou’. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan 9(4): 206. Seidensticker, E. G. 1991. Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Service, J. 2018. ‘The voice in modern Japan: translations from the history of the senses’. Japan Forum 30(3): 303–312. Smilor, R. 1977. ‘Cacophony at 34th and 6th: The noise problem in America, 1900– 1930’. American Studies 18(1): 23–38. Smith, M. D. 2018. Mass Media, Consumerism and National Identity in Postwar Japan. London: Bloomsbury. Steingo, G. and J. Sykes. 2019. ‘Introduction’. In Remapping Sound Studies, edited by G. Steingo and J. Sykes, 1–36. London: Duke University Press. Sueoka, S. 2000. ‘Souon kiesei no rekishiteki kousatsu: Meiji-ki kara dainiji sekai taisen’. Tokyo-to kankyou kagaku kenkyujou nempou: 207–214. Sueoka, S. 2007. ‘Edo kara Meiji e souon mondai no hasei’. Environmental Research Quarterly (145): 76–83. The Japan Times, ‘The whistle nuisance in Tokyo’, 9 September 1902, 3. Thompson, E. 2002. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America 1900–1930. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Townsend, S. 2014. ‘The Great War and urban crisis: Conceptualising the industrial Metropolis in Japan and Britain in the 1910s’. In The Decade of the Great War: Japan and the Wider World in the 1910s, edited by T. Minohara, E. Dawley, and T. Hon, 301–322. Leiden: Brill.

The ‘hell of modern sound’  123 Watanabe, T. 2013. ‘Talking sulfur dioxide: Air pollution and the politics of science in Late Meiji Japan’. In Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power, edited by I. J. Miller, J. Adeney Thomas, and B. L. Walker, 73–89. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Yasar, K. 2018. Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan 1868–1945. Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press. Yoshimi, S. 1995. Koe no shihonshugi: denwa, rajio, chikuonki no shakaishi. Tokyo: Kodansha.

6 Feel the power of my exoticism Japanese Noise music and claims of a distinct Japanese sound Jeremy Corral

Introduction Japanese Noise music is characterised by a blatant lack of traditional musical architecture; it evolves from schemes that ignore melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic progressions. It is thereby commonly considered as a brutal and ­radical expression of postmodernity, in the way it deconstructs musical progression, both structurally and historically. In certain regards, Noise can be interpreted as a general ecology of interference whereby the junction between human activity and nature can be re-evaluated with sounds. Noise makes intensity and preconceived excessiveness its own norm, and by extension, tends to straddle the dichotomies made by value judgements. Put another way, Noise rejects normality, as well as order, good, and beauty, to tumble in a sort of chaotic state outside human organisation. But does it really cut itself apart from any kind of structure? According to Mikawa Toshiji (1960–),1 a historical pioneer of Noise mainly known for his work with the groups Incapacitants and Hijokaidan, Noise actually fails to break from organisation: its diffusion at an international scale unavoidably subjects it to the classification imposed by stylistic and cultural categories (2004). Because of this, although it seems that we [Japanese] cannot calm down if things, basically multiform or heterogeneous by nature, are not vaguely coloured by our sensibility, without being necessarily categorised in accordance with objectified references. […] In some foreign press articles, despite the lack of clarity of the formulation, one can read that a thing called ‘Japanese Noise’ exists in a fixed way, linked to the absolutely superficial idea that the nature of Japan is somewhat alternative.2 (Mikawa 2005) In other words, even though the Japanese would prefer to think about the world in terms of vague and sensitive relationships, rather than through a systemic and precise ordering of all things, Noise is unavoidably and abusively subject to the extreme strangeness and exoticism of its country of origin. The result, according to Mikawa, is that Noise, in its circulation, ends up DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772-9

Feel the power of my exoticism  125 avoiding its naturally chaotic state to embody the fantasmatic categories established by the receiving side. Mikawa’s statement is important as it brings to light the relationship between man-made sound and its cultural origin—as if the properties of this sound could provide insights into the society that generates it. The sound of Japanese Noise is thus projected onto the bedrock of ʻJapanesenessʼ whatever its nature may be, that nonetheless defines itself by its fundamental alterity. According to Anaïs Fléchet (2008, 26), exoticism does not simply correspond to the structure of colonialism or archetypal colonialist relations. In Fléchet’s view, a double exoticism exists which means that both cultures engage themselves in a process of construction of the other. This does not expressly negate the question of power: it rather gives greater space to it, suggesting that strategies of positioning emanate from both sides. It would be extremely simplistic to say that one culture is incapable of going into action and remains passive in front of the other during the rapprochement—even if the relationship is often unequal. Alterity, then is in many ways a co-production. In other words, each culture calibrates itself through the eyes—or rather: ears—of the other, leading to the constitution of an exoticism reflecting the expectations of both sides. Rather than assuming that there is only one ʻJapanesenessʼ dreamed up by the ‘Occident’, various iterations exist that articulate specific ideas of what is, or what should be, the nature of Japan. In this context, this chapter examines what Noise can tell us about a sound that, within the process of mutual exoticism, is thought of as specifically Japanese in both content and structure.

An exoticism As Tzvetan Todorov asserts, exoticism is relative; it cannot be assigned to stable content: it occurs in the confrontation of two cultural entities imagined as mutually different and distant (quoted in Fléchet 2008, 21). One of these cultural entities is familiar to an ʻusʼ that represents the referential point of view; it is one that belongs to us or is so close to us that we can identify ourselves with it. The other remains outside: foreign, strange, somewhat naïve, sometimes barbaric. This other is pejoratively deemed less developed, but also positively fascinating in the way it recalls something we think we have lost in the course of progress or in the way it materialises a ʻsomething elseʼ we dream about. Exoticism is vivid because the other attracts us. This power of attraction, though, results from ignorance (Fléchet, 22). Because we do not know the other, we can imagine it connected, in a way, to a space of freedom antithetic to ours. As Anaïs Fléchet notes, exoticism is less a valorisation of the other than a criticism of us, and less a description of the reality than the setting up of an ideal. Beginning ostensibly as a discourse about the other, exoticism then becomes a discourse about us, and it reveals more about the perceiving subject than the object perceived (2008, 22). Consequently, just as the other is the product of our imagination, the contrasting self is also a production, its complexity reduced to the outline of some simplified traits capable of filling the space of comparison: a comparison that rethinks,

126  Jeremy Corral reshapes, and strengthens itself in light of the force of the other. In this way, it appears that the other is set more or less distant to us according to historical contexts and needs. Japan has, since modern times, been a society ʻon the peripheryʼ of the West, and it has constructed itself by mirroring various aspects of this referential centre (see Sakai 1997; Lucken 2012). In other words, Japan has shaped itself through a back-and-forth dynamic with the West. It is in the hollow of this movement between the two that ideas about a specific Japanese ʻway of beingʼ are constituted. These ideas lead to particular features in thought and the arts that are able—to a certain extent—to counter the power of the West’s referential culture. In this context, the attribution of an intense strangeness and exoticism to Noise is nothing more than the result of strategies of variation and differentiation maintained within the process of constructing contemporary Japan in contrast to Western nations. This building process incorporates a geographical tension with the West on the one hand, and a historical tension between Japanese contemporary society and the image Japan conceives of its sound tradition on the other. In his book Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation, David Novak shows how Noise constitutes itself progressively in a circular movement encompassing the musicians and the international audience while each side responds to the other (2013). Novak’s model efficiently reflects how the mirroring process with the West in the shaping of the musical practice is constantly at work. But shedding light on the system rather than the agents, it somehow reduces the importance of the historical and cultural background. The model I propose here refers to Novak’s in a way, but it expands upon it to include a more precise discussion of the construction of Noise from the Japanese side, taking account of specific dynamics of a sound culture building through time. This underscoring of Noise would then function as a sort of refutation of Mikawa’s remarks: the extreme exoticism that cloyingly permeates Noise is not the result of an incorrect interpretation by Western audiences. Rather, Noise is set up on a pre-existing cultural and creative structure designed to face the hegemony of Western modernity by promoting alterity (see Corral 2019). This chapter will therefore examine how the enjoyment and production of sound can be linked to the creation and development of cultural characteristics. First, I will briefly examine how Noise is constituted as a necessary (non-)musical expression and how its ʻextremeʼ disruptive character is produced. Then I consider, in a more precise way, how it relies on ideas of indigenous musical and listening patterns. I will argue that because Noise goes beyond a strictly traditional musical framework, it evokes the culture of sound in a broader sense.

The making of a genre Even though the musical genre known as Noise in Japan—with its technical and aesthetic idiosyncrasies—only truly appeared during the second half of the 1980s, it is commonly agreed that its precursor emerged at the end of the

Feel the power of my exoticism  127 1970s in the wake of Psychedelic and Experimental Rock music. At that time, the rise of Rock forms in Europe and the United States led to the creation of multiple expressions such as Punk, No Wave, and Industrial music. These all proved exciting for their subversive character, their novel sound discoveries— sometimes borrowing from the forefront of contemporary music—and most of all for their spontaneity. In an era where records produced in the West were still little circulated in Japan and expensive, the music they contained epitomised a certain ideal of modernity for Japanese youth, answering their desire for relaxed technique and expressive requirements. It constituted a model for creating music with no prior formal training. Following its introduction, however, this music was not merely imitated. People actively sought to reinterpret it personally. An endeavour that was not so much about synthesis as it was about transcendence towards new singular and audacious forms. The motivation behind this creation was primarily to constitute a novel musical dynamic that could spread out at a highly individually participatory level. Unlike the Pop music industry, mainly supported by powerful major labels whose aim is to reach the biggest audience possible through a smooth distribution mechanism and extremely refined sounds, this new ʻnoisyʼ and disruptive music was—from production to distribution—entirely shaped through a do-it-yourself process. Only small groups of musicians and listeners were involved, and their roles, moreover, were not fundamentally polarised, as creators were first of all active music consumers. In this manner, the almost total absence of financial objectives authorised the formation of cohesive sonorous identities strongly connected to local communities (see Corral 2019; Katō Hopkins 2015; Novak 2013). Within this process, the various creations were therefore marked by a strong subjectivity, in a climate prone to artistic rivalries. The outline of what would later be known as Noise emerged through an effort to rationally group this sound production: a kind of travesty of imported Rock music, stripped bare of its formal structures, leaving only its raw energy delivered in the most forthright and violent fashion (Novak 2013). Yet the protest value of Noise music was significantly milder than its models. As Mikawa Toshiji says, information reaching Japan was fragmentary and the political dimension of this music in its original environment was sometimes misunderstood; in every instance, it was not a case of projecting its cultural properties onto the realities of Japanese society, but rather to use it as a purely cutting-edge and defiant sound material (2004). Although Noise music is not very politically charged, in that it conveys no clear message against capitalism or the government the way, for example, Punk does, it constitutes, at best, a space for collective catharsis, where the harshness and inconsistencies of daily life are staged as ruled by social norms and driven by institutional and consumerist needs. It is, however, difficult to fully accept Mikawa’s suggestion that the differences between Western and Japanese musical production were simply the result of some contextual variations, that is to say: merely circumstantial. This is not to deny the fact that some data about the records and the music they contained were lost in the reception process, but to recognise that

128  Jeremy Corral reception is not a passive act: it is all about translation and adaptation. In this way, if Rock music and its subsequent forms in the West are thought of as teleological in their progression, typological and organised, musically structured, rather significant and loaded with political concerns in the tradition of Jazz and Blues, Japanese Noise music, in return, embodies a certain idea of rawness, simultaneity, natural agitation, and high sensitivity. The urgency with which Noise music is constituted and delivered to the audience, with maximum attention to the absence of stylistic and temporal framing, can reveal an appetite for sudden life bursts that are expressed through violent sonorous shocks, at once ephemeral and deprived of traditional musical direction and discursivity. Noise then is shaped as a misunderstanding because it can then function as an abnormality capable of developing itself outside the Western musical paradigm and, as a result, compete with it with no or little reference to the concepts of cultural ʻcentreʼ and ʻperipheryʼ. Japanese contemporary history is traversed with an insistence on making local arts and crafts an expression of spontaneity that goes against Western forms, which are thought of as more reasoned (Lucken 2012). Nevertheless, this attempt to characterise a Japanese creation as antagonistic to any frame is nevertheless a theoretical frame, or ‘a way to lock up the reality’ (Lucken 2015, 118). This taste for the ʻframelessʼ, the first efforts at theorisation of which can be traced back to the interwar period when Japan was discovering modern German philosophy and constructing its own subjective space, is the basis for a constructed vision of a nation that naturally ignores boundaries (ibid.). Japan is not only geographically located in an Orient far enough away to hinder direct understanding, it also represents a space of radical and ʻnoisyʼ excessiveness—where gratifying consumerism and overwork, as well as the coexistence of the modern with long-standing traditions—exceeding the boundaries of normality while creating a new regional ʻnormʼ at odds with Western representations. The public reception, in the process, reinforces the position of Japanese Noise production as a disruptive power (Novak 2013, 8). In a time that distinguishes itself by the fast circulation of ʻWesternisedʼ cultural goods, to stamp a so-called Japanese character to a particular form of musical production challenges the idea of cultural hegemony. At the same time, it gives space to alternative listening and modes of sound production.

A contrasting Japanese musical sound According to Hino Mayuko (1959–), a musician and performer particularly known for her activity with the band C.C.C.C., sound produced in the context of Noise practices in Japan relies primarily on listening approaches specific to the Japanese people. She asserts that: [Noise made by Westerners and Noise made by Japanese] are structurally different at the listening level. Japanese people … or maybe Far East Asians in general, have a more highly attuned sense of hearing.

Feel the power of my exoticism  129 For example, the birds twittering, the song of the cicadas, the murmur of the streams, Japanese people can perceive them with delicacy. For Western people, these are only background noises [that are not specifically noteworthy]. (Hino and Jibiki 1999, 18) Hino’s belief that the Japanese are strongly connected to the regional specificities of the land and its climate and have developed a heightened sensibility towards nature and the manifestations of seasonal change has been adapted to various ideas of geographic, social, and artistic spaces. These diverse developments converge, moreover, towards a unique conceptual space imagining a certain cohesion of the Japanese as a natural community (see Befu 1992, 2001; Pigeot 1983).3 In the same theoretical work, the continuity that gives shape to a total Japanese space, the sonorous manifestations of the direct environment, listening habits, and the processing of sound in artistic circumstances join to constitute a specific relationship with the sonic sphere. It is a framework from which musical patterns are justified and clarified in a dialectical way, with Japanese music juxtaposed against Western music. At the same time, by invoking and emphasising the larger Asian identity of the Japanese, Hino is better able to insist on the existence of a binary cultural and ethnic opposition with the West as a whole. However, the point is, as we shall see, to maintain particularities. The discourse on the specificity of the national space was a phenomenon linked to the feeling that this space was disappearing in the wake of Western influence, both physically, as the built environment came to resemble the industrial-apparently modern-cities of the west, and culturally with the influx of western cultural norms (Lucken 2015, 111). Japanese philosophers were on the lookout for Western ways of thinking from which they could articulate a local discourse, and while Western philosophers found in phenomenology a way to shed a particular light on temporality and history as the existential structure of the subject, the Japanese, nevertheless, made room for the concrete spatiality and its various sensible aspects. The rationalised vision of the Japanese space as a closed unity, somehow naturally and culturally different from the space other people live in, was a discourse that stood out. In this way, the Japanese climate and environment, considered harsh and at the mercy of the elements, yet often benign and full of compensatory resources for humans, was imagined as an axis around which the Japanese people could construct a unique character.4 This character was founded on emotions and a kind of detachment towards disasters, as well as Japanese social organisation focused on a strong sense of belonging to a group of individuals sharing the same experiences. National identity was conceived as a natural state, and, in this continuity, gave rise to a singular and durable taste for the observation of nature through its manifestations (ibid., 111–113). The practical ­application of the idea of cohabitation with nature operated as an essentialist binder that connects people through a sensible ʻJapanese way of beingʼ. As mentioned earlier, a particular codification of the sense of listening, making

130  Jeremy Corral the sounds of nature noteworthy and enjoyable, became one of the expressions of this discourse, occurring as part of the same movement within which musical aesthetics is grounded.5 As James Edwards shows, it is common in the Western musical world to consider noises, including the sounds of nature, as external to the realm of music (2011, 91–93). What are considered non-musical sounds, in other words, sounds that are not usually part of the musical intention or whose complex behaviour cannot be defined by an identifiable pitch or a regular rhythm, do not belong to the traditional modes of listening and interpretation and are, therefore, kept apart from the composition. Edwards recalls how Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904), one of the most influential music critics of the nineteenth century, participated in the construction of a binary distinction between autonomous natural sounds and musical material (ibid., 91). In an essay entitled On the Musically Beautiful (1854), which is often referred to as an important pillar of modern musical aesthetics, Hanslick writes that ʻwe receive from mother nature only material for materialʼ (cited in ibid.). This is to say that nature only supplies ʻraw materialsʼ which mankind ʻmakes into tonesʼ (cited in ibid.). That being said, Hanslick’s intention is not especially to denigrate nature, but to reinforce the position of instrumental music as an absolute art requiring an inspired and well-measured combination of tones (ibid., 92). The function of the composer, as an autonomous subject, is to create something new from some instrumental means which has already been submitted to human abstract organisation and practice; in no way does the musical act consist here of referring back to nature to shine a light on an implicit transposition process. Edwards notes how the distinction between non-anthropogenic sounds, related to a state of nature, and tonal anthropogenic sounds, is particularly reflective of the nineteenth-century historicism that guides (Western) humankind in cultural evolutionism (ibid., 92). Subsequently, in the colonialist context, the consideration of a musical practice whatever is its cultural origin was equivalent to positioning it on an axis plotted according to a logic of artistic progression that views Western traditional musical forms as its absolute horizon. When Hanslick goes on to say that ʻ[r]hythm, the sole musical element in nature, is also the first thus to be awakened in mankindʼ, and that consequently ʻ[w]hen the South Sea Islander bangs rhythmically with bits of metal and wooden staves and along with it sets up an unintelligible wailing, this is the natural kind of “music” yet it just is not musicʼ (cited in ibid.), he is, inevitably, locating non-tonal music in a liminal state characterised by a lack of discernment and precision in its acceptance of nature’s rawness, despite its attempt to articulate sounds culturally. The evaluative interpretation of the artistic practice from a binary perspective that makes a qualitative opposition between a Western-centred ʻusʼ and a less developed ʻotherʼ is obviously reminiscent of the schematic world order conception that holds non-Western cultures as not yet fully capable of logically articulated d ­ iscourse, meaning, concomitantly, that these other cultures are, by comparison, still somewhere in a primitive stage of development, and therefore bereft of the

Feel the power of my exoticism  131 full subjectivity that enables Western societies to fulfil themselves through the Hegelian consciousness of mankind in pursuit of an evolutionist goal. Although Japanese subjectivity is not completely dehistoricised, as it has shaped itself by mirroring the West, which necessarily and logically integrates history and modernity, it turns the narrative of historical progress as humankind’s truth to a more non-linear, relationalist one. It valorises the natural and social environment people live in as a fundamental component of the structure of the self. A key aspect of Japanese musical practice then traces a diametrical reversal away from the notion that noises are unsuitable for music. As a material that does not compete with tone-related sounds but rather intrinsically merges with them, noises, indeed, appear to be the answer formulated by Japanese composers and musicologists in order to break the qualitative dichotomies born from Western-style systemic thinking and to imagine a new and no less valid, though different, inclusive logic. Hanslick attracted criticism for his dismissal of musical referentialism in favour of a pure formalism and stating that music does not represent anything outside itself. This view fuelled well-known arguments with Franz Liszt (1811–1886) for example, whose ʻprogramme musicʼ was designed to render an extra-musical narrative. According to Edwards (2011, 93), Japanese musicologist Kikkawa Eishi (1909–2006) contributed, through his analysis of Hanslick’s work, to a growing awareness of the relationship between music aesthetics and socially determined attitudes towards listening experiences. In Nihon ongaku no seikaku (The Character of Japanese Music) (1948), Kikkawa takes another look at Hanslick’s conflation of non-Western music with natural sounds, emphasising what was considered a double rejection typical to the Western culturalist view: ʻ[b]roken down and re-phrased in more extreme terms, the relationship can be summarised: noise = strange or unfamiliar voices = “natural music” = the music of “savages”. As a whole, this position evinces an indifferent attitude towards nature. No: a haughty attitudeʼ (cited in Edwards 2011, 93). Kikkawa then returns to the relationship Japanese have with nature, and in the process, forges an indigenous aesthetics for a general listening practice that highlights sound timbre—or sound quality—through the notion of ʻsound colorʼ (onshoku) (ibid., 93–94). The peculiar attention brought to the timbre has a double function: it allows for the homogenisation of various regional musical repertoires, for which well-defined and fixed tones are not necessarily a preeminent component, through an aesthetic ­normalisation, in a larger and coherent entity. In the same movement, it establishes a schematically natural opposition to Western ideals. Thereby, while the Western musical language is the fruit of a highly conceptual and structuralist thinking and rests as a result on a definitive interruption with resonances in nature, Japanese music becomes sympathetic to the sensitive perception of sounds, privileging their inner quality rather than their macroscopic organisation. The post-war period—a time when the cultural and physical rebuilding of the country was central as Japan coped with defeat and the American occupation—represented a fertile ground for ideas with the potential capacity to,

132  Jeremy Corral once again, gather people around positive and common values, and re-position Japan as a dynamic society on the international scene. The reconstructed view of Japanese music aesthetics, by settling itself in this peculiar context, actively spread among critics and composers and offered many possibilities for starting over with new music forms that, in one way or another, tied in with what were thought to be stable aesthetic principles. Takemitsu Tōru (1930–1996), along with many other composers from the same generation, worked to strengthen the idea of a traditional musical aesthetics by reactivating and normalising ancient technical elements. According to Takemitsu, Japanese music favours loose rhythms and impure sounds in an attempt to reproduce the richness of sounds found in nature (2000, 201–202). This is in contrast with Western music, which organises itself around sounds with fixed pitches articulated within a strict temporal framework. While noise and musical sound refer to traditionally opposite spheres in Western countries, the rediscovered Japanese view was that no such distinction needed to be made. One of the most cited and revealing concepts concerning the importance of sound timbre, and one about which Takemitsu wrote, is sawari (a  word that can be translated literally as ʻtouchʼ, or ʻobstacleʼ) (Edwards 2011, 94). Indeed, the term designates a buzzy sound quality that can be heard in certain traditional stringed instruments, like the shamisen (a threestringed, long-necked lute) or the biwa (a four or five-stringed, short-necked fretted lute). For example, the adjustment device installed on the neck of the shamisen facilitates the production of a complex variety of overtones. This is a point that, at the time, gave credence to the affirmation of a regional and unique sound processing. For, although the shamisen and the biwa are both of foreign origin, their sound colour differs significantly from that produced by the instruments from which they were derived. As Edwards points out, these instruments ʻpicked up sawari at some point over the course of their “Japanisation”ʼ (ibid., 94). While Kikkawa relied on the noisier sound quality that imported instruments were designed to make once they settled in Japan and developed a natural opposition to Western instrumental music which was heading towards pure tones (ibid.), Takemitsu expanded the notion of sawari, going so far as to make it the quintessence of Japanese music. He believed sawari inhabited each single sound, making music extremely complex, and in a way ʻfull of moving soundsʼ (Takemitsu 2000, 367). Seen in this regard, the smallest element in Japanese music, the note, is, from the very start, self-sufficient, rich enough in musical events and subsequently highly expressive, whereas in Western traditional music, ʻa single sound cannot be sufficient for musicʼ (ibid.). It requires an encounter with another sound, an encounter that will result in the production of a sound that may be considered as the sum of the two previous ones. In this way, expressivity is necessarily rooted in ʻdialectical developmentʼ (ibid.), a structuration process that prevents music from being emotionally charged instantly and with simplicity. Takemitsu’s famous piece November Steps (1967) ostentatiously exposes the contrast between Japanese music—materialised by a biwa and a shakuhachi (a longitudinal, end-blown

Feel the power of my exoticism  133 bamboo flute)—and Western music—represented by a classical orchestra. Its structure is an example of a musical composition giving concrete form to the theories about sonic modes in opposition between two systems —even if within the course of the piece some bridges between the two said systems are also constructed. It goes without saying that this comparison of Japanese music criteria with those of Western music using elements specific to the latter compounded differences as they were being created. Noise, which up until that time was but a vague technical detail, was now able finally to conceptualise itself, and becomes in the process one of the major and considered timeless foundations of Japanese musical art. The narratives developed since that time have continued to sustain Japanese contemporary musical creation, in general, and indirectly provide a theoretical framework from which musicians and composers have more or less consciously thought of their practice. It is along this arc, though in its own particular way, that Noise music also inherited its manner of thinking about sound. In the wake of these musical theories, the taste for the non-discrimination of noise tended to be reused outside the context of art. Thus, what appears to be all the more decisive in the constitution of Noise’s peculiar treatment of sound is probably—as Hino Mayuko seems to suggest in remarks cited earlier about the unique Japanese ability to ʻfullyʼ hear—the assimilation of a well-known discourse that rises around the end of the 1970s, and which, this time, was supported by certain arguments related to neurophysiology, which claimed that Japanese people anatomically process sounds in a different way from others, making them, as a consequence, better equipped to positively receive and comprehend natural sounds than the majority of other ethnic groups.

The neurophysiologic justification of aural differences Tsunoda Tadanobu (1926–) is a physician who, in the mid-1970s, started to study the reaction of individuals from different ethnicities to various audio stimuli and came to the conclusion that language plays a central role in the configuration of brain functions and, consequently, leads to the formation of specific cultural practices (Nuss 2002, 36). In his book Nihonjin no no ̄: Nō no ugoki to to ̄zai no bunka (The Brain of the Japanese: Brain Functioning and East-West Culture), Tsunoda claims, for instance, to have discovered that, as a general rule for all people, whereas consonants and consonant-vowel combinations are perceived through the left hemisphere of the brain—where speech and systemic languages are commonly treated—Western people perceive isolated vowels through the right hemisphere while Japanese people perceive these sounds in the left hemisphere (1978, 84). He attributed this difference to the linguistic characteristics of the Japanese language, in which vowels play a more prominent role compared to most other languages (in Japanese, vowels can be fully significant as constituted words and then be considered as an elementary part of the speech). As a consequence, Tsunoda states, Japanese people have obtained the ability to treat language in only one hemisphere of the brain whereas people from most other linguistic groups

134  Jeremy Corral have to mobilise the full organ (ibid., 84). Non-verbal sounds, as unarticulated voice exclamations, animal cries and sonorous manifestations of nature, being commonly handled in the right hemisphere—where the treatment of sensorial perceptions and emotions is favoured—share common characteristics with isolated vowels in the author’s sounds typology: hence, in the case of the Japanese people, the treatment of non-verbal sounds in the left hemisphere enables these sounds to be processed and endowed with the qualities of the sounds comprising the articulated language. In this respect, the area of the brain that concerns the logos and the one concerning the pathos, supposedly separate in most human brains, are concomitant for the Japanese. And this neurophysiological feature accords them the aptitude to comprehend and structure the perceived world through emotions. We can understand that aural perception is a key factor, as the capacity to listen plays a major role in the unification of the emotionally constructed self with the sensible variations and agitation of nature. Takemitsu was deeply interested in Tsunoda’s research (Tsunoda 1978, VI). He described Japanese traditional music as a juxtaposition of accomplished and independent sounds like the independent sounds of nature. Interestingly, according to Tsunoda, while natural sounds and traditional Japanese music are effectively treated in the left hemisphere of the brain of Japanese people, Western traditional music and mechanical sounds are, in and of themselves, of a different nature. Indeed, Western traditional music, likely considered as highly conceptual from the start, and mechanical sounds, ultimately resulting from a production activity that does not especially seek listening enjoyment, both belong, in short, to a domain external to straightforward emotions and are, thereby, external to ʻJapanese expressionʼ (ibid., 84). Tsunoda’s work provided a physiological justification for the pronounced interest of the Japanese in the sounds of nature and their peculiar ability to process them. The ‘scientific’ findings could be used by its defenders to uphold the essentialist discourse surrounding Japanese cultural traits. Despite considerable doubts reasonably raised as to the validity of his results, Tsunoda’s work received an enthusiastic popular reception in Japan. Tsunoda’s effort was particularly influential among composers and musicologists who could then use this ʻevidenceʼ to support their task of restoring Japanese musical theory. However, his elaboration of the configuration of the Japanese brain during the processing of information needed a cultural basis on which to construct a specific Japanese aural ability related to the state of nature. One can go back in time and consider these cultural foundations in the social, seasonal practice of mushi kiki (or insect-listening), which consisted during the Edo period of going to specific locations to listen to the singing of insects (Edwards 2011, 95). Noise as an artistic expression revivifies the view of the peculiarity of Japanese sound culture through the reclaiming of the urban environment, extremely rich in auditory information, as a pool of natural sounds close to the people (Hino and Jibiki 1999, 18). Artists may draw from this resource to create their music. Indeed, while Tsunoda’s typology separates noises of

Feel the power of my exoticism  135 anthropomorphic origin—but external to Japanese traditional musical practices—from the sounds of nature, Hino Mayuko describes a singular aural experience of the urban environment for Japanese city-dwellers in these terms: ʻTokyo is ordinarily full of noise … Tokyo is crowded with busy people, but the other big towns in Japan are becoming very noisy as well. For us that is very common. So I think this could explain why our way to experiment with noise is naturally different [from the way Westerners experiment with it]ʼ (ibid., 18). Here, one can clearly perceive the traces of a junction created at the place of the interruption separating, temporally and geographically, two distinct but overlapping blocks, namely: Japan as a domain constituted of several autonomous, but somewhat close, regional and rather rural cultures centred on the land and its climate and Japan as a modern and massively urbanised nation formed of a homogenised culture. This is, of course, not to say that Hino consciously patches together ancient cultural listening practices, reactivated through discourses about a specific aural ability proper to the Japanese people, with what is the sonorous reality of contemporary society. Hino’s words manifest a thin continuity between the idea of a timeless Japanese aural culture and Noise practice, which in all likelihood requires, in the musician’s mind, a heightened state of consciousness of the urban sonorous movement. It would be wrong to say that every Noise musician shares Hino’s views about a Japanese innate ability to deeply perceive all the inner richness of the soundscape. In fact, numerous artists never refer, directly or indirectly, to any affiliation of a determined sound with a given culture. The late Tano Kōji (1961–2005) for example, well-known for his Noise project MSBR, actively worked to bring Japanese and international musicians together around several events and specialised publications. Far from trying to highlight any artistic or cultural differences, Tano’s intention was to support a new creative impetus establishing Noise as a global and homogeneous phenomenon, rather than a compartmentalised expression catalogued according to the natural determinations of respective given communities (Tano 1998). This desire to merge musical scenes into an entity deprived of inner structures can be seen as an attempt to free Noise of predeterminations and conceptual polarisations.

A positive binder between dualities In the quest for a truly Japanese musical art, though it has recourse to a certain sonic violence and shocking performance acts easily considered extreme, and in many cases presented that way, Noise must be understood as decidedly positive. It weaves a direct link between modernity and tradition, between hearing modes and the production of sound, and finally between what comes from spontaneous cultural practices and the idea of a common cultural background. This perspective echoes Mikawa Toshiji’s aforementioned statements, according to which the means of Japanese creation relies on a truly national sensibility whereby things are captured in their movement and

136  Jeremy Corral variation, in opposition to what is considered to be the dry systematic rationality of Western thinking. The idea that Noise captures the sensory reality of the world permeates most of its production. Thus, even though it borrows certain forms from Western counter-culture, the sole intention of this borrowing is to appropriate only its aural substance as a type of raw energy cleared of its structures, be they musical, cultural, or social. In this light, it seems clear that the extreme exoticism that determines Noise is not simply the result of the fantasies of an international audience: if this element of exoticism proves so prevalent when defining Noise, it is, first and foremost, because it accounts for the chasm created, in the Japanese imagination, between referential Western musical culture and Western modernity—both of which have become globalised—and a national particularism, hence ʻsomething elseʼ, that is seen as responding to and somehow resisting Western influence. Noise is one of the rare forms of Japanese musical expression to have found an international audience. And yet, despite this influence on extreme music production around the world and its subsequent acquisition of a certain universal character, Noise still remains purposefully and solidly bound to Japaneseness, for it is by emphasising its proclaimed exoticism that Noise distinguishes itself and thus exists as an authentic object. At a time when international exchanges are dense and where cultural differences tend to fade away as they get tangled in the push towards globalisation, the construction of a specific culture of sound proves essential for resisting the onslaught of totality. Of course, this culturised stance varies strongly between artists. Unavoidably, one must position one’s work within a wide stratified space the extremities of which are global and particular. However, and finally, as Christian Utz aptly states, while research today tends to consider cultural identities as constructions, it is important not to downplay the cohesive forces of individuals when it comes to the benefits of such imagination (Utz 2014, 3–28): it is indeed through the construction and deconstruction of concepts related to cultural identity over time that audio production—by affirming differences—remains alive, stimulating, and a source of enquiry.

Acknowledgements The author thanks Kevin Collins for his attentive proofreading and immeasurable help during the first draft of the chapter.

Notes 1 Throughout this chapter, I follow the Japanese convention of giving the family name first, followed by the given name. 2 All translations by the author. 3 Throughout the period after the Second World War, in order to justify what was perceived as major cultural differences with the West and to explain the reasons of the economic miracle, Japan developed a particular interest in the question of the national character. A popular literature dealing with Japanese culture,

Feel the power of my exoticism  137 Japanese people, and Japan itself, commonly designated under the general term of Nihonjinron (which can be roughly translated as ʻTheory of the Japaneseʼ, or ʻView on the Japaneseʼ) emerged in the form of a large amount of works responding to each other in the making of Japan as a homogeneous and monolithic entity. Though Nihonjinron leans on various disciplines such as philosophy, geography, anthropology, psychiatry, art history, it is largely discredited, both in the West and in Japan (by Peter Dale, Befu Harumi, Sugimoto Yoshio among others), for its lack of scientific evidence. 4 The philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō is the first Japanese thinker to argue for an essential influence of the climate in the making of the diversity of human cultures. His book Fūdo (1931) (Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study for the English translation [1961]) paved the way for numerous other publications (Miyamoto Tsuneichi, Fūdo to bunka [Environment and Culture] [1967]; Sabata Toyoyuki, Bunmei to fudo ̄ [Civilisation and Environment] [1974]; Suzuki Hideo, Fūdo no ko ̄zō [The Structure of Environment] [1974]; Misawa Katsue, Fūdoron [The Climate] [1979] among others) to discuss the relationship of the climate with what is thought of as being an unique Japanese character. 5 The musicologists Kikkawa Eishi and Kojima Tomiko and the composer Takemitsu Tōru are some of the main figures who took part in the formulation of the idea that Japanese native music is linked to the Japanese specific territorial milieu and the listening of nature (see e.g., Kikkawa 1980; Kojima 1983; Takemitsu in Uno Everett and Lau 2004, 199–206).

References Befu, H. 1992. ʻSymbols of nationalism and nihonjinronʼ. In Ideology and Practice in Modern Japan, edited by R. Goodman and K. Refsing, 26–46. London: Routledge. Befu, H. 2001. Hegemony of Homogeneity. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Corral, J. 2019. Japanoise: Extrémismes & entropie. Dijon: Les Presses du réel. Edwards, J. 2011. ʻSilence by my noise: An ecocritical aesthetic of noise in Japanese traditional sound culture and the sound art of Akita Masamiʼ. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 15(1): 89–102. Fléchet, A. 2008. ʻL’Exotisme comme objet d’histoireʼ. Hypothèses 11: 15–26. Hino, M. and Y. Jibiki. 1999. ʻInterview with Hino Mayukoʼ. Eater 6: 12–21. Katō Hopkins, D. 2015. Dokkiri!: Japanese Indie Music: 1976–1989: A History and Guide. Nara: Public Bath Press. Kikkawa, E. 1980 [1948]. Nihon ongaku no seikaku. Tokyo: Ongaku no tomo sha. Kojima, T. 1983. Nihon no ongaku o kangaeru. Tokyo: Ongaku no tomo sha. Lucken, M. 2012. Les Fleurs artificielles: Pour une dynamique de l’imitation. Paris: Publications du Centre d’Études Japonaises de l’Inalco. Lucken, M. 2015. Nakai Masakazu: Naissance de la théorie critique au Japon. Dijon: Les Presses du réel. Mikawa, T. 2004. ʻNihon no noizu (zenpen)ʼ. Japanoise.net. Available online: http:// japanoise.net/j/incapa14.htm (accessed 29 May 2019). Mikawa, T. 2005. ʻNihon no noizu (kōhen)ʼ. Japanoise.net. Available online: http:// japanoise.net/j/incapa15.htm (accessed 29 May 2019). Novak, D. 2013. Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation. Durham: Duke University Press. Nuss, S. 2002. ʻHearing Japanese, hearing Takemitsuʼ. Contemporary Music Review 21(4): 35–71. Pigeot, J. 1983. ʻLes Japonais peints par eux-mêmesʼ. Le Débat 23: 19–33.

138  Jeremy Corral Sakai, N. 1997. Translation and Subjectivity: On ʻJapanʼ and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Takemitsu, T. 2000. Chosakushū 1. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Tano, K. 1998. ʻElectro suplex: An interview with Koji Tano aka MSBRʼ. Angbase. com. Available online: http://www.angbase.com/interviews/msbr.html (accessed 26 February 2018). Tsunoda, T. 1978. Nihonjin no nō: Nō no ugoki to tōzai bunka. Tokyo: Taishūkan shoten. Uno Everett, Y. and F. Lau, eds. 2004. Locating East Asia in Western Art Music. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Utz, C. 2014. ʻNeo-nationalism and anti-essentialism in East Asia art music since the 1960s and the role of musicologyʼ. In Contemporary Music in East Asia, edited by E. S. Oh, 3–28. Seoul: Seoul National University Press.

Part III Sound and power

7 Listening to the talkies Atarashiki tsuchi’s (1937) acoustic construction of Japan for western consumption Iris Haukamp Introduction On 3 February 1937, prominent musician Miyagi Michio1 attended the premiere of the much-discussed film Atarashiki tsuchi (New Earth aka The Samurai’s Daughter, Fanck and Itami) in Tokyo’s Imperial Theatre: I don’t go to listen to the talkies very often, and therefore don’t know much about them, but when ‘New Earth’ was shown at the Teikoku Gekijō [theatre], I had also been invited. There were many prominent people there that night, and I could feel the presence of gentlemen and ladies in the atmosphere.2 (Miyagi 1972) The location’s splendour mirrored the anticipations layered onto the film to be screened that evening: Lauded as ‘Japan first export film’ and international co-production, it was supposed to open Western markets to the products of Japan’s extremely prolific but internationally under-appreciated film industry.3 Simultaneously, it was to project the correct image of the country that had become an exotic trope of foreign cultural representation.4 Set in 1936 Japan, Atarashiki tsuchi (1937) tells the story of Teruo (Isamu Kosugi), a young Japanese man who returns home from his agricultural studies in Germany.5 His costly education was only possible through the Japanese custom of ‘adopting a son-in-law’ (mukō yōshi), and he is thus expected to marry his wealthy adopted father’s daughter, Mitsuko (Hara Setsuko). Having learned the value of the pursuit of individual aspiration while abroad, he asks his adopted father to release him from the arrangement. This rejection of his native culture and the marriage worries his families (including his birth parents and sisters) and his German friend, the journalist Gerda Storm (Ruth Eweler), who accompanied him to Japan for an article about the country. The remainder of the film is dedicated to Teruo’s ‘reconversion’ to his Japaneseness, pushed and pulled by Gerda’s admonishments, his birth sister showing him around ‘traditional’ Japan, a priest’s teachings, and finally through Mitsuko’s attempted suicide on a volcano. After the lengthy rescue scene, during which Teruo proves his worth, the young couple relocates to Manchuria, the ‘new DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772-11

142  Iris Haukamp earth’ of the film’s Japanese title, to participate in Japan’s ‘enormous task of developing the country’, as Teruo explains it to Gerda.6 Eventually, there was little satisfaction with the representation of contemporary Japan on the screen, but the outstanding cinematography and beautiful shots of the national landscape were unanimously praised. Some even argued that the beauty of the shots disguised the ideologically problematic content as well as the film’s mediocracy, statements that account for a shared understanding of the power of the image. Yet, when Miyagi encountered Atarashiki tsuchi, it was not Fanck’s impressive visuals that he was concerned with. A pioneer in the modern development of the koto (Japan’s 13-stringed zither), Miyagi had turned to music after losing his eyesight due to an illness at the age of eight.7 His sensitivity towards sound and his previous experience as a film composer made him well aware of film sound as constructed: ‘Two years ago, J.O. Talkie [Studio] asked me to compose for Kaguya hime [Princess Kaguya, 1935, Tanaka and Aoyagi].8 Here, I understood for the first time that they record the music and dialogue first, and only then make the images to match’ (Miyagi 1972). Miyagi’s thoughts on what he heard that evening opens up a space to think about Atarashiki tsuchi’s acoustic representation of Japan in the context of a purpose-driven and ideologically charged process of cultural translation. His account is one of only a few concerned with sound;9 a gap that illustrates the often-commented-on oversight of film’s acoustic component. Yet, I find this omission curious: Atarashiki tsuchi occurred at the watershed of the relatively late, full transition to sound in Japan,10 and it was supposed to showcase and promote Japanese filmmaking skills in an international context. Thus, sound was crucial, and the film was produced by the J.O. Studios with strong ties to P.C.L. (Photo Chemical Laboratory), a small high-tech studio that had established itself particularly for its sound technology. Yamada Kōsaku, one of Japan’s most prominent composers at the time, also participated in the project. Hence, sound should have played a more prominent role in the lively discourse surrounding the production, but all emphasis was placed on the invited foreign director’s photographic imagery. In this chapter, I take my cue from Miyagi and consider the acoustic construction of Japan in Atarashiki tsuchi and the purposes behind it, keeping in mind that sound evokes strong emotional responses in the audience and shapes their interpretations. I will focus on the sound choices in the ‘GermanJapanese’ version, scripted and directed by Fanck for an anticipated German audience. His Japanese co-director, Itami Mansaku, had contested Fanck’s image of Japan in the script and in order not to endanger the costly, high-prestige project, the producers decided to have them each make their own version, from the same script, at the same locations, and with the same actors (Haukamp 2020, 53–84). While both were released in Japan, Fanck’s used Japanese and German for the dialogue, whereas Itami had his actors speak English and Japanese; his version was later presented, unsuccessfully, for ­distribution in the US. Fanck’s, however, is closest to the original blueprint as well as the most consciously shaped towards a specific, foreign audience.

Listening to the talkies  143 The chapter then takes a three-part approach to the acoustic construction of Japan, beginning with the musical score. Daibō has examined Yamada Kōsaku’s compositions for the film (2010), but as Miyagi’s article shows, other scores found their way into the project as well, and I will consider the music regarding the objective of constructing a specific image of Japan for a Western audience. However, Miyagi also comments on the other two components of film sound: voice and noise (sound effects).11 These, like the music, were carefully chosen, created, recorded, and added to the soundtrack, and the latter parts of this chapter examine their functions. The specificities of the acoustic construction of ‘Japan’ in a film written, directed, and edited by a white man, specifically invited to represent Japan to the West, support the argument that sound is crucial to proliferate and challenge the Empire (cf. regarding music: Radano and Olaniyan 2016). Atarashiki tsuchi, however, was also a co-production between two countries articulated as ‘friends’ and ‘equals’ within a discourse aimed at political and military collaboration. The resulting sound film was impacted by various ambitions and agendas but, despite the financial and artistic input from the Japanese side, it was eventually skewed towards the meanings intended for a German audience, revealing the underlying imbalance regarding cultural power and authority in this encounter. After the Tokyo premiere, the question of how contemporary Japan was represented by this foreign director was at the forefront of the discourse (Haukamp 2020, 107–156). In an unexpected turn of events, however, it was Itami’s version that was shown that evening—and that Miyagi listened to. It was only replaced by Fanck’s one week later. Fanck returned to Germany to prepare for his version’s premiere in Berlin, where it was titled Die Tochter des Samurai (The Samurai’s Daughter), mobilising preconceived notions about Japan—exotic femininity and mighty warriors—that the Japanese side had intended to challenge.12 This tension between lived reality, auteurial perception, and purpose-driven interpretation also impacted the soundtrack.

Music There was a scene where tea was being prepared and I heard a koto accompanying it. This appeared to have been taken from one of my records. Perhaps because of how the sound was magnified, it trembled, and it felt as if all the rough parts came out [clearly]. I broke out in a cold sweat. Had they consulted me, I would have played that piece differently in that situation. (Miyagi 1972) When watching Atarashiki tsuchi with students, they often remark on the over-presence of music. One of the project’s stated objectives was to evoke affectionate understanding and to represent Japan and its culture, and music is able to fulfil both by guiding our affective response towards the events on

144  Iris Haukamp the screen and by marking cultural difference. Furthermore, Fanck was not a great scriptwriter: ‘Fanck is the only person in the world able to make nature’s great feelings and sensations come alive [but] is neither a master of narrative films nor famous for depicting a national character’ (Yomiuri Shinbun 1935). Hence, perhaps, the idea to mobilise the power of music to supplement the landscape shots and help represent Japan’s ‘national character’. When it comes to international encounters, music has been said to provide a common language and thus overcome cultural barriers. However, it is also a major stage for processes of othering. In the case of Japanese music encountering the West, ‘[t]he cultural conservatism of sound is far stronger than that of seeing’ (Naitō 2005, cited in Yasar 2018, 70). Western music entered the country from the Meiji Period (1868–1912) onwards,13 but the reverse was not true. As a German reviewer of Atarashiki tsuchi notes: ‘If anything can bring the people of the world together it is music, as its language facilitates easy communication. When it comes to Japanese music, however, this communication is quite impossible … it would have presented the European ear with an impossible task’ (Martin 1937).14 His judgement—while more courteous—is in line with accounts by Westerners describing the music of the Japanese Noh theatre, for instance, as ‘“cacophonous” and “discordant”’ (Naitō 2005, cited in Yasar 2018, 70). Establishing a clear line between ‘order/ culture’ and ‘chaos/nature’, the Orientalist notions at work here are obvious. Martin then continues to praise composer Yamada’s skilful circumvention of the problem by making ‘traditional’ music more digestible via dilution (‘presenting it carefully’) and by having mastered the ‘modern music’—Western music, the proliferation of which, in Japan, is also due to ‘many German musicians’ (Martin 1937). While the adoption of ‘modern’ music can be attributed partly to Western musicians, even if one was inclined to overlook the Orientalist ascription of ‘progress’ to the self, Yamada was crucial for bringing European music to a Japanese audience. Following his studies in Germany, he pioneered in composing symphonies and orchestral pieces, and soon began merging European and Japanese classical conventions (Gōto 2014; Katayama 2007).15 His 1921 fusion of Japanese traditional music and Western orchestration, ‘Sinfonia Inno Meiji’ (Kōkyōkyoku ‘Meiji shōka’) opens Fanck’s Atarashiki tsuchi with its haunting sounds of the hichiriki reed wind instrument, and it also combines the traditional court music (gagaku) with a big orchestra. This blend denotes ‘contemporary Japan’ well, but the opening uses only about one minute of the 18-minute piece, with the distinctive hichiriki taking the lead. Hence, the first impression of Japan here consolidates imaginations of the never-changing Other. What I would like to focus on from here, however, is the music not composed by Yamada—such as the koto piece Miyagi mentioned. These undiscussed replacements reflect the multiplicity of agendas at work in the production, which often led to conflict and inconsistencies, and also emphasise the film’s message regarding the ‘true nature’ of Japan for Fanck’s intended German audience. Atarashiki tsuchi uses music to express culture, but also cultural clashes. In his review, Martin writes that the score’s

Listening to the talkies  145 contrasting of ‘modern’ and ‘traditionally Japanese’ serves to ‘deepen the [representation of the] young Japanese man’s struggle and make it clearly understandable’ (1937). Teruo’s struggle of feeling torn between two worlds finds its musical climax at the end of the first act, in a bar. The two worlds, West and East, modern and traditional, are here expressed through music (and women and alcohol). The first shot shows a dance bar, and the camera tracks through the foxtrotting couples, to finally reveal Teruo sitting at a small table; a Japanese hostess is pouring sake for him. The lively jazz music fits the upbeat atmosphere and the camera pans with Teruo gazing to the right and to a small jazz band.16 He looks very much at ease in this environment, corroborating the image of the suit-clad, bilingual cosmopolite. This feeling of borderlessness is visualised by the international dancing couples on the floor, overwhelmingly Japanese taxi dancers with mainly Western partners, and acoustically established by the choice of music, namely jazz—a choice as fitting as it is political: By the time Japanese began wrestling with jazz (part of the second wave of musical Westernization) in the 1920s, they relied on musical skills instilled during the first such wave … Jazz thus represented a challenge to a music culture whose values had been thoroughly refashioned, in quite recent memory, to reflect the technical and aesthetic standards of European composed music. (Atkins 2001, 49) The music in this scene contrasts with Yamada’s compositions, but is still concerned with nationalised hierarchies. Jazz as the liberating overcoming of barriers was a common discourse in many countries from the 1920s onwards. ‘Cigarettes and jazz … spun to the fast beats of global capitalism and imperialism’ as Enstad demonstrates with regard to interwar Shanghai (2016, 46). Her account of how members of the expatriate community both produced and consumed these commodities that also attracted elite Chinese consumers evokes the culturally and racially liberated (although still always unequal) atmosphere of that time and of that city. An echo of these ‘vibes’ can also be felt in the bar in Tokyo: As Teruo listens to the jazz, he is even smoking the all-important cigarette. This topic is strengthened by a Western hostess— perhaps one of the Russian taxi dancers often working in Japanese dance halls (Atkins 2001, 56)—coming to his table. By pushing away the sake and offering him a martini, a distinctly Western drink, she sets up a relationship of opposition and competition between East and West instead of the smooth syncretism evoked at the beginning. The soundtrack takes up and corroborates this new discourse: A pretty, young shamisen player wearing a kimono enters the bar and comes to Teruo’s table, her instrument’s sound clashing vigorously with the jazz. A brief moment of silence then sets up the acoustic climax of the scene and of the protagonist’s dilemma. As she starts singing and playing her shamisen, the jazz band gets going, too, with neither common ground nor harmony between the two styles. The soundtrack’s

146  Iris Haukamp jarringness is empathetic to the visuals, and vice versa: The rapid editing between close-up shots on the band, Teruo, the shamisen player, and multi-layered superimpositions of a disco ball and spinning dancers echoes and amplifies the sense of confusion created by the music. The final medium close-up on Teruo’s pained face amid the cacophony in the room and his mind clearly indicates that it is either/or: the West, individualism, cosmopolitanism, jazz, and martinis, or the pure face and innocent sound of Japanese traditions. We can feel his dilemma and the clash of cultures not only through empathy but also due to the audiovisual signals directly and painfully affecting us. The use of music taps into a shared discourse, which made the motif of cultural incompatibilities relatable to both Japanese and German audiences. In both countries, jazz had become a symbol of modernism, and with the tides changing towards a nationalist and protectionist discourse that drew on shared pasts and imagined traditions, it became a topic within conservative circles. While jazz was never fully banned in either country (Atkins 2001, 127–32; Fackler 1994), it did undergo some transformations—such as adding more domestic elements or evolving towards swing—to make it more palatable for the powers that be, leading to a second jazz wave in the mid-1930s (Fackler 1994, 439).17 Yet, the musical style also carried other undesirable connotations apart from ‘foreignness’ and ‘Americanisation’. The urban decadence associated with 1920s Berlin or Tokyo provided an ideal target for nationalists and militarists. As Atkins points out, as the economic crisis impacted rural farming communities severely, urbanites spending money in dance halls, and dance halls themselves, ‘became potent symbols of the widening cultural gap between urban and rural Japanese, a gulf that ultranationalist leaders exploited skilfully in their rise to political prominence’ (2001, 73). Jazz’s ‘subversion of the German national character’s moral strength’ also played an increasing role after 1933 (Fackler 1994, 438). A return to tradition discursively provided the appropriate counterforce, as heard with the shamisen sounds in the bar scene, and thus Atarashiki tsuchi clearly fits the trend—in German discourse, too— that the ‘1930s saw the movie screen take on the didactic function of awakening cosmopolitan Japanese to the glories of their own culture’ (Davis 1996, 45). The loudspeakers took on this function as well. In this sense, it is unsurprising that the ideologically appropriate solution to Teruo’s dilemma is announced by, firstly, the absence of all sound, clearing the overstimulated ears and mind, and then by the slow, rhythmic drums and bells accompanying sutra chanting, as Teruo’s father prays for his son in front of a Buddha statue. From now on, Teruo will return to his roots, and the soundtrack focusses on traditionally Japanese music, such as the koto in the tea ceremony described by Miyagi, Yamada’s syncretic orchestra compositions or, finally, his song about ‘our land’ to be discovered in the West, across the ocean (‘Aoi sora mirya’). The music in Fanck’s Atarashiki tsuchi constructs Japan as, first, inherently foreign and other, then as torn between superficial and unfitting Western and deeply buried indigenous ideas, and finally as returning to its authentic, traditional self. This development is in

Listening to the talkies  147 line with nationalist ideas circulating both in Germany and Japan, while at the same time safely confining Japan within age-old traditions, regardless of its outward modernity. The final song’s lyrics extend Japan westwards to the puppet state Manchukuo18 only for its Japanese audiences. But, still, the German viewers would have linked the up-beat melody with the visual cues and thus read the expansionist discourse that linked both countries.

Noise Someone told me that Mt. Fuji and cherry blossoms were shown, but I couldn’t grasp it. But then the sound of the waves began. It came through well, but it seemed to be the sound of a very large wave, and I wished I could hear the sound of smaller waves, too. (Miyagi 1972) The proliferation of music to the detriment of (background) noise in Atarashiki tsuchi places the film firmly within an interesting movement. In the very early stages of sound film, a reactive move against the musical accompaniment during silent film screenings ‘banished’ music for a while: ‘[T]hey called on music only if the action justified it as diegetic. The sparsity of music made room for noises on what was a very narrow strip for optical sound’ (Chion 1994, 161). But music came back in the mid-1930s, pushing noise out, reducing it to ‘stylised, coded sound effects’, rather than providing an ­acoustic verisimilitude of life (ibid.). Tasaka observes a similar development in early Japanese sound films (2020, 269). By now, the composers were well-versed in expressing the sonic environment through music: composers considered it the mission of the musical score to reconstruct the aural universe, and to tell in its own way the story of the raging storm, the meandering stream, or the hubbub of city life by resorting to an entire arsenal of familiar orchestral devices developed over the past century and a half. (Chion 1994, 146) This ‘sense of mission’ was one more factor for composer Yamada’s indignation regarding the ‘mistreatment’ of his compositions: ‘the musical accompaniment throughout the scenes on the mountain has been deliberately drowned out with the reverberations of the rumbling volcano in a most regrettable fashion’ (1937, 39). He saw the main reasons in ‘the imperfections in the function of motion picture production in Japan and the lack of musical perception on the part of the film editor’ (1937, 38), but really it was director Fanck. It is fair to say that Fanck, with his photographic eye, was not very interested in sound,19 as one of his comments about his first impressions of Japan illustrates:

148  Iris Haukamp When one travels through a Japanese town for the first time, one doubtlessly is disappointed. I too felt there is nothing uglier than a big city in Japan … I saw telephone pole after telephone pole, electric line after electric line [and for] any Westerner who is invited and comes to Japan, this completely destroys the fairy-tale image. (Fanck 1937b) As Hall and Smith also point out in their chapters in this volume, unlike its serene reputation, the urban Japan that Fanck encountered was noisy; still, Fanck had his visual, not his acoustic stereotype shattered. Clearly, the noise that did make it onto Atarashiki tsuchi’s soundtrack, was chosen very consciously. It is quite significant in this regard that the film opens with a bird’s eye view of Japan, approaching a miniature Mount Fuji and then cutting to smoking volcanoes. Yamada’s orchestral piece here introduces percussions that evoke the characteristic rumbling of an eruption— demonstrating the composer’s sensitivity to the merging of image and sound as well as locating him within the trend discerned by Chion. The following scene mixes music and natural noise, as waves break on rocky shores and the wind blows across snowfields. After this exposition, we are presented with the bucolic farmhouse of the protagonist’s birth family, their dialogue replacing the noise on the soundtrack.20 In this way, the film resists the trope of introducing an exotic country by emphasising its ‘noisiness’ in order to denote the associated unruliness and chaos (Weidmann 2016, 314–319). By the same token of relative serenity, however, for a film intended to break stereotypes, its exposition scene (re-)locates the modern country that Fanck had encountered firmly within an idyllic image of nature and traditional, rural life. This tension is based in Japan and Germany’s particular positioning vis-à-vis each other as well as within a larger Orientalist discourse, and in Fanck’s agenda for making Atarashiki tsuchi. It is only later that the soundtrack introduces ‘modern’ noise. There was a scene with a sleeping car in Atarashiki tsuchi, and, to me, the train’s sound came through very well. It appeared to be the sound of the train that runs between Nagoya and Kōbe, but of course that is unlikely. The train’s sound was good, but the sound of the car [later in the film] was probably a bit too loud. (Miyagi 1972) On further examination, in many instances the film distinguishes very clearly and politically between ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ noise; the former, such as waves, the wind, and the volcano’s rumbling denoting ‘traditional’; the latter, such as the train, car, and a brief instance of ‘Tokyo ambient sound’, including trams, cars, and the murmur of the urban crowd, denoting ‘modern’. A complication arises from the fact that sounds such as the temple bell in the film’s second act of Teruo’s reconversion to his essential Japaneseness seem to fall under the category of ‘natural’ in terms of it

Listening to the talkies  149 being associated with Japan’s traditional (in a nationalist discourse: natural) environment. On the other hand, the horn of the ocean liner that brings Teruo and his Western ideas to Japan is associated with modernity, international mobility, technological advancement, but also, ultimately, the influx of disruptive foreign ideas. The first act takes up the discourse of Japan as an industrialised nation as if to counterpoint the image of traditional Japan: We hear the rattling sound of the ship’s engine together with Teruo and Gerda as they visit the machine room. The sound is so loud that both have to raise their voices: Gerda:  Wonderful, such a machine, right? … Won-der-ful, such a ma-chi-ne!!! Teruo: WE built this! And woe to our old Nippon, if we hadn’t learned this from YOU at the very last moment! Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a free Japan today! The film then cuts to impressive shots from inside a steelwork that produces steel bars ‘Made in Japan’, with the soundtrack consisting entirely of the hammering, clanking, and hissing of industrial work. The next scene is of a large-scale silk mill, and the young female workers’ song is underscored by the sound of wafts and pressing machines. At first glance, this advancement from natural to industrial sound seems to reflect a discourse on Japan’s successful modernisation, which is then carried over to the film’s very last act, as Teruo ploughs the wide, fertile plains of colonial Manchukuo with his Komatsu tractor, the noise of which mingles with his song. The film’s soundtrack thus appears to resonate the four stages of cinematic Orientalism that Yomota delineates: The initial stage in typical films made by Westerners about Japan, such as Fritz Lang’s Harakiri (1919; based on Madam Butterfly), presents a Western male rescuing a Japanese female from her country’s premodern traditions. The second, often overlapping stage is characterised by the ‘beautiful Japanese woman’ as a discursive topic and marketing device, activating the Western male gaze in innumerable geisha-themed films. The ‘reverse stage’ (sakadachi dankai) is based in a psychological perversion occurring in Japan as the target of Orientalism: Striving to achieve modernity and catch up with the West, Japan perceives modernisation as being grounded in masculinity. In its quest to internalise this masculine power and take control over its own image, Japan takes on representing itself, but as feminine; the masculine task of Orientalist representation is still incomplete. This ‘lack’ is remedied in the fourth and final ‘transference’ stage: Japan perceives itself as having arrived at the stage of modernity, equated with Western masculinity. For continuous (self-) confirmation, Japan now applies ‘stage one’ to its neighbouring Asian countries, controlling their and its own image via the metaphor of gendered domination (Yomota 2000, 303–306). With Atarashiki tsuchi having been commissioned and largely financed by the Japanese side, this taking control of one’s own image relates to the more active stage three, and the tractor’s penetration of the colonised soil

150  Iris Haukamp completes stage four. Yet, the project’s international nature complicates this interpretation: The aforementioned dialogue about the ship’s engine introduces another Orientalist gaze, that of the invited foreigner. If the industrial sounds are due to German knowledge and tutelage, this puts Germany firmly in the place of the ‘bringer of civilisation’. Germany and Japan, however, were not in a colonial relationship. As Teruo says, Japan ‘escaped’ colonialisation through last-minute modernisation. Germany and Japan were new political and military allies, and both were late industrialisers. Hence, presenting Japan as a strong, capable nation was important. On the other hand, nativist discourses in both countries promised salvation and, paradoxically, progress through a return to one’s imagined roots. This is expressed in Teruo rediscovering his true self in purely Japanese surroundings and soundscapes, such as geisha performances and his father’s paddy field. However, Germany as embodied by Gerda acts as a friendly, all-knowing mentor. The machine sounds are due to ‘you’ (Gerda/Germany/the anticipated German audience), and she comments on the sounds of soldiers marching in step through the streets of Tokyo as indicative of Teruo needing to let go of his individualist delusion. Hence, the noise in Atarashiki tsuchi addresses shared discourses on the benefits and dangers of modernisation and globalisation, recognisable by both German and Japanese audiences. Yet, due to the unacknowledged power position of the invited Westerner, subtle racial hierarchies bolstering German feelings of superiority are maintained. And there was resistance to this discourse on the level of sound editing in Itami’s version: Reminiscent of the volcano’s noise drowning out the music, here the ship engine obliterates the dialogue about the origin of Japan’s progress. While it is impossible to discern directorial intention from technological issues, the tempering of the Orientalist trope is remarkable, demonstrating the relative power of the oftentimes neglected noise on the soundtrack.

Voice Also, and this is not limited to the impression I got from listening to Atarashiki tsuchi: If one person is talking and facing me, while another person is talking and facing the opposite direction, it still sounds to me as if both are facing me. Other sounds that should be far away are too close and sounds that should be weak are too loud. When someone’s voice is replaced by someone else, it feels incongruous. (Miyagi 1972) Speech posed an interesting and timely challenge for Atarashiki tsuchi as an international co-production that aimed at presenting an authentic image of Japan and fostering understanding. When the heard voice took the silver screen by storm, it engendered both enthusiasm and criticism. Apart from concerns about an aesthetic regression of the purely visual art towards

Listening to the talkies  151 theatrical conventions, sound also complicated the idea of cinema as a universally understood medium due to its reliance on the seemingly transparent image. Hirabayashi articulates this in the Japanese context by means of comparison to the novel and argues that film presents the image directly to the audience, instead of the audience constructing the image out of the word (2018 [1932], 260–261). Hence, ‘film’s language is, as it were, the world’s language’ (2018 [1932], 261). It was the speech that turned ‘cinema’ into a national cinema: ‘A talking picture … became the prisoner of its own language’ (Dibbets 1996, 213). One tactic for setting the prisoner free—dubbing—was regarded with suspicion, as it laid open dissonances between form and content. The visible split between language and nationality due to the unavoidable asynchronicity between the lip movements and the sounds heard by the audience prevents immersion and emphatic understanding. If, as also pointed out in Kim’s ­chapter in this volume, film is a ‘voccocentric or, more precisely, a verbocentric phenomenon’ (Chion 1994, 148), voice is crucial for the impact on the a­ udience. For a deceivingly simple film—often judged merely by its ­plotline—Atarashiki­ tsuchi’s use of voice, I argue, is complex and ambitious: We can observe synchronous and post-recording, dubbed voice-over narration, subtitling, and (perfectly and imperfectly) spoken Japanese, German, and English. In its heterolingualism, the film follows three conventions: When we are introduced to the story, Teruo’s birth family discusses his return in Japanese. This dialogue—presumably unintelligible for the majority of the intended foreign audience—is translated via German subtitles,21 a strategy kept throughout the film. In the next scene, Teruo explains the ‘character’ of the Japanese people to Gerda in accented German. The use of German in the presence of one of the two German characters is established here as another convention and made believable by Teruo having studied in Germany, his fiancée Mitsuko taking German lessons, and Teruo’s adoptive father Yamato Iwao (played by former Hollywood star Hayakawa Sessue) being educated upper-class. Before moving on towards the third strategy, German voice-over, I shall examine the concept of using these two languages for a film that was to be screened in Japan as well as Germany, where at least one language was unintelligible for most of the audience and thus required subtitling. As mentioned before, dubbing’s split between form and content figured prominently in the discourse on film export. Fanck tapped into this discourse when he wrote on the challenges of Japanese export film, based on his experience with Atarashiki tsuchi: There is no chance at all in a picture which is spoken entirely in Japanese. What is more, one which is dubbed in foreign language afterward or super-imposed picture is no good. We cannot think of dubbing Japanese into European language. There is, of course, a technical difficulty such as the disagreement of the movement of the lips. But, what do you think if a Japanese peasant spoke suddenly French.22 (Fanck 1937a, 27)

152  Iris Haukamp Keeping in mind that initially all dissonance between form and content as signified by the off-sync lip movements was criticised, the greater schism being attributed to the ‘gap’ between Japan and France, rather than, say, Spain and France, clearly introduces a racial bias. But the matter at hand was also one of authenticity regarding both audiences’ experiences, the unity of the actor/character seen, and the voice heard. Since the film gives plausible motivation for the character’s respective language abilities, I would argue that its linguistic flexibility allows for an authentic ‘spoken landscape’. Initially, Fanck had been opposed to using any language other than Japanese in order to ensure authenticity: Because of the ‘one hundred per-cent Japanese’ topic, it would be ‘absurd to make “versions” in which the Japanese suddenly speak German or English. What is spoken must be comprehensible without the actual words, but through the simple plot, the unambiguous situation and the clear mimic expression’ (Fanck 1935). While this statement on the one hand reflects a certain provinciality, the question remains about the reason for this change in plans. Firstly, this strategy was not as unusual as it seems. Early on in the discourse on sound, film critic Balázs linked the notions of the sound of voice, authenticity, and the impact on the audience: ‘In film, what attracts our interest is less what a person says than the sound of his voice. In dialogue, too, what is decisive is not the content, but the acoustic, sensuous impression’ (2010 [1930], 195). He cites Melodie des Herzens (Melody of the Heart, 1929, Schwarz), in which the protagonists speak German while the ‘people’ speak Hungarian, establishing ‘the image of an original landscape, an acoustic location shot, a linguistic landscape’ (Balázs 2010 [1930], 195). Thus, one of the first feature-length German sound films23 was heterolingual, albeit denying the Hungarian ‘people’ intelligibility; they are part of the landscape. In contrast, in P.C.L.’s first international co-production, the Burmese-Japanese Japan Yin Thwe/Nippon Musume (Japanese Darling, 1935, Nyi Pu), all dialogue is accessible, using Burmese subtitles for scenes with English or Japanese dialogue and Japanese subtitles for Burmese and English lines (Ferguson 2018, 278), thus ‘failing’ to set up nationalised hierarchies qua the intelligibility/unintelligibility binary. Atarashiki tsuchi follows this strategy, and, like Japan Yin Thwe, introduces a foreign character. Gerda Storm is a later addition to the script with two interrelated functions. Firstly, her interactions with the Japanese characters represent the topical notion of German-Japanese (military) friendship as indicated by Iwao’s lines spoken in German: ‘Go and tell your country that here, in the Far East, a nation on its rocky island is keeping watch. This storm will break on its walls’; the storm refers to the communist threat the military agreement was directed against. Secondly, she is a concession to German viewers, and not only regarding language: The introduction of a German character facilitates their emphatic involvement, even more so because Gerda learns with the audience about the strange country. However, she did not prepare for her journey by learning the language. While she does attempt to speak Japanese once, after a few stumbled words, her host Yamato Iwao graciously invites

Listening to the talkies  153 her to just speak German—in German. Having the other learn the language of the ‘coloniser’, albeit imperfectly so as not to pose a threat, is indeed a familiar notion. It also ensures German viewers that the effort of communication will be borne by the Japanese allies.24 Following Sonnenschein’s categorisation of accent—along with nonsense sounds and technical jargon—as ‘pure acoustical characteristics’ that can be used in sound design to ‘release the analytic mind-set into a more feeling mode’ (2011, 137–138), accent is here used to evoke the affective response abroad. However, the ‘feeling mode’ was rejected for other scenes as it could have been detrimental to a different objective. Returning to the primacy of voice in early films, Chion observes that ‘one element that remains constrained to perpetual clarity and stability … is dialogue. We seem to have to understand each and every word, from beginning to end, and not one word had better be skipped’ (1994, 170). This points towards speech’s other meaning, namely the verbal one, describing the speaker’s experience, often associated with the brain’s more logical, left hemisphere (Sonnenschein 2011, 138). In the crucial scene in which Teruo explains Japan’s mission in Manchukuo in German— ‘This land could feed many more people, if it was just properly cultivated’— only his voice is present on the soundtrack. It seems curious to dispense with the subliminal potential of music or noise to further the audience’s emotional response; for example, by denoting the region’s ‘noisy’ backwardness or the benefits of Japan’s technology, such as the sounds of the trains, planes, and tractors shown on the screen. However, this key message had to be absolutely clear. Not only did the exclusivity of ‘voice’ here prevent acoustic clashes during sound editing, it also addressed the audience’s rational consciousness, logically explaining the need for military expansion, corroborated by the corresponding images. The same strategy, taken even further, occurs in two other key moments in which the film rejects any potentially undermining accent altogether and mobilises the clarity and authority of voice-over narration. Both moments are lines of dialogue by Japanese characters—a priest and Teruo’s birth father—and both could also be described as merely dubbed by a male, German voice. In this sense, they are, strictly speaking, ‘dialogue issuing from characters in the action’ (Chion 1994, 171) and thus, like Teruo’s lines described above, ‘theatrical speech’ (ibid.). However, for the release in Germany, Fanck chose to have the initial Japanese dialogue change into German. The lines were likely recorded in Germany, but with different equipment resulting in a much clearer sound quality than the Japanese speech. The acoustic contrast between diegetic and seemingly extradiegetic speech resembles the ‘textual speech’ (Chion 1994, 171) of the classical voice-over commentaries: ‘Textual speech has the power to make visible the images that it evokes through sound—that is, to change the setting, to call up a thing, moment, place, or characters at will’ (172). As mentioned before, a temple bell signals the narrative turn from Teruo’s infatuation with Western ideas and towards his re-becoming Japanese. We hear the bell again as he visits the priest who taught him in his youth.

154  Iris Haukamp After greeting each other in Japanese, they walk silently through the temple grounds, the only sound heard is that of mokugyō (‘wooden fish’), a rounded, wooden gong with fish carvings, used at Buddhist temples. Its very distinct, rhythmic percussion sets the stage, creates tension, and underscores the priest’s speech to Teruo, now suddenly in German. The sound of his voice has changed dramatically, and there is no establishing shot. The lines flow, bodiless and visually unanchored, through the soundtrack, as the camera does through the temple. It is perhaps the sound occupying a strange middle ground between the two types of acousmatic film sound (Chion 1994, 171– 173) that accounts for the slightly disorientating but powerful effect: the sound’s cause is not a secret (it is the priest), but neither has this specific sound been visualised first, allowing the image to be associated with the offscreen sound. The speech is about the necessity of adopting things of use from the technologically advanced but restless West, so that ‘our aged Nippon will be able to contend in the nations’ struggle over the world’s [living] space’. However, he cautions that each individual, however insignificant in the stream of ancestors and history, ‘is responsible for what came before him and what will come after him’. This eternal entity ‘is Japan’, and this understanding, he stresses, is the principle of Japanese cultural identity and to be summarised as ‘Shintō’. Fanck claims that he was introduced to Shintō in Germany and used it in his film due to similarities to the German situation (Fanck 1935). Despite some resemblance, such as the subjugation of individual desires for the service to the state, the priest’s speech not only is in German, it is German. The rhetoric of one being just ‘one small link in the long chain of ancestors and descendants’ (verbatim used by the priest) was a mainstay in National-Socialist ideology (Haukamp 2020, 110–113). The German voice relates it to, and thus corroborates, the German audience’s context, not merely by means of comparison but by a process of identification that is forced through the use of ‘pure’ German language. Similarly, in the last scene set in Japan, Teruo’s birth father, a farmer, speaks to the newlywed couple as they are overlooking small paddy fields. His lines begin in Japanese, but suddenly the German voice-over sets in, floating over the shots of manual labour. His voice commandeers the images of people working in the fields, and the lack of any technology establishes the idea of timelessness, hard labour for the sake of Nippon, since eternity. Then, however, he insists that ‘now, we are too many. We are too many, Teruo my son’. Immediately after this, the soundtrack cuts to a surprisingly upbeat song and the sound of a tractor, over a panning shot of the modern vehicle, tiling fertile, black soil. The superimposed text informs the audience that this is ‘Manchuria’. In other words, the voice-over speech motivates the film’s final act and legitimises Japan’s contested westwards expansion; militarist expansionism, of course, being a common goal of both countries—with Germany aiming eastwards. The film’s three strongest ideological messages are expressed through ‘voice’, and in a manner setting it apart from its regular, theatrical mode.25 If propaganda is intended to impact on people’s thoughts and actions, power is

Listening to the talkies  155 clearly implicated in this endeavour. Chion has likened textual speech to the archaic power of the word: ‘the pure and original pleasure of transforming the world through language, and of ruling over one’s creation by naming it’ (1994, 173). This power is granted very selectively, and hence only in the scenes that the creators deemed most crucial. As Weidmann points out, the Western cultural imagination associates the signifying (as opposed to the bodily, material) voice with ‘individuality, authorship, agency, authority, and power’ (2015, 232–234). The signifying/bodily binary here gives preference to the former, masculine part, hence the use of the authoritative, male voice in Atarashiki tsuchi is within this tradition. Looping back to the international project’s hierarchically structured nature, however, it is also the white male voice that manifests its authority through the voice-overs and their seemingly ‘rational’ appeal to the German audience, thus replacing the Japanese voice in the film and the image of Japan it creates.

Conclusion I go to the theatre sometimes. The stage is large, and there is space between the actors. Just by listening, one can understand their movements very well. With the talkies, however, everybody comes together in a small box … so it’s easy to feel like you’re listening to a gramophone after all. But if you also use your eyes, you wouldn’t think so. (Miyagi 1972) Listening to a talkie creates a very different impression than seeing one. Of course, at a time when sound film was still in its infancy, film’s inherent two-dimensionality extended to the soundtrack, preventing the spatial immersion and real-to-life sonic environment Miyagi mentions regarding the theatre. However, his observation also points towards the ‘added value’ of the combination of sound and image (Chion 1994, 3–24). The effect of both combined transcends that of the individual types of sensory input in terms of power, affect, and consequently the interpretation of the film. Previous foci on Atarashiki tsuchi’s cinematography confirm Weidmann’s statement about the prioritising of the visual over the aural in specific spatial and temporal contexts (2016, 315–316), a tendency apparent also in the contemporaneous discourse on the film project. However, as this chapter has shown, the major messages about Japan and its relation to Germany are encoded on the soundtrack, coming into effect in interplay with the beautiful but over-promoted images; sound, like the image, is selected, constructed, recorded, and reordered. The emphasis on the visual and narrative levels in fact veils mechanisms occurring on the soundtrack that, in fact, might be more crucial for understanding the film’s function in its particular contexts. When it comes to international encounters, sound can play a crucial role in representing cultures—to indicate cultural difference or cultural affinity. Yet, the reception of these sounds also lays open cultural biases as well as issues

156  Iris Haukamp regarding the acoustic representation of others for context-dependent purposes. As Weidmann argues with regard to British colonial novels, ‘[r]epresentations of sound… are fundamentally about class and race hierarchies and about the clash of whole systems of value, as characters—and authors—make their passage between India and the West’ (2016, 315–316). Atarashiki tsuchi’s characters and authors, as well as the film itself, made their passage between Japan and Germany, encountering similar issues. Music appears to be a prime battlefield for these clashes, despite its reputation as universal. When Martin writes that ‘the Japanese heart must have felt deeply because of the music’ and ‘we all experienced how the Japanese music stirred us, despite its careful presentation’ (1937), he not only speaks to the emotional power of music, but also to the association in Western thought of ‘aurality’ to the East (Weidmann 2016, 317). Martin’s statement echoes the trope of the Other being prone to arousal by sound as well as that of the need to discipline native sound—as Yamada did by virtue of his foreign education. The binary opposition between visuality ascribed to the West and aurality to the rest (Weidmann 2016, 315–317) determined the readings of the film. Because most actors were Japanese, the music was composed and performed by Japanese composers and musicians, and the noise was recorded or created in the country, sound can be attributed the Japanese side; while the visuals, including Fanck’s high-tech Askania camera and lenses, were seen to originate in the West. The image dominated the discourse in Japan, silencing the notion of sound, despite its important role in the film and the project (e.g. Haukamp 2020, 137). The German reception, too, focused mostly on the images and narrative (ibid., 122). In reviews, but also in the film project and the image of Japan it created, a careful path emerged between Orientalist traditions and notions of Aryan supremacy and the reality of a Japan that no longer could be fitted quite as neatly into these categories as a military and political ally. Hence, the film also creates ideological ties between Germany and Japan through similar concerns about the disorderliness caused by jazz, and dispenses with the trope of ‘chaotic noisiness’ in favour of ‘progressive mechanical’ sound. We also observed long seated, albeit non-colonial hierarchies, comprising racial, political, economic, geographic, and cultural aspects play out in the representation of Japan in Atarashiki tsuchi. Messages of value to the topical discourse are transmitted to the German audience via noise-free dialogue, in an inwardly directed Orientalist tradition; at the same time, the film also addresses shared discourses in Japan, such as Teruo finding his home in his native soil and his destination in the song about the fertile land beyond the Eastern Sea. Japan, after all, was an empire, with its own imperial aspirations and associated images and sounds. In this way, the film provides different layers of meaning for different audiences. These meanings, as shown above, are mostly encoded on the acoustic level, making ‘good use’ of the new technology. In sound film, the visual and the aural enter a powerful relationship, but for composer Yamada, Atarashiki tsuchi was not yet an instance of success—hardly surprising, given the treatment of his contributions. Still, he

Listening to the talkies  157 recognised the potential: ‘The “talkie” is as yet in its early stages of progress. Consequently, I have not lost faith in it’ (Yamada 1937, 39). Miyagi was equally dissatisfied with listening to Atarashiki tsuchi, partly due to technical issues, but also the purpose and potential of sound: I was often disappointed when I listened to a talkie, even when it used my koto playing. This might be because of the recording or the playback, but both sound and voice were trembling. Now I felt the same thing. I have come to think that in some cases a film with only natural noise and a skillful theater orchestra would be more pleasant to listen to. What I’d like to listen to would be a foreign talkie with unfamiliar nature sounds. (Miyagi 1972) Sound in cultural translation here perpetuates preconceived images, but in the best case, it can open new worlds. In Atarashiki tsuchi, due to a lack of understanding and, indeed, cooperation, the added value of sound and image was appropriated to careerist and ideological aims, such as Fanck’s ambitions regarding his career and his visual focus. However, before these interventions, as they embarked on this remarkable film project, the producers and participants in Atarashiki tsuchi had been well aware of the tremendous potential of this synergy for making the unfamiliar familiar. And as I have shown throughout this chapter, sound was used specifically with the ideological agenda to create an acoustic representation of Japan for foreign consumption within a very complex and particular historical context regarding the use of culture for political purposes.

Notes 1 Throughout this chapter, I follow the Japanese convention of giving the family name first, followed by the given name. 2 I am grateful to Roger Macy for kindly sharing Miyagi’s article with me. Translations are my own, if not indicated otherwise. 3 Eventually, the product of this project was also released in Shanghai and Manchukuo (see Haukamp 2020, 91–92), but my focus here is on the originally anticipated Western markets and audiences with their associated preferences and sensibilities. 4 For book-length treatments of the film project see Hansen (1997; in German), Segawa (2017; in Japanese), and Haukamp (2020; in English). 5 This summary pertains to Fanck’s version, mainly directed at German-speaking markets. 6 Within the politically charged historical context, various agendas operated in the background, ranging from the wish for artistic prestige to leading covert negotiations regarding the Anti-Comintern Pact, Japan and German’s fist military agreement signed on 25 November 1936 and leading to the formation of the ‘Axis’. Needless to say, the film’s narrative solution in the wide, fertile fields of Japan’s ‘puppet state’ Manchukuo, the establishment of which in 1932 had caused much international consternation, evoked similar responses in some international reviews and was also later likened to similar German aspirations (Haukamp 2020, 83–100).

158  Iris Haukamp 7 See Chiba (1992) and, for a brief account in English, see Miyagikai (2016). 8 The cameraman in this puppet animation adaptation of the traditional ‘Legend of the Bamboo Cutter’ (Taketori monogatari) was Tsuburaya Eiji. Tsuburaya was also responsible for the screen projection and miniature scenes in New Earth and, of course, later rose to fame as the ‘father’ of Godzilla. 9 Such accounts are concerned with Yamada Kōsaku, mentioning Atarashiki tsuchi in passing. Daibō provides the most thorough examination of Yamada’s compositions for the film (2010). Irie briefly remarks on the sound-design), and my book treats sound to a certain extent (Haukamp 2020). 10 On the transition to and early use of sound in Japan see Freiberg (1987) and Kinoshita (2011), and more recently Yasar (2018), Nordström (2020), Tasaka (2020, 192–224), as well as the chapters in Raine and Nordström’s edited book The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan (2020). 11 The distinction between ‘voice’, ‘music’, and ‘noise’ for the acoustic elements on and heard from a film soundtrack is one possibility of many. While ‘voice’ and ‘music’ are quite self-explanatory, ‘noise’ here means anything that does not fall under the previous two categories, i.e., footsteps, a car door closing, the wind rustling leaves on a tree, etc. In. this sense, I am using the term ‘noise’ slightly differently than many of my co-authors in this volume. 12 It must be pointed out that many of the participants, including Fanck and Kawakita, were not opposed to using the film project to further their careers by appealing to the powers that be, in both countries. 13 See Yasar for an outline of the earlier rejection and later adoption in a context of modernisation and international competition (2018, 70–71). 14 For his article, the writer drew heavily on Chamberlain’s Things Japanese (1905, 340–344), albeit omitting Chamberlain’s most unfavourable descriptions of Japanese music—likely in the spirit of binational friendship. 15 Yamada also had experience with writing film music, such as for Osanai Kaoru’s early, experimental talkie Reimei (Dawn 1927), Mizoguchi Kenji’s propaganda film Manmō kenkoku no reimei (The Dawn of Manchuria and Mongolia, 1932), and the Japanese-Soviet documentary Big Tokyo (1933, Shneiderov) (Fedorova 2014; Katayama 2012). 16 Yamada’s former pupils, Aoki So and Itō Noboru adapted some of Yamada’s older pieces for Itami’s version. According to Katayama, Itō is the trombone player in the bar scene (2012, 36). 17 Fackler and Atkins examine the eventual inability of the Japanese and German authorities to erase jazz completely, describing instances of resistance, compliance, or collaboration by artists, listeners, and authorities (Atkins 2001, 93–163; Fackler 1994). 18 Following involvement in the area since the Russo-Japanese war (1904–1905), Japan seized control in 1931 and established Manchukuo as an independent state in name only in 1932 (Young 1998). This move was observed with deep suspicion by the international community, resulting in Japan announcing to leave the League of Nations in 1933. Germany, with similar expansionist aspirations, followed in the same year. 19 He very rarely mentions sound in his numerous publications, perhaps also because his career was at its height in the pre-sound Weimar cinema. 20 Irie has pointed out Itami’s more interesting approach to sound: In his version, the sound of waves bridges the change of scenes to be eventually ‘revealed’ as the sound of a mortar (1996, 12). 21 Fanck sold his version to Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic States, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Holland, and Austria, most of these markets obviously required new subtitles for both Japanese and German dialogue.

Listening to the talkies  159 22 The idiosyncrasies in expression in this article in the English-language publication Cinema Yearbook of Japan are either due to Fanck’s limited English, or the result of a translation by somebody from German to English. 23 Melodie des Herzens was released on 16 December 1929, shortly after the first feature-length sound film Das Land ohne Frauen (Land Without Women, Gallone), released on 20 September 1929. 24 My students gave another interpretation: For them, Iwao put Gerda (and Germany) in her place, demonstrating his (and Japan’s) superiority via his language ability and proficiency in international ‘manners’. 25 In the Japanese release version, the voice is all theatrical, thus achieving less powerful effects. And, indeed, the Japanese post-premiere discourse questioned several of the film’s messages about Japan (Haukamp 2020, 107–142). This discursive space was, of course, also due to the mismatch between lived experience and representation, but the use of sound also had a part in it.

References Atkins, E. T. 2001. Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan. Durham: Duke University Press. Balázs, B. 2010 [1930]. Early Film Theory. Edited by E. Cater. New York: Berghahn Books. Chamberlain, B. H. 1905. Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan for the Use of Travellers and Others. London: J. Murray. Chiba, J. 1992. Oto ni ikiru; Miyagi Michio den. Tokyo: Kodansha. Chion, M. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press. Daibō, M. 2010. ‘Todokanai merodi: Nichidoku gassaku eiga ‘atarashiki tsuchi’ no eiga ongaku ni miru Yamada Kōsaku no risō to genjitsu’. In Eiga to neishon, edited by K. Sugino, 1–34. Tokyo: Mineruba Shobo. Davis, D. W. 1996. Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film. New York: Columbia University Press. Dibbets, K. 1996. ‘The introduction of sound’. In The Oxford History of World Cinema, edited by G. Nowell-Smith, 211–219. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Enstad, N. 2016. ‘Smoking hot: Cigarettes, jazz, and the production of global imagineries in interwar Shanghai’. In Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, edited by R. M. Radano and T. Olaniyan, 45–65. Durham: Duke University Press. Fackler, G. 1994. ‘Zwischen (musikalischem) Widerstand und Propaganda – Jazz im Dritten Reich’. In Musikalische Volkskultur und die politische Macht, edited by G. Noll, 437–483. Essen: Blaue Eule. Fanck, A. 1935. ‘Shinto: Dr. Arnold Fanck über das Projekt eines japanischen Filmes’. Film-Kurier 17(170): 4. Fanck, A. 1937a. ‘On the exportation of Japanese motion picture films by Arnold Fanck’. In Cinema Yearbook of Japan 1936–1937, edited by T. Iijima, A. Iwasaki and K. Uchida, 27–32. Tokyo: Sanseido. Fanck, A. 1937b. ‘Nihon no sōgōteki inshō (1)’. Asahi Shinbun, 25 January: 9. Fedorova, A. 2014. ‘Big Tokyo (1933) and the ideology of sound’. Japanese Slavic and East European Studies 35: 103–127. Ferguson, Jane M. 2018. ‘Flight school for the spirit of Myanmar: Aerial nationalism and Burmese-Japanese cinematic collaboration in the 1930s’. South East Asia Research 26(3): 268–282.

160  Iris Haukamp Freiberg, Freda. 1987. ‘The transition to sound in Japan’. In History on/and/in Film, edited by T. O'Regan & B. Shoesmith, 76–80. Perth: History & Film Association of Australia. Gōto, N. 2014. Yamada Kōsaku: tsukuru no de wa naku umu. Tokyo: Mineruba Shobō. Hansen, J. 1997. Arnold Fancks Die Tochter des Samurai: Nationalsozialistische Propaganda und japanische Filmpolitik. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Haukamp, I. 2020. A Foreigner’s Cinematic Dream of Japan: Representational Politics and Shadows of War in the Japanese-German Coproduction New Earth (1937). New York: Bloomsbury. Hirabayashi. H. 2018 [1932]. ‘Geijutsu no keishiki to shite no shōsetsu to eiga’. In Nihon senzen eiga ronshū: eiga riron no saihakken, edited by A. Gerow, K. Iwamoto, and Markus Nornes, 253–262. Tokyo: Yumani Shobo. [original publication: 1932. Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke Ikōshū, 116–126. Tokyo: Heibon sha. Irie, Yoshiro. 1996. ‘Curator’s Choice/Jōeisakuhin Kaisetsu’. NFC Newsletter 8: 12–13. Katayama, M. 2007. ‘Liner Notes’. Kósçak Yamada: Nagauta Symphony, Inno Meiji, Maria Magdalena. Naxos 8.557971, CD. Katayama, M. 2012. ‘Yamada Kōsaku wa nihon no eiga ongaku no ganso de aru’. In Atarashiki tsuchi, edited by T. Takasaki and S. Aoki, 34–37. Tokyo: Kinema Junpōsha. Kinoshita, Chika. 2011. ‘The benshi track: Mizoguchi Kenji’s The Downfall of Osen and the sound transition’. Cinema Journal 50(3): 1–25. Martin, C. R. 1937. ‘Die Musik zu Die Tochter des Samurai’. LAB (Leipziger Abendblatt?), 27 March: n.p. Miyagi, M. 1972. ‘Mimi dake no tōkī’. In Miyagi Michio Zenshū, Tokyo: Tokyo Bijutsu. Miyagikai (Miyagi Koto Association). 2016. ‘Miyagi Michio’s life and achievements’. Available online: www.miyagikai.gr.jp/eng-michio (accessed 22 September 2020). Naitō, T. 2005. Meiji no oto: Seiyo ̄jin ga kiita kindai Nihon. Tokyo. Chūō kōron shinsha. Nordström, J. 2020. ‘Sound and intermediality in 1930s Japanese cinema’. In The Japanese Cinema Book, edited by H. Fujiki and A. Phillips, 151–163. New York: Bloomsbury. Radano, R. M. and T. Olaniyan, eds. 2016. Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique. Durham: Duke University Press. Raine, M. and J. Nordström, eds. 2020. The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Segawa, Y. 2017. Atarashiki tsuchi no shinjitsu. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Sonnenschein, D. 2011. Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions. Tasaka, Y. 2020. ‘When the music exits the screen: Sound and image in Japanese sword-fight films’. In The Japanese Cinema Book, edited by H. Fujiki and A. Phillips, 269–282. New York: Bloomsbury. Weidmann, A. 2016. ‘Echo and anthem: representing sound, music, and difference in two colonial modern novels’. In Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, edited by R. M. Radano and T. Olaniyan, 314–333. Durham: Duke University Press. Weidmann, A. 2015. ‘Voice’. In Keywords in Sound, edited by D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny, 233–245. Durham: Duke University Press.

Listening to the talkies  161 Yamada, K. 1937. ‘Music and motion picture’. In Cinema Yearbook of Japan 1936– 1937, edited by T. Iijima, A. Iwasaki, and K. Uchida, 36–39. Tokyo: Sanseido. Yasar, Kerim. 2018. Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945. New York: Columbia University Press. Yomiuri Shinbun. 1935. ‘Kamera no shi ni utau: Setsugaku nihon no seibi’. 28 December: 4. Yomota, I. 2000. Nihon no joyu ̄. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Young, L. 1998. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Films Atarashiki tsuchi (New Earth, aka Die Tochter des Samurai, 1937), Arnold Fanck and Itami Mansaku. Japan/Germany: J.O. Studios/Arnold Fanck Film AG. Big Tokyo (1933, Shneiderov), Soviet Union. Das Land ohne Frauen (Land Without Women, 1929). Carmine Gallone. Germany: F.P.S. Film GmbH/Tonbild-Syndikat AG. Harakiri (Harakiri, 1919), Fritz Lang, Germany: Decla-Film. Japan Yin Thwe/Nippon Musume (Japanese Darling, 1935), Nyi Pu, Burma/Japan: P.C.L. Kaguya hime (Princess Kaguya, 1935), Tanaka Yoshitsugu and Aoyagi Nobuo, Japan: J.O. Studios. Manmō kenkoku no reimei (The Dawn of Manchuria and Mongolia, 1932), Mizoguchi Kenji, Japan: Irie Production et al. Melodie des Herzens (Melody of the Heart), Hanns Schwarz, 1929, Germany: Universum-Film AG. Reimei (Dawn, 1927), Osanai Kaoru. Japan: Shōchiku.

8 Recovering the lost Cantonese sounds in pre-handover Hong Kong Sinophone politics in Dung Kai-cheung’s ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’ (1995)1 Ka Lee Wong Introduction The discourse of Hong Kong is exceptionalist—after all, 99 years of colonial history have set the city apart from its mainland Chinese counterparts regarding how their cultural identity is configured. In recent years, more and more cultural productions, including literature, emphasise Hong Kong’s ‘Cantonese’ identity. The point is less about regional identity, which emphasises Hong Kongers’ belonging to Canton (or Guangdong, a region in southern China), but more about a linguistic identity that highlights their distinctiveness from the rest of China. While Mandarin is the official spoken language in China, it is not widely used in Hong Kong, where over 90 per cent of the population is Cantonese-speaking. Since Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible, the choice of language in the cultural productions of Hong Kong signifies a struggle of power. Using Cantonese to emphasise the Cantonese identity in Hong Kong can be read as the unwillingness to being absorbed and assimilated into either the British colonial or the mainland Chinese culture. Yet, in Hong Kong literature in Chinese, writing in full Cantonese is rare. This rarity can be explained by a writing convention that demands that regional expressions, like the ones in Cantonese, are to be ‘translated’ into the so-called ‘literary language’ shumianyu (書面語). That is to say, Cantonese, while being the spoken vernacular in Hong Kong, has been largely ‘muted’ in its literature given the existing convention governing the propriety of writing in Chinese. In this chapter, I aim to bring to attention the inaudibility of the Cantonese sounds in literature, historiography and academic scholarship in pre-Handover Hong Kong. The attention to sound in Hong Kong reminds us how the story of the city can be understood differently: Hong Kong’s story has always been written in a distorted way, given that the sounds of local people’s actual lived experiences in Cantonese, both the spoken language and aural culture, are omitted. Situating my discussion in the Sinophone theories put forward by Shih Shu-mei, I explore how recovering the historical silencing of Cantonese sounds in Hong Kong literature not just problematises the Chinese literary conventions where regional colloquial expressions are undermined by standardised norms, but it also sheds light on the politics interwoven with the DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772-12

Recovering the lost Cantonese sounds in pre-handover Hong Kong  163 question of ‘Chineseness’ in ‘Chinese’-speaking areas like Hong Kong. In her Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (2007), Shih argues against ‘Chinese’ or ‘Chineseness’ as a monolithic concept that flattens various diasporic communities which are, or were, part of China. Shih’s idea of Sinophone as a theory challenges the necessary sense of belonging, long-distance nationalism or anti-China sentiments among various overseas ‘Chinese’-speakers. In this regard, the tag ‘Chinese’ is problematic when it is used as a term to understand these diasporic communities, which experience different historical events, ideological influences and thus self-identification of their own cultural identity. Following Shih’s approach, I explore how Hong Kong writer, Dung Kai-cheung 董啟章 (1967–), creatively responds to the hierarchical tension between ‘Chinese’ and Cantonese as a Sinophone language and culture. In ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’ (永盛街興 衰史 yongshengjie xinshuaishi), a short story published in 1995, Dung ­Kai-cheung historicises a fictive Cantonese soundscape with the protagonist’s aural memory of Wing Shing Street where his imagined ancestors resided. Making use of Shih’s Sinophone theories, together with recent discussions on sound studies, I discuss how Dung evokes an alternative way to recover the aural history of Hong Kong in Cantonese in the short story. I contend that Dung, through textually simulating a sonic restoration of the lost orality of a Hong Kong Cantonese singing tradition, nanyin (南音), stages a literary form of sonic resistance against the existing hegemony which maintains who is audible and who is not, giving voice to the Hong Kong Sinophones to tell their own stories in Cantonese, which, for most local people, is their mother tongue.

The history of Hong Kong: Are Hong Kongers heard? Dung Kai-cheung is an acclaimed Hong Kong writer in Chinese. A good part of his works is concerned with the question of Hong Kong’s historiography in the colonial and post-colonial period. In his overview of Dung’s major work like Natural History trilogy (自然三部曲 ziren sanbuqu, 2005–2010),2 Visible Cities: A Chronicle of the Splendor of City (繁勝錄 fanshenglu, 2012), and Atlas: Archaeology of the Future (地圖集:一個想像的城市的考古學 ditu ji: yige xiangxiang de chengshi de kaogu xue, 2010a), David Der-wei Wang comments that Dung’s work has been extremely conscious of how Hong Kong’s history is written: ‘[Dung] understands that no matter whether Hong Kong is a colony or a Special Administrative Region, its history must be in the hands of others, and it is in the process of being invented’ (2011, 81). That Hong Kong’s history is always ‘in the hands of others’ can be understood by its political status in the colonial and post-colonial period: be it during the colonial rule by Britain or after the handover back to the People’s Republic of China, the local Hong Kong people had and have little right to decide how the city’s past and future can be written. Despite the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ clause in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, stipulating that Hong Kong has her own autonomous

164  Ka Lee Wong government and that her way of living is sustained for 50 years after her handover back to China, people in Hong Kong did not actually have a say in how things should be after the 99 years of British colonial rule. Regarding the pertinent question of why there was little resistance when this decision was made, as compared to the recent pro-democracy movements, such as the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and the Anti-Extradition Law Movement in 2019, Rey Chow’s specification of how Hong Kongers in the 1980s were pacified and compensated is enlightening: colonialism did not allow political choices to be made, Hong Kong people had to channel their energies into the economic sphere […] as thriving capitalism is a (morally degenerate) compensation for the lack of political possibilities and as what is at best a delusory accomplishment. (2008, 312) As the city enjoys capitalism under the government’s laissez-faire, or the so-called ‘positive non-interventionalist’ stance that was first proposed by then Financial Secretary of Hong Kong, John Cowperthwaite, in the 1970s, freedom denotes economic rather than political freedom. By the same token, Ackbar Abbas characterises this compensatory economic success and the lack of political autonomy in Hong Kong before the end of the colonial era as the ‘paradoxical phenomenon of doom and boom: the more frustrated or blocked the aspirations to ‘democracy’ are, the more the market blooms’ (1997, 5; original emphasis). This phenomenon is consequential to not just Hong Kong’s economy but also its configuration of cultural identity. Abbas proposes that in the critical moment of 1997, the city experiences a culture of ‘deja disparu’, where ‘what is new and unique about the situation is always already gone, and we are left holding a handful of clichés, or a cluster of memories of what has never been’ (ibid., 25). Life under Hong Kong’s thriving capitalism is transient; the local cultural identity is configured with a sense of powerlessness in making any changes. This sense of powerlessness stems from what Abbas calls ‘negative hallucination’ (ibid., 6). Appropriated from Sigmund Freud’s concept of ‘reverse hallucination’, it means not seeing what is there: In colonial Hong Kong, people did not seem to see the possibility that they could write a different history of themselves, either in a figurative sense, seeking actual political rights to decide their future, or in a literal sense, inscribing their own presence in the course of the city’s history. The elitist colonial education created an ‘import mentality’, by which Hong Kongers only regarded as ‘culture’ what came in from the outside, that was Chinese or Western traditions. Not recognising what configures the hybridised and localised East-meetingWest culture, local people tended to consider the city a cultural desert. Moreover, the history of Hong Kong is one of colonialism: in the dominant discourse about the city characterised by economic prosperity, her history only began when she was opened up by British as an entrepot for international trade, meaning that there is no pre-colonial root that the local can return to.

Recovering the lost Cantonese sounds in pre-handover Hong Kong  165 Dung Kai-cheung’s work is conscious of these problems faced by Hong Kong in the pre-handover period, when the city’s fate is always ‘in the hand of the others’. Atlas, for instance, is emblematic of his effort to question the official account of how Hong Kong has or could have come to be: he tells an alternative history by empowering an individual fabricator to mix facts and fiction, hearsay and anecdotes. While Atlas, as the title denotes, is a collection of different forms of maps that traces the beginning of history and the development of Hong Kong on a macro scale, ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’, a short story about a fictive neighbourhood structured by a Hong Konger’s aural memory, can be seen as a part of his opus to challenge and reimagine the historical discourse of Hong Kong. ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’ is set in a critical period right before the end of colonial rule in 1997. The protagonist in Dung’s story, Y ­ au-shun ­(有信) is an embodiment of the pre-handover anxieties felt by many Hong Kongers. Yau-shun is a returnee from Canada, who was born in the 1980s, which was at a time when Hong Kong experienced waves of mass migration from the city—statistics show that, in this city populated by around six million, the total outflow was close to 800,000 from 1984 to 1997 (Sussman 2011, 21). This ­large-scale emigration was triggered by the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which states that the British government will hand over the city back to the mainland Chinese government without granting British citizenship to Hong Kongers. Furthermore, the Tiananmen Massacre in Beijing, on 4 June 1989, was a blow to confidence in Chinese rule, prompting another wave of outflow from Hong Kong. In the story, Yau-shun, coming back to Hong Kong in the so-called pre-handover ‘return tidal’ (回流潮) in the 1990s, attempts to write a family history about the time when they were living in Wing Shing Street, before the end of British colonisation in Hong Kong. Yet, upon his investigation in historical records, Yau-shun can only find one single mention of Wing Shing by a nanyin critic in a prose collection called The Spotlight. Given the lack of official supporting evidence, Yau-shun concludes that Wing Shing Street only exists in his memory, but not in any ‘official’ records, such as maps or documents. Unwilling to believe the non-existence of Wing Shing Street, Y ­ au-shun becomes hysterical: setting all the materials which he has collected about Wing Shing and its surrounding neighbourhoods on fire, he starts re-creating his version of Wing Shing Street’s and his family’s history by using his childhood memory of listening to records of nanyin, a Cantonese singing tradition which literally means ‘southern sound’, on his grandmother’s radio. The mysterious existence of Wing Shing Street is conjured up by Yau-shun’s vivid aural memory and imagination—Wing Shing comes into being with not just Yau-shun’s depiction of the visual, but more critically, the sonic and musical quality of the street in the past and the present.

The hierarchy in Chinese writing: The split of sound and script Through the narrative structure of ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’, Dung forces us to hear various Cantonese sounds. He constantly reminds us that we are listening to another soundtrack, too, by making Yau-shun’s aural

166  Ka Lee Wong memory of nanyin creatively play along with the main narrative. While the narrative is mostly narrated by Yau-shun in form of his first-person stream of consciousness, his voice recurrently is interrupted by bracketed sentences. At the beginning of the story, it is not clear whether these bracketed parts are a part of Yau-shun’s narration, given that they have little correlation to what the narrator is ‘saying’. For example, when Yau-shun is describing the apartment in Wing Lok Street, left behind by his grandmother, out of nowhere a question in brackets appears, asking ‘(Is the show about to begin?)’ (Dung [1995] 2008, 237, 2014). This seemingly unrelated question is left unanswered in Yau-shun’s ongoing narrative. But it comes up again in the next paragraph, with a clear answer this time: ‘(Is the show about to begin? Yes, it’s starting: “The cold wind keeps its promise, and the autumn moonlight is boundless.”)’ (ibid., 238). The continuity of the scattered bracketed portions as shown ­suggests that these portions should be read as a whole. In fact, the translators of the English edition specifically point out in their first footnote that these brackets contain the lyrics of a nanyin ballad called Haak Tou Cau Han ­(客途秋恨) in Cantonese, or in English, ‘Autumn Regrets of the Lone Traveler’ (ibid., 235).3 The live-ness of this bracketed ‘show’ in which ‘Autumn Regrets of the Lone Traveler’ is being played creates a sense of the presence of another temporality, side by side with Yau-shun’s narrative. Intriguingly, these two separate narratives converge at some point in the story. When Yau-shun talks about a manuscript he has been working on, the nanyin ballad ‘Autumn Regrets’, in brackets once again interrupts his narrative: (‘The cold wind keeps its promise, and the autumn moonlight is boundless.’) (ibid., 239). Yau-shun responds to the lyrics, saying ‘[again], the music started up. These days, I often hear this tune in my head like a ringing in the ears. I have begun to think that in some way, it has come to rule my destiny’ (ibid., 239). It becomes clear that the brackets are possibly his inner thoughts; they are ‘ringing in the ears’. A later bracket confirms this speculation by suggesting Yau-shun’s ‘presence’ in the brackets: ‘(“My Grandmother was forever telling me: [Yau-shun, ­Yau-shun].4 Remember we should stay true to the end. There must be ­constant!”)’ (ibid., 240). This hints at Yau-shun’s aural memory of listening to nanyin with his grandmother, as ‘staying true to the end’ and ‘being constant’5 are originally a part of ‘Autumn Regrets’. Inserting bracketed ‘ringings in the ears’ into the main narrative, Dung opens up a new dimension to tell Yau-shun’s story with various types of sounds in Cantonese. In the original Chinese version, all bracketed portions, including the lyrics of ‘Autumn Regrets’ as well as Yau-shun’s internal monologue are written in colloquial Cantonese, while the non-bracketed ones are in standard written Chinese. For instance, to emphasise Yau-shun’s act of ‘speaking’ in his mind, Dung uses the Hong Kong Cantonese conventional way, maa maa seng jat tung ngo gong (嫲嫲成日同我講), as ‘my grandma was forever telling me’, rather than the standard written language, which should be naai naai ging soeng gan ngo gong (奶奶經常跟我講).6 In the translated version in English, the differences between the standard written language and

Recovering the lost Cantonese sounds in pre-handover Hong Kong  167 the spoken Cantonese are not linguistically translated, but visually, the translators attempt to highlight the distinction by italicising the Cantonese. By having this conceptual audio track of Cantonese sounds ‘playing’ throughout the story, Dung highlights the aural quality, or actually, musicality in Yau-shun’s memory of listening to the nanyin ballad in the past with his grandmother. The accentuation of the aural quality of Yau-shun’s ‘ringing in the ears’ can be seen as Dung’s strategy to make visible and audible what has been omitted in the course of history writing in contemporary Hong Kong. The brackets symbolically hint at the condition of Cantonese writing in Hong Kong: Cantonese writing has been marginalised by the convention of using ‘proper’ standard written Chinese; just like in the story, it has to be secondary, or ‘hidden’ in brackets from the main narrative written in standard Chinese. While Abbas points out that ‘not seeing’ Hong Kong’s culture is a result of the internalisation of colonial mentality (1997, 6), I propose that the condition of misrecognising Hong Kong’s culture has to be understood by a more universal but less studied problem of ‘not hearing’ of the local voices. This inaudibility can be attributed by the intricate language politics in Hong Kong, where the Cantonese sound, language and its culture are marginalised in the course of history writing in an intricate interplay of the effect of colonialism as well as that of literary conventions in the city. For sure, primarily, the suppression of Cantonese in Hong Kong can be understood in a framework of colonialism, given that the British language and culture is one of the centres in the power relationship involved to shape how the city has become. Like other colonies, the coloniser’s language and culture was made to be dominant, if not superior, to the local. Local culture, such as those in Cantonese, is historically considered inferior; this inferiority internalised by the local can be precisely understood with what Abbas says about the aforementioned condition of the colonial mentality: the local cannot see what is there. Yet, what makes the situation in Hong Kong particularly complex is that, in actual practice, the colonial government in Hong Kong did not entirely suppress the use of Cantonese; on the contrary, for very specific purposes, it actually encouraged the local’s usage of it, instead of other ‘Chinese’ languages. Indeed, in the Cold War era, Cantonese was adopted in Hong Kong as a strategy for the colonial government to suppress the circulation of Communist ideology from mainland China, which was in Mandarin. The absence of Cantonese in the ‘proper’ Chinese written language rather is a result of literary conventions. While ‘Chinese’ has been made an official language in Hong Kong since 1974, when the colonial government recognised the key to social and political stability was to rule in the local vernacular, the law does not actually specify which ‘Chinese’ should be the official written medium. Although Cantonese, which has been the vernacular most people speak in the Guangdong region in Southern China even before the British rule, became the official spoken language, it had never been a ‘proper’ written language.

168  Ka Lee Wong The ‘proper’ writing convention in Chinese denotes that regional verbal expressions, like the ones in Cantonese, are to be ‘translated’ into the so-called ‘literary language’. which is not quite similar to Cantonese. For example, while in Cantonese, one says ng goi (唔該) as ‘thank you’ in the context of expressing gratitude for non-material favours, in standard written Chinese, one has to convert the expression to ze ze (謝謝), which is a general expression of gratitude not specifying the distinction between material and non-material favours. While theoretically ze ze can also be pronounced in Cantonese, the phrase is too literal and is rarely used colloquially. Regarding this loss in conversion from spoken Cantonese to ‘proper’ written Chinese, Chow highlights the problems of loss in translation resulted from this rupture of sound and script in spoken and written Chinese: Writing ‘Chinese’ for people whose mother tongue is Cantonese is therefore already learning to use a different language whose preeminence comes primarily from its long status as script. In Hong Kong especially, this has always meant negotiating between the ‘standard’ that is Mandarin/Putonghua and the colloquial daily usages of Cantonese that one actually speaks and hears, suppressing the latter’s ‘local’ features, and translating such features into ‘readable’ Chinese, which exists as a kind of common, viable currency. (2013, 215) As Chow remarks, Cantonese is usually conceived in the form of speech, given that there is no standardisation of the written Cantonese words. Cantonese, when used as a written language, is seen as informal or improper, since most colloquial terms can only be written out in romanisation, or homonyms. Under this convention, many Cantonese expressions, which are actually spoken by its users in their everyday life, do not get to survive in the written form. That is to say, on top of ‘not seeing’ the local culture due to a colonial mentality, the audible aspect—‘not hearing’ the Cantonese sounds and culture—is also very prevalent. The absence of the Hong Kong Cantonese sounds in the literary, or more generally, cultural tradition offers a very unique example to the recent discussions in the realm of sound studies. Indeed, despite the fact that sound studies started gaining currency in the late 20th century with the appearance of discussions such as R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1993) and Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003), there has been an absence of other sounds, particularly, those outside of the West, in the field. Recent publications demonstrate heightened awareness of the history of imperialism in conceiving ideas such as sounds and hearing. For instance, in Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan propose to rethink the study of sound by paying specific attention to the idea of empire. By discussing ‘music as a means of comprehending empire as an audible formation’ (2016, 13), the book provokes

Recovering the lost Cantonese sounds in pre-handover Hong Kong  169 critical questions regarding how empire comes to be, as well as how it is challenged. Hong Kong’s situations, particularly the status of the Cantonese language and culture as illustrated here, exemplify the complexity and tensions of the studies of sound and empire, given that Hong Kong Cantonese is suppressed by not just the imperial language, English, because of its colonial background, but also the long-existing idea of a proper ‘Chinese’ language, which governs a hierarchy of script and sound. With these concerns in mind, in this chapter, I propose to use Shih Shumei’s Sinophone theory, where she puts particular emphasis on ‘sound’ or ‘-phone’ in her discussion of the trans-Pacific imagination of ‘Chinese-ness’, to illustrate the unique condition of Hong Kong Cantonese sounds and culture. Shih Shu-mei puts forward Sinophone as a theory, by which she challenges the essentialist views of ‘Chinese’ or ‘Chinese-ness’. Such views usually implicitly denote certain stereotypes, such as ethnically being Han, nationally being Chinese under the rule of Communist Party in the China proper, or Mandarin Chinese speaking. In Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (2007), Shih specifically emphasises the diversity of Sinophone sounds in the discussion of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍 wohu canlong 2000). There she explains how the illusion of a homogenous China in a martial art romance is shattered by a sense of linguistic dissonance informed by the dynamics of different Sinophones. Rather than dubbing different Sinophone accents into a more standardised form of Mandarin, Lee chose to retain traces of the main actors’ original linguistic background: in the film, on one hand, Chang Chen (張震) and Zhang Ziyi (章子怡) speak with very distinct Taiwanese and Beijing accents respectively; on the other, Chow Yun-fat (周潤發) and Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊), who is respectively from Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong and Ipoh in Malaysia, in Shih’s words, give ‘an awkward delivery’ (2007, 2) of heavy Cantoneseaccented classical lyricism in Mandarin. Initially, Shih attributes the primacy to the visual, as she aims to illustrate how visuality mediates identities under global capitalism—specifically, in this example, how images of an eternal China are circulated across what she calls ‘Sinophone Pacific’, where cultural politics are actually negotiated between different Sinophone-speaking locales like Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and the United States. Still, Sinophone theories are inevitably based on the distinctive sounds of different Sinophones, which is what recent sound studies scholars call for. In fact, on different occasions, Shih specifies that, ‘the Sinophone is not only of multiple sounds (polyphonic) but also of multiple orthographies (polyscriptic)’ (2011, 716). By pointing out the polyphonic and polyscriptic quality of different ‘Chinese’ languages in various locales, we are reminded that Sinophone is ‘place-based’ in a sense that each locale should have its own strategy to negotiate its own identity through creative localisation and creolisation, going beyond the constraints of being merely ‘Chinese’. Such views help us understand the condition of Hong Kong as a Sinophone locale, as well as the dilemmas faced in the pre-Handover period, specifically the pressure to erase the city’s uniqueness so as to embrace the ‘Chinese’

170  Ka Lee Wong tradition, either out of a sense of long-distance nationalism to China during the colonial era, or as a part of the preparatory work before reuniting with the motherland. Regarding the ways that one can actually mediate the uniqueness of the Cantonese sounds by using the ‘Chinese’ script, Dung ­Kai-cheung in ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’ brings to light not just the suppressed linguistic features of Hong Kong Cantonese, but also the affects, dreams, hopes and imagination embedded in it, through the trope of a form of Cantonese music called nanyin.

Nanyin: Inaudible Cantonese culture As discussed, the conventions governing the propriety and class of writing and other cultural productions have suppressed the textual expressions in Cantonese under an official script. Like the bracketed portion of Yau-shun’s memory about nanyin in ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’, cultural production in Cantonese is historically deemed secondary, or even of lower class. In Dungs’ story, nanyin, which has been forgotten by many people, or even history, is not only a metaphor for the absence of the Cantonese voice in the discourse of culture including history writing. Rather, by incorporating the scholarship of Hong Kong’s nanyin culture in the discussion of Dung’s story as well as Hong Kong’s Cantonese literature, I aim to point out how the biases, marginalisation and misrecognition of nanyin in the existing studies are a prime example of how a language and its culture is made gradually absent. In the short story, Wing Shing Street is presented as a form of ghostly co-existence with nanyin, or specifically, the protagonist’s aural memory and imagination of nanyin. This mysterious existence of Wing Shing Street is conjured up by the interweaving of facts and fabrication in the story, with an accentuation of its aural history. On one hand, in the main narrative, Yaushun repeatedly confirms that Wing Shing Street cannot be found in any historical record, such as the Hong Kong street directory; on the other hand, we, as readers, are expected to question its non-existence. Other than Yau-shun’s firm belief that Wing Shing Street once existed, we are also given a piece of seemingly authentic record, confirming the possible existence of Wing Shing Street. Placed at the opening of Dung’s short story before Yau-shun’s narrative begins, we are given a glimpse of a record titled ‘The Exotic Flora of Wing Shing Street’ written under the pseudonym ‘Old-Fashioned Scholar of a Hundred Faults’ and published in The Spotlight, dated 2 July 1930. Intriguingly, as we read on, it becomes clear that this piece is the only existing record which Yau-shun can find that mentions Wing Shing. In this record, Wing Shing’s existence is presented as solid: according to the ‘Old-Fashioned Scholar’, Wing Shing is as renowned as other places like the Possession Street and Shek Tong Tsui, which are actual historical redlight district in Hong Kong, for its thriving musical culture. Speaking highly of a nanyin songstress called Apricot from the Riverview Teahouse in Wing Shing Street, the ‘Old-Fashioned Scholar’ records his pleasurable listening

Recovering the lost Cantonese sounds in pre-handover Hong Kong  171 experience of Apricot’s rendition of the nanyin ballad called ‘Autumn Regrets of the Lone Traveler’, which ‘astonished all those present with her technique, and whenever she sang passages that were sweetly melancholy or gloomily disconsolate, not a dry eye was left in the house’ (Dung [1995] 2008, 236). Despite the ‘Old-Fashioned Scholar’s’ seemingly authentic report of his aural memory listening to the nanyin performance by a legendary songstress in Wing Shing Street, as Yau-shun mentions in the story, it is not sufficient to challenge the fact that Wing Shing never exists in the official account of Hong Kong’s history. That is why at last Yau-shun, feeling daunted, decides to burn this only piece of evidence he can find which mentions Wing Shing, and then resorts to his own imagination to create his own version of Wing Shing’s nanyin history. In a way, Dung’s story can be read as a critique of how the role of sounds is always neglected in Hong Kong’s historiography and collective identity. Under Dung’s lenses, an individual’s aural memory of a place is presented as so powerless that it is not inscribed in history. In this regard, nanyin is a perfect example to dramatise how the lack of preservation and inheritance of the Cantonese sound culture does not only lead to the disappearance of the culture itself, but also possibly oblivion of a place. In his search for evidence to prove the existence of Wing Shing, the protagonist, Yau-shun, reveals his intention behind his investigation of Wing Shing Street’s and his family’s history: My generation knows next to nothing about the history of Hong Kong … There is perhaps no other group of people on this earth who understand less about the place they grew up in than we do, but we are not to blame—colonies have no use for memories. However, when colonies approach their end, we suddenly become aware of blank space in our heads, and we are anxious to search for an identity, only to find that we have nothing to base ourselves on apart from fiction and fabrication (Dung [1995] 2008, 252) This notion of having no knowledge of Hong Kong, as well as having ‘nothing to base on’ when it comes to telling Hong Kong’s history under colonial rule, sounds very familiar to Ackbar Abbas’s diagnosis of the absence of culture in Hong Kong as a type of ‘negative hallucination’, or ‘not seeing what is there’. The failure to recognise nanyin as ‘something’, rather than ‘nothing’, in the telling of Hong Kong’s history is made paradoxical. At the very beginning of the story, the excerpt written by the ‘Old-fashioned Scholar’ specifically introduces to us the value of nanyin: ‘[t]he understated southern nanyin song is by no means inferior to the exuberant music of the north’ (ibid., 237, original emphasis). Yet, in the story, this admiration of nanyin in a commentary made in the 1930s fails to be passed on to Yau-shun’s generation in the 1990s. ­Yau-shun realises the importance of nanyin in understanding his family’s, Wing Shing’s and Hong Kong’s history, as he says, ‘[t]he only thing that

172  Ka Lee Wong enabled me to delve back into her past was her talent for singing nanyin ballads’ (ibid., 253); however, he admits his ignorance to this musical form: ‘Of course, I never really paid much attention to what [my grandmother] sang about. Those tunes were the voices of an altogether different world and meant nothing to my generation’ (ibid.). Dung here reminds us of the existence of a ‘high’ Cantonese cultural production: as the Old-fashioned Scholar says, nanyin is as sophisticated as the northern art form for its elegance and literariness. Yet, it is forgotten; or to be precise, it is bias and the lack of attention, proper study and preservation that makes it disappear. Indeed, the ‘inferiority’ of the Hong Kong Cantonese culture can be explained by what Raymond Williams describes in his ‘Culture is Ordinary’ in the 1950s, when Williams tries to shatter the cultural hegemony brought about by the upper-class tradition. He argues that ‘culture’ has been very restrictively defined, the culture of the working class is not recognised in the discourse of culture in Britain—after all, the working class, in the eyes of scholars such as Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, is uneducated, irrational, unrefined, mob-like and vulgar. With regard to this vulgarity, their culture is thus irrelevant to a more elitist sense of culture. Williams defends it by saying that ‘we cannot ignore the new cultural vulgarity’ (2002, 97), that working class has culture, just that it is not (yet) semantically or sociolinguistic registered in this very narrowly defined culture dominated by the middle and upper class, and thus not taken seriously. Hong Kong Cantonese cultural production has been going through comparable, but even more intricate conditions, due to the differences between language policies in Britain in the 1950s and colonial Hong Kong. While the situation described by Williams concerns only one language, English, and possibly its socio-lingual and regional variants marked by class and area, the situation in Hong Kong is complicated by the inherent ‘inferiority’ of Cantonese as the colonised language. The education system in colonial Hong Kong was very elitist in a sense that Cantonese culture like Cantonese opera or nanyin was silenced in curricula brimming with Chinese and English classics. In fact, nanyin’s history can be traced back to the late Qing dynasty and its golden era in the early part of the twentieth century in Southern Chinese regions like Hong Kong, Macau and Guangzhou, where live musicians could earn a living through performing in public space like restaurants, teahouses, opium dens, brothels and even streets (Yung 2008, 46). However, with the explosion of various forms of entertainment in the advent of technological advancement, live performances of nanyin were replaced by mass media broadcast or cassette records, accelerating their fade-out. Even though from the mid-1950s to early-1970s Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) broadcast programs featuring different forms of Cantonese music live broadcast including nanyin, they were cancelled when newer forms of pop music, such as folk and rock, became the mainstream. As Yu Siu Wah points out, ‘since RTHK decided to terminate the daily live broadcast of nanyin performance by the blind musician Dou Wun (杜煥), there is no more trace of nanyin in the Hong Kong “soundscape”’ (2014, 23). This disappearance of nanyin from

Recovering the lost Cantonese sounds in pre-handover Hong Kong  173 the Hong Kong soundscape is detrimental to the study of Hong Kong Cantonese culture and history. Bell Yung, one of the earliest scholars of nanyin publishing in English, tells his personal story about how nanyin had been inaudible to those who grew up in the era with colonial elitist education. His ‘Voices of Hong Kong: The Reconstruction of a Performance in a Teahouse’ discusses his conducting an in-depth study of legendary nanyin artist Dou Wun and relates Yung’s study of nanyin as his personal journey into re-discovering the ‘“disappeared” culture of [his] childhood and youth’ (2008, 44). Growing up in a middle-class family in colonial Hong Kong, where education and leisure meant studying Shakespeare and classical Chinese poetry, and watching Hollywood movies, Yung humbly confesses his juvenile lack of contact with and interest in mainstream Cantonese. Like Yau-shun in Dung’s short story, Yung’s encounter with Cantonese sound culture around his life was left unnoticed. As he writes, [i]n short, our lives were not touched very much by the bustling Cantonese culture around us. The only close local contact was through our maid, who we occasionally noticed was listening on the radio to what I realized later must have been Cantonese opera and Cantonese narrative song (2008, 44) Yung, in recounting his personal history about nanyin, reminds us of Yaushun in Dung’s story—to the two young Hong Kongers, Cantonese aural culture is nothing more than a meaningless ‘ringing in the ears’. Even though Cantonese is the commonly spoken language in contemporary Hong Kong, as Yung writes in his ‘re-discovery’ of nanyin, Cantonese aural culture has been a symbol for the lower class, especially the illiterate who rely on singing narratives as a form of mass education (ibid., 45). This hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ is even more obvious in the traditional study of Chinese literature: Cantonese oral culture such as singing narratives is considered tongsu 通俗 literature (Wong 2014, 49)—while tong 通 means mass or the general public, su 俗 is less about xisu 習俗 (convention) but more about su as a Cantonese slang for tackiness or cheapness, disu 低俗 (lowbrow) or cusu 粗俗 (vulgar). This tag of tongsu echoes both Abbas’s and William’s ideas: Hong Kong Cantonese culture, such as nanyin is not essentially inferior; rather it is a sense of culturalism fused by colonialism and conventions of Chinese writing that leads to the exclusion of the Cantonese culture in the discourse of ‘proper’ culture. Intriguingly, as pointed out by Yu Siu-wah in his critique of the current scholarship on nanyin in Hong Kong, Abbas in fact plays a part in confirming the misrecognition of nanyin in his reading of the local Hong Kong cinema: Abbas, in his Hong Kong Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, discusses Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (胭脂扣 yanzhi kou, 1988) in details. Yet, he has mistaken the nanyin sung by Fleur and Twelfth Master in their first

174  Ka Lee Wong encounter as Cantonese Opera (Abbas 1997: 42), which provides a prime example of his notion of ‘misrecognition’ in the reading of Hong Kong’s local culture! (2014, 22) To Yu, calling nanyin a type of Cantonese Opera is a misnomer, given it is not a dramatic work where different singers and instruments are involved. Instead, the specificity of nanyin comes from a single performer, who does not act, but sings and narrates the story from the third-person perspective, while playing the music at the same time. The confusion of nanyin as Cantonese Opera in renowned scholarship suggests that there seems to be no gatekeeper to prevent the Cantonese art form from vanishing for good.

Mapping the lost sounds in Hong Kong In ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’ Yau-shun’s unwillingness to accept the disappearance of Wing Shing Street and nanyin in the local history, together with his attempt to excavate and recreate the history of Wing Shing, signifies a mistrust of official history. However, how does one recuperate lost sounds through writing? Indeed, Yau-shun shows signs of pessimism about how the marginalised Cantonese sounds, memories and history in Hong Kong can be mediated: No matter how great the power of the netherworld, it could never withstand the merciless onslaught of the bulldozer. I reached out a hand and brushed away a strand of stray hair which had fallen across her face as I waited for those sleeping eyes to slowly open, and for that hundred-yearold body to gradually come to, to sit up, to lead me beneath the dim moon, and to sing for me one last nanyin ballad. (‘I want to ask the goddess of the moon for guidance in love, but the maple forest blocks her light’) However, she no longer had the strength to serve as a medium for memory… (Dung [1995] 2008, 266) The ‘she’ who has been sleeping quietly in the story is mentioned regularly by Yau-shun when he describes his writing journey in his grandmother’s apartment. While logically this ‘she’ is Yau-shun’s current girlfriend, his emphasis on the ‘hundred-year-old body’ refutes this speculation. Possibly, ‘she’ does not only mean his deceased grandmother and Apricot, who sung the nanyin ballad, but also this ‘she’ can mean Hong Kong, or nanyin, which is on the verge of disappearance after a hundred year of history. The emphasis on ‘the merciless onslaught of the bulldozer’ reminds us that, at the time when Dung wrote ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’, Hong Kong underwent different forms of transformation, including demolitions of historical heritage in the name of urban renewal. The resulting loss of local communities and other living history embedded in the physical demolition raises the question

Recovering the lost Cantonese sounds in pre-handover Hong Kong  175 about how the Hong Konger’s unique culture, identity and history can be mediated and preserved. As evoked from Yau-shun’s monologue where he questions the strength of Hong Kong and its language to ‘serve as a medium for memory’, the aspiration to recover and mediate lost sound culture is very taxing, if not impossible. In reality, such anxieties are not specific to nanyin but to much local culture in Hong Kong. What comes with this anxiety of dissipation is ‘the last generation mentality’, which has been more and more brought up in the realm of Hong Kong studies (Leung 2012, 305). Regarding this anxiety from ‘the last generation’ of Hong Kongers, Chu Yiu-wai proposes a creative way out of the dilemma by appropriating Rey Chow’s idea of ‘self-writing’ as a specter to disavow both dominant powers. By this, Chu calls for using an alternative approach to finding its own voice so as to ‘free itself’ and ‘haunt the complicity between “nation” and “capital”’ (2018, 88). As he writes, Hong Kongers’ sense of belonging has become a luxury under globalisation, neoliberalism and Mainlandisation when Hong Kong is constantly under the pressure to integrate culturally with China. However, the sense of belonging should not just be defined from the ‘top-down’, such as in the national education campaigns pushed forward by the government; ‘bottom-up’ lived experiences and citizenship are what give the local a sense of agency in defining the unique identity of Hong Kongers. The ‘bottom-up’ tactic that Chu proposes is that Hong Kong keeps itself ‘visible’ by visualising what has been or is under the threat of being erased. Chu’s proposition is a re-examination of what ‘Chineseness’ means and does for Hong Kong. Indeed, this is exactly the same question which sparks off the emergence of Shih Shu-mei’s Sinophone Studies in the late 2000s. Shih’s approach has triggered heated debates in the realm of modern Chinese cultural studies, when she problematises the homogeneous and dominant view of ‘Chineseness’ with the Sinophonic dissonance from geopolitical sites which have complicated relations with China. Chu’s discussion of Hong Kong can be seen as a response to this controversy by revisiting and responding to some of the key arguments. For example, one of his key propositions is to rethink ‘Chineseness’ in Hong Kong as ‘Chinesenesses’, by which he strategically uses the strike-through to visualise the erasure of the plurality of Chineseness. Considering how Dung creatively makes visible the Cantonese sound culture which has long been marginalised in the discourse of culture in Hong Kong, ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’ exemplifies how this ‘Chinesenesses’ can bring to light what has been made invisible and inaudible in the course of history. Even though Chu’s proposal is directed to Hong Kong’s post-colonial condition in the late 2010s when the city has been under increasing pressure to surrender her distinctiveness and integrate with mainland China, Chu’s approach is also useful in analysing the challenges, that is, the marginalisation of its sounds, which Cantonese culture has been facing since the colonial period up to the present days.

176  Ka Lee Wong

Conclusion The excavation of the historical omission of the fictive Wing Shing neighbourhood in Dung’s story uncovers the ways in which Cantonese sound culture has been marginalised. The value of conjuring up a fictitious area as such does not lie in authenticity and objectivity, but in the political implications it evokes. By recuperating the vanished space of Wing Shing Street with its various forms of Cantonese sounds, including Cantonese as a written language and nanyin, Dung reminds us that the power of sounds lies not just in mediating the history of a community, but also dreams, hopes and imagination which all play a part in defining cultural identity, not only of Hong Kongers. In incorporating nanyin, Dung’s story recovers the almost forgotten Cantonese singing tradition in telling a story in Cantonese about the pre-handover anxieties in Hong Kong. Up to the present, in post-handover Hong Kong, writing in Cantonese receives more and more attention and recognition., Children of Darkness (lielao chuan; 烈佬傳, 2012), for instance, in which Wong Bik-wan (黃碧雲) narrates an autobiographical story using the voice of a Cantonese-speaking inmate who experiences Hong Kong behind bars in the pre- and post-colonial era, won the fifth Dream of the Red Chamber Award in 2014. This proves the point Dung makes in ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’: the Cantonese language and culture, as well as Cantonese sounds and voices, are not necessarily destined to fade away. The use of sound studies, and also of Shih Shu-mei’s Sinophone theory with a particular focus on sound, brings to attention what has been forcefully silenced in the course of telling Hong Kong’s story. The discussion of Dung’s short story in this chapter reminds us how the significance of sounds in Hong Kong’s Cantonese culture has been traditionally marginalised in favour of a standard written language. As I discussed in this chapter, the misrecognition of the Hong Kong Cantonese nanyin as something else in the existing academic studies seems, unfortunately, to prove the point that the Cantonese language and its sound culture that assemble Yau-shun’s memory of nanyin in Dung’s story will disappear—if not studied, or listened to, properly. After all, in this cacophonic age when everyone seems able to voice out and leave his or her own audio-visual or textual trace with the aid of technology, the question of where and how to listen properly becomes especially worth pondering. The mission to interrogate and recover the marginalised, if not lost, Sinophone sounds like the ones mentioned in this chapter, including the Cantonese sounds in Hong Kong literary and musical culture, will very much rely on those who not just have the heart and passion to pass on the Hong Kong Cantonese language and culture, but also proficient ears, that is, the ability to truly understand the beauty and vibrancy of it. As Sinophone theories highlight, this task is not limited to people of a particular ethnicity or nationality; rather, it is open to those who are able to make sense of the Sinophone sounds. After all, rather than one’s roots, what is crucial are the routes one has gone through, and which have truly informed his or her linguistic and cultural identity.

Recovering the lost Cantonese sounds in pre-handover Hong Kong  177

Notes 1 The romanization of Chinese terms in this chapter are mostly based on the official version in English. For example, ‘董啟章’ is written as ‘Dung Kai-cheung’ using Cantonese transliteration, rather than ‘Dong Qizhang’ using Mandarin pinyin, since he is from Hong Kong, where Cantonese is the official spoken language. Other terms are translated by convention. For instance, even though ‘南音’ is a Cantonese singing tradition, most studies in the current scholarship in English use pinyin (‘nanyin’) rather than Cantonese transliteration (‘naamjam’). I have, however, used Cantonese transliteration for the name of the protagonist in ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’, given that the characters in the story are Cantonese-speaking. Although in the translation by Flora Lam and Simon Patton, the main character’s name is written in pinyin as ‘Youxin’, which is a transliteration of Mandarin pronunciation, I consider ‘Yau-shun’ a more conventional way to romanise the name ‘有信’ in the context of Hong Kong. The names of other characters translated by Lam and Patton such as Apricot, (杏兒) and Ah Kuen (阿娟), follow the romanisation convention in Hong Kong (i.e. ‘Apricot’ as translation, while ‘Ah Kuen’ by Cantonese pronunciation); hence, these names will be used according to Lam and Patton’s translation. 2 Natural History trilogy includes The History of the Adventures of Vivi and Vera (天工開物 . 栩栩如真 tiangong kaiwu. xuxu ruzhen, 2005), Histories of Time: The Lustre of Mute Porcelain (時間繁史·啞瓷之光 shijian fanshi yaci zhiguang, 2007) and The Origin of Species: The Educational Age of Beibei's Rebirth (物種源 始:貝貝重生之學習年代 wuzhong yuanshi beibei chongsheng zhi xuexi niandai, 2010b). 3 In the original version in Chinese, reminders as such are absent. 4 As mentioned in the first endnote, the protagonist’s name is translated as ‘Youxin’ by Lam and Patton. Yet, in my discussion, Cantonese transliteration (‘Yau-shun’) is considered more appropriate. 5 The original of these two phrases (‘staying true to the end’ and ‘being constant’) is, in Cantonese transliteration, ‘cing ji loeng sam gin’ (情義兩心堅), which is a part of the lyrics of the nanyin balland ‘Autumn Regrets’. 6 Both of the romanised sentences, ‘maa maa seng jat tung ngo gong’ (嫲嫲成日同我講) and ‘naai naai ging soeng gan ngo gong’ (奶奶經常跟我講) are transliterated in Cantonese. While the standard written version as demonstrated in the latter sentence, ‘naai naai ging soeng gan ngo gong’, can be pronounced in Cantonese, the colloquial expressions like ‘seng jat’ (成日) has to be converted into ‘ging soeng’ (經常).

References Abbas, M. A. 1997. Hong Kong: Culture and the politics of disappearance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chow, R. 2008. ‘King Kong in Hong Kong: Watching the “Handover” from the USA’. In A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, edited by H. Schwarz and S. Ray, 304–318. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Chow, R. 2013. ‘Things, common/places, passages of the port city: On Hong Kong and Hong Kong Author Leung Ping-kwan’. In Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by S. Shi, C. Tsai and B. Bernards, 207–226. New York: Columbia University Press. Chu, Y. W. 2018. Found in Transition: Hong Kong Studies in the Age of China. Albany: State University of New York Press. Dung, K. C. 2005. Tiangong kaiwu. xuxu ruzhen. Taipei: Rye Field Publishing. Dung, K. C. 2007. Shijian fanshi yaci zhiguang. Taipei: Rye Field Publishing.

178  Ka Lee Wong Dung, K. C. [1995] 2008. ‘The rise and fall of Wing Shing Street’. In To Pierce the Material Screen: An Anthology of 20th-Century Hong Kong Literature, edited by E. Hung and C. Ip. Translated by F. Lam and S. Patton. Hong Kong: Research Centre for Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Dung, K. C. 2010a. Ditu ji: yige xiangxiang de chengshi de kaogu xue. Taipei: Linking Publishing. Dung, K. C. 2010b. Wuzhong yuanshi beibei chongsheng zhi xuexi niandai. Taipei: Rye Field Publishing. Dung, K. C. 2012. Fanshenglu. Taipei: Linking Publishing. Dung, K. C. [1995] 2014. ‘Yongshengjie xinshuaishi’. In Selected Works of Contemporary Hong Kong Writers: Dung Kai-cheung, edited by N. Y. Wong. Hong Kong: Cosmos Books Ltd. Leung, M. T. 2012. ‘Yige zuihou yidai xianggang wenhuaren de gaobai’. In Pupu xianggang: yuedu xianggang puji wenhua 2000-2010 er, edited by K. W. Ma, C. H. Ng and C. W. Cheung, 305–308. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Educational Publishing Company. Radano, R. M., & Olaniyan, T. 2016. Audible empire: Music, global politics, critique. Durham: Duke University Press. Schafer, R. M. 1993. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Vermont: Destiny Books. Shih, S. 2007. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shih, S. 2011. ‘The concept of Sinophone’. PMLA 126(3): 709–718. Sterne, J. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Sussman, N. M. 2011. Return Migration and Identity: A Global Phenomenon, a Hong Kong Case. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Wang, D. D. 2011. ‘A Hong Kong miracle of a different kind: Dung Kai-Cheung’s writing/action and Xuexiniandai (The Apprenticeship)’. Translated by C. Mason. China Perspectives 1(85): 80–85. Williams, R. 2002. ‘Culture is Ordinary’. In The Everyday Life Reader, edited by B. Highmore, 91–100. London: Routledge. Wong, B. W. 2012. Lielao chuan. Taipei: Titan Publishing. Wong, C. M. 2014. Xianggang wenhua daxi 1919–1949: Tongsu wenxuejuan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Commercial Press. Yu, S. W. 2014. ‘Shiniangqiang: nanyin chengchuanren yu gangao wenhua’. In Yueyu de zhengzhi: xianggang yueyu de yizhi yu duoyuan, edited by K.W. Man, 21–42. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Yung, B. 2008. ‘Voices of Hong Kong: The reconstruction of a performance in a teahouse’. In Critical Zone 3: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge, edited by D. Kerr and Q. S. Tong, 37–57. Hong Kong; Nanjing: Hong Kong University Press; Nanjing University Press.

9 When the looms stop, the baby cries The changing sounds of the Kyoto kimono-making industry Jenny Hall

Introduction As I sit at an upstairs window, I can hear the rhythmic clacking of the mechanical loom in the building at the end of the street. It is hot and everyone has their windows open in order to catch the slightest breeze. The sound of the loom stops periodically, and I imagine the weaver making some adjustments to the machine. Then the loom resumes its drum-like beat—gacha gacha gacha gacha. From a distance, it sounds like a shush-shush-shushing sound. It beats every day except Sunday, from 8 am until 6 pm. When I walk along the narrow neighbourhood street, the clicking becomes more distinct, the metal loom rasping, and I can hear weavers shouting to each other above the noise. This is the sonic environment of Nishijin, a district of Kyoto where the community has been devoted to weaving for over 500 years.1 The sound of weaving looms has been ubiquitous throughout Nishijin for centuries, and it has become a distinguishing aspect of the local sonic environment. It is the sound of the community and forms part of the local identity. The sonic landscape has changed over time, especially with the introduction of new technologies such as the power loom, which have rendered the sounds louder and more regular in a mechanical sense, but the association of this industry with the Nishijin area has remained constant. In contrast, the sonic environment of the yūzen (paste-resist dyeing) industry is inaudible from the street, and the yūzen artisanal community is less cohesive. There is not a specific district associated with yūzen in Kyoto that locals recognise or associate with the industry. Nevertheless, I believe the sonic environment of yūzen dyeing is also an important factor in understanding constructions of identity and community, particularly for the artisans themselves. It is equally as important, in terms of documenting the significance of sound in Asia, to consider yūzen’s auditory footprint as that of the more noticeable Nishijin sonic environment. Early sound studies have been criticised recently for being Western-centric and for ‘presumptions of universality’ (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015, 7); for romanticising sounds of nature over urban ‘noise’ (Plourde 2014); and for representing the state as ‘having the power to produce, authorize, or condone loudness and to coerce silence’ (Quintero 2019). In order to address these DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772-13

180  Jenny Hall shortcomings, ethnography in particular can offer ‘an ear into the expressive, embodied, and participatory relationships with sound as it unfolds into powerful articulations of particular selves, publics, and transcultural identities’ (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015, 7). This chapter focuses on the ways in which technological change, in particular mechanisation and digitisation, has altered the sonic environment of the Kyoto kimono-making industry in order to highlight and address these debates in sound studies. The kimono-making industry is an apt sonic environment to study for several reasons. First, there is a wide body of existing local knowledge and scholarship—the ‘Japanese interdisciplinary field of acoustic ecology (oto no kankyō) or soundscape studies (saundosukēpugaku) predates much of the sensory turn in Western academia’ (Gould, Chenhall, Kohn and Stevens 2019, 246). Second, this local scholarship provides an alternative understanding of urban sonic environments through which entrenched Western dichotomies such as nature/urban and public/private are challenged. Third, despite the fact that the Japanese public has been typified as ‘passive and unable to resist or “assume control” over such urban noise’ (Plourde 2014, 71) an examination of weavers and dyers in Kyoto illustrates that individuals continually negotiate and contest their sonic environments. To understand a sonic environment, we need to consider this continual negotiation and contestation by looking at how aspects such as emic ideas regarding the senses, agency of participants, and the politics of sound, intersect. Following a discussion of these three aspects, I will describe Nishijin orimono (weaving) because the Nishijin district of Kyoto is a relatively cohesive weaving community with a strong sense of identity and is an audible example in terms of a recognisable sonic environment in the urban space. Secondly, I will explore Kyō-yūzen (Kyoto-style paste-resist dyeing) because it is a more fragmented community in terms of place and sound is a less obvious factor in negotiations and contestations of community. For each technique, there will be a brief definition and history of innovations, including a description of the sonic environment and the impact of technological change on these environments. Specific examples, along with weavers’ and artisans’ comments, will support the discussion. Data for this chapter was collected during fieldwork undertaken in Kyoto in 2012, with follow-up communication from 2013 to 2019. Interviews were conducted in Japanese, and I spoke to manufacturers, artisans, designers, and retailers in the weaving and dyeing industries. Participatory and non-participatory direct observation, including video and sound recording, was undertaken in order to document and obtain a deeper understanding of the working conditions of artisans and staff members. My ethnographic approach was not limited to sound, but included all of the senses (that is, taste, touch, sight, and smell) in data collection and writing because ‘we never interact with or confront our surroundings via only one sense’ (Plourde 2014, 73).

Reconsidering sound Since the first sound studies research, the point that ‘the senses are not bounded discrete entities’ (Plourde 2014, 73) has been made many times (Rodaway 1994; Ingold 2007; Hankins and Stevens 2014; Gould et al. 2019).

When the looms stop, the baby cries  181 This idea becomes more apparent when considering Japanese discussions of the senses. Even the Japanese terms used for the senses reveal the ‘slippage between physical sensation, emotion, and intellect’ (Gould et al. 2019, 234). For example, the terms kankaku and chikaku are both used for ‘senses’ (kaku means consciousness) but kan means emotional and physical feeling, whereas chi means intellect (ibid.). This indicates that the senses are not merely thought of in terms of physical processes but have an intellectual component, a ‘consciousness of bodily sensations versus mindfulness of these phenomena’ (ibid.). In addition, various Japanese practices demonstrate slippage between sensory modes. Japanese used to gather in Ueno Park in the early Showa period (1926–1989) to ‘listen’ to lotus flowers blooming even though this is outside the human range of hearing (Gould et al. 2019, 232). Appreciation of incense is described as ‘listening to the incense’ (kō wo kiku) (ibid., 232), with the incense types classified by taste (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and pungent) (Moeran 2007, 165). This multisensorial aspect of incense also applies to yūzen production—for example, dyers taste natural dyes to ascertain the depth of colour (Hall 2020, 6). As with the other senses, ‘sound is never a matter of auditory engagement alone but instead comes to significance within a broader range of sensory engagement’ (Hankins and Stevens 2014, 40). Therefore, in this chapter, I focus on sound but have incorporated the other senses where relevant. Early sound studies valued sounds of nature over industrially produced sounds, but these hierarchies of sound are not necessarily locally operative. As Plourde points out, ‘Schafer’s research on soundscapes, while important in its calls for engaging with our sonic environment, has long been criticised for privileging (or romanticising) rural landscapes, while denigrating urban soundscapes’ (2014, 83). Not only is industrial noise categorised as a social problem, but by applying Western interpretations of sound, local interpretations of sound and noise are silenced. In Japan, as a ‘keynote sound of industrial development and mechanization, noise is also recognized for its anti-social and physiologically damaging effects’ (Novak 2015, 125) and strong anti-noise legislation does exist, but it is rarely enforced (ibid., 132). This points to the contested nature of noise not just cross-culturally but within cultures: What constitutes ‘noise’ in certain contexts, and at what volume levels? Not only is noise ‘an essentially relational concept’ (Novak 2015, 126) but ‘sound comes to matter through ongoing practices of contextualization that produce sounds as well as the social and spatial contexts in which they come to have significance’ (Hankins and Stevens 2014, 2). These ongoing practices ‘are not neutral, apolitical background matter; their recognition as “noisy, silent, musical” are socially, culturally and morally informed and motivated and, thus, essentially political in nature’ (Chandola 2019, 238). ‘Noise’ is culturally contingent and changes through time. For example, ‘leaking headphones’ (Hankins and Stevens 2014, 3) and loud noise in general is not tolerated on Japanese trains (many have signs stating phones must be turned off and train staff walk through carriages policing this on some lines). On the other hand, higher noise levels are

182  Jenny Hall accepted in other contexts of Japanese life, as documented in various studies such as that of chindon-ya (street musicians hired for advertising) (Abe 2014), right-wing nationalists’ megaphones and ‘sound trucks’ (Smith 2014), and yakiimo (sweet potato) trucks’ amplified playback loops (Hankins and Stevens 2014). In defining what constitutes noise, it is ‘generally acknowledged to be that which disturbs, disrupts, and interferes; it is a sound or message that we do not want to hear. It is excessive and uncontrolled’ (Plourde 2014, 72). However, as these examples demonstrate, the ‘border between sound and noise is a highly subjective demarcation and often culturally contingent’ (ibid., 73). In addition, this border is also constantly being negotiated, contested, and is evolving over time, as will be demonstrated by changes in the kimono-making industry. Japan has been described as ‘sonically saturated’ (Abe 2014, 92), or as a ‘sound saturated society’ (oto zuke shakai) (Plourde 2014, 71; Novak 2015, 132). However, only ascribing noise to the public sphere, as oft occurs for urban settings, is problematic. In the case of both the geographically cohesive Nishijin weaving district and the more fragmented yūzen industry, a private/ public demarcation is difficult to draw because work is essentially carried out within homes or workshops attached to homes. In addition, public/private models have previously assumed that the ‘liberal listener’ responds to public noise with retreat, with an assumed ‘ability of private property to cloister the individual ear’ (Quintero 2019, 137–138). The Nishijin weaving district provides a useful example for challenging this assumption because individuals residing in the area, and children growing up in weaving factories, are not able to ‘retreat’. As Quintero found in Buenaventura, ‘agonistic understandings opposing society and the autonomous individual fail to account for the gamut of interpersonal entanglements’ (2019, 138). As many textile factories and studios in Japan are incorporated within homes, growing up surrounded by this industry means that their conditions, including their associated sounds, form the basis of these interpersonal entanglements and childhood memories. As Professor Yūzō Murayama, who grew up in Nishijin, told me, ‘our house itself was kind of a factory and behind there were two or three textile machines so I kind of lived with those machines. That was my environment so the shokunin [artisans] were all over. My house was located in the centre of Nishijin and all of the neighbours were engaged in Nishijin textiles’ (personal communication 2012). It is these memories that ‘echo across whole communities…these sounds link the memories of a populace, but within that shared experience lies a myriad of personal recollections’ (Street 2014, 139). Digital yūzen designer, Kawabe Yūnosuke, explained, For a child growing up in a musician’s house, sound is important. Inside the womb, they can hear sounds. Then naturally they get lots of information about music. In my case, from childhood, I was surrounded by kimono, so I learnt what colours to use, and as a student I went to art school; the family business is my backbone. (Hall 2020, 86)

When the looms stop, the baby cries  183 Kawabe’s statement focuses on the visual for his own sensory input (Kyo ̄yūzen dyeing), but the omission of other sensory markers is revealing, as will be discussed later in the chapter.

Nishijin orimono Definition and history Nishijin is a district in the northeast corner of Kyoto well-known throughout Japan for its brocade weaving or orimono. It is geographically distinct, bordered by Kitayama-dōri in the north, Marutamachi-dōri towards the south, Nishioji-dōri in the west and Karasuma-dōri towards the east (see Figure 9.1).2 It was established after the Onin Civil Wars in 1477 and has been a centre for silk brocade weaving used for obi sashes since that period (Hareven 2002, 26). The historical nature of the district has resulted in a mix of residential and industrial buildings, with many residences abutting or incorporating weaving workshops. Streets are narrow and houses are set side by side in typical Kyoto fashion, sharing retaining walls or with very little space between them. Workshops are not usually sound-insulated (Minoura and Hiramatsu 2003, 3349). All of these factors aid in creating a cohesive, audible community. For centuries, Nishijin weavers used wooden or bamboo tebata (handlooms), in particular the takabata (treadle loom), or the sorabiki-bata (a drawloom that required an assistant to manage the figure harness which is used to control each warp thread separately). In the late 1800s, the industry underwent technological change with the introduction of the French jacquard system (jakādo in Japanese) that used foot pedals to operate a jacquard (a punch card system that controls the warp threads), rather than an assistant. The jacquard can be attached to either a tebata or a riki-shokki (power loom). The metal power loom was also introduced in the 1880s and its use gradually increased during the Taisho period and rose dramatically after World War II (Hareven 2002, 42). Power looms are looms in which the shuttle, shedding (the raising of the warp threads to create the ‘shed’ for the shuttle to pass through), the battening of the weft threads and the taking up of the roll of completed fabric are mechanised and driven by a power source rather than by hand. However, Nishijin power looms are not the same as industrial mechanical looms used elsewhere because the type of brocade produced in Nishijin needs additional skills and craftsmanship compared to ordinary industrial weaving; Nishijin power loom weavers must still operate shuttles by hand to achieve the intricate designs and one weaver must operate one loom as opposed to one weaver operating several industrial looms as occurs in Europe (Hall 2020, 58). In the 1950s, Nishijin experienced a boom and Kyoto residents nicknamed Nishijin weavers ‘gachaman’, from the combination of two words: gacha referred to the sound of the shuttle clicking when moved across the warp, and man (ten thousand yen) that the residents believed the weavers earned every

184  Jenny Hall

Figure 9.1  Map of Kyoto showing the district of Nishijin and various yu ̄zen workshops. (By author; adapted from Hall 2020, 42; Diagram 2.1).

When the looms stop, the baby cries  185 time this occurred (Hareven 2002, 30). By 1960, about 90 per cent of silk-weaving businesses, 80 per cent of workers employed, and almost 74 per cent of the products in the district still revolved around weaving (ibid., 66). Since the latter half of the 1960s, power looms have made up 80 per cent of the looms in the district (Minoura 2014). By 1984, Nishijin manufacturers used 20,000 power looms and about 5,000 handlooms (Hareven 2002, 42–43) but since then an average of 40 to 50 manufacturers per year have ceased operating (ibid., 46). Manufacturers in Nishijin began to use digital looms in the 1980s (Hareven 2002). A digital loom is a power loom in which the jacquard design component has been computerised (Hall 2015, 64). The designs are sent to the loom via a disk drive attached to it. To operate the machine, the weaver turns it on, and the machine sends the shuttles shooting across the warp threads, creating the fabric; the speed of the shuttle, or shuttles, is dictated by the machine. Production time is much faster than traditional methods—about two to three days as opposed to two to three months to produce the same woven fabric. However, a digital loom weaver must still prepare all of the weft threads for the shuttles by winding them onto spools (a machine is used for this), thread the loom warp threads (which involves threading thousands of silk threads that are thinner than human hair), rethread shuttles when they run out of thread, ensure the new shuttle thread is taken into the weaving pattern, and generally maintain the machine (Hall 2020, 63–64). The weaver cannot walk away from the machine and let it carry out the weaving process unattended— they must always monitor it because of the complexity of Nishijin orimono. The Nishijin sonic environment A characteristic of the Nishijin district is the coexistence of old and new technology (Hareven 2002, 45), so it is possible in the present day to audibly experience treadle looms, power looms, and digital looms in the district. On a wooden treadle loom, or handloom, all operations are controlled by the weaver; the warp threads are operated by foot pedals while the weaver threads the weft shuttle across the fabric. With experience, the wooden loom operates as an extension of the body (Hall 2014, 173), and the weaver develops a rhythm, beating the warp threads tightly after each slide of the shuttle—tap tap slide, tap tap slide—it sounds like a drum punctuated by the squeaks of the foot pedals moving the warp (Hall 2020, 53). The pace, and therefore the rhythm, is dependent on the weaver’s ability. It is punctuated by interruptions as the weaver makes alterations and adjustments such as rethreading the shuttle or pulling the completed fabric through the cloth roller (ibid.). The sonic environment is created by these movements. I observed Nojiri Shūichi weaving at the Orinasukan in Nishijin. The Orinasukan is a museum and weaving workshop founded in 1907 that specialises in hand weaving obi and noh theatre costumes. In 2012, there were 14 handlooms and ten weavers working in the large workshop. The looms emitted clicks and taps as the weavers worked. There were also machines for reeling thread so there was a background hum when these machines were in

186  Jenny Hall action; they produced a low-level whirring noise. Nojiri was working on a ten-meter-long obi that he told me would take him 30 months to complete (ibid., 58). The sonic impact of the power loom must have been tremendous for weavers initially, both in terms of noise level and also rhythm, pace, and vibrations. Working on the handloom, weavers could work at their own pace, creating the sounds themselves by moving the shuttle back and forth. The power loom was three times as fast as the handloom in terms of production (Hareven 2002, 57), so the pressure to keep up with the machine’s pace and the intense noise it produced would have been overwhelmingly different (Hall 2014, 174). In addition, the power loom was introduced in conjunction with other machines such as mechanised silk and cotton reeling that also had a sonic impact. In other countries such as Scotland, the introduction of the power loom caused riots and strikes by handloom weavers (Clark 1997). Yamada, an obi manufacturer, took me to a digital loom weaving workshop in Nishijin. It was down a little alley and if the sound of the looms had not been audible, it would have been difficult to ascertain it was there, as with most of the weaving kōbō (workshops) in Nishijin. However, walking through the streets of Nishijin and hearing looms is not the same as being inside a weaving factory. Obviously, sound behaves differently inside a building. In addition, the other senses are engaged in a way that they are not when the sound is experienced outside the building—standing outside while listening means that the visual, olfactory, and even the vibrations associated with sound are dulled or cut off. Inside the workshop, there were four digital looms, but Yamada said only two of them were operational. Even when only one of the looms was in operation, the sound of it meant conversation was difficult, and I could feel the vibration and thumping of the loom bodily.3 There were three men and two elderly women working there. I noticed that one of the older men had a hearing aid. I asked Yamada about the noise, querying its effects on the workers. Yamada’s response was, ‘narareru’ (they get used to it) (Hall 2014, 174). He did not mention hearing loss or damage. He grew up in this sonic environment and he told me, ‘the babies that grow up with [this noise] start to cry when the looms stop because they’ve become so used to it’ (personal interview 1 November 2012). It was clear that he did not consider the sounds problematic but rather a part of the environment. In her seminal work on Nishijin weaving, Hareven discusses working conditions for the weavers. In her interviews, many of her subjects talked about the sensory impact of weaving on their bodies, such as cramps, aches, and pains. However, there is actually very little in her book on the impact of the sonic environment, and I surmise the reason for this is that weavers did not think it a significant issue. As Japanese sound scholar Minoura notes, ‘when an industry is deeply connected with a community, the sounds can be taken as an acceptable and even appropriate element of the area’ (2013, 2). As many of the weavers had grown up in the sonic environment, the sound of the looms was a part of daily life and also the sound of business (Minoura and

When the looms stop, the baby cries  187 Hiramatsu 2003). Weavers told Minoura that they monitor the looms by the noise they make and considered the sound ‘as a representative noise of the area’ (2003, 3351). However, it is true that not all residents of Nishijin felt the same about the sonic environment. The work of elementary school teacher, Saito Kikuo (1929–2000), gives a useful insight into weavers’ understanding of the sonic impact on their lives. Saito worked at Kashiwano Elementary School in Nishijin from 1963 to 1971 (Minoura 2014, 535). During this period, Kashiwano was one of the most densely populated districts in Kyoto. The 1965 Population Census of Japan recorded the population as 6,914, with a population density of over 40,000 residents/km2 (ibid., 534). There were 613 manufacturers in the district, most of which were connected with the textile industry; in comparison, in 2009, there were only 83 manufacturers, and by 2010, the number of residents had halved (ibid., 534). Saito realised that the sonic environment was having a detrimental impact on his students’ education and decided to incorporate this characteristic of the neighbourhood into his teaching practice to try and improve learning outcomes. Because weaving workshops were mixed with residential spaces, students were subjected to intense noise levels for a large portion of their lives. As Minoura and Hiramatsu note, ‘the area used to be filled with the loud weaving noise of power looms when the industry flourished in years around 1950s and 1960s’ (2003, 3349). Saito took readings of noise levels within classrooms, students’ homes, weaving studios, and public points in the streets that demonstrate the intense weaving noises were distributed throughout almost the entire district, again challenging the public/private dichotomy. He then set students tasks that focused on expressing the impact of these noise levels on their lives, such as eliciting onomatopoeic responses to the noises or setting poetry compositions or essay tasks about them. He self-published his findings in a series of articles such as ‘Nishijin no ko to hata no oto’ (Children in Nishijin and Sounds of Looms, 1965) and the books Nishijin no ko (Children in Nishijin, 1971) and Ookina ki no shita no kodomotachi (Children Beneath Big Trees, 1995). The coexistence of handlooms and power looms in Nishijin meant that pupils at Kashiwano Elementary School were able to note down their perceptions of each of these technologies, and their responses give some idea of the auditory differences between the two. The handloom sounds reflect the varying actions of the weaver such as ‘bacchan gacha gacha tsuru tsuru gacchan’ or ‘basha ku ku ku kachin basha’, whereas the power loom was more mechanical and regular, such as ‘gudassha gudassha gudassha gudassha’ or ‘chachon chachon chachon chachon’ (Minoura 2014, 541). Pupils also noted the sonic effect of the looms stopping. They had numerous responses, which included, ‘feel scary’, ‘feel awkward’, ‘feels like the earth is stopping’, ‘don’t have to yell’, and, as with Yamada’s anecdote above, ‘a baby cries’ (ibid., 542). Some described the sounds being like a personality, and ‘many of the pupils felt that the weaving sounds could be like family members’ (ibid., 544). This demonstrates that the sounds were embedded deeply in the pupils’ lives, and

188  Jenny Hall that they had both a physical and emotional response to them, that it was not just an audible experience, but a multisensory experience that formed a significant part of their everyday life and identity. Saito’s work demonstrates that, even though ‘the ears do not close’ (Chandola 2019, 228) and cannot be closed, listeners are not entirely stripped of their agency. Although Nishijin children might not have been able to walk away or escape the sounds of the looms, they were not merely passive recipients of the sonic environment—the content of their responses shows their active engagement with it. These sonic environments also reveal the continual process of negotiation and contestation undertaken by participants. For example, the weaving manufacturer’s statement above about babies crying when the looms stop, suggests that other sonic environments are considered abnormal and therefore unsettling in this community. The manufacturer used this statement to justify the hearing problems that weavers in his industry suffer later in life, but he also stated it as a matter of pride and a mark of inclusion in his community. The sounds of weaving are seen as indicative of the liveliness of the town (Minoura and Hiramatsu 2003, 3352), and the prosperity, or not, of the district. This is evident from the historical term gachaman, mentioned above, that those outside the district formulated from an onomatopoeic word to describe Nishijin weavers; sound is obviously recognised as a defining characteristic of the district by those within the community and those outside it. Weaver Hosoi-san worked at the Nishijin Ori Kōgei Bijutsukan, a museum and factory that made brocade maru-obi (a double-sided obi sash).4 Hosoi had been a weaver for 49 years and, even though she complained about the ‘noise’ of her digital loom, she told me that present-day Nishijin was quiet compared to 30 years ago when the district was noisy with the sound of weaving machines (Hall 2014, 174).5 This awareness of the sonic environment across the Nishijin district through both space and time gives an indication of the industry’s health, but even on a localised level, the sound of the looms in operation could signify the condition of a neighbour’s business. It is clear from Hareven’s interviews with respondents that in the last 20 years, weavers increasingly feel constrained by the lack of noise in the district. For example, one respondent stated, when there is nobody working on Sundays, there is no sound at night. Then we cannot work. A few years ago, it was possible. People use to work even at 10:00 at night. It should be each person’s choice. But nowadays, such a thing does not exist anymore. It is very quiet in the evenings. As a matter of fact, there is the problem of noise. Nobody dares to make noise. (Hareven 2002, 212) Even though some weavers complain about the noise of the power looms, they still recognise that it is their livelihood. Quintero’s description of the city of Buenaventura is apt; the neighbourhood stakes claim to ‘sonic liveliness’ and ‘a quiet neighbourhood, with no noise and with everyone cloistered in

When the looms stop, the baby cries  189 their homes, is described as solo (lonely) or even muerto (dead)’ (Quintero 2019, 145). The decline of the Kyoto weaving industry affects not only the sonic environment but also the sense of community and the decreasing noise level becomes a metaphor for the industry’s decline and the death of the district. This decline reveals and is revealed by the continually evolving sonic environment.

Yūzen Definition and history Yu ̄zen, the dominant dye method used to create kimono fabric, employs glutinous rice paste to prevent dyes from mixing together. The dyes are fixed by steaming, and the rice-paste resist is then washed out. The technique was pioneered by a fan artist called Miyazaki Yūzen in the late seventeenth century (The Japan Craft Forum 1996, 74) who transferred his talents from fans to fabric. His technique involved hand painting and using dye-resist paste on silk to create designs and colour the background of the fabric (Hall 2018b, 15). The basic method of yūzen, called tegaki yu ̄zen, involves using a conical tube (tsutsu) to pipe rice paste resist onto the fabric in the chosen design; the fine lines of paste contain any dye applied to the area within them, while leaving the fine lines themselves undyed. Kyō-yūzen, sometimes known as hon-yūzen (authentic yūzen), is fabric dyed in the Kyoto style and is characterised by bright colours and idealised images (Hall 2020, 74). Tegaki yūzen utilises about 20 different processes, such as sketching the design (often an artist is commissioned for this), shita-e (transferring the design onto the fabric using aobana, a water-soluble ink), itomenori (application of the rice-paste resist), hikizome (application of the dye), jizome (applying the background dye), ji-ire (setting the dyes using soy bean juice), mushi (steaming the dye), and finally mizu arai (washing the paste out of the fabric). In the past, many of the 20 processes would have been outsourced to specialists, but recently artisans such as Kobayashi Shumei are doing more of the processes themselves. This includes preparing the rice-paste resist, a process that involves making and kneading a dough. In fact, Kobayashi likens many of the tegaki yūzen processes to cooking; even the application of the paste to the fabric using the tsutsu ‘is similar to decorating cakes using a piping bag’ (Kobayashi 2011, 4) and Kobayashi tastes the plum dye he makes from boiling the wood to determine the depth of colour. This demonstrates the importance of the senses in yūzen dyeing. The similarity to domestic activities also means that tegaki yūzen can be executed in artisans’ residences, and typically, tegaki yūzen is carried out within artisan’s homes. The introduction of chemical dyes to Japan enabled an alternative method of yūzen to be developed by Kyoto artisan, Hirose Jisuke (1822–1890), in the late nineteenth century (Milhaupt 2014, 80). Kata yūzen, an abbreviation of katagami (paper pattern) and yūzen zome (dye) (also known as katazome), employs the use of a stencil and brush or squeegee (sukeji) rather than a

190  Jenny Hall tsutsu to apply the paste, thereby enabling multiple copies of the pattern to be made at a faster pace. The kata-yūzen technique also involves stencilling colours that are suspended within coloured paste (ironori) made by mixing synthetic dyes with the paste. This allows several colours to be applied without them bleeding into one another. A kata yu ̄zen workshop such as that at Kamedatomi Co. Ltd, requires a large space to store all of the stencils. Founded in 1919, Kamedatomi has a vast storehouse of 6,000 Taisho-era patterns (Hall 2020, 94). Today only family businesses that have existed for a long time, such as Kamedatomi’s, are still in business. The kata yu ̄zen process was automated in the Meiji period (1868–1912) with the introduction of Adam Parkinson’s textile printing machine (invented in 1785), that enabled up to six colours to be applied onto the fabric at the same time through the use of rollers (Mori 2012, 124). With roller printing, the design is engraved onto a copper plate roll and reactive dye (nassen nori) is applied along the plate. The fabric is passed across the plate mechanically and six plates could be connected for different colours. Roller printing suits repeat patterns and automates some of the dyeing steps. Roller printing requires a large workshop in order to house the machines, and there are few companies in Kyoto that employ this method of dyeing. However, significant changes in the yūzen industry have occurred in the last 20 years with the adoption of new technology. Since 2000, artisans and manufacturers began to use inkjet printers as an alternative to the yūzen method (Mori 2012, 126). Designs are done on a computer and printed, omitting most of the traditional steps of yūzen production. Nevertheless, artisans, including those still using traditional processes, refer to this method of production as yūzen—either ‘inkjet yūzen’ or ‘digital yūzen’ (Hall 2018a, 295) and two designers claimed in 2012 that it already constituted 70 per cent of the kimono-making market (ibid., 296). The Kyo ̄-yūzen industry is not a cohesive area in Kyoto but there is a concentration of yūzen manufacturers in Nakagyo-ku on Ogawa-dōri between Marutamachi and Oike (Murayama, personal communication, 2019). However, yūzen production is not visible or audible in comparison with the Nishijin orimono district because the production system is not based on weaving factories. It consists of dye-related works that can be executed within the rooms of artisans’ ordinary houses rather than in houses with workshops attached. In addition, once digital yūzen is taken into account, it is clear that the yūzen industry is dispersed throughout the city. The Kyō-yūzen sonic environment Tegaki yūzen, the actual dyeing, is a quiet process. The fabric is stretched using bamboo dowels, and then the artisan uses the tsutsu to pipe on the ricepaste resist, and brushes to paint on the dye. The noisiest part of the process is washing the fabric to remove the rice-paste resist. Saeki Akihiko and Kayoko are tegaki yūzen artisans who carry out their work in their apartment in the north of Kyoto. They told me that about 70 per cent of their

When the looms stop, the baby cries  191 commissions are kimono for maiko (apprentice geisha). Akihiko learned tegaki yu ̄zen from his father who worked from home. In contrast, Kayoko lived in at her work (sumikomi) for three years when she was an apprentice and learned in a workshop taught by artisans (shokunin). Therefore, their auditory experiences growing up and learning their craft differed. When I met the couple in 2012, they had a small baby but even when they were working it was very quiet in their home. I asked Akihiko if it was good to work at home and he said, ‘For me, it doesn’t matter. I can work at my own pace, so it suits me’ (personal interview, 7 November 2012). Like Kobayashi discussed above, the Saekis are undertaking many of the processes themselves rather than outsourcing them. Kobayashi does all of the processes himself but goes one step further, making his own tools which would involve additional sonic impact (he makes his own metal tsutsu and other items) but he is a rare case. He believes that ‘how well you design your work will be affected not only by your ability to draw, but also by where and under what circumstances you are working’ (Kobayashi 2011, 1). Kata yūzen is noisier than tegaki yūzen because the dyer must lift the stencil frame along the nassendai (long wooden boards on which the fabric is laid out). But it is still a relatively quiet technique in comparison to working in a mechanised weaving factory. The dyer works at his own pace, sliding the stencil frame along and clicking it into the correct slot for each section, then passes the squeegee down the fabric, making a soft rasping noise. In the Kamedatomi factory, there was also a general hum from the heating/cooling system, and sporadic noises emanating from the washing of screens and other auxiliary processes, but it was possible to conduct a conversation comfortably.6 Kikai nassen (machine printing using a drum roller machine) is a step up in terms of noise levels. There is the general hum of the machines and rasping noises as squeegees are automatically passed over the material. However, until digital yūzen, more traditional forms of yūzen remained the main methods of production. Roller printing can only print 12 colours and it cannot print connected designs over seams (Mori 2012, 126). Because of these disadvantages, roller printing was not adopted on a large scale in Kyoto. It had less impact on the industry, and therefore less impact on the sonic environment, so I will not dwell on it here. As Mori states, ‘the use of inkjet printing in kimono production is the most radical change to occur in the field for centuries’ (ibid.). I interviewed three digital yūzen designers; each has a slightly different working environment and creates different products. Takahashi Seisuke established his digital yūzen studio within his existing company, Takahashi Rensen Co. Ltd., one of the largest fabric finishing companies in Kyoto. He discovered about two thousand Meiji-era designs in a warehouse and uses them to produce bags and accessories (Hall 2020, 88). In-house designers copy the original patterns, resize the elements, and select colours using computer technology, and then print them out onto cotton fabric (ibid.). Takahashi was keen to point out that his company could do all of the

192  Jenny Hall production in-house—‘kikaku seizo ̄ hanbai no subete’ (planning, manufacture, selling: everything)—even the fabric finishing which involves washing, waterproofing, drying, and setting the cloth (ibid.). His head office is located in Ukyo ward to the southwest of Nishijin and the digital yūzen studio is in a room in this vast, busy, automated factory. However, after a tour of the whole factory, the studio was surprisingly quiet apart from the Mimaki Textile Jet printer which produced a constant hum, whir, hum, whir as the inkjet head passed across the fabric. Mori Makoto’s kimono design business, Shinrindo LLC, is located in the western Kyoto suburb of Kami-Katsura. Mori designs furisode (long-sleeved kimono), for seijin shiki (the coming-of-age ceremony). Mori’s workplace is on the second floor of a two-storey house, the ground floor of which accommodates another kimono-making company that uses airbrushes and stencils to create their designs (Hall 2020, 83.). Mori uses Adobe Photoshop software for his designs and two printers: a Mimaki TX200 and an Epson PM-10000 (Mori 2012, 129). Only one printer was operating during our interview, and the sonic environment was also punctuated intermittently by loud whirs from a machine that applies silk fabric to special backing so that it will feed through the printer evenly; we had to speak up over the noise but were not shouting to communicate. As Mori pointed out, his workspace is very similar to a contemporary office, with computers and the constant hum of the inkjet printer and the radio (Hall 2015, 70).7 For Kawabe Yūnosuke, ‘his home doubles as his studio: the walls are decorated with his father’s extravagant kimonos, sofas are festooned with his contemporary yuzen [sic] silk cushion covers and computer equipment sits side by side with paint pots and brushes’ (Dickens 2012, 111). Kawabe creates a range of items under his company name, Japan Style Systems, using digital yūzen. These include a kimono with designs based on images of earth taken from a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency satellite and the official swimsuits of the Japanese synchronised swim team for the Athens Olympics. At the time of our interview, the printer was not in operation, so his studio was very quiet. Growing up with the sounds of traditional yūzen—the sketching of a design, the brushing on of dye, the washing of fabric that signals the completion or near completion of a commission, would have had a sensory effect on artisans such as Saeki Akihiko, Kawabe, and Mori who all grew up in yūzen households. The low volume of the sounds does not make them less emotive or symbolic. Kawabe had not been taught to listen to the sounds of yūzen because it is not so important to the success of yūzen—he had been taught to pay attention to visual characteristics such as patterns and colours. It is also worth noting that criticism voiced by more traditional tegaki yūzen artisans about technologically advanced digital yūzen methods concerned the quality of the end product—it did not include any criticism of the almost total change in methods of production, or the new sensory environment it had engendered. And presumably just as babies in weaving households cry when the looms stop, so would babies in yūzen households cry if a loud machine started.

When the looms stop, the baby cries  193 Japanese sound scholar Torigoe Keiko believes that when it comes to Sound Culture we have to consider not only the sounds we create or we hear, but also the sounds of which we are not conscious, or which we think we do not or cannot hear. Sounds of the past, sounds of the future, sounds in our memories and dreams—all these kinds of sounds should be included. (1994, 7) This concept of sounds of which we are not conscious explains Kawabe’s lack of recognition of it as a factor in his upbringing; he received sonic input but was not conscious of doing so. Torigoe believes that the Japanese understanding of silence is the synaesthesia of our total sensations, ‘formed not only by natural, geographical, and biological factors, but also by s­ ocio-cultural factors such as people’s activities and local legend and history’ (ibid., 7). The sounds from the traditional and digital yūzen processes are an important part of the yūzen community’s sound culture, that communicate meaning to participants and form the collective memory of the community. This understanding of silence, as with sound, involves the socio-cultural, moral, and therefore political aspects of sound that are continually negotiated and contested.

Conclusion In Japan, one’s shōbai is one’s trade, profession, or industry; ‘it contributes to an individual’s identity, along with other attributes such as gender, age status, and institutional or geographic affiliation’ (Stevens 2016, 85). The sensory environment of a given industry forms a component of one’s shōbai. It is evident from the term gachaman that was attributed to the Nishijin weavers during the 1950s mentioned above, that the sonic environment was a significant aspect of the weaving industry, not only for people living and working in the industry, but also for the wider Kyoto community; ‘the weaving sounds were understood as pertaining to business, everyday life, and community’ (Minoura 2013, 6). It is also evident that this sonic recognition has evolved with technological developments in the weaving industry. There are changing ideas about what sounds are appropriate, both in terms of time and space. As demand for Nishijin orimono declines, weaving factories are closing and the district is becoming quieter as a result. It is no longer socially acceptable to keep machines weaving late into the night—as the industry evolves, the sounds are being renegotiated and contested by participants and the wider community. This renegotiation is expressed through actions and also by participants verbally. When I mentioned the noise of the power loom to weaver Hosoi, and asked about her ears, she said her hearing had deteriorated and all the weavers using those [power loom] machines had suffered hearing loss. She told me that young people do not want to do that kind of work because it is

194  Jenny Hall noisy and hard, and the demand for kimono was decreasing (Hall 2014, 175). There are young artisans taking up handloom weaving, traditional yūzen and digital yūzen but I did not meet any young people taking up power loom weaving. However, it is clear from history that when there is demand, people are willing to take up these technologies despite aural and other sensory impacts on their lives. When I asked why Murayama had not continued his family’s weaving business, it was not the sonic environment that discouraged him. He told me, I looked at my mother working, and she had such hardship. She had to sit down every day and do really small things. I didn’t like that. I helped her to do that kind of detailed work, but I didn’t want to do that kind of thing for good. (personal communication, 2012) The Nishijin orimono industry is in decline and therefore this sonic environment is changing as the community and its individuals negotiate and contest what is acceptable in this context. Kyo ̄-yūzen (Kyoto-style paste-resist dyeing) is also undergoing change—a revival. Technological innovations are creating a new sensory environment that is more acceptable to younger artisans than traditional environments—a digital yūzen studio is very similar to a contemporary office environment, including the sounds of an office environment such as an inkjet printer; the socially appropriate response has been negotiated for this new form of yūzen, for the time being.

Notes 1 Visit https://youtu.be/83eAzytumCo for a video walk around Nishijin. 2 In Japanese, ‘-dōri’means street or avenue. 3 Visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTMoy7KU4ZYandfeature=youtu.be to view and hear the workshop. 4 Visit https://youtu.be/mCm33wTA2uc to view and hear the weaving factory. 5 The Nishijin Ori Kōgei Bijutsukan filed for bankruptcy in 2013. 6 Visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meBDlVYbbBA to view and hear kata yu ̄zen at Kamedatomi Co. Ltd. 7 Visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xolgTYEEuPc to hear and view his workspace.

References Abe, M. 2014. ‘Sounding imaginative empathy: Chindon-ya's affective economies on the streets of Osaka’. In Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan, edited by C. Stevens and J. Hankins, 89–107. NY; London: Routledge. Chandola, T. 2019. ‘“Faking it”: moans and groans of loving and living in Govindpuri slums’. In Remapping Sound Studies, edited by G. Steingo and J. Sykes, 228–240. Durham: Duke University Press. Clark, A. 1997. The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

When the looms stop, the baby cries  195 Dickens, P. 2012. ‘The craftsmen of Kyoto’. In Shibusa—Extracting Beauty, edited by M. Adkins and P. Dickens, 107–116. Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield Press. Gould, H., R. Chenhall, T. Kohn and C. Stevens. 2019. ‘An interrogation of sensory anthropology of and in Japan’. Anthropological Quarterly 92(1): 231–258. Hall, J. 2014. ‘The spirit in the machine: Mutual affinities between humans and machines in Japanese textiles’. Thresholds 42: Human (Journal of the MIT Department of Architecture), Spring: 170–181. Hall, J. 2015. ‘Re-fashioning kimono: How to make “traditional” clothes for postmodern Japan’. New Voices 7: 59–84. Hall, J. 2018a. ‘Digital kimono: Fast fashion, slow fashion?’. Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 22(3): 283–307. Hall, J. 2018b. ‘Digital traditions: The future of the kimono’. TAASA Review 27(3): 15–17. Hall, J. 2020. Japan beyond the Kimono: Innovation and Tradition in the Kyoto Textile Industry. London: Bloomsbury. Hankins, J. and C. Stevens. 2014. ‘Introduction’. In Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan, edited by J. Hankins and C. Stevens, 1–19. Abingdon: Routledge. Hareven, T. 2002. The Silk Weavers of Kyoto: Family and Work in a Changing Traditional Industry. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ingold, T. 2007. ‘Against soundscape’. In Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, edited by A. Carlyle, 10–13. Paris: Double Entendre. The Japan Craft Forum. 1996. Japanese Crafts: A Complete Guide to Today’s Traditional Handmade Objects. Tokyo: Kodansha International. Kobayashi, S. (2011), Japanese Traditional Craft Workshop: Reviving a Dyeing Art— tsutsugaki yuzen with Master Shumei Kobayashi, course notes from a professional development course, April 16–21, Sydney: Australian Academy of Design; Japan Foundation. Milhaupt, T. 2014. Kimono: A Modern History. London: Reaktion Books. Minoura, K. 2013. ‘Life with weaving noise in Fujiyoshida: A soundscape as a commons’. Proceedings of the 14th Global Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons, 3–7 June, Fujiyoshida, Japan. Minoura, K. 2014. ‘Kikuo Saito and the children of Nishijin: The soundscape of a weaving district and sound education in an elementary school in 1960s Kyoto’. Invisible Places Symposium, 18–20 July, Viseu, Portugal. Minoura, K. and K. Hiramatsu. 2003. ‘How do residents describe symbolic noise? A case study on an area of traditional textile industry in Japan’. inter-noise, 3347–3354. Moeran, B. 2007. ‘Marketing scents and the anthropology of smell’. Social Anthropology 15(2): 153–168. Mori, M. 2012. ‘History and techniques of the kimono’. In Shibusa—Extracting Beauty, edited by M. Adkins and P. Dickens, 117–134. Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield Press. Novak, D. and M. Sakakeeny. 2015. ‘Introduction’. In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 1–11, Duke University Press. Novak, D. 2015. ‘Noise’. In Keywords in Sound, edited by D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny, 125–138, Durham: Duke University Press. Plourde, L. 2014. ‘Distraction, noise, and ambient sounds in Tokyo’. In Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan, edited by C. Stevens and J. Hankins, 71–88. NY; London: Routledge.

196  Jenny Hall Quintero, M. 2019. ‘Loudness, excess, power: a political liminology of a global city’. In Remapping Sound Studies, edited by G. Steingo and J. Sykes, 135–155. Durham: Duke University Press. Rodaway, P. 1994. Sensuous Geographies. London, New York: Routledge. Smith, N. 2014. ‘Facing the nation: Sound, fury, and public oratory among Japanese right-wing groups’. In Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan, edited by C. Stevens and J. Hankins, 37–56. NY; London: Routledge. Stevens, C. 2016. ‘Irasshai! Sonic practice as commercial enterprise in urban Japan’. Journal of Musicological Research 35(2): 82–99.

Part IV Technology and imperialism

10 Early radio in late colonial India Historiography, geography, audiences Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Hoene

Introduction Previous scholarship on the radio in colonial India has largely focused on official and private papers such as policy documents, letters, and memoranda from sources such as the India Office Records and Private Papers in order to sketch an argument that positions the radio as technology vis-à-vis the colonial state.1 Here, the radio is positioned both as an instrument of propaganda for the colonial government and the imperial project, and as an instrument of potential subversion and a platform of anti-colonial nationalism (Gupta 1995, 2002, 447–480; Pinkerton 2008; Zivin 1998, 1999); variously embraced or critically rejected by nationalist politicians such as Nehru (in favour) and public figures such as Gandhi (against). Appropriately, this scholarship predominantly focuses on the 1930s and, more specifically, on the second half of that decade, which saw the Government of India Act of 1935 and the consolidation of All India Radio (AIR) (1936) with Lionel Fielden (formerly of the BBC) at its helm. While the model for broadcasting in India pre-1935 markedly rejected radio’s function in creating a national audience, culture, and politics in order to affront ‘the legitimacy of Indian nationalism’ (Zivin 1998, 717), the nationalising momentum that started with AIR pre-Independence was concluded in the postcolonial nation. By the 1950s, radio had become one of the central technologies through which, eventually, a ‘national audience’ and ‘nation-as-audience’ was fashioned (Lelyveld 1994, Punathambekar 2013).2 Radio broadcasting is thus implicated in the narratives of nation-­ building through infrastructural consolidations, a standardised sense of clock time (especially leisure time), and linguistic and affective communities across territories. In this chapter, we shift scholarly attention from the late 1930s to the early years of the radio in late colonial India, and from official and private papers by state and radio officials to reportage about the radio in the ‘Wireless Notes’—a feature in The Times of India—and The Indian Listener, one of the earliest broadcasting trade publications in India. We are particularly interested in the years 1925 and 1935, as they both present pivotal points in time for the development of the radio and its audiences on the subcontinent. To tune in to the public’s discourse about radio eleven years and one DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772-15

200  Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Hoene year—respectively—before the official establishment of AIR in 1936 provides us with the opportunity to excavate the way radio as a then-new sound technology was received and explored by certain sets of audiences: the urban elite (1925) and rural audiences (1935), with sporadic overlaps. This difference between years and audiences can be attributed to the inherent skews/biases of the sources, the spread of radio enabling audiences outside of the urban centres to access the radio, and to the colonial government’s investment in the radio as a mode of British propaganda. This will enable us to answer the following questions: How did the radio affect listening practices in the Indian subcontinent? More specifically, how did the radio as technology impact people’s perception of space and place beyond the geopolitics of empire, including how it affected audiences along the rural-urban divide? Asking these questions focuses scholarly attention on the specificity of the experience of Indian sonic modernity via the radio; a modernity that was not only marked by the technological dimension of the radio, but also by the effect it had on audiences in opening up people’s imagination of space and place. We explore this in detail below by engaging with the geographic imagination produced by the radio and by laying out the then-contemporary audiences’ engagement with the device, its programming, and sonic forms. Further, we discuss radio as a sound event: both in the way in which it structured knowledge through sound and in ways that eventually produced the radio as a small-scale everyday media object and technology. In doing so, we build on David Arnold’s (2013) emphasis on ‘small everyday technologies’ such as sewing machines and bicycles as critical tools in Indian technological modernity, through their adaptation and use in the subcontinent. In this examination of the early years of the radio, we focus on the radio as a new technological object by analysing the urban audiences’ engagement with radio as tinkerers, that is, as amateur radio enthusiasts with instances of late colonial jugaad (loosely: hack).3 More broadly, this discussion positions the radio and radio sound alongside other similarly globally mobile and locally imbricated media such as cinema and the gramophone.4 Further, an examination of rural audiences in the subcontinent also highlights various intermedial relations between gramophone records, the radio, and other media forms. Exploring these concerns allows us to cross-fertilise thought emerging from the field of media studies with South Asian studies and specifically, Indian radio history. This cross-fertilisation is particularly pertinent given the paucity of South Asian sound studies scholarship. In this way, our work draws on and is in conversation with recent scholarship in the field of sound studies that particularly addresses Indian sound cultures (Brueck et al. 2020, Raghunath 2020), the relationship between sound and power across Southeast Asia (Porath 2019), sonic modernities in the Global South (Steingo and Sykes 2019), and sonic modernity articulated in and through black cultures (Weheliye 2005). In positioning our essay alongside this scholarship, we do not try to argue that the experience of radio on the Indian subcontinent is wholly exceptional. Instead, we place radio experiences and Indian sound modernity on a continuum with elements from early

Early radio in late colonial India  201 twentieth-century modernities around the world and especially in parts of Africa and Southeast Asia. Analysing popular radio discourse allows us to think through how the radio changed sonic experiences of listeners throughout India and how it affected the colonial soundscape itself. Sound, we interpret here in two ways: one, in the trace of sound found in writing (in this case, English-language reportage); and two, radio sound—whether heard or unheard by human ears—in its physical capacity to be potentially heard across landmasses, weather conditions, and media infrastructures of sending and receiving sound signals.

A brief history of radio historiography in colonial India Early on in his Report on the Progress of Broadcasting in India, Lionel Fielden, the first Controller of Broadcasting of the Government of India (1935–1940), lists the ‘Landmarks in Radio History’ (1940, x). According to this list, the ‘[h]istory of organised broadcasting in India begins’ on 23 July 1927. This day marks the opening of the Bombay Station of the Indian Broadcasting Company by His Excellency Lord Irwin, Viceroy of India. However, radio existed in India before 1927. Pinkerton (2008, 170) traces the start of radio on the subcontinent back to Giachand Motwane, one of the founding members of the Bombay Presidency Radio Club, ‘who is widely credited with having made the first recorded (i.e. ‘noted’) radio transmission in India, during 1920’ (170). This was followed by further experiments in Bombay (1921), Calcutta (1923; see Raghunath 2020, 93), Bangalore, and Hyderabad—all during the early 1920s. Soon after, radio clubs were established in Ceylon and Madras. Yet, the first entry on Fielden’s list regarding radio clubs in India is 16 May 1924, the foundation of the Madras Presidency Radio Club; and neither the Bombay Radio Club—connected to, but not to be confused with the Bombay Station Fielden mentions—nor the Calcutta club are mentioned. In Chapter 1 of his report, titled ‘Early History’, Fielden also glosses over these early years of radio in India: Before this date [23 July 1927] a number of amateur radio associations had been permitted to broadcast on very low power in various parts of India and had been granted a proportion of the licence fees. It was not, however, until 1926 that the idea of a regular service took shape in the form of an agreement between the Government of India and the Indian Broadcasting Company Limited under which a licence for the construction of two stations at Bombay and Calcutta, respectively, was granted.5 (1) Although Fielden briefly mentions the early radio clubs, he does not consider them in any way significant to the development of radio in colonial India. Instead, he focuses on the involvement of the colonial government and on the strategically important locations of Calcutta as the old and Bombay as the new capital of colonial India to mark the beginning of broadcasting seven

202  Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Hoene years after the first radio transmissions on the subcontinent. In many ways, Fielden’s historiography of early radio tells us more about the position of the colonial government vis-à-visà the radio than about the actual development of the radio as technology in India.6 To expand this historiography of radio scholarship in colonial India, we will accent the years 1925 and 1935. Both years pre-date significant steps taken by the Government of India (GoI) to consolidate radio on the subcontinent under government control: in 1926, the GoI made an agreement with the Indian Broadcasting Company (IBC), which had previously been established by the Bombay and Calcutta radio clubs as a commercial broadcasting venture. This agreement granted a licence ‘for the construction of two stations at Bombay and Calcutta respectively’ (Fielden, 1), which were then inaugurated the following year. 1926 thus saw a complete U-turn in the colonial government’s attitude vis-à-vis the radio on the subcontinent. Before that, official government policy was ‘to leave broadcasting to develop naturally under private enterprise’, as Viceroy Lord Irwin wrote to the Secretary of State for India, Lord Birkenhead, on 9 September 1926 (qtd. in Pinkerton 2008, 172; original source: IOR/L/PO/3/1. Broadcasting in India; Private letter from Lord Irwin to Lord Birkenhead [9 September 1926]). However, Irwin’s letter continues with the concession that the colonial government is ‘fully alive to the fact that if progress in India is in any way to resemble that in the United Kingdom, it will have to be considered whether Government should take a more active part’ (ibid.). The joint GoI-IBC agreement was signed four days later, on 13 September 1926. The year 1926 thus marked the official beginnings of the process that would eventually lead to state-sponsored radio in colonial India in 1932—a period of six years that saw the Indian Broadcasting Company go into liquidation in March 1930, coming under government control as the Indian State Broadcasting Service (ISBS) a month later, only to be closed down by the GoI in October 1931 and re-continued a month later, before the decision to definitely continue the ISBS under state management in May 1932 (Fielden, x–xi). Five years later, in 1936, the Delhi Station of the ISBS was inaugurated on 1 January, and the ISBS was renamed ‘All India Radio’ (AIR). And on 8 June that year, AIR became a regular Associate Member of the Union Internationale de Radiodiffusion in Geneva (Fielden 1940, xi–xii). As before, these dates mark significant developments of the radio vis-à-vis the GoI, and thus tell us more about the colonial government’s attitudes towards the radio than about the radio itself. Focusing on the years 1925 and 1935 allows us to shift the emphasis from government policies about the radio to the radio itself, which will in turn expand the historiography of radio development in the colonial period. The development of radio from the 1920s to the 1930s is often recorded in the ‘Wireless Notes’ (later: ‘Wireless News’) in The Times of India, the Indian Listener, and other publications of the time.7 Throughout this chapter, we therefore tune our attention to the rhetoric that surrounded the radio in these publications. The first available issue of the ‘Wireless Notes’ dates back to 10 March 1922. It was part of the ‘Indian Engineering Supplement’, which was

Early radio in late colonial India  203 distinct from The Times of India ‘Engineering Supplement’. The former was designed to separately address Indian manufacturing interests as well as represent Indian businesses’ advertisements that were of importance to the British Empire’s interests. The latter on the other hand clearly announced itself as focusing on ‘Industrial Development’ and being ‘A Page Devoted to the Interests of British Manufacturers’. Thus, radio broadcasting was, in the early period in India, discursively located along three vectors: (i) Indian manufacturing and business’ interests; (ii) large infrastructure projects and development such as railways, electricity, dams and so on; (iii) science and engineering innovations and accomplishments. Reportage on nascent forms of the wireless in India straddled business, science, and governance, predominantly; sometimes, it also addressed education. In the early days, radio broadcasting and radio reportage did not, in fact, primarily position itself along with leisure technologies such as the cinema or the gramophone (Arnold, 12). Instead, as programming details and letters to the editor emphasise, the wireless cut across these various sites. On 11 July 1924 ‘Wireless Notes’ became a fortnightly column of The Times of India ‘Indian Engineering Supplement’, with the complete title being: ‘Wireless Notes: A Weekly Review of Progress’. It started as a two-column feature of a series of short articles and ads as part of the supplement. By the mid-1930s, the ‘Wireless Notes’ had become the ‘Wireless News’ and were a weekly feature of the main newspaper—and not just a supplement—spanning a full page, sometimes two. Given our focus on the early years, and for the mid-1920s in particular, several trade publications were not yet available—but the ‘Wireless Notes’ were. The cross-section of articles, advertisements, programming bulletins, readers’ letters, and sketches that form part of the ‘Wireless Notes’ by the late 1920s to the early 1930s thus allow for a unique perception of the popular consumption of and discussion about radio in the late colonial period. Along with the ‘Wireless News’, we also draw upon The Indian Listener, the official radio organ of the ISBS, which in turn allows us to understand the continuities in discourse around radio. This allows us to use local anglophone discourse to map the audiences of the period and understand the radio as a new media.

Space and place: From the local to the global What is remarkable about the early editions of the ‘Wireless Notes’ is the geographical emphasis, which is at the same time local and global. The reporting is subdivided into ‘The Week in India’, which also covers the UK, and ‘World Wireless News’, which can be taken literally, as it includes radio-related news from the USA, Australia, and Canada—in one issue alone (30 January 1925). The ‘Wireless Notes’ column in The Times of India from 20 March 1925, for example, ends with a summary of the latest in wireless broadcasting, aptly entitled ‘News in Brief’, and reads as follows:

204  Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Hoene 2 L.O. (London) broadcasting has been picked up in Madras, a distance of about 5,500 miles. Bournemouth has been tuned in at Bulawayo (Africa) on a 2-valve Unidyne. The latter is a circuit that employs 4-electrode 5-pin valves and dispenses with a high tension [sic] battery. Harry, [sic] Tate, that stage-master of satire whose ‘Motoring’ sketch has become famous throughout the world, has developed a ‘Wireless’ playlet in which the ‘transmitting apparatus’ consists of an old umbrella, a bucket, a typewriter, a frying pan, a gas meter and a wheel-barrow. The description sounds atmosphericus! (17) This report is as brief as it is significant because it touches upon some of the core themes that we explore in this chapter. The fact that it is newsworthy which station (here: 2. L.O. London and Bournemouth) is being picked up where (here: in Madras and Bulawayo) and often by whom (although these details are not included here) indicates the crucial role of place and space, and how radio altered people’s perception of both. Given the ethereal nature of sound, wireless communication (whether via radio or telephone) covered great distances, crossed borders, connected people, and thus expanded people’s imagination of place and space. In these particular examples, the London-Madras and Bournemouth-Bulawayo connections also map onto the pathways of empire from the metropole to the colonies (UK-India and UK-Southern Rhodesia, respectively). This links the colonial politics of space to the development of the colonial politics of the radio. However, the spatial connections that early radio allowed for and that were hence considered newsworthy were often along geographical lines that had little to nothing to do with the empire, such as in a report about a rural Frenchman who managed to tune into a Japanese radio station (see below). The Bournemouth-Bulawayo report also includes technical details about the receiving set: ‘a circuit that employs 4-electrode 5-pin valves and dispenses with a high tension [sic] battery’. As with the details about specific places, many ‘Wireless Notes’ reports include these highly technical and very specific descriptions of wireless sets, which suggests that ‘Wireless Notes’ readers were familiar with and could make sense of early radio technology. This further suggests that early radio in India was very much an amateurs’ project with a distinctive DIY character, which can be confirmed throughout the 1925 issues of ‘Wireless Notes’. Several reports also point towards an active community of listeners and readers that engage in three-way conversations— editor to reader, reader to editor, reader to reader as mediated by the editor— throughout the pages of the ‘Wireless Notes’. The network thus established within the pages of a newspaper column curiously mirrors the network established the moment that sound waves were first used to communicate across great distance. The ‘News in Brief’ report from 20 March 1925 then concludes with a brief description of a comedy sketch that is in and of itself a commentary on that presumed technical expertise of the reader, pointing out that to a layperson, the complex construction of a radio set and the technical

Early radio in late colonial India  205 vocabulary seem as likely and miraculous in achieving the aim of spanning half the globe as commonplace household items. Another brief ‘Wireless Notes’ report in the 20 March 1925 issue exemplifies how the radio, particularly in the early days, impacted people’s geographical imagining. Titled ‘Wireless Seeks Explorers’, the report summarises how radio was being used to broadcast a call for missing people from an arctic exploration: Radio’s greatest attempt to locate missing persons was started when KDKA, operated by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in company with its three sister stations[,] broadcast messages destined to be picked up by [a] member, or those knowing the whereabouts of the ill-fated Nutting expedition now swallowed in the Arctic wastes. Immediately following their regular programs KDKA at East Pittsburgh, Pa., WBZ at Springfield, Mass., U.S.A., and KYW at Chicago U.S.A. sent out the first messages into the northland asking any who might have heard, particularly those living on the eastern coast of Baffinland, to send in information regarding the expedition. (17) A couple of things are significant here: the three radio stations that broadcast the missing persons’ report are named as ‘KDKA at East Pittsburgh, Pa., WBZ at Springfield, Mass., U.S.A., and KYW at Chicago U.S.A.’, when they could have been summarised as ‘three radio stations in the U.S.A.’. This would have saved a total of 56 characters, or roughly two lines. In 1925, the weekly ‘Wireless Notes’ feature was limited to about a column and a half. Hence, space was scarce and every line and every word counted. Nevertheless, most reports include details about precise locations: where people, who are often named, are listening to what radio station broadcasting from where. As is reported, for example, in the 23 October issue, ‘Colombo seems to be coming through exceptionally well in Bombay at something less than 2 F.V.s strength on the headphones’ (13). Beyond India, there is also often a sense of how radio connects even the most far-flung and remote places on earth. Radio is thus implicated in the imperial project of exploring and developing presumably previously empty land. As the report on the Arctic expedition continues: ‘It should be explained that last year the lonely trading posts of the Hudson’s Bay Company fringing the Arctic Ocean were supplied with wireless sets’ (20 March 1925, 17). The technology of the radio expands people’s imagination of places both within and beyond the imperial networks of communication. In the ‘Wireless Notes’ from 16 January 1925, we find reports that ‘an amateur wireless station in Nova Scotia has established two-way communication with New Zealand’ (15); and that ‘an amateur wireless enthusiast living in the department of the Basses-Pyrenes, M. Menars, states that he has picked up the JFWA station at Tokio [sic] on a 90-metre wave length’, and that this station ‘was heard clearly for ten minutes’ (15). This insistence on spatial

206  Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Hoene specificity—M. Menars lives in ‘the department of the Basses-Pyrenes’, we are told, not just ‘in France’—in the context of global communication is in and of itself remarkable; and it is particularly interesting in connection with the radio due to the nature of radio waves as sound. Sound, of course, has often been related to territory: as marking the limits of the territory but also as that which can erase territorial bounds, often sounding across such boundaries (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 310–323). In other words, sound easily transcends national borders. Restrictions in terms of coverage and reception are geographical and atmospheric—distance, weather, time of day—not political. Although secondary political restrictions such as censorship and taxes can, of course, be introduced, these do not affect the nature of sound waves as such. These reception reports (see Figure 10.1) of the Bombay broadcasting station tell us that, as radio stabilised by 1936, Indian cities were not only receivers, but also transmitters of programming around the globe. Such programming was regularly listed in The Indian Listener, and it included broadcasts from the cities of Bombay, Calcutta, Daventry, Ceylon, and Peshawar. Across the pages of the ‘Wireless News’ and The Indian Listener, and across advertising, radio propagation, trade in radio parts, and listening, the metropole and the colony came together; whether the metropole and settler colonies (Canada, Australia, South Africa among others), or the metropole and subjugated colonies (India, Burma, Ceylon, and so on). Crucially, the empire also generated sonic traffic amongst the colonies themselves, for instance, (i) by having broadcasts from India relayed to South-East Asian territories including Singapore and vice-versa, and (ii) through the reportage in The Times of India in the 1930s that featured news about broadcasting in Ceylon, in Burma, and Malaya, as for instance in a report on 5 February 1935 about Malaya listeners’ radio licences. The ‘empire’ was thus stitched together in time and space through sound. As Alexander Weheliye (2005) argues vis-à-vis the phonograph and the dissemination of black music culture, the phonograph enabled ‘disparate

Figure 10.1 Reception reports of the ISBS indicating transmission received across various part of the British Empire in Africa, North America, England, and Scotland. (The Indian Listener 1(3), 22 January 1936, 146.)

Early radio in late colonial India  207 audiences in a variety of locations to consume black music’ (21). This ‘recalibration of locality’, Weheliye argues, ‘effected changes in its [the phonograph’s] relation to other vicinities rather than erasing the local altogether’ (21). Our analysis so far has shown how the radio similarly created multiple yet interrelated localities across and beyond the empire. Radio thus placed the empire on the same sonic plane in terms of (i) the possible reception of sounds across these vast geo-physical areas, and (ii) through the above-noted reportage of sound. Thus, radio sound-as-empire drew into its fold radio infrastructures across the colonies and the imperial metropole; programming, whether local to the metropole or produced by the BBC especially for the colonies;8 and elite English-speaking audiences across these spaces, including newspaper readers. In these ways, the empire was sonically produced through the multiple sonic flows of the radio. By its nature, sound—particularly in the early days of the radio—thus expanded the spatial imaginary of listeners. Hence, it suddenly became noteworthy for an English-language newspaper in India to write about a rural Frenchman receiving a radio station based in Tokyo, Japan. News from all around the world, and not just from within the British Empire, became important because of a common shared interest in a new technology that enabled communication between these places. And faced with a technology that allowed for the potential of covering great distances and thus enabled listeners to imagine far-away places, it became important to specify those places, both in terms of one’s own location and in terms of the other’s location. In other words: confronted with a technology that allows for easy displacement—if only imaginary—there is a desire to hold on to a sense of physical place and specific location. Moreover, reports such as the ones mentioned above go against the established geopolitics of the British Empire. The achievements of an amateur radio enthusiast in rural France would not be newsworthy to a colonial institution like The Times of India, were it not for the subject of the radio as new technology. The radio thus gave the sense that the colony is cosmopolitan, global, and transnational, rather than following the colonial narrative of centre and periphery. The technology of the radio and its roughly simultaneous global development also contributed to this sense of the global. Appadurai’s technoscapes can help us understand this global flow of technology; at least amongst elite urban listeners that could afford the equipment. Appadurai also theorises the radio in its ability to be both global and local (1996, 64). But, as we have seen, it is not only the technology that travels globally; it is also the listeners’ imagination. Here, Potter’s (2020) concepts of ‘wireless internationalism’ and ‘distant listening’ are useful. In its ability to cross borders and travel large distances, Potter argues, radio at the same time echoed and projected the utopian optimism of the internationalist movement in the 1920s. Radio, so the hope was, could contribute ‘to international understanding and world peace’ (48). Distant listening played a crucial role in this process, as it ‘carried many ordinary people, in their minds and in the privacy of their own homes, to far-off places’ (5). Tracing ‘the history of distant listening in, and to,

208  Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Hoene Britain’ (8), Potter’s ‘distant listeners’ are mainly located on a geographical axis that points from the world to Britain and from Britain to the world—in other words, a geographical axis that, where it connects to the colonies, goes from the imperial centre to the periphery and back again. While some of the examples quoted above also follow along this geographical binary, many do not. Instead, our analysis shows that ‘wireless internationalism’ and ‘distant listening’ also happened well before the inauguration of the BBC Empire Service in 1932—which Potter discusses in detail—and well beyond the geographical binary of imperial centre and periphery. In all these ways, between the early experimental years of 1924–1936, radio produced a near-cosmopolitan sense of empire, especially for urban audiences. Rural audiences were another matter as Zivin (1998) and Biswas (2012) demonstrate, and which we discuss in the next section. It is for these audiences that arguably, ‘empire’ came to mean not multiple flows but sounds of ‘civic uplift’.

Imagining radio audiences By the mid-1930s, British India was on the brink of launching All India Radio with Lionel Fielden appointed to take charge in 1935. The ten years before Fielden’s arrival in India had ensured that the radio had become a talking point, part of the electronic consumer goods traffic, and otherwise also part of experiments in transforming leisure and other cultural practices not only in the cities but also in the villages. In this section, we discuss different figures that would have comprised this audience: the individuated, privately listening amateur, and the groups of villagers tuning in publicly—in crowds and in open spaces—that required special governmental schemes. The amateur and the village crowd represent two ends of the spectrum of radio-listening audiences in the late colonial period. Our use of the word ‘figure’ functions to highlight the sociological and historical located-ness of these disparate audience members, but also that they are imagined in and through the sources we use. In other words, on the one hand, we note that the diversity of the audience was also echoed in the spread of radio in formal capacities—governmental efforts, radio traders, manufacturers/businesses—and informal ones, such as amateur listeners and amateur leagues. On the other hand, as scholars like Zivin (1998) point out, colonial government officials would write about rural broadcasting with an idealised Indian peasant in mind. Our exploration of this imagined audience allows us to unpack the way in which a new sound technology both maps and reconfigures the colonial soundscape. A unique perspective on the history of the radio emerges through a first-person anecdotal narrative titled ‘Looking Backwards: A Radio Enthusiast’s Recollections’ (‘Wireless News’, 8 October 1935, 14). The article refers to a current standardised textbook (first edition, 1921) and the author speaks of his first encounter with the radio as a college student in 1912. Ten years later, and after his military service in Northern Ireland during World War 1, this radio enthusiast acquired a Marconiphone set. In

Early radio in late colonial India  209 spite of the poor conditions of Indian broadcasting infrastructure at the time, he claims to have been optimistic about receiving results in India, especially in the mid- to late 1920s when the old experimental station started working. He says that he was able to hear ‘a few words and some music’ (14) from Bombay. Spurred on by this success, he proceeded to purchase a sixvalve set on which he could hear England, Rome, and Bombay. Thereafter, rather than purchasing the next set, he built it himself, and he provides the reader with tremendous technical detail including information about valves, condensers, aerial circuits, and so on. He carried on using his own set until 1934. However, with the arrival of shortwave broadcasting, the author says it was difficult to make a set, since parts were either too expensive or not available at all in India and therefore had to be improvised. This, then, is an early version of jugaad. The article indicates to us how the amateur radio enthusiast is figured in the Indian context, including the tools, devices, and objects available to him (and it is almost always exclusively him). This radio enthusiast is undoubtedly an affluent gentleman of either elite Anglophone Indian or European origin. These men carried out experiments in radio broadcasting, which led to the formation of urban radio amateur leagues such as the Indian Radio Amateurs League,9 of which we find mention in the mid-1930s. However, the integration of amateur broadcasting was not straightforward. An article on 7 May 1935 notes the absence of published material for Indian listeners: ‘[f]or Indian residents the Overseas Stations Lists are only useful to a degree, as what they need is […] a list of the actual stations heard in India at entertainment value’ (11, original emphasis). Thus, it appears that as much as the rhetoric of and desire to bring the ‘world’ sonically ‘home’ exists, there are nevertheless the physical limits of propagation that radio sound rubs up against. Radio listening ends up being predominantly focused on cities and towns, including major trading centres such as Ludhiana, Lahore, Bombay, Surat, and Sholapur. These urban areas would form part of the radio-licence acquiring populace as well as part of the letter traffic to the Editor. ‘Wireless News’ readers would write in to request help with tackling problems in radio reception, set construction, and clarifications about radio programming. As part of the weekly ‘Wireless News’ column, page and two-page fold, the readers’ responses/letters to the Editor are most illustrative of disturbances in the reception of radio waves such as interferences (whether from local stations in Bombay or ships or weather conditions) as well as specific questions regarding valves, aerial, loudspeaker, and wiring requirements. In other words, the radio was a new, wondrous objet du désir for display; but equally it was to be understood as an object that participated in popular scientific discourses, such as those found on the pages of The Times of India, Bombay edition in the 1920s and 1930s and as an object to tinker with. The radio produced different registers of pleasure, interest, and excitement for rural audiences. For instance, consider this description given by the Delhi

210  Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Hoene station about programming for villagers at the Delhi Province Rural Exhibition at Mehrauli: the two receiving sets and loudspeakers which were installed at the Exhibition proved exceedingly popular, and the interest manifested both by villagers and rural uplift workers augurs well for the time in the very near future when the Delhi station will begin its scheme for the provision of special programmes and special items for villagers. (The Indian Listener, 22 February 1936, 255) Not only does the imagination of tinkering disappear, but there is a different understanding of programming (‘special’) laid forth. The possibility of the radio sets’ popularity reported might be imagined further by paying attention to a photograph (Figure 10.2). The photograph indexes communal listening in open, public spaces, a feature that marked listening in village India. Placing the male subject gazing at the camera at the centre of the frame, the photo highlights the act of listening, with a hand cupped behind the ear, leaning towards the radio set. Such an arrangement of the radio and the human body is a visual trope that speaks to the wonder of and attention to this new technological object, which gathers its audience close, inviting them to participate in a new sonic, technological experience and to participate in modernity. Inviting the viewer of the photograph to imagine the sounds being heard, the photograph

Figure 10.2  Mid-shot of village men listening together to a radio set in the mid-1930s. (The Indian Listener 1(3), 22 January 1936, 144).

Early radio in late colonial India  211 foregrounds the village listener in a manner that is, arguably, a graphic reflection of the written discourse on rural broadcasting. Across the 1935 ‘Wireless News’ issues, we note several articles on the subject. These often take the form of specialist columns by Prof. E. Duncan Smith, an expert with the Poona Wireless Experimental Centre, who also wrote articles on the same topic for The Indian Listener as well as broader general interest articles for The Times of India. Some of the observations that emerge from these articles include an attention to alternative modes of providing broadcast through parallel infrastructures, and comments on existing schemes, programming changes, and so on. These columns on village broadcasting are important for their emphasis on ‘India’ as well as the reportage on the development of indigenous radio. Zivin (1998) in her evaluation of village broadcasting schemes notes that these were rendered possible only because of the curiosities and interests of a few select British bureaucrats, oft-described as ‘guardians’, such as Frank Lugard Brayne, Lieutenant Colonel Hardinge, and C. F. Strickland. Both Hardinge and Strickland were writing on broadcasting for rural areas for The Asiatic Review,10 whereas F. L. Brayne and Duncan Smith reflected upon experiments with rural broadcasting that they put into effect in Lahore and Poona, respectively. They were aware of each other’s work, with Strickland referencing both Brayne and Duncan Smith in his writing, and Brayne’s schemes on ‘village uplift’ (1927) finding mention in Smith’s columns. Some key terms of the discourse on rural broadcasting schemes emerge across this writing: education, community, and civic uplift married with entertainment. Rural broadcasting schemes were to allow, as F. L. Brayne suggested, ‘all sorts of news, information, and advice, and all the hundred and one things one wants to tell the villagers’ to be spread (Brayne, 183; quoted in Zivin 1998, 717–718).11 In so far as radio technology was intended to promote modernity and development, especially for the villagers, it may be said to represent one of the two modes of the colonial sublime. The colonial sublime, Brian Larkin (2008) argues, is a way of thinking the relationship between technology and representation, particularly in the context of colonialism. For Larkin, the colonial sublime is a relation of power produced between coloniser and colonised through two modes: (i) evoking feelings of fear and awe, as in large-scale infrastructure, namely, bridges, railways, factories, etc.; and (ii) an invitation to become modern through participation in new technology for development. Crucially, for Larkin, the experience of the sublime does not reside in the technological object but rather in the perceiving subject’s judgement—as may be seen in the representations of rural broadcasting, both visual (see Figure 10.2) and verbal. The discussions of the radio’s civic pedagogic impulse, we argue, produced the radio as part of the colonial sublime in the British officials’ comments on the perceiving subject and his relationship with the new sound technology. This was done, we propose, not only through British officials’ descriptions of the wonder of radio as a modern technology but through their understanding of the ways in which the village listener would hear (and perceive and judge) the radio as sound and as technology. For instance, the rural listener was constructed by the ‘guardians’ as being (i) seemingly unconcerned with

212  Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Hoene liveness, or the real-time relay of broadcasts, whether speeches or song, over the radio waves, (ii) preferring both a repetition of content and repetitive content, and (iii) demanding clarity and ease of listening. C. F. Strickland (1934) comments: If the voice is irregular and ‘fades’, the Indian peasant will soon refuse to listen or will fail to understand. Whatever is given to him must be clear and easy, and this means a short range of transmission with no ‘fading.’ […] peasants prefer what they know, and they like it twice over; any man who has heard rural music or seen a rustic buffoonery play will bear me out. […] The Indian peasant will not insist on hearing a speaker or artist at the exact moment of the speech or performance; he will be quite content with a reproduction of it in the evening, when he is free from work and is accustomed to sit down and listen. (7–8) Strickland’s imagination of the rural listener is undoubtedly stereotypical and derisive. Nevertheless, across the comments, we note an attention to practices of programming and transmission and the way new technologies transform what constitutes sound and listening for the village listener. Thus, rural broadcasting is not only about ‘civic uplift’—it is also about a material and sensual transformation in practices, which construct the listening subject and his (and the sources always refer to ‘his’) relationship with new sound technology. This can be further demonstrated by considering Duncan Smith’s writing as he describes a possible programme in a 15 October 1935 article titled ‘Broadcasting for Rural Areas: Necessity for Special Programmes’ to warn against ‘indiscriminate public spitting’ as follows: A teachalogue covering this topic would be prefaced by the noise department producing the noise of a train entering a station—on this the entry of the charwallah [sic] and paniwallah would be superimposed and of course the station-master abusing his clerk. This would then be faded out and give place to two villagers exchanging salutations in village patois. […] Social questions are the subject of discussion by a mythical Panchayat or village court and the chiefs of the noise department have been known to drink gallons of water after producing yawning, coughings and throat clearing noises peculiar to members of a Panch [Panchayat] without which the illusion would not be complete. (15) The programme that Duncan Smith suggests brings together a concatenation of sounds: on the one hand, voices of the ‘station master’ and ‘clerk’, the cries of the chaiwallah (tea-seller) and paniwallah (water-seller), the ‘noises peculiar to’ Panchayat members and the villagers’ voices and, on the other

Early radio in late colonial India  213 hand, the sounds of the train. In other words, the human and the non-human mingle sonically. These, then, are also the sounds of modernity: mechanical and technological sounds wedded in equal measure with accent-driven dialogues, hawkers’ cries and throaty—perhaps guttural—non-verbal sounds. They are placed on the same sonic plane, courtesy of the noise department, sound mixing possibilities, and broadcasting. Technologically created and disseminated, the construction of such a rural railway-driven soundscape allows for another element to be foregrounded: the social. The civic uplift (not spitting in public places) embedded in casual conversation serves to sonically produce human and professional categories of the station master, clerk, chaiwallah, and paniwallah, marking their cries of vending their respective wares. This is also done through the description of Panchayat members’ vocal exercises including the onomatopoeia of ‘yawning’ and the villagers exchanging notes. It uses these voices to create rural accents, sounds, and tones. Each of these sounds functions to sonically present identity (caste) and place (rural/semi-urban/mofussil location) to a knowledgeable listener. Thus, Duncan Smith’s description works at multiple levels: it attempts to produce the sonic ‘civic uplift’ of the empire and presents us with a description of the soundscape of colonised India. In the process, it also registers sound, language, and identity working inseparably from each other. The programme ‘teachologue’ described by Duncan Smith forms the template for much governmental and public service messaging by colonial and subsequent postcolonial governments as well. Indeed, in the decades following Indian Independence, in half-hour programmes on All India Radio dedicated to the farming community and campaigns around public health, the model of programming offered by Duncan Smith in the 1930s would be most readily heard; sometimes interspersed with advertisements, film songs, or folk songs.12 Apart from the model offered for future civic propaganda of successive postcolonial governments, Smith’s articles produced, critically, a template for sonic realism (‘illusion’) on the radio for such governmental programming. This is rendered perhaps best through a description of the soundscape of a (possibly) semi-urban or mofussil train station through the teachologue. In the absence of sound recordings of radio programming for the period, the programme’s description can function as a source for the construction of a historically contingent soundscape for colonised India in the 1930s. The formal choice of realism in such radio programmes indicates the medium’s attempts to establish itself in a dis/continuity with other forms circulating at the time: nautankis (local dance-drama forms), the travelling cinema, and popular musical forms. However, in a rural population that remains deeply splintered socially, it is impossible to determine how such soundings-out would have been received in the 1930s. We may also suggest that such a socially splintered reality is what prompted Smith to write that, ‘in village work we deal with the mass mind and in consequence have to study mass action in relationships to labour and time, mass thought and its reactions to programmes, and adopt mass methods to propagate the programme’ (15; emphasis added). The figure of the village

214  Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Hoene mass as a listening subject, structured as it is through the body (labour), practice (time), cognition (mind), and action becomes pertinent when considered in the face of extreme social divisions such as that of class, caste, and gender. Smith’s writing suggests that there is a perceived sense of homogeneity bringing together the community-driven and -oriented village folk, as opposed to the individualised ‘ordinary listener’ of the ‘established forms of radio’; presumably the kind of amateur listener described earlier in this section. Thus, Duncan Smith’s writing and the discourse developing around rural radio broadcasting allows us to place the urban and rural listeners in two different relations to the idea of a ‘mass’. While the elite, possibly affluent, urban radio listener was to be addressed as an individual, the rural listener was to be addressed already as part of a community. Community formation through sound—whether local, regional, national, or transnational—was not merely a question of programming, but also a question of infrastructure. Indeed, infrastructural questions of broadcasting determined community-listening, urban or rural. For instance, in an article dated 15 January 1935 titled ‘Village Broadcasting—An Alternative: The Possibilities of Recorded Programmes for Rural Uplift’ (17), Smith presents a comparison between radio broadcasting experiments conducted in Bombay Presidency and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). In the course of this article, he specifically points to an alternative model of broadcasting to be deployed in rural areas. By borrowing from the critical vocabulary of digital media, the model of broadcasting he proposes may be described as being an off-line mode of transmission. He suggests that village broadcasting— particularly for the purpose of ‘rural uplift’—is to be constructed not through signal relay across stations and transmitters, or across short-wave or medium-wave, but instead on records through a combination of (i) trucks, (ii) two-stage amplifiers and horn-type loudspeakers, (iii) dual turntables, and (iv) oral transmission of media content. Smith proposes that two special records of 11 minutes duration each be produced and be played in order, one side after another, to create about 45 minutes’ worth of total programming. These records would be played in the village without the bother of interference, atmospherics, fading, and distortion that plagued radiating broadcasts, or what we may call online broadcasting, in rural areas of the Bombay Presidency. Village broadcasting relied, fundamentally, on loudness as a principle for listening, with the use of loudspeakers and public spaces. The audience listening in the village, Smith suggests, would hear the broadcast together and then orally relay the information and programme to others in the village who did not attend the programme. Using a network of trucks and roadways, the records themselves would then be passed on from one village to another, enabling the creation of local listening networks. This model of broadcasting based on gramophone records was, Smith argued, considerably cheaper and more cost-effective. From transmission and programming to financing broadcasting, and distinguishing between rural and urban audiences, radio in India starts building communities of listeners in the colonial period. Further, as evidenced above,

Early radio in late colonial India  215 we argue that there is a reconfiguration of the soundscape and the structures of listening. The radio audience that we construct in this section is one that is engaging variously with a new technology and learning new sounds of the empire in the form of ‘civic uplift’. Radio sound for urban audiences may have meant multiple geographical flows and the creation and dissolution of territories, whereas for rural audiences, radio sound often took the form of propaganda, as demonstrated above. The experience of listening to the radio was here communal rather than individual and intensely localised rather than sweepingly global. Mapping the diverse audiences then allows us to indicate different modes of engagement with the radio as sound technology and demonstrates how varied experiences of Indian sonic modernity can be situated geographically.

Conclusion Tracing the institutional history of the radio allowed scholars in the past to analyse the radio as an instrument of the colonial government in India and to show, for example, how the radio in the Indian subcontinent was deployed as part of the British Empire’s propaganda in the colony. As Gupta (1995), Zivin (1998), and Pinkerton (2008) argue, during the 1930s, the colonial government used the radio to address a fractured, local set of audiences so that it did not produce a national audience. Indeed, despite the British government’s efforts and Gandhi’s disagreement, and because of the efforts of Fielden, Nehru, and others, the radio was not only deployed by the Indian National Congress and later the Indian government; but by the 1950s, it became seemingly synonymous with the national project. Stepping away from this concern, we asked what did radio as a new sound technology mean in colonial India? In other words, what imaginaries and practices did it bring into effect? In answer, we have demonstrated that early radio in late colonial India transformed sonic imaginings, that is the imagination of sound itself and imaginations through sound—of spaces, territories, and figures. We further argue that radio effects the above in three ways: (i) by re-structuring the geographies of ‘home’, ‘world’, and ‘empire’; (ii) by allowing for variegated audiences that were learning to listen in different ways and lastly, (iii) by re-configuring standards, taste, and programming, variously for rural and urban audiences. Taken together this transformation has a specificity that produces an Indian sonic modernity that is born of conversations with technologies, capitalism, and colonialism.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Iris Haukamp, Martyn Smith, and colleagues from the Centre for Gender and Diversity at Maastricht University for thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of this chapter. We would also like to thank Iris

216  Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Hoene Haukamp for the careful copyediting of the final draft. Open Access publication of this chapter was made possible with a grant from the University Fund Limburg/SWOL; for that, our sincere thanks. Christin Hoene’s research was funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (ECF-2016-362).

Notes 1 For foundational work on the politics of the radio in colonial India, see Brayne (1929), Fielden (1940, 1960), Gupta (1995), Kaul (2014), Pinkerton (2008), Potter (2012), Zivin (1994, 1998, 1999). On the cultural, linguistic, and literary debates regarding the use of Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani on All India Radio (AIR), see Nijhawan (2016). See Asthana (2019) on the role of A.S. Bukhari, who contributed to drafting the language policy for AIR. Lelyveld (1994) discusses the policies of broadcasting music on AIR, amongst other topics, as well as the decentralisation of broadcasting in colonial India and initial distributions of radio sets. 2 The postcolonial radio’s relationship with the formation of a national listening public/national audience has been complicated by several scholars in recent years (Sharma 2015, Duggal 2018). It is also necessary to note the fact that radio and radio programming was indeed not available to most parts of the country, or large portions of the population. Hence, the oft-deployed rhetoric of the nation is one that is suspect. 3 Jugaad is a Hindi/Punjabi word that roughly translates to a hack or an act of making do. It has been theorised as belonging to the world of offline, working class, and pirate media practices across the Indian subcontinent and other countries in Asia (Sundaram 2010). Scholarship has indicated parallels with the Portuguese term gambiarra, particularly with similar pirate media practices dominating the favelas of Brazil and other states in Latin America. The phenomenon is more widely spread, encompassing several regions of the Global South. It is thus understood to be a subaltern practice of everyday resistance which depends upon illegal means of accessing state resources, forced into yielding new configurations of space, time, jobs, media objects, and practices. In these ways, jugaad as practice deploys the assemblage as its sine qua non. What was deployed as a mode of subaltern resistance has been adopted since by neoliberal capitalist regimes in India, especially as seen in the context of the mobile phone (Rai 2019). Similarly, in the case noted above, jugaad is not used by the working class but by an elite Indian or British or European resident of India. 4 Cinema and the gramophone have been variously discussed and theorised in the Indian context. For instance, cinema in early twentieth century India has been positioned in relation to questions of the urban, industrial, and other media ecologies (Mukherjee 2020), as well as part of intermedial networks of photography, the gramophone, and the radio (Mahadevan 2015). The intermedial legacy is not limited to cinema alone but encompasses sound technologies such as the gramophone by being positioned alongside theatres and cinema in histories of music circulation and consumption in late colonial Madras (Hughes 2007). 5 In fact, and as Pinkerton points out, the idea of a nation-wide broadcasting service in India was not new: ‘John Reith, General Manager of British Broadcasting Company, lobbied the India Office on the issue as early as March 1924 by advocating the potential benefits of the burgeoning “British model” (i.e. centralised, licensed monopoly) in transforming the Indian subcontinent’ (170). See Gupta (1995) on some of the reasons—both personal and political—of why this was without effect at the time.

Early radio in late colonial India  217 6 In the political context of broadcasting in colonial India, Fielden is an interesting character, who had sympathies with the nationalist movement in colonial India. Zivin (1999) describes Fielden as a ‘colonial subversive’ (195) and an ‘anti-­colonial aesthete’ (196) who ‘came to be viewed as the founder of Indian broadcasting by his Indian successors’ (196). 7 For instance, a fortnightly programme magazine of the Indian Broadcasting Company, The Indian Radio Times (renamed the The Indian Listener in December 1935), was started around the time the Bombay station went on air in 1927, and the Bengali publication Betar Jagat, which covered the Calcutta station, was first published in 1929. By the mid 1930s, just before the launch of AIR, there was significantly more writing. 8 For more on the BBC Empire Service, see, for example, Potter (2012, 2020) and Johnston and Robertson (2019). 9 There is a reference to a reception report being received from Sergeant H. J. Dent, Vice-President, Indian Radio Amateurs League by the editor of The Indian Listener (7 February 1936, 205). It is not clear from the available information whether this was European or Indian in origin and membership, or when it was formed. Speculatively, however, it is possible that Dent was a British officer serving in India at the time. 10 The Asiatic Review began its life as the Asiatic Quarterly Review in 1885 as a publication of the East India Association. From 1914, it included proceedings of the East India Association, as well as book reviews and articles on the politics, economics, international, and cultural affairs of several parts of Asia that were part of the British Empire including India, Ceylon, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. 11 FL Brayne envisioned a central role for the radio in The Remaking of Village India (1929), drawing upon his experiments with the medium in Lahore. He fantasised, Zivin (1998) argues, about ‘community listening’ and an immediacy of contact through radio transmission. 12 Zivin (1998) notes that there was a half-hour of radio programming addressing farming communities or the rural listeners on several regional All India Radio stations during the 1930s. Apart from this, it is necessary to note the continuity between the colonial and the contemporary, wherein the dominant format of this programme for rural/farming continues with minor variations.

References Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arnold, D. 2013. Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Asthana, S. 2019. India’s State-run Media: Broadcasting, Power, and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biswas, I. 2012. Indian Broadcasting in the Regional Context: A Survey of the History of the Radio Broadcasting Station at Calcutta, 1927–77 (Unpublished PhD thesis). Kolkata: University of Calcutta. Brayne, F. L. 1927. Village Uplift in India. Allahabad: The Pioneer Press. Brayne, F. L. 1929. The Remaking of Village India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brueck, L., J. Smith, and N. Verma. 2020. Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Volume II. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

218  Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Hoene Duggal, V. 2018. ‘Imagining sound through the pharmaish: Radios and request-postcards in North India, c. 1955–75’. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 9(1): 1–23. Fielden, L. 1940. Report on the Progress of Broadcasting in India. Delhi: The Government of India Press. Fielden, L. 1960. The Natural Bent. London: Andre Deutsch. Gupta, P. S. 1995. Radio and the Raj, 1921–47. Kolkata: K. P. Bagchi & Co. Gupta, P. S. 2002. Power, Politics and the People: Studies in British Imperialism and Indian Nationalism. London: Anthem Press. Hughes, S. 2007. ‘Music in the age of mechanical reproduction: Drama, gramophone, and the beginnings of Tamil cinema’. The Journal of Asian Studies 66(1): 3–34. The Indian Listener, 1936. Johnston, G. and E. Robertson. 2019. BBC World Service: Overseas Broadcasting, 1932–2018. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaul, C. 2014. Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Larkin, B. 2008. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lelyveld, D. 1994. ‘Upon the subdominant: Administering music on All-India Radio’. Social Text 39: 111–127. Mahadevan, S. 2015. A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India. Albany, New York: SUNY Press. Mukherjee, D. 2020. Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City. New York: Columbia University Press. Nijhawan, S. 2016. ‘Hindi, Urdu or Hinustani? Debates through Radio Broadcasting in late colonial India’. South Asia Research 36(1): 80–97. Pinkerton, A. 2008. ‘Radio and the Raj: Broadcasting in British India (1920–1940)’. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Series 3 18(2): 167–191. Porath, N. 2019. Hearing Southeast Asia: Sounds of Hierarchy and Power in Context. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Potter, S. 2012. Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British World, 1922–1970. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Potter, S. 2020. Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Punathambekar, A. 2013. From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry. New York: NYU Press. Raghunath, P. 2020. Community Radio Policies in South Asia: A Deliberative Policy Ecology Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Rai, A. 2019. Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sharma, R. 2015. Words in Motion: A Social History of Language in ‘Hindi’ Cinema (c. 1931 till the present). Unpublished PhD thesis. New Delhi: University of Delhi. Steingo, G. and J. Sykes. 2019. Remapping Sound Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Strickland, C. F. 1934. ‘Broadcasting in the Indian village’. The Asiatic Review 30(101), January 1934. London: East and West Limited. Sundaram, R. 2010. Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism. London/New York: Routledge. The Times of India, 1925, 1934–36.

Early radio in late colonial India  219 Weheliye, A. G. 2005. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zivin, J. 1994. The Projection of India: Imperial Propaganda, the British State and Nationalist India, 1930–1947. PhD thesis. Duke University. Zivin, J. 1998. ‘The imagined reign of the iron lecturer’. Modern Asian Studies 32(3): 717–738. Zivin, J. 1999. ‘“Bent”: A colonial subversive and Indian broadcasting’. Past and Present 162(1): 195–220.

11 (Re)Diffusion of beautiful sound Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok1 Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt

Introduction Depicting the everyday life of Chinese communities in post-war Bangkok, Letters from Thailand is the first Thai novel to use a Chinese as a main character.2 It portrays the following important part of a regular evening through the Chinese protagonist’s eyes: In the evening, I would like to turn on the radio and listen to the Chinese songs that were becoming popular for a while. Nevertheless, I do not understand why they have suddenly vanished. One Chinese entrepreneur leases a radio attachment that permits reception of a private station which plays Chinese music, but I have heard that all its broadcasts are in Mandarin … Our children learn Mandarin, and therefore, enjoy this new radio receiver, while their mother listens to radio dramas during the day … This receiver is very cheap, unlike a usual radio receiver, let alone a television. (Botan 1999, 420–21) The pleasure of listening to the radio through this new receiver is associated with the so-called ‘Rediffusion’3 (known in Chinese as ‘Li de hu sheng’: ­‘beautiful sound’)—a Chinese language wired radio broadcast between the 1950s and 1970s. While the above excerpt depicts the listening experience of the ethnic Chinese, Thailand’s largest minority, it also presents the radio as part of everyday life in post-war Bangkok (U.S. Information Service 1964, 6–8).4 Music, listening, and sound have become inseparable from the processes of empire building as ‘audible formation’ (Radano and Olaniyan 2016, 13). Yet Thailand, known as Siam until 1939, remained an independent nation, while much of Asia endured Western or Japanese, imperialism during the colonial era. Taking pride in never having been colonised, Thailand ­cherishes its national language. However, this Chinese broadcast undeniably had remarkable success, and one may wonder how its minority’s sound came to be ­omnipresent in urban Thailand,5 and entangled with the formation of the Thai state during that period. In particular, one may ask why and how the ‘Rediffusion’ broadcast was established, what kind of broadcasting DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772-16

(Re)Diffusion of beautiful sound  221 technology did ‘Rediffusion’ operate, and what kind of ideas and information were presented in the broadcast programmes? To answer these questions, this chapter traces the history of the ‘Rediffusion’ broadcast from the 1950s to the 1970s, a period of modern development in Bangkok,6 marked by urbanisation and the diffusion of new technologies. Recent scholarship in sound studies (including the history of sound and auditory cultures) and the history of the senses has noted ‘the cultural meaning of hearing and listening, and the historical changes they have undergone’ in the modern age (Morat 2014, 2), and scholars have acknowledged this trend by contributing a number of historical case studies. Gibson and Biddle historicise sound by raising ‘ontological and epistemological questions about the nature of sound production and its reception by hearing and listening subjects’ (2016, 1). In other words, this field of study investigates how life in the past was shaped by sound (ibid., 2). Despite the growing interest in this field, Steingo and Sykes argue that sound studies up to now have mainly been based on Northern-centric perspectives and done little to engage with experiences in the ‘Global South’, in particular in Africa and Asia (2019, 5–6). Furthermore, primary source materials about sound and aurality are dispersed in different forms or may be lost, due to the fact that the technology for recording and reproducing sound began only in the nineteenth century (ibid.). Fortunately, recent literature offers a greater variety of approaches, perspectives, and historical sources to research sound in Asia (see Radano and Olaniyan 2016; Steingo and Sykes 2019). Therefore, this chapter takes a historical approach to examine Chinese Broadcast in Thailand. Focussing on ‘Rediffusion’, it uses a variety of historical sources, such as archival documents, newspapers, memoirs, and especially a collection of Rediffusion magazines that provide a remarkable amount of information. The first of the chapter’s three sections engages in narratives of how sound encountered technology in the form of radio broadcasts under the trading name Rediffusion. It emphasises that, as clearly seen in the case of Bangkok, the development of this Western technology went along with urban development and played a crucial role in shaping sonic experience. The second section regards the establishment of the Rediffusion service in Thailand and explores the interplay between the broadcast and the Chinese sound it disseminated and the Thai government. Unlike many Rediffusion services in former British Colonies, which were private, the Rediffusion broadcast in Thailand was an asset of the Thai state used to control its Chinese minority’s sound. The final section investigates how sound and broadcast helped create meaning for the Chinese audience who listened to the programmes. Despite being a state-owned service, Rediffusion broadcast was able to encompass knowledge and understanding of Chinese language and culture. Finally, the chapter reflects upon the meaning of Rediffusion as implied by its Chinese name (Beautiful Sound) and discusses the end of the Rediffusion story in Thailand.

222  Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt

When sound meets technology: The origin of the Rediffusion broadcast 1920s. Where it all began, turning early radio experiments into a new medium—broadcasting. (BBC 2019) The Rediffusion broadcast was born in the UK in the early twentieth century. The successful radio transmission of programmes from one station to another in 1922 led to the establishment of the ‘British Broadcasting Company’, which was granted a licence to operate a full service, henceforth known as BBC (ibid.). The BBC launched its London transmitter, 2LO, to operate a network connected to new transmitters in London, Manchester, Birmingham, and Newcastle (Science Museum 2018). This wireless sound communication technology used radio waves from single broadcast stations to households equipped with receivers (Skretvedt and Sterling 2018). Despite its on-air success, the BBC signal was too weak to reach remote areas (McDaniel 1994, 136). Moreover, radio sets were expensive and accessible only to a very limited audience. Thus, an effort was made to extend the broadcast from BBC London to other cities that could not yet access the signal, such as Clacton, Essex (Rediffusion Limited 2020). One such attempt consisted of wired relay networks, independently distributed to subscribers, a method and technology known as rediffusion (‘Rediffusion and teleprogramme systems’ 1935). The broadcast programme usually received by radio had a better reception from the main station, while an amplifier station delivered fluctuating signals to subscribers who had a receiving set (ibid.). Founded in 1928 as one of the first companies to relay radio programmes, Broadcast Relay Service Ltd, with its registered office in Clacton, initially provided its service to around 200 subscribers (ibid.). The Broadcast Relay Service established the new company, Rediffusion Ltd in 1931, and Overseas Rediffusion Ltd in 1948. The method of rediffusion had become the company’s trading name (ibid.). As its name implies, the Rediffusion broadcast originated from re-transmitting audio signals through a wired network.7 This method relied on the position of the amplifier station and on the wires used for connecting it to the subscriber’s home (ibid.) (Figure 11.1). The Rediffusion service proved successful and was expanded throughout the UK and worldwide, especially in the (former) British Colonies such as the islands of Malta and Gozo (Rediffusion Limited 2020). Overseas Rediffusion Ltd. also provided services for other foreign stations with the introduction of its own sound programmes. In 1949, Rediffusion began operations in Singapore, Malaya, and Hong Kong, broadcasting one audio programme in Chinese and one in English. As mentioned above, the Chinese Rediffusion broadcast became known as ‘Li de hu sheng’—‘beautiful sound’. In the same year, due to the broadcast’s success, the company decided to expand its service to Thailand.

(Re)Diffusion of beautiful sound  223

Figure 11.1  Radio and rediffusion broadcasting technology. (By author).

The Rediffusion broadcast and Bangkok’s urban phenomenon The Rediffusion Broadcast was eventually inaugurated in Thailand in 1956.8 This section will examine Rediffusion service and its connection to the technology adopted from the West and the process of urbanisation in Bangkok. Based on the technology of the UK Rediffusion broadcast, the Rediffusion service in Thailand used wired transmission to relay broadcast from a radio station to equipped subscribers. In Thai, this technology was called ‘song siang thang sai’ (‘transmitting sound by wire’), while ‘Li de hu sheng’ remained as the Chinese name, with a very different implication that I shall discuss in the conclusion. Rediffusion operated on two simultaneous channels, one in Thai and one in Chinese, which made it attractive to the Chinese audience (U.S. Information Service 1964, 23).9 Listeners were supposed to subscribe to the company in order to have a receiving set installed. In Thailand, the set consisted of a blue wooden box equipped with a speaker to amplify the volume. Subscribers needed to fill in an application form, stating their listener types (household, company, or business), address, and the number of receiving sets they wished to order. The application form was subsequently sent to the company. During the application reviewing process, the company checked whether its service covered the location of the subscriber’s residence, then made an appointment to install a Rediffusion receiving set. The initial installation fee was 100 baht, and the monthly fee was 30 baht, i.e., 1 baht per day.10 The Rediffusion service was a distinctively urban phenomenon for several reasons: Firstly, the Thai Rediffusion wired transmission network used former electrical lines, which were available only in urban areas (rural areas had no electricity at that time). Secondly, the investment was viable only in densely populated areas that already had the necessary infrastructure and a potentially high number of subscribers. And, finally, the low cost of the receiving set made it affordable as an everyday object, and radio listening became an everyday routine for urban residents. In Bangkok, the service was available in

224  Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt neighbourhoods with a large Chinese population. Bangkok had been the political, economic, and cultural capital of Thailand since the late eighteenth century and had attracted large waves of Chinese immigrants (Skinner 1957: 21). Despite being a minority, the ethnic Chinese significantly influenced and shaped the urbanisation process and the economic nature of the city (Vesarach 1974). Bangkok was the preeminent manufacturing, financial, and service centre of this resource-based economy, and the Chinese had traditionally specialised in these activities (Xoomsai 1987, 8). The coverage of the Rediffusion service indicates the ethnic Chinese population along the line with the increasing wired networks of the Bangkok-based station that extended to most of Bangkok. Rediffusion was broadcast daily for 17 hours from 6 am to 11 pm. The wired network of the Bangkok-based station extended southward to the Samut Prakan Province and westward to Bangkhae (Figure 11.2). The company also served northern Bangkok’s suburban districts of Bangkhen, including Lat Phrao and Saphan Kwai. Due to this expanded network, the company installed four sub-stations in the outlying areas to enhance the transmission power (Jeer 1970, 19). Encouraged by the success of the service in Bangkok, the first branch station was established in the Chonburi Province in 1964, and the second and third in the Provinces of Chiang Mai and Nakhon Sawan in 1967. These areas also had a large number of ethnic Chinese residents. The personnel of the branch stations were appointed and directed by the main station in Bangkok. Likewise, most of the programmes were duplicates of their Bangkok counterparts (‘Kongzhong huaju’ 1966). However, there were slight variations in the broadcasting timetables. In the late 1960s, there were approximately 28,000 receiving sets in Bangkok, and an estimated 200,000 listeners. The three branch stations

Figure 11.2  Rediffusion coverage area. (Courtesy of Patipat Sathaporn).

(Re)Diffusion of beautiful sound  225 serviced around 5,000 receiving sets with an estimated 50,000 listeners. The overall daily audience in Thailand amounted to 2–300,000 listeners, 95 per cent of whom listened to Chinese programmes (ibid., 12), and around 89 per cent listened to the broadcasts regularly (Smith 1968, 293). However, one of the most common technical problems of the Rediffusion broadcast was that its electrical wires often got tangled with telephone lines, which led to interferences and disturbances in the sound. Sometimes, road repair affected the functioning of the broadcast, causing the line to break up. In such cases, subscribers would call the station and have a technician sent to fix the line (‘San khong kammakan’ 1967, 93). Another common complaint of Rediffusion listeners was that the receiver became easily overheated, as it was not equipped with a fan cooler. Subscribers had to turn off the receiver for a long while to let it cool down (ibid.). The company was aware of these problems and resignedly accepted the complaints, but they make clear the varied nature of the listening experience. Wherever a receiving box in a public or private place was equipped with a speaker, it also functioned as an amplifier. This had the following crucial implications: firstly, the device encouraged groups or even mass audiences to gather and listen to the programmes together, and thus form shared senses of identity. This practice also explains why the number of listeners estimated by the company was seven to ten times higher than the numbers of receivers sold.11 Secondly, the broadcast lent itself to a range of auditory experiences: Some audiences would carefully follow a specific programme, while others were merely overhearing and not actively concentrating. Finally, listening to the radio was no longer necessarily a private activity. Even if one intended to listen to a broadcast privately, the receiver’s function as an amplifier made it difficult to limit its loudness. This inevitably became a problem, and the company had to ask its subscribers to be considerate at night (ibid.). As a result, listening was not necessarily individual or uniform. Along with the development of the radio, the Rediffusion broadcast established itself as a prominent part of urbanisation in Bangkok, thanks to the diffusion of electricity and due to a large number of people and institutions that engaged in radio listening activities and could afford the equipment, especially the inexpensive receiving sets. However, the distinctive feature of these receivers equipped with a speaker problematised the difference between listening and hearing.12 According to Rice, listening is about trying to hear something, while hearing is considered a more passive mode of auditory perception (2015, 99). Ehrhardt similarly notes that hearing the programmes was not equivalent to actively listening to them (2014, 116–117). However, under the authoritarian rule in Austria between 1934 and 1938, for instance, the integration of a loudspeaker into the radio receiver enabled ‘collective modes of listening’ that emphasised propaganda and nationalism (ibid.). In fact, the state broadcast had imposed radio on its people, which made state propaganda unescapable. In this sense, the radio broadcast and the State had become inseparably intertwined. A similar complicated relationship between the Rediffusion broadcast and the Thai State will be discussed in the next section.

226  Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt Behind Rediffusion: the Chinese Sound and the Thai State Let us now examine why and how the Chinese Broadcast was established in Thailand, with the aim to explain the evolving relationship between the ethnic Chinese and the Thai State in terms of perception of sound. Before Rediffusion’s inauguration in 1956, the country’s largest minority13 had access to many other Chinese radio stations and to other forms of entertainment delivered in Chinese dialects. Chinese migrants tended to share local affinities (dialect or hometown) rather than national ones (Kuhn 2009, 29). Many Chinese were unable to communicate in the local language, and therefore relied on fellow Chinese from the same region who had migrated before them. In the late nineteenth century, this mentality determined the formation of dialect-based Chinese communities, especially overseas (Skinner 1957, 212). Chinese dialects were undoubtedly quite distant from the national language of Thailand. Accordingly, one may find that hearing and listening were inseparable from daily life; there was a clear distinction between the native Chinese dialects and the national Thai language. Before the invention of modern leisure technologies, such as the cinema, radio, and television, Chinese opera was one of the most important and popular forms of entertainment within the Chinese community in Bangkok, and ethnic Chinese preferred to attend Chinese operas associated with their dialect/speech group (‘Di ba bu: Yule zhinan’ 1966). If the demand for radio broadcasts among the ethnic Chinese was one issue, the willingness of the Thai government to authorise them was quite another. Policies and regulations about Chinese broadcasts were subject to frequent reconsiderations and changes: since the democratic revolution of 1932, the Thai government had been paying attention to broadcasting as a means of propaganda. Therefore, the Propaganda Department14 was established in 1933 (Phaothongsuk 1990, 21–3), taking over from the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, which was previously in charge of radio broadcasting (Siriyuvasak 1992, 92). Still, both departments continued their broadcast since it was a critical source of revenues. Attracted by profits, other government organisations also established their own radio stations, both military and civilian. The post-war decades saw the establishment of a considerable number of State-owned radio stations, making it a very competitive industry (Phaothongsuk 1990, 22–23). In order to commercialise their airtime, many state-owned radio stations, such as the Army Radio, granted licenses for the Chinese communities to broadcast in their own language. The most popular broadcasting programmes were music and drama, particularly in the Chaozhou dialect. In the 1950s, Chinese broadcasts became so popular that they attracted large numbers of advertisements, generating massive incomes (Li 2000, 48). However, the Thai government soon began to express concerns about the pervasiveness of Chinese broadcast. It was said that one could hear advertisements in a Chaozhou dialect anywhere in Bangkok, and some exaggerated that the Chinese communities were turning Bangkok into an extension

(Re)Diffusion of beautiful sound  227 of the Chaozhou district in China (ibid). Therefore, the government eventually terminated all leasing contracts with Chinese broadcasts, except for Rediffusion (ibid.). A newspaper article explained this change as a further step towards the assimilation of ethnic Chinese into Thai society: It has been claimed that the termination of Chinese programmes from the radio station throughout the nation is ‘a calculated move’ by the government to accelerate the assimilation of local Chinese residents. For the best national interests, the decision to eliminate the Chinese language from the radio programmes was not totally unexpected in view of raising nationalistic sentiments during the past two decades. In addition to speeding up the assimilation process of the Chinese, the ban was also considered as a move to save government officials’ embarrassment when foreign visitors asked why so many radio programmes seemed to be broadcast in non-Thai accents. (Jeer 1970, 19) So why was the Thai state so fixated on Thai/non-Thai accents? As stated in the introduction, Thailand prides itself on its independence during the colonial era, therefore, neither foreign nor colonial language is enforced upon Thai commoners. In the late 19th century, Siamese elites had celebrated Western ideas and technology,15 but the course of history necessitated a heavy investment in the discourse of Thainess even though the actual referent of this ‘identity’ always remains unclear (Winichakul 1997). In fact, Thai authorities continually work to discursively define ‘un-Thainess’, so as to enable Thainess to become more apparent (ibid.). As such, the notion of ethnicity was used in forging the sense of We-self (Thai) versus the other (the ethnic Chinese, usually denounced as Jek in colloquial Thai). The Thai state—calling for a submission of the Chinese to Thainess—suppressed nonThai language and culture, including Chinese broadcasts. In addition to the discourse on Thainess, Chinese sound was also employed as a tool of the discourse of national integration. It became a source of irritation for the Thai society, and was often characterised as ‘noise’.16 Hendy (2013) defines noise as an unwanted sound that is perceived as such in a specific cultural context, by a specific kind of person and in a specific kind of place. Murph (2018) also notes the notion of noise being unwanted is deeply rooted in socio-economic dynamics. In this sense, noise is entangled with the power a person or a group holds over another (Kolkowski et al. 2017). Concerns about national integration and national security had considerably increased in the country, especially after the Second World War, and Chinese broadcasts started being perceived as disruptive. This evolution is reflected in the changed perception of Chinese broadcasts (from sound to noise) on the part of the Thai government. Radio was deemed too important to this process of national integration to allow private sectors to operate Chinese broadcasting on their own. Indeed, the radio was considered more trustworthy and able to reach a larger audience than any other mass medium (U.S. Information

228  Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt Agency 1966: 23). The Thai government thus wanted to tighten its control on Chinese broadcasts and several Thai officials fully supported Rediffusion to this end. For instance, M. L. Khap Kunchon—Secretary of the Office of the Prime Minister, 1948–1957—reiterated the importance of the Rediffusion service: ‘I have continuously tried to inquire about advantages and disadvantages from foreigners who used to have such a service. They say it will be beneficial, especially for current situations. ‘Rediffusion’ can be a tool to effectively counter communist propaganda’ (NA OPM, (2)sor.ror.0201.93/51). Another supportive figure was Police Director-General Phao Siyanon, also known as a strong advocate of national broadcasting services. He also suspected that private Chinese broadcasts engaged in spreading communist ideology (ibid.). The absence of a designated Chinese-speaking radio, however, would have left a serious communication gap between the Thai government and the Chinese community. To avoid this risk, the Thai government needed a state-controlled channel in order to prevent the ethnic Chinese community from accessing any unauthorised information. In this light, Phao made it clear that Rediffusion would be useful to the police in terms of command and defence, as the communication channel would have to conform to the government’s policies (ibid.). The largest shareholder, the Thai TV Company, was under the direct control of the Department of Public Relations. The company likely had learned its technical know-how from Overseas Rediffusion in Malaya, since it imported its broadcasting equipment from the Malayan branch of General Electric for a total of 43,960 pounds sterling (NA OPM, (2)sor.ror.0201.4.5/52). In short, the establishment of the Thai Rediffusion Company shows that the Thai State expected it to bridge the gap between the Thai government and the Chinese communities and shore up the promotion of Thainess. This political goal was expressed by Prasong Hongsanan, a board member of the Thai Rediffusion Company, during his New Year blessing to the station’s audience in 1967: Rediffusion attempts to spread news and information issued by the government as quickly as possible. While political problems confronting the government are enormous, it is the value of ‘unity, understanding and cooperation’ that are most crucially needed from all people who live in Thailand, regardless of their race and language. (‘San khong kammakan’ 1967, 4) Beautiful sound and its implications Although the Thai government had terminated all other Chinese broadcasts in 1958, Rediffusion continued its operations as a state-owned enterprise. The broadcast became part of daily life of the Chinese communities, especially in Bangkok, contributing to the development of leisure and entertainment culture. This section examines the Rediffusion listening experience through its programmes and content. As mentioned in the first section, the Rediffusion daily broadcast lasted 17 hours daily, from 6 am to 11 pm, and had two audio channels, one in Thai and one in Chinese dialects. The main

(Re)Diffusion of beautiful sound  229 dialects used were Chaozhou, followed by Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka, and Hainanese. This order reflected the ethnic Chinese demographic distribution in the areas by Rediffusion in Thailand. The Chaozhou community was the largest Chinese ethnic group, especially in Bangkok (Figure 11.3).

Time 6:00 6:30 7:00 7:15 7:45 8:00 8:30 9:00 9:30 9:45 10:00 10:30 11:00 11:30 12:00 12:15 12:30 12:45 1:00 1:30 1:45 2:00 2:30 3:00 3:30 4:00 4:15 4:30 5:00 5:30 5:45 6:00 6:30 7:00 7:30 8:00 8:30 9:00 9:30 10:00 10:30 11:00

Monday-Saturday morning songs educational talk English class Mandarin pop music synchronizing Thai time;1 Chaozhou operas Gua Ceh (Chaozhou rhyme singing) radio dramas short news talk on common knowledge Cantonese content Storytelling Gua Ceh Mandarin pop music news report Mandarin pop music Hainanese songs Chaozhou operas educational talk Mandarin pop music Storytelling Mandarin pop music Chaozhou operas Storytelling community news; Gua Ceh Hakka content Storytelling radio dramas instrumental music news report Mandarin pop music Chaozhou operas Gua Ceh radio dramas synchronizing Thai time; storytelling Cantonese content Gua Ceh Mandarin pop music Chaozhou operas Mandarin pop music Closed

Sunday morning songs Hong Kong today Mandarin pop music US today health report synchronizing Thai time; Chaozhou operas Gua Ceh storytelling for children Cantonese content singing contest song recommendation weekly news Mandarin pop music Chaozhou operas/Live broadcast

song request

weekly current affairs Gua Ceh Buddhist sermon Chaozhou operas Gua Ceh Chaozhou operas Cantonese content Gua Ceh Mandarin pop music instrumental music Closed

1

Until this day, national broadcasts in Thailand announce ‘synchronizing time’ at 8 am, 6 pm every day, followed by the national anthem. This setting of a common, standard time is to keep people on the same page with the government.

Figure 11.3  Timetable for Rediffusion broadcast (‘Kongzhong huaju’ 1966).

230  Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt As Rediffusion stated in its advertisements: ‘For only one baht a day … you can enjoy news, drama, music, story, and education’. The variety of programmes produced can be classified as follows: 1. News reports: Rediffusion collected news from big news agencies and compiled international and local news in the morning, noon, and evening. Urgent news, such as government emergency decrees, fire alarms, and international or local emergency incidents, was relayed immediately. Contents also included ‘weekly current affairs’, ‘Hong Kong today’, and ‘US today’ every weekend. 2. Storytelling: Several storytellers performed on subject matters such as religion, history, martial arts, and folktales, which appealed to diverse age groups (Jeer 1970, 19). 3. Education: Educational programmes included Chinese and English language classes, basic knowledge about family and housekeeping, guides to Thailand and a kind of Chinese Buddhist sermon. English classes were also known as ‘Global English’ programmes, with English textbooks sold for five baht to Rediffusion’s English learners (‘Lide hushing siyue’ 1969). 4. Radio dramas: These were among the favourite programmes of Bangkok listeners (‘Kongzhong huaju’ 1966, 15). There were three drama troupes in Rediffusion: (1) Nam tiang (southern sky) drama troupe usually broadcast modern radio plays; (2) Bangkok drama troupe regularly specialised Chaozhou operas and dramas adapted from Chinese classics; (3) Li-ngow (beautiful art) focused on folktales, martial arts, and thrilling stories. 5. Music: Rediffusion provided a variety of music programmes, such as Gua Ceh, Chaozhou opera, Cantonese opera, Peking opera, Hakka folk song, Hainanese opera, and Mandarin pop music (Xie 1969, 39–43). In the following discussion, the implications in terms of informal education of the music and drama programmes will be considered through examples drawn from the content scripts published in Rediffusion magazines.17

Women’s great learning: Gua Ceh and Chaozhou operas Drama and music programmes had a large female audience. Chinese women listened to the radio not only for entertainment purposes, but also for learning, as they traditionally had little access to education, and especially to literacy. In this respect, the popular Gua Ceh and Chaozhou opera programmes of the Rediffusion broadcast provided them with informal learning opportunities, as the language used was easy to understand and the stories offered basic knowledge. In fact, the messages conveyed in Gua Ceh and Chaozhou operas directly aimed at morally ‘educating’ women: Gua Ceh was a form of musical and poetic storytelling, popular among the Chaozhou people (Banxiao 1969, 36–37). Having a fixed rhyme based on Chaozhou dialect’s

(Re)Diffusion of beautiful sound  231 fifteen sounds, each sentence of Gua Ceh had five or seven words, which made singing Gua Ceh sound like reading poetry (Lide Husheng Zazhi 2 1966, 6). Rediffusion produced contemporary stories to make traditional Gua Ceh more inventive and exciting (Baren 1969, 33). For instance, the New Year Resolution’ Gua Ceh to welcome the New Year of 1969 describes the creation of the world and what to do in each month in accordance with one’s New Year resolution in January: Since Pan Gu created heaven and earth, the beginning of the world, Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors established the kingdom. Sky and Earth shone through all constellations, The understanding of Yin and Yang decided month and year. The descendants carried on four seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter … The first month when rain and spring comes, … One must not be lazy or be in a mess. The second month when a hundred flowers begin to blossom, … One must raise the spirit and not hesitate. (Baren 1969, 32–33) The above verse demonstrates the worldview of Chinese cosmology, according to which humans must behave in conformity with the principles of nature. It can, therefore, be regarded as a means to learn about the outside world and oneself. Likewise, Chaozhou Operas also reflect the ways values and virtues in Chinese traditions, which ‘good’ Chinese women must learn and practice, including ‘xiao’ (filial piety). ‘Guo Ziyi bai shou’ (Birthday Congratulations to General Guo Ziyi), one of the most celebrated Chaozhou operas, reiterates the importance of the virtues required of a good wife: in the story, Guo Ziyi was a respected general who had long guarded the Chinese kingdom. When he and his wife turned seventy, their seven sons and eight sons-in-law came to celebrate his seventieth birthday. His sixth son, Guo Nuan, had asked his wife, Princess Li Junrui, to join the celebration, but she refused: Guo Nuan: Princess, tomorrow will be my parents’ seventieth birthday celebration. Family members and friends, be them civil or military, all will be there. …. What about you, as their daughter-in-law? Li Jinrui: Well… Guo Nuan:  This is a vital matter. Don’t you want to come?

232  Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt Li Jinrui:  I do, but I need to ask my father, the emperor… Guo Nuan: Of course, but I learnt that the emperor has issued an imperial edict to the Crown Prince of East Palace to attend tomorrow’s event. If you ask for his permission, he will certainly grant it. (‘Konzhong huaju’ 1966) Li Junrui chose not to celebrate her father-in-law’s birthday and her infuriated husband slaps her. She returns to the palace, and tells her father, the emperor, about the incident. To teach his daughter a lesson, the emperor pretends that he will decapitate his son-in-law. Hearing this, Guo Ziyi offers to sacrifice himself to save his son Guo Nuan. Deeply regretful, the princess asks the emperor to spare her husband. The emperor not only exonerates Guo Nuan, but also promotes Guo Ziyi to a higher rank. Finally, they all celebrate Guo Ziyi’s seventieth birthday at the palace. In a nutshell, this story is about three kinds of relationships—between emperor and officers, father and son, and husband and wife. The moral lesson addressed to Chinese women is clear and straightforward: a woman must obey her husband and express gratitude to his family. This duty, known as ‘xiao’ (filial piety), is one of the highest virtues in Chinese culture and was developed into popular stories in the form of Gua Ceh and Chaozhou operas with the aim to educate female listeners.

The popularisation of literary classics and modern literature As noted by Rediffusion playwright Banxiao, ‘huaju’ or drama has long been one of the best entertaining tools to ‘educate’ the masses in China, enabling them to learn about Chinese language and literature (Lide Husheng Zazhi 4 1968). Rediffusion was aware of this and used radio dramas based on Chinese classics and modern Chinese literature for education as well as leisure. These adaptations significantly contributed to the popularisation of these texts. Written texts are limited to educated, literate audiences, while a radio adaptation turns a literary text into a story that can be heard and imagined through music and sound effects. As Crook notes: ‘it is auditory in the physical dimension but equally powerful as a visual force in the psychological dimension’ (1999, 8). Thus, to a certain degree, radio dramas transcended the literacy barrier while enhancing the listening experience of the story and its characters. The radio dramas broadcast by Rediffusion combined art and technology for the entertainment of their audience. The number of voice narrators and voice actors varied depending on the nature of the drama. Moreover, radio dramas usually added background music, ambience tracks, and sound effects to create a unique atmosphere for the story. A play would usually involve about twenty voice actors, but in exceptional cases, more voice actors were recruited. The 600,000-word Chinese classic San Guo (‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’) was adapted into several episodes of (Zheng 2005, 388; Li 2000, 51). One of these episodes, the epic war story Chi bi zhi zhan (‘The Battle of the Red Cliffs’), also known in the Chaozhou dialect as Sek Phek,

(Re)Diffusion of beautiful sound  233 was one of the largest endeavours of the station and mobilised more than forty voice actors (Lide Husheng Zazhi 4 1968). In addition to literary classics, the Rediffusion broadcast also adapted works of modern Chinese literature, including romance fictions such as Qiong Yao, a famous female Taiwanese novelist since the 1960s. According to Li Yi, another Rediffusion playwright, there were several reasons for the popularity of the radio adaptations of Qiong Yao’s romance novels (2000, 50–51): Her fiction was about the universal themes of love and romance, which were easy to understand. She also was an exceptional storyteller, whose writing techniques could turn an ordinary story into a touching one. Moreover, the Qiong Yao series was inexpensive; a volume cost only three baht but could be adapted into six or seven episodes. Finally, her novels usually contained many conversations through which the characters expressed their emotions, making them easily adaptable as radio dramas. Qiong Yao’s work Yan yui meng meng (‘Misty rain’) was a series of stories about love and hate, all of which ended tragically in a misty rain. Abandoned by her father, the female protagonist vowed to take revenge on him and his new family. In the end, her father and half-sister paid for all their wrongdoings, but the protagonist also lost her loved one. The Misty Rain Saga was popularised through long episodes of radio dramas. Li (2000, 51–52) notes that he was able to produce good scripts thanks to Qiong Yao’s excellent emotional dialogues and inner monologues. In short, as a form of entertainment, radio drama offered listeners a glimpse of the world of literature. It turned written texts into an audible, imaginable story with dialogue, music, and sound effects. The adaptation was a helpful introduction to Chinese literature for general audiences despite their lack, or low level, of literacy. Therefore, it can justifiably be said that radio dramas enlarged the listening experience through the story and its characters.

Connecting through pop music Despite a lack of Chinese education provided by the Thai government, for the Chinese audience of Rediffusion, and especially the younger generation, listening to songs became a crucial tool for strengthening their language abilities. Unsurprisingly the audience was particularly interested in pop music, which in this context refers to popular Mandarin songs. Broadcasting programmes such as ‘Mandarin Pop Song’ (Shidai ge qu) aired for almost the entire day, ‘Song Recommendation’ (Ge yue jieshao) and ‘Song Request’ (Dian chang) were available on primetime during the weekends. Usually, the hosts of these music programmes were required to speak good Mandarin, and young listeners could learn Mandarin Chinese while listening to music. For example, Wang Zhuqing, the host of Song Request and Mandarin News Report grew up and was educated in northern China, and therefore had a good command of Mandarin Chinese (Lide Husheng Zazhi 4 1968, 8). She also had a beautiful voice, and her show was so popular that she received 10 to 40 letters from listeners each week (some of which even asked her out).

234  Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt Wang sometimes recommended a song that she found pleasant and meaningful, such as Hui xiang qu (Melody of Reminiscence) by Tsu Wei (Zi Wei). The lyrics went as follows: ‘The peach flower blossoms in the spring. When I see the peach flower blossoms, I think it is like a lover that comes back to me again’. Wang’s eloquent and gentle personality contributed to the show’s success. Although Mandarin had been China’s national language (putonghua, common speech) in the 1950s, the Mandarin pop music mostly came from Hong Kong. Before the rise of Cantonese pop music in the 1980s, Hong Kong was indeed an influential beacon of Mandarin pop music, due to the city’s flourishing of the entertainment and commercial industry (Wong 2003, 7). Since Hong Kong was an open society, its entertainment industry welcomed ethnic Chinese from different backgrounds and origins (ibid.). For example, Mandarin pop singers such as Huang Qingyuan (Wong Ching Yuen)—a Singaporean Chinese, Pan Xiuqiong (Poon Sow Keng)—born in Macau and brought up in Malaya, Pan Dihua (Rebecca Pan)—born in Shanghai and based in Hong Kong in 1949, all were able to succeed in Hong Kong. Among the many pop singers who came to Hong Kong to develop their careers, one should mention Deng Lijun (Teresa Teng), the Chinese pop music icon of the 1970s and the 1980s. Moving to Hong Kong, Deng expanded her global success.18 Rediffusion incorporated these singers’ songs into its ‘Mandarin Pop Song’ programme, running for almost the entire day. The popularity of Mandarin pop music among the young audience led the Rediffusion Company to hold the singing contest ‘White Lion Cup’ (Bai shi ge wang bei) every Sunday between 1966 and 1969 (‘Lide hushing zuotian’ 1966). The singing contest was not unlike today’s reality shows, and the inclusion of Mandarin pop songs was almost compulsory, due to their immense popularity. Titles included ‘Nan ren de yan lei’ (Tears from a Man), ‘Qing ren de yan lei’ (Tears from a Lover), ‘Meigui meigui wo ai ni’ (Rose, Rose, I Love You) and ‘Qing ren qiao’ (Lover’s Bridge) (Xie Zengtai 1969, 42–43).19 The contest encouraged the younger generation to express their passion for the Chinese language and music, and live broadcasts allowed them to share the experience and emotions with others. As Mandarin pop music became widespread in the Chinese-speaking world, it connected the younger generation in Thailand with people from other Chinese communities. Liu Zhenting (2009), a veteran Sino-Thai journalist and Rediffusion listener recalled in his memoirs: ‘The Chinese in Bangkok who can still remember their childhood, when Chinese songs were played in the streets, should also be grateful to Rediffusion for sharing Chinese songs with everyone’ (ibid.).

Conclusion: Why is the sound beautiful? As a consequence of the Thai government’s decades-long assimilation policies, the younger generation of Chinese descendants in Thailand gradually lost their ability to understand (and to read and write) Chinese (Tejapira 1997, 86), while the older generation, literate in Chinese, was dying off. The

(Re)Diffusion of beautiful sound  235 lack of a Chinese-literate audience, therefore, can be considered as an indirect factor for the decline of Rediffusion in Thailand and for its end in 1982. Yet, the end of Rediffusion was also due to internal factors, as the Thai TV Company, the company’s largest shareholder, had gone bankrupt on 8 April 1977 (MC CRF Thai TV Company 1934/2520).20 Moreover, emerging technologies and forms of entertainment such as television were being preferred to outdated radio stations. After resisting for another few years, Rediffusion made its last broadcast on 31 August 1982, 26 years after the first broadcast in Thailand in 1956 (MC CRF Thai Rediffusion Company 11356/2525).21 Yet, the story of Rediffusion tells us many things. Rediffusion broadcasts were made possible by sound and technology, together with urban development as Thailand eagerly embraced a Western modernity. Although it was first broadcast in the UK, the Rediffusion service travelled to many parts of the world, including Thailand. As mentioned above, the service was known in Thai as ‘song siang thang sai’ (‘transmitting sound by wire’), a name that referred to the technology used, and in Chinese ‘Li de hu sheng’ (‘beautiful sound’), which referred to the impression it aspired to convey. Despite being recognised as loud and noisy, Chinese sound is, and will always be, beautiful in the eyes (or ears, to be more precise) of the ethnic Chinese. Although the Thai state used Rediffusion to communicate with the Chinese communities, the emergence and influence of the service went beyond partisanship and propaganda (Jeer 1970, 19). In a certain sense, then it did achieve the aims of the state as it became a crucial part of Chinese life, especially in Bangkok. Chinese women could learn basic notions and Chinese traditions while listening to Gua Ceh and Chaozhou opera programmes from home. Moreover, radio dramas offered insights into Chinese classics and modern literature for a minority community that often lacked literacy in Thai and Chinese. As for Mandarin pop music, its mission was not only to entertain younger audiences but also to promote Chinese songs worldwide, connecting them to a global diaspora through networks of listening. The sound of Rediffusion broadcasts was understandably perceived therefore as ‘beautiful’ by both the Thai state and by the ethnic Chinese in Thailand.

Notes 1 This article was part of the author’s dissertation ‘The Urban Culture of Chinese Society in Bangkok: Cinemas, Broadcast and Literature, 1950s–1970s’, submitted to the National University of Singapore in 2012. Part of the thesis was published as ‘Rediffusion: History of Broadcasting and Chinese Society in Thailand, 1950s–1970s’ in Rian Thai International Journal of Thai Studies 6, 2013. The revision for the article was supported by the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Thammasat University, and by the Asian Sound Culture and Modernity Project, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. 2 First published in 1969, in a ground-breaking departure from typical Thai novels, Letters from Thailand was the first to depict Chinese life in Bangkok in a serious narrative. The author, Botan, was born and raised in a Chinese family. Her personal experience became the material for her novel, which many people have claimed relates to their families too (Kepner 2002).

236  Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt 3 For the sake of clarity, this chapter uses ‘Rediffusion’ as the name of this radio service and ‘rediffusion’ when referring to the method and technology employed by the Rediffusion broadcast. 4 Western agencies also observed this phenomenon. For example, a USIS report in 1964 indicated that 95 per cent of Bangkok respondents listened to the radio (76 per cent of which listened to it every day or almost every day). 5 This Rediffusion broadcast was popular and regarded as a reliable source of information among the local Chinese (U.S. Department of the Army 1970, 204). 6 Bangkok in this context refers to Krung Thep and Thon Buri, respectively located on the east and west banks of the Chao Phraya River; they merged into a single province in 1971. 7 The company’s later developments included the rebroadcasting of television programmes over their existing networks (Rediffusion Limited 2016). 8 The Broadcast Relay Service had been planning to expand its service in Thailand since 1949. There are several possible explanations for the postponement: During the 1950s, economic nationalism was an important theme in promoting a ‘Thai economy for the Thai people’. This policy discouraged foreign capital from entering the Thai market (Suehiro 1989, 138). This may have caused a conflict of interest among the Thai government officials who saw an opportunity in such a promising, lucrative business. The company likely could not make a satisfactory deal with Thai government officials behind closed doors. After long negotiations, the Rediffusion project was proposed again in 1953 by Thai government officials who later became board members of the Thai Rediffusion Company. Still, there were significant questions relating to the establishment. First, why was the Broadcast Relay Service Company completely erased from its establishment? Second, if the Broadcast Relay Service Company was no longer involved with the establishment, why could Thai Rediffusion Company still use the name, Rediffusion? Third, using the same broadcasting technique as the Broadcast Relay Service Company, did Thai Rediffusion Company buy the license to learn any technical know-how from the Broadcast Relay Service Company? The answers remain unclear since materials on Thai Rediffusion Company are fragmentary and poorly documented (Tungkeunkunt 2013). 9 Thai listeners represented a minimal proportion of the audience, because they had other choices for Thai-language programmes by the approximately eighty radio stations broadcast in Thai in the early 1960s. 10 During the 1960s to the 1970s, one US dollar was equal to 20 baht, while a dish of curry rice cost around 1.40 baht (U.S. Department of the Army 1970: 204). 11 The number of subscribers tended to increase during the Chinese New Year, as many Chinese liked to listen to live broadcasts of Chaozhou operas from Hong Kong during that period. 12 In fact, the terminologies—listening and hearing—are widely discussed as the distinction between both is unclear (Rice 2015; Sterne 2015). 13 It is difficult to determine their exact number, due to the loose definition of the Chinese population according to Thai laws. 14 The Propaganda Department aimed at publishing announcements, speeches, and news to promote and legitimate the new political order. 15 For instance, King Rama VI imported and transformed the Western concept of nationalism. King Rama VII opened a radio station in Bangkok and used Western technology to broadcast more openly to the public. 16 The Thai idiom ‘Jek prasai muaen thai ti kan’ means ‘the Chinese talk like the Thais quarrel’, conveying. that spoken Chinese is loud and noisy. 17 Because of the lack of recordings, the author has to rely on scripts published in Rediffusion magazines, with an attempt to explore the programmes themselves in addition to ‘reading the scripts of radio programmes’ (Daly 2016, 5).

(Re)Diffusion of beautiful sound  237 18 Although Deng was born and had made her debut in Taiwan, she expanded her success to other regions including Southeast Asia and Japan. Hong Kong PolyGram produced the eight most representative albums (for a total of 96 songs) of Deng’s singing career. The impact of her music has been far-reaching throughout Chinese communities worldwide. It is often said that wherever there are Chinese people, there are Deng’s songs. 19 ‘Ye lai xiang’, ‘He ri jun zai lai’ and ‘Meigui meigui wo ai ni’ were first circulated in Shanghai in the 1930s and 40s and later became well known among the Chinese community in Southeast Asia. Deng Lijun’s covers during the late 1970s raised these classics to popularity once more. 20 The Thai TV Company was established in 1955 and closed in 1977. Its organisation and property were transferred to the newly established governmental company ‘Mass Communication of Thailand’, known today as MCOT. 21 Thai Rediffusion Company underwent bankruptcy in November 1982.

References Baren. 1969. ‘Guanyu jingshi chaozhou gece’, Lide Husheng Zazhi (henian kan): 32–33. Banxiao. 1969. ‘Gece jiemu zhuchangren fangwenji’, Lide Husheng Zazhi (henian kan): 36–37. BBC. 2019. ‘1920s’. History of the BBC. Available online: https://www.bbc.com/­ historyofthebbc/timelines/1920s Botan. 1999. Chotmai Chak Mueangthai. Bangkok: Chomromdek Publishing House. Crook, T. 1999. Radio Drama: Theory & Practice. London and New York: Routledge. Daly, M. 2016. Reading Radio 4: A Programme-By-Programme Analysis of Britain’s Most Important Radio Station. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ‘Di ba bu: Yule zhinan’. 1966. In Taiguo Huaqiao Dacidian, K1-11. Bangkok: Witthayakon. Ehrhardt, C. 2014. ‘Phones, horns, and ‘audio hoods’ as media of attraction: Early sound histories in Vienna between 1883 and 1933’. In Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe, edited by D. Morat, 101–128. New York: Berghahn Books. Gibson, K. and I. Biddle, eds. 2016. Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300–1918. London: Routledge. Hendy, D. 2013. Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening. London: Profile. Jeer, M. 1970. ‘On the air’, Bangkok Post, 15 November: 19. Kepner, Susan. 2002. ‘Translator’s introduction’. In Letters from Thailand, edited by Botan, v–vi. Chiangmai: Silkworm Books. Kolkowski, A., J. Mansell and J. Kannenberg. 2017. ‘Music, noise and silence: Defining relationships between science & music in modernity’. Science Museum Group, Available online: https://www.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2017/11/Music-noise-and-silence-full-report.pdf ‘Kongzhong huaju yu kongzhong peiyue gushi’. 1966. Lide Husheng Zazhi (chuang kan hao): 15. Kuhn, P. A. 2009. Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Lide Husheng Zazhi 2. 1966: 6. Lide Husheng Zazhi 4. 1968: 37. ‘Lide husheng siyue qibo huan huangyuxin yingwenke’. 1969, Sing Sian Yit Pao, 29 March: 6.

238  Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt ‘Lide husheng zuotian juxing baishi gewang bisai’. 1966. Sing Sian Yit Pao, 3 June: 5. Liu, Z. 2009. ‘Taiguo getan gaoge zhuinian deng lijun’, Yazhou Zhoukaan, 4 June. Available online: http://www.yzzk.com/cfm/Content_Archive.cfm?Channel=ms& Path=241276811/23ms2.cfm Li, Y. 2000. ‘Wo yu lide husheng de yiduan yuan’. In Wangshi Suixianglu, 47–52. Bangkok: Bayin Chubanshe. MC Ministry of Commerce, Thailand; CRF Company Registration File Thai TV Company 1934/2520. MC Ministry of Commerce, Thailand; CRF Company Registration File Thai Rediffusion Company 11356/2525. McDaniel, D. O. 1994. Broadcasting in the Malay World: Radio, Television, and Video in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Connecticut: Praeger. Morat, D., ed. 2014. Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe. New York: Berghahn Books. Murph, M. 2018. ‘The necessity of noise’. Sound Studies 4(1): 93–95. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2018.1531341 NA National Archive of Thailand; OPM the Office of the Prime Minister, (2)sor. ror.0201a.93/51. NA National Archive of Thailand; OPM the Office of the Prime Minister, (2)sor. ror.0201b.4.5/52. Phaothongsuk, S. 1990. ‘Prawat wittayu krachaisiang nai prathetthai’. In The 60th Anniversary of Broadcasting Day, 16–27, Bangkok: Public Relations Department. Radano, R. and T. Olaniyan, eds. 2016. Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique. Durham: Duke University Press. ‘Rediffusion and teleprogramme systems in broadcasting’. 1935. Nature 135: 196. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1038/135196a0 Rediffusion Limited. 2016. ‘The history of television’. Available online: http://www. rediffusion.info/History/ Rediffusion Limited. 2020. ‘Remembering Rediffusion Limited 1928–1988’. Available online: http://www.rediffusion.info/. Rice, T. 2015. ‘Listening’. In Keywords in Sound, edited by D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny, 99–111. Durham: Duke University Press. ‘San khong kammakan phuchatkan borisat songsiang thangsai’. 1967. Lide Husheng Zazhi 3: 4. Science Museum. 2018. ‘2LO calling: The birth of British public radio’. Available o n l i n e : h t t p s : / / w w w. s c i e n c e mu s e u m . o rg . u k / o b j e c t s - a n d - s t o r i e s / 2 l o calling-birth-british-public-radio#when-was-the-bbc-founded. Siriyuvasak, U. 1992. ‘Radio broadcasting in Thailand: The structure and dynamics of political ownership and economic control’. Media Asia 19(2): 92–99. Skinner, G. W. 1957. Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History. New York: Cornell University Press. Skretvedt, R. and C. H. Sterling. 2018. ‘Radio’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Available online: https://www.britannica.com/topic/radio Smith, H. H. 1968. Area Handbook for Thailand. Washington: For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print. Off. Steingo, G. and J. Sykes, eds. 2019. Remapping: Sound Studies in the Global South. North Carolina: Duke University Press. Sterne, J. 2015. ‘Hearing’. In Keywords in Sound, edited by D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny, 65–77. Durham: Duke University Press.

(Re)Diffusion of beautiful sound  239 Suehiro, A. 1989. Capital Accumulation in Thailand, 1855–1985. Tokyo: The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies. Tejapira, K. 1997. ‘Imagined uncommunity: The Lookjin middle class and Thai official nationalism’. In Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe, edited by D. Chirot and A. Reid, 75–98. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Tungkeunkunt, K. 2013. ‘Rediffusion: History of broadcasting and Chinese society in Thailand, 1950s–1970s’. Rian Thai International Journal of Thai Studies 6: 99–135. U.S. Department of the Army. 1970. Minority Group in Thailand. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. Information Agency. 1966. The Overseas Chinese in Thailand: A Communications Fact Book. Washington, DC: USIA, Research and Reference Service. U.S. Information Service. 1964. Cross-Section Survey of Communications in Thailand. Bangkok: USIS Research Division Office. Vesarach, P. 1974. ‘Urbanization in Thailand: A bibliographical essay’. In Urbanization in Thailand, edited by M. L. Thomas, 59–75. Illinois: Center for Governmental Studies, Northern Illinois University. Winichakul, T. 1997. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Xie, Z. 1969. ‘Lide husheng gechang bisai zongjie’, Lide Husheng Zazhi (henian kan): 39–43. Xoomsai, T. N. 1987. Bangkok, Thailand: The Quality of Life and Environment in a Primate City. Toronto: Joint Centre on Modern East Asia, University of TorontoYork University. Wong, J. 2003. ‘Yueyu liuxingqu de fazhan yu xingshuai xianggang yinyue yanjiu’, PhD. diss., Hong Kong University. Zheng, Y. 2005. ‘Taiguode huayu guangbo diantai’. Sino-Thai Studies (April): 385–390.

12 Arranging sounds from daily life Amateur sound-recording contests and audio culture in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s Tomotaro Kaneko Introduction The period of rapid economic growth in Japan began in the mid-1950s and continued until the beginning of the 1970s. The end of growth marked a turning point in postwar culture. At the end of the 1960s, many baby boomers born after the war became engaged in the radical student movement but then went on to obtain employment and become eager participants in a burgeoning consumer society. According to the magazine Keizai tenbo (Popular Economics), at this point, audio equipment was the most desired durable consumer product among the young (Keizai tenbo 1973, 66–69). FM radio began regular broadcasting, and ownership of cassette recorders became widespread and brought alternatives to the pursuit of high-fidelity sound reproduction to Japanese audio culture. Airchecks, the personal recording of radio programs by listeners, were the most common of these. Namaroku was another alternative practice in the audio culture of this time (Kaneko 2017). The term was created from the abbreviation of namarokuon (live recording) and referred to sound recordings that were not of records or radio programs. People enjoyed recording their own musical performances, their own conversations, and environmental sounds, including the sound of steam locomotives, festivals, or the natural environment. This was a remarkable sound practice in the history of Japanese audio culture, and, during the 1960s and 1970s, audio manufacturers, audio magazines, and broadcasting stations sponsored amateur sound-recording contests. This article explores the significance of namaroku through a survey of these amateur recording contests. There were, in general, two types of contests: for one, only recordings of live musical performances were invited, whereas the other called for any type of sound recording without restrictions on genre. The latter type of contest was especially common during the 1970s and entries included acoustic and electronic music, documentary productions, sound dramas, and much work that is not easy to classify. Because namaroku was largely an amateur practice of audiophiles, most practitioners’ personal recordings were never published, yet sound-recording contests at the time were public events that collected the DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772-17

Arranging sounds from daily life  241 work of these amateurs. This article focuses on a representative amateur recording contest that had no genre restrictions, the Audio Union Recording Contest (hereinafter referred to as AURC), an annual sound-recording contest that was organised by Audio Union, an audio dealer based in Tokyo. AURC appears to have been the longest-running contest of this kind, running from 1971 to 1980. Audio Union made LP records of its winning works from the third to the last contests, distributing them to the applicants for free. This makes it possible to listen to a wide variety of personal recordings created by namaroku practitioners. The author has collected these recordings and uploaded them to YouTube with the permission of Disk Union, the successor to Audio Union.1 The award-winning works were varied. Yamagata Takahisa created a silent recording of the middle of the night in winter. Noda Ichiro produced a sound documentary using recordings of conversations with his daughter taken over ten years. Shinozaki Koichi generated rhythmic electro noise using magnetic tape and a permanent magnet. Kawazoe Makiko received an award for a sound drama based on a folk tale, which was produced by Chiba University Broadcasting Society. The amateur singer-­ songwriter Kawakami Shigeyoshi played multiple instruments and produced experimental rock music. This article considers several aspects of these amateur sound-recording contests to better understand the history of postwar sound technology culture in Japan. The contests show the close relationships among various actors, technologies, and contexts as well as the diverse creativity of amateur audiophiles. Namaroku was a culture similar to that of sound hunting popular in Western countries in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, the Federation of All Japan Amateur Recording Associations, founded in 1976, joined the Fédération Internationale des Chasseurs de Sons (Tape Sound 1976, 336– 337). Previous research has investigated sound hunting culture in Europe and America, but little has been written about the practice outside the ‘West’ (Morton 2000, 138–143; Bijsterveld 2004). The most important difference between sound hunting and namaroku is the length of their periods of prominence. Namaroku culture formed a part of Japanese consumption culture in the 1970s just as the period of rapid economic growth came to an end. This article is organised into three sections. The first traces the brief history of Japanese amateur recording contests in the 1960s and 1970s to summarise Japanese audio culture of the period from a creative point of view. The second section gives an overview of the AURC and describes its transition. It argues that a consideration of the different categories of award demonstrates a shift in the content of the contest. The third section focuses on those who won awards from the AURC, surveying their motivations and social environment through data in interviews, either previously published in magazine articles or conducted by the author. In this way, this article attempts to understand an important part of the postwar cultural history of sound technology in Japan in the context of amateur creation in the consumer society of the 1970s.

242  Tomotaro Kaneko

Amateur sound-recording contests in Japanese audio culture during the 1960s and 1970s This section divides the history of recording contests into three movements: the mid-1960s, around 1970, and throughout the 1970s. The development of recording contests during these periods outlines the history of audio culture and the social environment of postwar Japan. By 1962, there was at least one amateur sound-recording contest that called for participants to provide their own original recordings. Although there were few amateur sound recorders in Japan, the technology magazine Musen to jikken (Radio Experimenter’s Magazine) held its Tape-Recording Contest five times from 1962 to 1967, excluding 1964. The contest called for a maximum recording time of ten minutes, with no limitation on genre. In a round-table discussion following the second contest, the editorial staff of Musen to jikken explained their initial idea (Musen to jikken 1974, 114–119): The contest was modelled after amateur 8-mm film contests and was intended to be useful for improving sound-recording techniques and promoting the use and popularity of the tape recorder. It was small scale, with only 30 participants in the second contest. The judges for the first commented on the lack of basic recording techniques among the entries, resulting in distortion, inconsistencies of sound level, recordings going over time, and the need to erase some tape. The judges of the fifth contest criticised the poverty of ideas in the entries despite an improvement in technique, and the contest was not repeated the following year. There were not many entries, but the winning works covered various genres. These included sound dramas, music concrete, and field recordings of nature, the urban environment, and the participant’s families. The most common type of entry was the recording of a local musical event, such as a traditional festival or a campus concert.2 The judges often criticised the entries for attempting to imitate radio programs. In the Japanese radio scene, the documentary technique rokuon kosei (radio programs composed of recorded voices) had been developed in the 1950s (Miyata 2016, 101–171), and it appears that amateur recordings of the mid-1960s still employed this technique. The most distinctive feature of the contest was that it was supported by Tape Recorder Kenkyukai (Society for Tape Recorder Research), a group that was established around 1952 to promote homemade tape recorders (Abe 2016, 400–402). The members of the society included both judges and winning entrants and showed a clear connection with the self-made electronics culture formed after World War II. The contest focused on the function of the tape recorder itself, but this type of contest declined in the late 1960s, to be replaced by other types of amateur recording culture. The Stereo Recording Contest was held in 1969 and 1971 by Stereo, a leading audio magazine, which had developed as the audio market expanded in the 1960s (Stereo 1969, 131–153; Stereo 1970, 26–52). The first contest focused on Hi-Fi stereo recordings of music split into two groups. In the first, called a rokuon kai (recording meeting), participants all recorded a single concert, in one go. This type of event was often organised by producers of

Arranging sounds from daily life  243 audio equipment to promote Hi-Fi open reel tape recorders. The second group was called katei deno ongaku no rokuon udekurabe (competition of home musical recordings), in which amateur recordists competed with their recordings of amateur musical performances. During the same period, Musen to jikken also held a Tape Recorder Contest, which also had two groups of entrants: the first, limited to musical recordings and the second, with general recordings (Musen to jikken 1971a, 288–290; Musen to jikken 1971b, 251– 262). These musical contests, all taking place around 1970, formed the second movement in the history of the amateur recording contest. Although their focus differed from that of the first movement, the two movements attracted a similar number of participants. The central figures among the judges were well-known, professional recording engineers, including Wakabayashi Shunsuke and Sugano Okihiko. As the audio market and audio journalism developed through the late 1960s, interest in stereo sound quality among audiophiles grew and the names of recording engineers became better known thanks to the increased attention paid to professional recording (Nagaoka 1993, 42–53). The recording contests that developed around 1970, then, were a sophisticated expansion of a burgeoning high-fidelity audio culture. From the mid1960s to the early 1970s, Japan’s rapid postwar economic growth peaked and the so-called ‘Izanagi Boom’, established Japan as the second largest economic power in the world. Audiophiles became able to purchase diverse audio components rather than making them themselves. The expansion of consumption culture at that time turned the interest of amateur recordists from the self-creation of sound equipment and recording to the pursuit of quality in recorded sound and kick-started the exploration of sound recording as an adventurous, creative hobby in its own right (Smith 2021).

Amateur recording contests in the 1970s Beginning in the early 1970s, namaroku culture broadened among audiophiles. Supported by producers of audio equipment and audio journalism, the practice of field recordings grew in popularity (Kaneko 2017). After the full-fledged development of FM radio in the late 1960s, the practice of airchecks became common, and sound recording became familiar to audio fans through the writings of well-known recording engineers in audio magazines. Additionally, young people began to travel with cassette recorders, with some of them using the recording function like a camera to capture scenery. In the early 1970s, an unprecedented number of young middle-class people graduated from university, and brand-new audio equipment was often at the top of their wish lists of durable consumer goods. Producers of audio equipment and journalists popularised different uses of recording devices beyond the pursuit of high fidelity, attempting to expand the market beyond audiophiles. As noted, to promote namaroku culture, audio equipment makers and dealers, audio magazines, and radio companies held amateur recording

244  Tomotaro Kaneko contests throughout the 1970s and articles appeared dedicated to teaching the best methods to win (Rokuhan 1977, 149–150). The Sony Zen Nihon Namaroku Contest (Sony All Japan Namaroku Contest) began in 1976 and was the largest of these, with over 1000 entries in the first contest (Ogi 1977, 68). The manufacturer Japan Victor Company ran the Victor Music Plaza Namaroku Tape Contest, the electronics retail store Daiichi Katei Denki held the DAM Binaural Recording Contest, and the music publisher Ongaku No Tomo Sha backed the Rokuhan Tape Contest (Recording Hunting Tape Contest). The AURC, sponsored by Audio Union, began at the start of the 1970s and continued for the entire decade. As with earlier contests, most recording contests in the 1970s had no restrictions on genre. However, these contests were incomparably larger than the earlier ones: for example, the fourth AURC, although it was one of the smaller contests of the decade, received 206 entries (Ogi 1974a, 40). While there were certainly diverse entries in the contests of the mid-1960s, there was much greater variety in winning works during the 1970s, and the organisers provided additional subcategories for the entries. The Sony Zen Nihon Namaroku Contest awarded their winners the following designations: Golden Award, Silver Award, Association of Broadcast Critics Award, Planning Award, and Recording Technique Award. The AURC had particularly diverse awards and often changed its categories. In addition, the characters of the two judges for the first AURC, Ogi Masahiro and Wada Norihiko, testified to the differences in attitude between the second and third phases of audio contests. Ogi was a film and audio critic, and Wada was a composer and a participant in the Onkyo Designer no Kai (Meeting of Sound Designers), which developed electronic and environmental music during the late 1960s (Kawasaki 2009, 392–403). In the early 1970s, Ogi played a critical role as a theorist of namaroku culture. He criticised the pursuit of high-fidelity sound as ‘techno-perfectionism’ and encouraged people to take a creative approach to recording sound (1974b, 60). Wada also compared the sound recorders in rokuon kai with salaried workers who lacked individuality (1971, 400). Their perspective reflected the social environment that followed the end of postwar rapid economic growth, as consciousness began to grow of the negative results of that growth (Yamazaki 1984, 11–15). The Basic Law for Environmental Pollution was established in 1967 as a response to diseases caused by industrial waste in local areas. Pollution, including noise, gradually became a serious concern in urban areas. The violent student protest movements, active throughout the late 1960s, criticised the corruption of authorities. After runaway rapid economic growth, people were being forced to consider a lifestyle different from existing conventions. From 1970, ‘moretsu kara beautiful e’ (from gung-ho to beautiful) became a popular commercial catchphrase representing a positive proposal for new lifestyles (Fujioka 1991, 13–23; Smith 2021).3 Moretsu was a negative reference to the workaholism of salaried workers in the 1960s. Both Ogi and Wada’s comments on amateur recording pointed to the same problems in relation to the approach to sound taken by those involved in the

Arranging sounds from daily life  245 hobby of sound recording. More creativity, individuality, and experimentation needed to be combined with technical proficiency.

From the joy of sound recording to designing sound: Transition in the AURC The call for entrants to the first AURC was made in an audio magazine: Audio Union has a recording contest that we have been planning for a long time. You can send any content, including drama, documentary, recording of FM radio, or disc jockeying, so long as it is produced by you. Please enjoy the pleasure of creation from your heart. That pleasure will double when you compete with others. (Stereo 1971, 345) This call included recording FM radio as a possible genre of entry, which is surprising. In fact, an aircheck recording of Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky took second place in the high-fidelity category showing that aircheck was part of namaroku culture at the beginning of the 1970s, and the early stages of the AURC seemed to emphasise sound quality over creativity in the category. The first AURC received 65 entries (Wada 1971, 396). The judges awarded a prize to five entries and a second place to another five, and the winners received TEAC and Sony audio equipment. Yamamoto Shoji’s documentary work ‘Kogai (Pollution)’ won overall first prize. Four more specific awards were given: High fidelity Award, Editing Award, Documentary Award, and Effort Award. The list of the winning works contained the titles, the authors’ names, and their addresses. Judging by the names, all the winners were men, and most lived within Tokyo’s 23 wards. The winning works were broadcast on the Tokyo FM radio program Dynamic Sound, hosted by Ogi. Competition categories, then, were usually established by the Audio Union in advance and were presented in the call for the contest. Examining them shows the changing relationship between the organiser and the entrants or, to be exact, among the Audio Union, judges, entrants, and supporting producers of audio equipment. Further, the changes in the categories help to place the history of audio culture within the social environment of the 1970s. The early years of the AURC centred on the joy and techniques of sound reproduction: sound quality, tape editing, and ideas. The liner notes for the album of the third contest mentioned the following: The essential aim of the contest is not to look for works that seem professional but genuine works, in which an amateur discovers, and records sounds buried in daily life to present to their audiophile friends.4 That is, finding and recording interesting daily sounds was the key to the contest. Wada commented on the winning works in the first contest in terms of the relationship between the source of the sound and the recorded sound

246  Tomotaro Kaneko (Wada 1971, 396–400). He did not prioritise fidelity, instead he praised various techniques, referring to the reality and presence of the recording. Wada criticised the sound quality of a poetry reading with a sound collage, Takagi Isamu’s ‘Shi “daishizen” (Poetry ‘Great Nature’)’, which won the editing award. For the first prize, ‘Kogai’, he only noted the fidelity of its expression of the author’s intention. Following this, the AURC gradually paid closer attention to creative sound production, with or without reference to recording techniques. The third contest added a prize after the judgement, and this was the first turning point in the contest. The judges gave the Creative Audio award to Hara Makoto’s ‘“Feedback 0.14” for UD-35’. This was an abstract electronic music piece, composed of deeply modulated sound clusters of musical instruments. The term ‘creative audio’ may have referred to the creation of both sounds and self-made audio equipment, but it did not seem to be strictly applied. Hara was a 20-year-old university student in communication engineering who was studying the techniques of electronics and contemporary music in his spare time (Wada 1974, 66; Musen to jikken 1975b, 90–91). Another transition in the third contest was the division into the Open Reel and Cassette Categories. This step relates to the remarkable growth of cassette entries. The first prize in the Open Reel Category was won by a namaroku musical recording, ‘Satin Doll’ by Haraguchi Hiroyasu, and the Cassette Category was won by an introduction to the recorded tape-exchange group Fusen (Balloon). During the fourth contest, recording engineer Sugano Okihiko joined the judges, and cartoonist and animator Kuri Yoji replaced Wada in the next contest. The liner notes for the album of the fifth contest observed a transition in the entries, noting that, ‘[r]ecently the tendency to arrange sounds from daily life as one’s own has been developing. That is the opening of, so to speak, active recording’.5 The three First Prize works were far from namaroku in the narrow sense, that is, from the field recording of actual sounds. The First Prize in the Cassette Category was Machida Hideo’s creative use of Japanese traditional music, ‘Sangen to kogata frying pan no tame no composition’ (Composition for sanxian and small pan). In the Open Reel Category, the primitive psychedelic composition, ‘Seikimatsu no saiten’ (A festival at the end of the century), by the high school student Komine Yoshio and Shinozaki Koichi’s radio collage ‘1975.1.19, 6:00 p.m.’, received the prize. In addition, Japan Broadcasting Corporation showed a documentary program, ‘Oto wo tsukuru’ (Making sounds) in 1975. It featured Ogi Masahiro and the winners of the AURC, Nagata Shigeho, Natsume Chiyoko, and Akiyama Shunsuke, as well as Tomita Isao, a composer, and Iwabuchi Toyo, a foley artist. Two-thirds of the winners lived outside Tokyo. The sixth contest announced a special category: Sayonara Okajoki (Farewell to the steam locomotive), referring to the fact that the last steam locomotive in Japan had been retired the previous year. The steam locomotive boom in the early 1970s was part of the foundation of namaroku, which was, in a narrow sense, revived in the contest: for example, the winner of the first prize, ‘Mushi no oto wa nagarete’ (The sound of insects flows) by

Arranging sounds from daily life  247 Takahashi Yoji, was a lyrical field recording featuring a transient ensemble of a steam locomotive and insects.

Restarting the AURC and after The seventh AURC was a major turning point for the contest: the liner notes in the LP of the contest noted that the understanding of sound recording had changed radically over the previous seven years, prompting an attempt to restart the contest. There is a growing tendency to demand active initiative in sound recording, not only recording actual sound faithfully but also creating sound or expressing one’s own sensibility and thinking in actual sound. In other words, designing sound to express something.6 This tendency was already apparent in the fifth contest as mentioned above, but it was nevertheless important that this shift was declared explicitly. The programming chief of FM Tokyo, Ueda Hikoji, was featured as a judge for the seventh contest. The award categories were considerably increased and modified, with the Creative Award, Documentary Award, Drama Award, Natural Sound Award, Rokuon Kosei Award, Humor Award, Music Award, Theme ‘Wagaya no oto’ (Sounds of my house) Award, Idea Award, and New Face Award. In addition, the division between open reel and cassette entries was abolished, possibly because few open reel entries were appearing, relative to cassettes. The shift in the AURC was influenced by several significant events in namaroku culture in 1976. Magazine and radio programmes that focused on namaroku, Rokuhan, and Sony Namaroku Jockey, appeared, and the Sony Zen Nihon Namaroku Contest received more than 1000 entries for the first time. The population of namaroku enthusiasts was clearly growing, especially among the young. In 1977, Rokuhan ran an article titled ‘Tape contest ni katsu tameno keiko to taisaku’ (Trends and countermeasures to win a tape contest) that treated recording contests as a game (Rokuhan 1977, 153–154).7 In the same year, a famous comedian, Tamori, published a book, Tamori no cassette omoshiro jutsu (Tamori’s Entertaining Art of Cassette), which showed a lot of humorous ways of using a tape recorder (Tamori 1977). Several more playful works by teenagers also received awards at the seventh AURC. The 18-year-old high school student Sebata Hideo won the ‘Wagaya no oto’ Award with his ‘Shichigosan rock day’ (Seven, five, and three rock day).8 This piece, beginning with the sound of an alarm clock, provided a snapshot of home life, with two children shouting and singing an original song to the music of Deep Purple, which is suddenly interrupted by the sound of a temple bell, giving the appearance of a slapstick comedy. In contrast to these humorous works, first prize was given to the extraordinarily high fidelity namaroku recording of firecrackers by Seki Masami. A magazine article on the Rokuhan Tape Contest suggested a commercial factor for this expansion of amateur recording contests in the late 1970s

248  Tomotaro Kaneko (Rokuhan 1977, 65–66). The end of the article featured an advertisement for several kinds of sound equipment, including mixers, graphic equalisers, reverberators, synthesisers, system selectors, biphonic processors, noise reducers, and radio cassette players with a tape-editing function. The profiles of the winners published after the event contained a detailed list of their sound equipment. Japanese audio makers were releasing a wide range of sound editing and production devices at the time, and these were often donated to sound-recording contests for use as prizes. After the seventh contest, the categories of awards in the AURC continued to grow, whereas the distinctions among them became more blurred. The ninth contest replaced the Theme Award with the Effort Award, Aircheck Award, and Editing Award. The winner of the Aircheck Award, Seki Masami’s ‘Shin dial: Shuhasu henko no koro’ (A new dial: When the frequency changes) was a cut-up of radio programs talking about frequency changes in Japanese radio broadcasting. This work was completely different from the winner of the Aircheck Award in the first contest, and it could have been entered for the Editing Award, but it seems that the practice of aircheck itself had begun to shift from pure reproduction of the existing content of a radio programme to incorporate some creative, editing practices. The 10th and last AURC was held in 1980 and added the Junior Award, Synthesizer Award, and Live Recording Award. The synthesiser is considered to have played a part in the end of namaroku culture, along with the Walkman, the multitrack recorder, the CD, and mini-components (Kaneko 2017, 95–96). Roland held its first Synthesizer Tape Contest in 1976, and it entitled its 1979 LP release of winning contest entries ‘Invitation to The Wonderful Synthesizer-Land’. For the 10th AURC, Okuyama Ichiro received the Synthesizer Award for his work made on his homemade synthesiser, ‘“J” no theme’ (Theme for ‘J’). Becoming perhaps the youngest winner of the AURC, an 11-year-old boy, Akao Yuichi, won the Junior Award for ‘Hae tai ningen’ (Fly vs. human), a short sound comedy that used an electronic hum to represent a buzzing fly. Yamagata Takahisa, an experienced amateur sound recordist who received four AURC awards, won First Prize in the 10th contest for his ‘Kokuden: Tokyo eki kara Tokyo eki made’ (JNR: from Tokyo Station to Tokyo Station), submitted at 45 years old. In summary, the AURC gradually shifted its focus from sound recording to sound design. At first, the contest judges stressed the creativity of sound recording in contrast to the pursuit of high fidelity. Later, several factors appeared that indicated a shift in the course of the contest: greater quality of creative work, a decrease in participant age, and the emergence of new types of sound equipment. This transition in the AURC illustrates the course that the history of amateur sound-recording culture took in the 1970s.

Who creates sounds? Award winners of the AURC Yamazaki Masakazu has discussed the differences in Japanese product development between the 1960s and 1970s with reference to Daniel Bell’s theory of the post-industrial society (1984, 69–76). According to Yamazaki, Bell

Arranging sounds from daily life  249 distinguished between an industrial and post-industrial society as two different types of game. In an industrial society centred on manufacturing by machines, people concentrated on playing a ‘game against fabricated nature’. Conversely, a post-industrial society is managed through a ‘game between persons’ as the fundamental principle. In other words, the latter viewpoint tends to emphasise the importance of human relationship management over manufacturing products. Yamazaki adopted this theory to highlight the difference between the 1960s and 1970s in Japan. Although a post-industrial society began to emerge in Japan in the 1960s, Yamazaki argued that it only came to full bloom in the 1970s. He argued that during rapid economic growth, consumers can share a relatively static demand and producers build on such a demand as a premise for product development; when that rapid economic growth comes to an end, consumer demand develops through what Bell terms a ‘game between persons’. In this case, producers should pursue individual development rather than shared demand (Yamazaki 1984, 85–90). His arguments generally appear to cover the shift in amateur recording culture from the 1960s to 1970s because, although audio equipment and the pursuit of high-fidelity were a shared demand until the early 1970s, amateur recordists gradually came to enjoy individual creation through recording contests organised by the audio industry—Bell’s ‘games between persons’. The Audio Union collected detailed information on the recording equipment and sound tape used for all entries, and this section considers those who won awards at the AURC to determine their motivation for producing recordings (Ogi 1974a, 41). Ogawa Genji, a director of marketing for the Sony portable stereo cassette recorder, stated that he supported the namaroku boom to help expand the group of those interested in sound recording (Ogawa 1974, 102–105). Information on the winners can be found in the listings of awards in post-contest publicity and the liner notes for the contest LPs, but the information on these lists is imperfect because it only begins to feature the age and occupation of the winners with the sixth contest. The recorded winners were mainly men in their twenties, living in Tokyo or a neighbouring prefecture. Many university students won awards, and other winners had diverse occupations, including teacher, dentist, bank officer, civil servant, and unemployed. There were few women: the first woman winner was Natsume Chiyoko, who entered her ‘Wagaya no aiken no shokuji no oto to ashioto’ (Sounds of my family’s beloved dog eating and its footsteps) in the third contest, at the age of 53 (Wada 1973, 219–223). A lowering of the age of the winners was apparent after the contest restarted. The winners of the 10th contest included two junior high school students and one elementary school student; among them, Higure Masami, a 13-year-old girl, received the Humour Award for ‘Chichi to haha no harmonica kyoshitsu’ (My parents’ harmonica class). But how did these participants come to send their recording work to the AURC? Each participant was motivated to record sounds, and this motivation was connected to their social environment. Thus, the broader social context of the AURC can be illustrated through an examination of the participants’ motivations. The following section provides more detailed information on some

250  Tomotaro Kaneko AURC winners. The first part of the section presents those who enjoyed sound recording as a hobby, and the second addresses those who extended their practice of sound recording to a profession or artistic expression. Some winners were featured and interviewed in articles in audio magazines or in advertisements for tape or other equipment. The author was also able to interview some.

Sound recording as a hobby In the early 1970s, several books and special issues of audio magazines on namaroku were published, one after another: Rokuon no subete (All About Sound Recording), edited by Okada Jun (1971); Amateur rokuon nyumon (Introduction to Amateur Sound Recording), edited by Kato Shigeki (1973); Stereo Shukan FM bessatsu: Rokuon no subete (The Stereo, The Weekly FM Special Issue: Expansion of the Recording World) (1974); and others. These books certainly initiated audiophiles into the pleasures of sound recording. In fact, some early AURC entrants, including Natsume Chiyoko, were directly influenced by these publications (Wada 1973, 219–223).9 She was an audiophile who was running a photo studio with her husband in Kagurazaka, Tokyo. In an interview with Wada Norihiko, she talked about her experience with audio and sound recording. When Wada asked for her opinion on the relationship between photography and audio, she replied that there was no relationship. ‘Photography is tough because it is our business and requires a lot of patience, but audio is interesting and fun’ (ibid). Yamagata Takahisa, a leading figure of the AURC, was born in 1935 and worked with electronic measurement equipment as an engineer in the 1970s (Musen to jikken 1975a, 88–89; Ohira 1977, 104–106). He assembled an early homemade tape recorder around 1950, but only really began working in stereo sound recording around 1970. Like Natsume, he stressed the amateurism of his practice: ‘Because it could be fun to record this sound, and only for that reason’. He spoke about the importance of curiosity regarding sound in daily life. His namaroku works were full of freshness in a soundscape of everyday situations, including a fire station and a cold winter night. Hobbyists produced many entries to the AURC, sometimes even the winning works. Some continued to produce audio for a long time, despite holding down a full-time job, like Yamagata. On the other hand, others recorded their own work for the first time because of the AURC. The 20-year-old Tajima Shosen, a student at an institute of technology, was invited by his friend to enter the eighth AURC. He recorded an electric guitar improvisation with a tape echo in the style of meditation music like Tangerine Dream, mixed with a click noise from the end of an LP. Although he had played guitar casually for a long time, this was his first recording (Author interview June 2019). He received the Idea Prize, and his friend won a prize in the DAM Binaural Recording Contest. Tokutake Naoto was born in 1960 and began namaroku recordings of trains in the early 1970s. The special category of the sixth AURC, Sayonara

Arranging sounds from daily life  251 Okajoki, gave him the motivation to participate in the contest. He received the Natural Sound Award at the 10th AURC for ‘Even though it’s such a fresh morning’, recorded one early morning when he set a dummy head microphone in the woods and recorded environmental sounds. When he listened to the recording, the buzzing noises of insects flew around his head. After winning, the object of his interest moved from sound recording to photography. However, after he obtained a home CDR burner in the late 1990s, he resumed the recording of trains and began to sell his past and present namaroku works at the Comic Market in 1999, and he has continued to participate in it since then (Author interview May 2019). The Comic Market, the largest festival of amateur creation in Japan today, began in mid-1975, at a time when Tokutake was absorbed in namaroku culture. His experience is one part of the large-scale reorganisation of amateur creation culture in Japan after the 1970s.

Sound-recording contests as an opportunity for self-examination Kobayashi Goro, who directed several well-known musical programs as the director of the entertainment division of NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), was a winner at the AURC (Asakura 2014, 44–48). His work, ‘Dynamic Orchestra’, was a recording of the Tokyo University Orchestra playing a piece by Kodály. Like him, some winners were trying to connect their amateur practice of sound recording to the profession itself or artistic expression. After winning an award at the AURC, Hara Makoto participated in Nihon Onkyo Designer Kyokai (Japanese Society for Sound Designer), receiving First Prize at La Mostra di Ecologia Environment 74, held in Italy (Stampa Sera 1974, 17). The second part of this section discusses other AURC award winners who related the entries to their careers in interviews with the author. Tomizawa Yasuo received the Creative Audio award in the sixth contest for his ‘An experiment with image-sound from “Electro-City”’. He was a university student in sound engineering. His work was produced with a guitar, homemade synthesiser, and various types of editing equipment as a part of his Image–Sound series. He won a prize at the DAM Binaural Recording Contest for another work in this series, and he won prizes in the Homemade Speaker Contest organised by Shukan FM (Weekly FM) and the Synthesizer Idea Contest sponsored by Roland. Born in 1954, Tomizawa grew up with electronic handcrafts and a model railroad.10 After he joined the Onkyo Kenkyukai (Acoustics Study Group) at his university, the seniors in the group established Gakusei Audio Rengo (Student Audio Union), in which students from six universities participated in 1975. Tomizawa founded Rokuon and PA Han (Sound Recording and PA Crew) through the group and began to produce recordings both within and outside of the university. At this time, dance parties were popular among university students, and he worked as a sound engineer using his homemade mixer. He also wrote articles on audio with his friends and published them in a general magazine for young people.

252  Tomotaro Kaneko In the mid-1970s, then, university students linked professionals and amateurs in audio culture and Tomizawa created his Image-Sound series in this stimulating environment. He also worked in various fields within sound technology: for example, he taught Okuyama Ichiro, who received the Synthesizer Award in the 10th AURC, how to build a homemade synthesiser. After graduating from university, he developed a mass-produced radio cassette player for Pioneer and later developed electronic musical instruments for Victor and Roland. While working on a video editing system for Roland, he also ran an amateur video contest, the Roland Video Festival. He recounted that his experience of contests in the 1970s was useful when he came to manage the festival (Author interview April 2019). Machida Hideo, one of the winners of the AURC who received the prize several times, was born in 1950 (Musen to jikken 1975c, 94–95). His works ‘INNER MUSIC’ and ‘Sangen to kogata frying pan no tame no composition’ (Composition for sanxian and small pan) were recordings of improvisational performances, and his ‘MUSIC FOR 1•9•7•6’ was produced using an electronic metronome and a frequency modulator. The three years that he won prizes fell within the time that he was exploring future possibilities after graduating from art school. For him, this contest was merely an opportunity to develop his artistic expression. He said there was no other place where he could present his recording works at the time. In the late 1960s, he had been a high school student with an interest in both contemporary art and audio culture. He was impressed by the International Psytech Art Exhibition: Electromagica ‘69 and began to study traditional Japanese music around this period. While still at university, he managed the stage sound for Butoh performances and stage design for corporate events. He thought that he could earn his living through the latter, but the Oil Shock of 1973 forced him to change plans. In the mid-1970s, Machida attempted to find his own expression in design, sculpture, and music. In 1977, he exhibited a grid-shaped wire object at the 13th Gendai Nihon Bijutsu Ten (Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan), sponsored by the Mainichi Newspaper and the Japan International Art Promotion Association. Around that period, he met the graphic designer Kiyohara Etsushi and joined Seihoukei Corporation. Since then, he has pursued a career in graphic design. One of the reasons he studied under Kiyohara was that they shared an interest in audio (Author interview May 2019). Tomizawa and Machida ceased producing recorded works after obtaining employment. Machida regarded the AURC as an occasion to present his unique sounds and re-evaluate his career. Meanwhile, Tomizawa concentrated on developing and demonstrating his engineering skills by making recordings. Through this kind of practice in the 1970s, university students blurred the boundary between producer and consumer. In his theory of the birth of consumer society in Japan in the 1970s, Yamazaki proposed that consumers and producers can share their interests in developing demand (Yamazaki 1984, 87–90). Against this background, the participation of university students in sound recording culture increased thanks to the bubble economy that fully developed during the 1980s. Moreover, in terms of the

Arranging sounds from daily life  253 history of the consumer electronics industry and amateur creation culture in Japan, it is interesting that Tomizawa, who was a very successful participant in amateur recording contests, became an organiser of an amateur video contest. Conversely, Machida’s practice illustrated influence from the heyday of avant-garde arts and counterculture in the late 1960s, although he was one year younger than the baby boomers who played leading roles in the student movements. His participation also highlights the challenges in the arts caused by the economic crisis during the early 1970s, because he needed to find opportunities to present his works, one of which was the AURC. The experiences of both Tomizawa and Machida make clear the social and economic contexts of the early and late 1970s.

Conclusions Beginning in the early 1960s, sound-recording contests played a part in postwar self-made amateur audio culture in Japan. Such contests were replaced by the contests of high-fidelity stereo musical recording around 1970, after the peak of rapid economic growth and the expansion of the audio market. During the 1970s, contests with no restrictions on genre increased along with the spread of namaroku culture. The judges of the AURC, discussed in this chapter, criticised the lack of creativity in the pursuit of high fidelity and their attitudes correspond with the exploration of new lifestyles after the end of the period of rapid economic growth. The early years of the AURC gradually shifted attention from techniques of sound reproduction to creative sound production. As namaroku culture spread beyond audiophiles in the late 1970s, contests sponsored by major organisations appeared. The AURC restarted in 1977 with an expanded category of awards and an emphasis on the importance of sound design. This expansion complicates the significance of the amateur recording contest somewhat because the judgement criteria became ambiguous; for example, people who were interested in synthesising electric sounds could choose the Synthesizer Tape Contest by Roland. Nevertheless, the contests increasingly came to be regarded as a game by young audiophiles. Award winners of the AURC were mostly men in their twenties, and entrants became increasingly younger. Tokutake Naoto’s practice suggests that amateur recording contests during the 1970s were part of a large-scale shift in Japanese amateur creation culture within this period. Tomizawa Yasuo’s diverse practices indicate an increase in the presence of university students in audio culture. Additionally, his career was one of the connections between the amateur contests for sound and video recording. Meanwhile, Machida Hideo’s case exemplifies the relationship between the avant-garde arts and counterculture of the late 1960s and amateur creation culture in the 1970s. A relationship that became increasingly complicated due to the economic crisis of the early 1970s. Although amateur recording contests themselves were a way of promoting audio equipment in Japanese consumer society, many of the participants appeared to give meaning to the contests in

254  Tomotaro Kaneko the context of their everyday lives. Some winners participated because sound recording was a hobby, whereas others considered the contests to be an opportunity to develop their engineering skills and artistic expression. As this chapter has shown, a closer look at their practice shows a deep but illuminating relationship between audio culture and the social environment of the 1970s.

Acknowledgements This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 17K02351. I would like to thank Disk Union, Kinouchi Yosuke, Kinouchi Naomi, Machida Hideo, Tajima Shosen, Torutake Naoto, and Tomizawa Yasuo for their invaluable support.

Notes 1 See https://tomotarokaneko.com/projects/aurc/ (accessed 8 August 2019). 2 There was also a truly unique entry: ‘Neko no kagyu no microphonic no jikken (An experiment on cat’s cochlea microphonic)’ by Oikawa Tadao, the Special Award of the second Tape Rokuon Contest. It seemed to reproduce a cat telephone built by Ernest Glen Wever and Charles W. Bray in 1929 (Sterne 2012, 61–62). 3 Fujioka was a famous advertising executive credited with establishing a more lifestyle centred focus in consumer advertising that really took hold in the late 1970s. For more on this connection to new trends in advertising and sound recording as a creative and individual hobby see Smith (2021). 4 Liner notes, LP record, ‘The Winning Works of the Third Audio Union Recording Contest’, AU-4801-C, 1973. 5 Liner notes, LP record, ‘The Winning Works of the Fifth Audio Union Recording Contest’, AU-5003-E, 1975. 6 Liner notes, LP record, ‘The Winning Works of the Seventh Audio Union Recording Contest’, AU-9007, 1977. 7 The article discusses trend sounds in recent amateur recording contests and suggested the readers use quadraphonic sound, sounds of a monster and thunder. The title of the article was borrowed from a famous study-aid book. 8 Shichigosan (literally, seven, five, and three) is a traditional Japanese festival for children aged three, five, and seven. 9 Tokutake Naoto and Tomizawa Yasuo, who will be discussed below, also admit to having read one of these books. 10 See also the liner notes of the LP record ‘DAM Binaural Recording Contest Vol. 2’, DOR-0029, 1977.

References Abe, Y. 2016. Tape rokuonki monogatari. Tokyo: Seibundo Shinkosha. Asakura, R. 2014. ‘Seiji Ozawa’s video work: the direction of Goro Kobayashi, a revolutionary in music video’. The record geijutsu 63(7). Bijsterveld, K. 2004. ‘“What do I do with my tape recorder…?”: Sound hunting and the sounds of everyday Dutch life in the 1950s and 1960s’. Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 24(4): 613–634.

Arranging sounds from daily life  255 Fujioka, W. 1991. Moretsu kara beautiful e. Tokyo: Dentsu Publishing Department. Interview with Shosen Tajima by the author (13 June 2019, Saitama). Interview with Naoto Tokutake by the author (31 May 2019, Tokyo). Interview with Yasuo Tomizawa by the author (24 April 2019, Tokyo). Interview with Hideo Machida by the author (14 May 2019, Tokyo). Kaneko, T. 2017. ‘1970 Nendai no Nihon ni okeru namaroku bunka: Rokuon no giho to tanoshimi. Kallista 23: 84–112. Kato, S., Y. Ishida, and Y. Namekata, eds. 1973. Amateur rokuon nyumon. Tokyo: Radio-Craft Company. Kawasaki, K. 2009. Nihon no nenshi ongaku: Zoho kaitei ban. Tokyo: Aiikusha. Keizai tenbo. 1973 ‘Matsushita, Sony no kosei de stereo gyokai ni ihen’. 45(20): 66–69. Miyata, A. 2016. ‘“Rokuon kosei” no hassei: NHK documentary no genryu toshite’. In NHK hoso bunka kenkyujo nenpo 60: 101–171. Morton, D. 2000. Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Musen to jikken. 1971a. ‘Tape Recorder Rokuon Contest nyushosha happyo’. 58(1): 288–290. Musen to jikken. 1971b. ‘Tape Recorder Rokuon Contest shinsakatei report’. 58(2): 251–262. Musen to jikken. 1974. ‘Dai 2 kai Tape Rokuon Contest o shinsa shite’. 51(1): 114–119. Musen to jikken. 1975a. ‘Maxell Dynamic interview: professional, so what! Series 1’. 62(5). Musen to jikken. 1975b. ‘Maxell Dynamic interview: professional, so what! Series 2’. 62(6): 90–91. Musen to jikken. 1975c. ‘Maxell Dynamic interview: professional, so what! Series 3’. 62(7). Nagaoka, T. 1993. Nagaoka tetsuo no nihon audio shi 1950–82. Tokyo: Ongaku No Tomo Sha. Ogawa, G. 1974. ‘Namaroku boom no tateyakusha “Cassette Densuke”’. Bessatsu sendenkaigi 8. Ogi, M. 1974a. ‘Oto wo tsukuru no wa dareka’. FM Fan 9(8). Ogi, M. 1974b ‘“Kiku” kara “tsukuru” e: Namaroku toiu na no sozo’. Bessatsu FM Fan: Tokushu rokuon no sekai winter 4. Ogi, M. 1977, ‘Namaroku’. Hoseki 5(11). Ohira, J. 1977. ‘Rokuon mania haiken’. Stereo 15(7): 104–106. Okada, J. ed. 1971. Rokuon no subete. Tokyo: Futoh-sha. Rokuhan. 1977. ‘Tape contest ni katsu tameno keiko to taisaku’. 3(5). Smith, M. D. 2021. ‘Sound hunting in postwar Japan: Recording technology, aurality, mobility, and consumerism’. Sound Studies 7(1): 64–82. Stereo. 1969. Stereo 11 gatsu rinji zokan: Tape Music ’70. November: 131–153. Stereo. 1970. Stereo 5 gatsu rinji zokan: Tape Music 1971. May: 26–52. Stereo. 1971. ‘Dai 1 kai union rokuon contest’. 9(1). Stereo Shukan. 1974. Stereo Shukan FM bessatsu: Rokuon no subete. Tokyo: Stereo Shukan. Sterne, J. 2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Tamori. 1977. Tamori no cassette omoshiro jJutsu. Tokyo: Shufu to Seikatsu Sha. Tape Sound. 1976. ‘Zennihon amateur recording renmei hossoku’. 20. 336–337.

256  Tomotaro Kaneko Wada, N. 1971. ‘Angura rokuon kara pro kyu made’. Swing journal rinji zokan: Saishin stereo plan 25(9). Wada, N. 1973. ‘Mania tanbo no.53’. Transistor gijutsu 10(6). Wada, N. 1974. ‘Mania tanbo no.67’. Transistor gijutsu 11(8): 64. Stampa Sera. 1974. ‘I giovani per una Europa migliore’. 6 May: 17. Yamazaki, M. 1984. Yawarakai kojin-shugi no tanjo: Shohi shakai no bigaku. Tokyo: Chuokoron–sha.

13 The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand From United States anti-communist weapon to the Phetchabun processional bands’ sound system Pierre Prouteau Introduction This article follows the itinerary of a ‘twin horn’ (horn faet) loudspeaker in Thailand. Dating from the 1960s, the model was initially used by the United States Army during the Vietnam War. Attached in rows to aeroplanes, they were powerful public address speakers, loud enough to amplify music, slogans, and information. The speakers were used in operations flying from US bases in the Thai Northeast to the Vietnam battleground. They were also used in the communist-sensitive areas of Thailand in counter-insurgency operations. Although mostly used from the air, Thai/US mobile teams also used the speakers to present movies on large screens, regional molam songs, and other propaganda to ‘remote villagers’. As the US retreated from Vietnam and Thailand in 1972–1973, the equipment was either given to government offices or exchanged on the black market. From this point, the horns passed from hand to hand. In 1990, Acan Naem1 decided to form a processional band in the Lom Sak district of Phetchabun province. This band adopted the twin horn and established a local genre, called phin prayuk, in which, five generations later, musicians continue to play. The horn loudspeaker is now appreciated for its sound and is a necessary component of any acknowledged phin prayuk band. The horns were one set among other electronic sound technologies that penetrated Thailand in the twentieth century: radio, sound recording, mechanical reproduction of sound, and the electronic amplification of sound. Keeping track of the circulation of this model of loudspeaker and of the discourses it triggered, this chapter examines the malleability of sound technology. By looking at United States reports of the psychological battlefront in the Northeast, oral history of the implementation of amplification and its adoption, and including a study on contemporary aesthetics, repertoire, and the ritual roles of a local music genre featuring the twin horn, I outline the role played by the horn in the Thai adoption of electrical sound amplification technology. Moreover, by paying attention to the population handling of these new technologies and by studying the sound uses that pre-existed them, I argue that a new sound-system culture-specific to Thailand emerged, in DOI: 10.4324/9781003143772-18

258  Pierre Prouteau which regions outside the Thai capital played an important role.2 I also argue that this sound culture has progressively emerged out of the twentieth century and is interwoven with local and global history. It was the struggle against communism in Thailand and neighbouring Southeast Asian countries that brought this model of horn from the United States to Thailand. And it was the same model that eventually became a fundamental element of the sound aesthetic of an electrified processional music genre called phin prayuk. This musical genre originated from the margins of Central, Northeast, and North Thailand, in the province of Phetchabun. Any medium implies effects on its content. This implies an inherent continuity between the twin horn’s uses as a propaganda weapon in the US war in Vietnam and against communism in Thailand, to its place as a music bands’ precious equipment. As Steingo and Sykes (2019) argue, music, technology, and even sound itself must be approached and studied as specific, localised ontologies (4–11).3 Here lies, in my opinion, one of the most interesting arguments brought by the field of sound studies. Following the anthropology of music—which postulated that the very definition of music is peculiar to a given culture (Merriam, 1964)—sound studies proposed and proved that even sound is a constructed category. Every culture and every distinct ontology must then be considered on a strict equal basis: here, those of Thailand as well as those of the US. But decolonising the field implies to take another path, which is to acknowledge and analyse the relationships of domination. Thus, Thai/US relationships were not of equal interlocutors but that of one of the most intense deployment of the US ‘audible empire’ in Asia (Olaniyan and Radano 2016), and in what appears as one of deep if not deepest involvement of a western foreign power in Thai soil and politics.4 If we are going to decolonise sound studies, we should highlight and decipher these mechanisms of imperialistic power in sound and through sound. This chapter is divided into three parts. First, I explore the use of the twin horn as a weapon of anti-communist propaganda by understanding its integration into the psychological warfare tactics of the US in the Isan region of Northeast Thailand. I then highlight the perpetuation of Thai propaganda through sound after the US departure, at a time when electronic amplification pervaded more and more into Thai civil society. This process perfectly shows the process of crypto-colonialism at stake in Thailand (Herzfeld 2002, 900),5 and how sound and sound technology were an important tool of it. It is thus in the context of a pacified Phetchabun province and of a generalised availability of technologies that the genre of phin prayuk emerged. I outline the birth of the genre and the different set-ups it has successively adopted up until the twin horns emerged as a definitive element of any phin prayuk band’s sound system. Sound technologies were made available through US anti-communist war and then locally derived from their original uses. The twin horn is malleable and was modelled to suit and enhance the intensity of a specific festive musical context. I will then explain its integration into local, ritual life through an ethnographic analysis. Going back to the complexity and liveliness of local musical performance in contemporary Thailand is also a political choice. The loud argument here imitates the two paths as through sound

The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand  259 into the twin conduits of the horn: one voice screams that it is linked to a deep process of domination, and another one blares equality must absolutely be maintained, even if the signal is discreet globally. There lies a potential for resistance and emancipation—most notably from colonisation—if the past and its complexities are acknowledged.

Twin Horns as weapon of anti-communist propaganda The model of loudspeaker commonly referred to as ‘twin horns’ (horn faet) among the processional musicians of the Phetchabun province in Thailand can still be bought under the name Cobraflex IIB as part of the catalogue of the sound equipment brand Electro-Voice. According to the specification sheet, it is an ‘exponentially flared, reflex designed horn for use in public address, paging and voice warning systems’.6 The patent was filed by Simon E. Levy on 29 April 1953. The model is sectoral or multicell, meaning that the emission comes from a single driver unit and is then divided into two compartments. The driver, used to transfer the electrical impulses into audible signals, is an electroacoustic transducer plugged into the rear of the horn. The horn then serves to amplify the arriving signal—as any cone-shaped object would do—and to disseminate the transformed signal. The horn itself does have an impact on the sound signal; it has its range of frequencies, and different amplitude responses as shown in Figure 13.1 for the twin horn.

Figure 13.1  Twin horn schematics (© Electro-Voice).

260  Pierre Prouteau Electro-Voice is an audio equipment company created in the 1920s focusing on the production of public address speakers. During World War II, the company received contracts from the US Department of Defence. In 1965, two new production plants were built in the US, and in 1967, the company was bought by Gulton Industries. However, the twin horn was not yet in the Electro-Voice catalogue. At that time, it was a University Soundspeaker product registered by its director of research, Simon E. Levy. Along with the audio company Altec Lansing, University Soundspeaker was acquired in 1959 by the US weapons conglomerate Ling Temco Vought. In 1984, Gulton Industries acquired the Altec Lansing Sound Products Division from Ling Temco Vought, and University Soundspeaker was part of this. The interest of defence conglomerates in buying up manufacturers of audio equipment is evidence of the importance of sound equipment to the war effort.7 Following the career of the sound experimenter Harold Burris-Meyer, Juliette Volcler (2017) goes further by demonstrating that there was collusion not only between the military and conglomerates, but also between the army and the entertainment industries—for example, research was carried out on sound in theatre and cinema as well as on Muzak as a means of increasing productivity and sales in factories and shops. From the mid-1950s through the 1970s, the US was Thailand’s main provider of sound technologies through war production and this was the starting point for the general dissemination of electrical sound technology in the country. Nevertheless, although it was deemed to be an essential component of psychological warfare, the equipment was not only put to military use.8 Thailand was on the defeated side at the end of war in 1945. The United States was quick to see the strategic position of the country in the struggle against communism. As early as 1950, treaties of agreement were signed and a contingent of Thai soldiers was sent along with US troops to the war in Korea. In 1953, an important report was drafted for the future of Southeast Asia and the role of Thailand in it. It was coded PSB D-23 and entitled ‘U.S. Psychological Strategy with Respect to the Thai Peoples of Southeast Asia’. The content and context of the decision are described at lengths in Fineman (1997, 170–172). The report explains the US ethnographical and political findings about Thailand, thought of as a perfect launching base for military and psychological campaigns against the communists and the colonial French. The plans followed Eisenhower’s belief that psychological warfare could range ‘from the singing of a beautiful hymn up to the most extraordinary kind of physical sabotage’ (1997, 173, cited in Gaddis 1982, 155). In order to instil the necessary ‘climate of victory’ and counter communist influence in the region, broadcasting facilities would be built and development works would begin; all the while paying attention to the importance of local particularities.9 In this context in 1954, as the French were being defeated in Indochina, the Psychological Indoctrination Program (PIP) was launched in Thailand with mobile teams composed of Thais and Americans setting up

The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand  261 counter-insurgency groups that would roam the countryside for the next two decades. Mobile Information Teams (MIT) were then set up and finally Mobile Development Units (MDU) were established in 1962, at the time of the official engagement of the United States in Vietnam.10 These mobile teams are especially interesting because of their intense deployment of sound amplification and the only proven presence of the twin horn captured in the photograph in Figures 13.2 and 13.3. The question of Thailand’s involvement with the US in the Vietnam War is still a sensitive issue. It goes against US claims at the time that the struggle against communism was a spontaneous local initiative and against the Thai official view that nothing was happening.11 It is difficult to know whether the mobile teams were a Thai or US initiative, or both together.12 What we do

Figure 13.2 An MIT trip showing movies in Nongkhai province along the Lao border in 1964 (USIS ‘The 19th mobile…’, 1964b, 74).

262  Pierre Prouteau

Figure 13.3 The phin prayuk band Samoe Sin, Lom Sak district, Phetchabun province. (Photo by author).

know is that the teams were mainly composed of Thai, with advisors, equipment, and audio-visual materials from the US Information Service (USIS), as well as a few other US members of staff. Of the 18 USIS bases in Thailand in 1968, 11 were situated in Isan, which was and still is the most impoverished and least developed part of the kingdom. Because Isan was considered to be an area with a high threat of communist insurgency, it was also the main target for development projects and anti-communist psychological warfare. The first phase of the MDU was focused on psychological impact and ‘quick improvement projects (medical, clinics, movies and folk plays)’ (Randolph 1986, 101). Every unit of seventeen men would travel from village to village, staying one to three days each time. There were four vehicles per unit ‘one of which is equipped as a soundtruck’ (Huff 1967, 437). Each stay would consist of ‘large outdoor assemblies with adults invited. When a public address system is set up, names are called, presentations are made with senior

The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand  263 team members giving talks on public health’ (439). In the evening, there were long programmes of movies (USIS-made with a Thai soundtrack, and even Walt Disney 1964a), as well as short talks between the reels; it was ‘jam packed’ according to Lee Huff.13 The team leaders would also seek out the best musicians and singers in the village and invite them to perform over the public address system. This was ‘an outstanding crowd pleaser’ (439): The use of local music has been developed in three ways. The first is achieved by making tape recordings ‘on the scene’ and replaying them over the sound system. Some mobile teams have this music playing at their headquarters much of the day. A second method is to use professional molam troupes to give performances … appropriate MDU themes are included. The third music ‘use’, not necessarily related to MDU specifically, is on radio programmes beamed into the region. (440) Music was recorded and performed during the trips, and the recordings paid attention to regional particularities, most notably in using the molam musical genre peculiar to Isan and Lao. Molam performers were using the US sound systems, most of them for the very first time. Amplification was put to various uses and combined with recordings. These recorded performances were then re-broadcast either from static sound systems in the headquarters, or whilst on the move. This necessitated multiple complex sets of technologies compared to what would have been available in Isan prior to US involvement. Before coming to the musical content, I would like to name one last method of using amplified sound for psychological warfare in Thailand. Cited in my interviews, the method consisted of attaching racks of loudspeakers to airplanes, which then broadcast in-flight loud enough to be heard on the ground. The person who sold the twin horns to the first phin prayuk band said to them that the twin horns came from the US military bases and were attached to planes for this purpose. I have, however, never seen it mentioned in the Thai archives.14 There was a notable amount of US music played through the loudspeakers and played among both Thai and US soldiers. But without a doubt, most of the broadcasts were Thai music. In the case of Isan, molam was used. Molam is the music from Isan (and Laos) sung in Lao, which is distinct from the Central Thai official language. The singer is traditionally accompanied by a free-reed bamboo mouth organ (khaen). There exist multiple styles depending on place, melodies used, instrumentation, rhythms, performance type, including the number of singers, stories, Buddhist teachings, possessions, and others. The following example of counter-insurgency molam is taken from the movie Fay yen (‘fresh fire’) produced in 1965. The title refers to a child’s game where you light something with a match and quickly have to stop it before the fire burns it all, being therefore an image for communism—you quickly have to extinguish it before the whole country burns.15

264  Pierre Prouteau อ๊าวพ่อแม่เอ๊ยให้พากันระลึกไว้ไฟใหญ่ คอมมิวนิสต์ มันนั่นเป็นคนคิดก่อกวนเมืองบ้าน เฮาต้องพากันต้านระวัยไฟอันนิดนอย ไฟเห็นเย็นเห็นเล็กน้อย มันสิไหม้แม่นเมื่อลุน เอย…หน่า… เราชาวไทยขอให้ระวังไฟเย็น เราชาวไทยขอให้ระวังไฟเย็น (*5) อย่าได้เห็นเพียงเล็กน้อยมันจะคอย ลามไป จะลุกไหม้พี่น้องเอย จะลุกไหม้พี่น้อง เอย เฮามาพากันต้าน ตัดไฟนั่นไว้สาก่อน มันสิฮ้อนเมื่อหน้า เผาสิ้นสิบ่ยัง นั่นนาพี่นาพี่นวลหน่า ใหช้าวไทยเจ ริญเอ้ย

Oh my relatives, may I let you think about the big fire communists are, They are just agitators who want to stir up troubles in our place. I have to lead us to resist and be careful about the fire that looks so little. We still see a ‘fresh fire’, a tiny one, but this is gonna burn for sure, oh… Let us, Thai people, be careful about the ‘fresh fire’! (in Central Thai language) (5 times) Don’t think it is just a tiny one; this will spread little by little. It will raise and burn, brothers and sisters! (2 times) I will lead us to resist it, make the fire die in the first place. It will be hot when in front of it, inflaming everything until there is nothing left. That’s it, dear rice field brother, may Thai people be prosperous (/ developed)!

Another repertoire used was phleng pluk cay (lit. ‘song to awake/excite/raise the heart’), or, more simply put, nationalistic songs. An example could be the song ‘Toen thoet chao Thai’, (‘Wake up Thai people!’); the translation can be found in Thak Chaloemtiarana’s book (1978, 320). The song, exhorting the population to fight and die for their country, is still in use and well-known throughout the country. Luang Wichit Wathakan, who was head propagandist of the Thai state for decades, wrote the song in 1937. He was a playwright, composer, and occupied diverse official positions: Director General of the Department of Fine Arts after 1932, Chairman of the Radio Broadcasting Committee of Thailand, Minister of Foreign Affairs during the second World War, and Vice Prime Minister after 1958 (see Barmé 1993). One last repertoire cited in my interviews was the phleng san soen phra barami (lit. ‘panegyric song of royal perfection’), or song in honour of the King, whose return, after the 1932 Thai constitutional revolution, was backed by the US and Marshal Sarit Thanarat from 1958.16 As the US began to plan its withdrawal from the region in 1970, they also organised the handover of all the propaganda programmes. After an accord between President Nixon and Prime Minister Kittikachorn, the equipment and the programmes were given to the Thai Ministry of Public Relations. What was not sold on the black market or spread at the dismantling of the bases, was solemnly given to the Thai Army in a ceremony in Bangkok. USIS officer G. L. Schmidt, present at the ceremony, noted that ‘the Thais were happy to get the equipment but not the programs’ (ADST 2019, 259). The uses of sound in psychological warfare clearly implied innovations in technology, and changes in ideology for Thailand. What Benedict Anderson

The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand  265 (1985) called the ‘American Era of Thailand’ was one of industrial production of audio equipment, shipped, used in warfare and then given away by the US. The magnitude, the origins, and the context shaped it as an unprecedented experience. Newly available and already highly appreciated sound technologies were adapted and generalised whenever possible. Nevertheless, if there was a resolute democratisation and broader access to amplification, some parts of Thailand were still outside the national communication network as late as 1980. We now have to look at what the Thai central authorities and their branches in the provinces did with the horns, and what the population, who experienced this amplification for the first time, did with it.

Sound propaganda and the grassroots takeover of amplification The province of Phetchabun, the main location for my fieldwork, is situated at the crossroads of different cultural and administrative subdivisions. It is attached to the region of the Centre for military administration, to the North for civil and school administration, and linked to the Northeast region and Laos in terms of culture.17 It is clear that Isan benefited momentarily from American programmes and money, but the situation in Phetchabun and in the nearby provinces of Loei and Phitsanulok remained unknown. There were a few trips by the Thai/US mobile, teams but with no follow-ups.18 It appears as a forgotten space. Yet it is this area—in the range of mountains at the junction of the three provinces—that the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) took as their headquarters. The CPT planned to start its revolution with the seizing of 16 provinces of the nearby Isan region. There were autonomous military bases, villages, and schools in Khao Kho and Pu Hin Langka districts. Some are still open to visit. The CPT declared military action in 1965, and the conflict was officially declared in 1968 (Prizzia 1985, 13–18). During my fieldwork, the most important hint I had of this civil war was the rare pictures of the King’s visits to Phetchabun, each time dressed in military fatigues as if ready to fight on the battlefront.19 After the US departure, the war against the communist party was the first field test for Thailand’s newly-formed army. But successive military governments failed to prevent student activists, workers, and villagers taking to the hills and joining the resistance.20 In 1977, the intensity of the battles was at its peak. At this point, Thai government troops were suffering heavy losses. Propaganda campaigns mirroring those of the US were set up. The mountains were bombarded with the exact same Thai songs, again broadcast from airborne loudspeakers. Roads were built under heavy communist fire. But the most successful operations were the ones involving amnesty, local donations, and land in exchange for surrender.21 The resistance was finally crushed in a 1982 offensive and the area was depopulated and converted into a tourist zone. Khao Kho is now registered as a national park; its hillsides are full of resorts and huge coffee shops for Bangkokians’ holidays. Nowadays, it is probably the only place that any Thai person would have heard of when speaking about Phetchabun.

266  Pierre Prouteau What happened to the sound equipment and the twin horns from the moment the US left Thailand up to the suppression of the communist insurgency? Some of the equipment that had been handed over to the Thai government was still in use in the civil war context of Phetchabun. Some had been attached to official buildings; some was used by itinerant film troupes travelling from village to village. I once encountered a twin horn fixed to the front of a house in Lom Kao district. The owner told me that the horn had been handed down from generation to generation and had become almost sacred because the model had become quite rare and highly sought after. Despite the diffusion of sound technologies and an earlier generalisation of amplification, in the specific case of Phetchabun, it was in the years following CPT’s defeat in 1983 that they became normalised. And it was then, in that pacified context, that the type of bands called phin prayuk appeared. The words phin prayuk first occurred as the older name of the famous Thai band Phetphinthong. King Rama 9 himself gave the new auspicious name Phetphinthong (lit. ‘the diamond golden phin’, the Thai three stringed lute), while attending a concert of the band because he was impressed by the sound of the phin.22 Indeed, the band’s phin player, Acan Thongsay Thapthanon, played a modified phin in the form of an electrified version of the instrument from an idea of the Phetphinthong’s leader Nophadol Duangphon.23 The processional bands of Phetchabun then took up the former name of the famous band phin prayuk and were also influenced by its music. Acan T, first phin player of the first phin prayuk band, recalls that, ‘before C [another musician] would join and play, he bought Phetphinthong tapes and brought them back for us to listen’. The great innovation consisting in the electrified phin was also copied from Acan Thongsay: ‘I built my own phin and I sought the sound in order that it would resemble Acan Thongsay’s. I tested the sound for a long time until nothing was left off the mark. Our real masters were the tapes we brought back and listened to’. The electrification of the instrument and new methods of learning to play became popular because ‘in Phetchabun, although there were phin players from former generations, they were seen as old and obsolete (may khao kap samay) and didn’t make anyone want to dance or listen’ (personal communication, 15/12/2017). The genre of phin prayuk fits into the overall genre of ‘processional band’ (wong hae). Its set-up has developed gradually. In 1990, a former military officer at Khao Kho, Acan Naem, created the first phin prayuk band in the province, O Yo Sin (lit. ‘tiny tiny art’) in which Acan T played. ‘At the experimental stage, we hung the horn mounted on a bamboo pillar attached to a person. The carrier also held a 12V motorcycle battery in a handmade bag. We looked like cosmonauts’, remembered Acan T. After a few tiring engagements, a mobile sound system was conceived for the band. The metallic structure was welded at home, mounted on little wheels, and the battery and the horns were installed on it. Acan Naem, as the leader of the O Yo Sin band, had to buy new horns for the sound system. The horns were acquired from an itinerant film company that was ceasing its activity. The previous owner told Acan Naem that he

The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand  267 bought these horns—the twin horns—from the US military base of Udon Thani and that they were attached to planes. Acan Naem had seen the model when he was in the army. It was used by the ‘psychological warfare’ division when screening movies on field trips, or for music performances when hundreds of soldiers from the division would appear in costume on stage, acting as singers, dancers, and musicians.24 Acan denied any link between having seen the psychological warfare division performing and his idea of forming a processional band. Similarly, even though he saw the twin horns when fighting in the Khao Kho district, he denied that this experience has made him choose this specific model—it was ‘purely incidental, but looking back at it, it was good for us that we decided to buy them’ (personal communication, 09/05/2018). The twin horn was an important component of phin prayuk bands’ success. The first phin prayuk’s manager, Acan Naem, describes its importance: the sound of the twin horn is huge (yay) and pleasant to hear (phro). When people hear the twin horn, they know that it is O Yo Sin, its sound is a little bit strange (plaek), sweet (wan), it would spin around (mun). We would be engaged to play at people’s rituals and they would remember the sound of our loudspeaker. [Imitating two people chatting] ‘Hey, it sounds like O Yo Sin over there…’, ‘Of course, that’s them!’. Its sound is also described as ‘long’ (yao), ‘sharp’/’shrill’ (paep/laem), ‘sweet and wide’ (wan kwang), and it can be heard from afar, has a good ‘span’ (khum, khum di). (Khun N, personal communication, 18/11/2018) Most contemporary phin prayuk bands still have twin horns attached to their rolling sound system. Twin horns are what made the ‘unique’ (ekalak) sound of the genre (ibid.). As I have observed it, the search for a pair of twin horns to attach to its rolling sound system is mandatory for any new phin prayuk band; not having these is close to not being considered a proper phin prayuk band. The twin horn remained, but other elements of the sound system underwent great changes. During the O Yo Sin period, an electric bass was built after just a few engagements playing with a plain acoustic guitar with only the two upper strings. Portable drum kits (klong solo) from parade bands quickly replaced the heavy processional long drums (klong yao). Bamboo and then metal cowbells were fixed to the drum kit’s harness. Big drums from parade bands were used, but floor toms were finally preferred. The last modification of instruments happened during the third generation of musicians. The portable drum kit was again customised—cutting out its three short toms, and adding the two deeper and louder high and medium toms of a drum set. This achieved the definitive phin prayuk instrumentation; an electric phin, an electric bass, a portable drum kit, two floor-toms modified so as to hang on the player’s side and different kinds of hand cymbals. Important other changes occurred: phin players added effects between the instrument and the sound system—mostly delay and distortion—carefully copying the

268  Pierre Prouteau sounds of molam and popular hits of the period. Compared to the initial sound system, recent phin prayuk performances are louder thanks to a gradual increase in amp capacity.25 But it has also become increasingly complex; besides adding a mixer table, an audio crossover is sometimes used to direct the acceptable frequencies of the phin’s sound into the horns without damaging them (see Figure 13.4). A crucial event validated these modifications and propelled the local fame of the genre. In 2006, the phin prayuk band Phet Caroen Sin won a provincial processional band competition. Before this official recognition, only a few other phin prayuk bands had followed in the steps of O Yo Sin’s success. Phet

Figure 13.4 The phin prayuk sound system (by author).

The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand  269 Caroen Sin’s win initiated a local craze; young students began to create new bands, all of them adopting the same set-up as well as playing a similar repertoire. Musicians also began using the internet to post promotional videos. All these inputs helped create today’s phin prayuk consisting of three complementary elements (see Figure 13.4): a cart, most importantly. No, actually what matters the most is the audio equipment (khruang siaeng). Wait, the most important of all is the musicians. The name of the cart is the name of the band: Phet Paknam Sin. Everything must become one with another. If it is not, it will be like a potholed road, the sound will be bad, it will squeal. It will not be loud enough, it will not boom. (Khun C, sound engineer of a Pak Nam phin prayuk, personal ­communication, 10/2014) The success of the genre now spans five generations of musicians, and there are about 20 bands in the whole Phetchabun province as of 2018. Phin refers to the instrument. Prayuk is a very difficult word to catch fully; it is generally translated as ‘applied’, but its complete definition found in the dictionary is ‘bringing knowledge from diverse scientific fields and, after modification, using them for better utility’. For Phetchabun’s musicians, the term prayuk is somewhat opposed to old ways of playing, as well as always standing in contrast with the neighbouring region of Isan conceived as the original source for the music played. As Khun N puts it: ‘in Isan, it is more about anurak [conserving] whereas in Phetchabun it is prayuk’ (personal communication, 11/2017). ‘The phin can be boran [ancient] or it can be prayuk, in which case the sound will strangely break from the usual’ (Khun C, ibid.). The strangeness of the sound is always mentioned in my interviews. This sentiment arose for different reasons: ‘it was considered strange because of electrification and because we assembled musical instruments and ways of playing never done and heard before’ (Acan T, ibid.). What is then applied is not only newly available foreign technologies of amplification allowing the phin to be electrified and the very existence of the whole sound system, but also a new combination of instruments, innovative ways of playing and the integration of new musical material. Amplification was one out of these equally important other components of this new ‘recipe’ (sut, sk. sutra). Prayuk is a transformative process whose ruling principles are not yet stable nor clear. As Acan Ti explains: ‘we took musical instruments like long drums, mouth organ (khaen), and parade percussions, and we prayuk them so we can use them. We integrated one with another in a prayuk version so that they can get along’ (Acan T, ibid.). Acan T also emphasises his successful experimentations on his instrument: ‘the way I play the phin is different. Most phin players will play like in Isan, jumping from one note to the other, but I played as if phin was a guitar. For example, I would use ‘chords’ [in English] which opened the possibility for many more styles to be played’. Acan T searched for new finger positions on his instrument and ended by including

270  Pierre Prouteau ‘Western’ chords (mostly by adding the octave and the third of the note played) to its style. Acan T played double and even triple-neck phin (usually a low-pitch tuned one for playing the male singers’ melodies and the higher-pitched neck for female singers’ melodies, or just to modulate in different keys). In the quotation, Acan T also refers to the Isan staccato-like style of playing phin, which indeed appears almost rigorous when compared to Phetchabun’s much more ornamental style. Practitioners themselves sometimes have difficulty explaining what prayuk means: ‘it means… [hesitating] We have Isan melodies, old melodies, and then we also put and mix some new songs, sam cha [cha cha cha] for example. We can also play Western melodies… This is prayuk!’ (Khun J, relative of the phin prayuk band Phet Caroen Sin, personal communication, 16/12/2017). The array of melodies that can be played within the prayuk frame is extended; musicians can actually adapt any song as long as it can be adapted to the Thai pentatonic scale. This includes a few international Western hits (e.g., ‘Zombie’ by The Cranberries, 1994), some Asian hits (more recently the obscure Indonesian song ‘Tak Tun Tuang’ by Upiak Isil, 2017), but also different regional and national styles. ‘Prayuk means that we are free to play whatever melodies we want, be it molam, be it string (Thai and Western rock) … We play like ‘infinity’ [in English], there is no end, we go and never stop’ (Phi Em, personal communication, 18/10/2014). The musicians emphasise this adaptability and openness of their repertoires, but a good phin prayuk band is also one that can play all the standards as well as be able to stay up-to-date. In the very dynamic Thai music market, in six months, dozens of songs must be learnt, and if one stops for a year ‘it is like starting back from scratch’ (Acan T, ibid.). All the musicians note the integration of Western elements: ‘in Phetchabun, we used to play songs like anywhere else [in Thailand]. But we then took some from over there [outside of Thailand, mostly the West] and prayuk. We prayuk from “international” melodies [sakon i.e., Western]’ (Khun J, ibid.). Prayuk takes other shapes when understood through this Western prism: ‘prayuk also allows for Thai instruments to be compared (priep) with international instruments (sakon)’ (Khun C, ibid.). It thus allows local Thai processional bands, and along it the whole local culture, to express itself on an equal footing with the West. Along the way, something has been irretrievably lost: ‘it is not authentic Thai (Thai thae), it is mixed Thai already (Thai prasom)’ (Acan T, ibid.). Noticing Acan’s formulation, Thainess has not been lost, but it is no more authentic. Prayuk could almost be assimilated to the process that allows one to comply with the need to tune itself with the world (the West) and maybe in the way not to be left behind—lit. ‘to be on time with the era’ (than samay, another possible translation of ‘modernity’ in Thai). Phin prayuk appears as a changing patchwork of available instruments and relevant aesthetics, a blend that uses and fuses the old and the new into the specific phin prayuk entity. It does not stand in contradiction with tradition and gives access to ‘modernity’ on its own local and national terms.26

The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand  271

Twin Horns as a definitive component of the phin prayuk set-up Phin prayuk is organised around the owner and manager of the band. S/he is the person who owns equipment, though s/he might not be a musician. The members of one band may vary from one engagement to the other, even if a stable core of musicians is preferred to acquaintances or outsiders. Depending on the distance to the festivity, the distance and length of the procession, an average sum would be 5,000 baths, or around 160 US dollars. This is divided by order of importance of the role in the band: the owner, then the phin player, the klong solo, the bass player, the two floor toms players, down to the optional one or two hand cymbals players, and finally the driver, making a total of five to seven people. During months of intense ritual activity, bands can take on up to three engagements in a single day. Any of these engagements implies a minimum of three hours non-stop performance, walking and playing under a blaring sun. The bands are mostly hired for the procession stage during ordination rituals. The procession leads the future monk (called naga at the processional stage) from the house to the temple where he will be ordained.27 Ordinations (ngan buat) are the most important and wildest celebration in Phetchabun. They are domestic festivities that also gather people from the whole family, friends, as well as other guests, quickly adding up to hundreds of people. During the procession, more and more people—mostly young—will join in, as the procession weaves around the locality on its way to the temple. Guests are welcomed with massive quantities of liquor, because, ‘the basic courtesy of the ritual’s host is to provide alcohol and food, and it is the basic courtesy of the guests to get drunk and dance so the celebration will be as joyous as possible. You will have to drink, get up and dance, even if you are tired, even if you don’t want to’ (Ozone, klong solo player, Dao Phra Suk Sin, personal communication, 10/2017). Without going too deeply into ritual sequences and relationships between ritual and music, the average phin prayuk performance would be as follows: days before, musicians are contacted and a quick rehearsal is organised— longer if some musicians are not yet acquainted to the band’s few particularities out of the repertoire shared by most phin prayuk bands. The sound system is checked and potential problems are fixed. A dozen drumsticks are cut from appropriate wood and slowly burnt on the top of a fire so as to harden them. On the day of the performance, all band members gather around 5 am at the house of the sound system owner. Mobilising everybody’s strength, the chariot is lifted on the platform of a pick-up truck and the whole band sits around the mobile sound system, the latter properly tightened to the truck with ropes. While driving, the musicians finish their instant coffee, make jokes and flirt with girls, sometimes they belt out a few classic songs. When the band arrives at the place of the festivities, it is already fully decorated with rows of coloured symmetrical paper cuts, representing stylised monks in meditation posture. The future monk’s necessary collection of objects is displayed on a table, topped with the candidate’s name and picture

272  Pierre Prouteau printed on a vinyl sign. A highly elaborated vegetal construction (bay sri) shares pride on the side. Under a few large tents, in front of the home of the candidate’s parents, some 30 tables are installed, wrapped with curtains knotted for the guests to eat and drink during the morning. A paraglider is flying above, throwing bundled colourful coins around the place. The master of ceremony’s voice is already blaring from the rented powerful sound system, bombarding the arriving guests with information and jokes. Regarding the band, they are welcomed at a table slightly shunted aside from the area reserved for the designated guests and domestic rituals. After quick offerings to the musicians’ masters, the musicians begin to play, usually the slow repertoire, while the candidate’s head and eyebrows are shaved. After a 30-minute set, during which the band seem to restrain themselves from speeding up, they take a break with food and drinks provided by the host. The manifold rituals continue (see Bizot 1993, 49–57; Swearer 2010, 51–58; Terwiel 2012, 92–105; Wells 1960, 135–150), up until the candidate is transformed into a naga—the Indian mythic subterranean reptile. He is then lifted up on the top of the most daunting vehicle available (the biggest truck around, an elephant, or even a mixer truck). The procession is spatially organised with the dancers at the head, followed by the band already warming up the crowd, and at the rear, the candidate’s and his parent’s vehicles complete the final preparations before launching the stroll around the locality to the temple. The improvised flow of melodies the phin prayuk plays is accompanying and encouraging the inebriation of the people who form the procession. What makes a phin prayuk performance so complex is the direct relationship with the crowd of dancers. Always the first to enliven the parade, married women in their thirties flourish their hands in arabesque gestures and shake their hips and backs. An elder woman in a sarong distributes Thai whisky poured from a beheaded 500ml bottle of water, followed by a soothing mouthful of ice-cold water. More and more people join in, and groups of younger dancers are breaking in suggestive moves, quickly stopping after a more acrobatic one, bursting into laughter but still step by step more engaged into the larger cordon ‘flanking’ (royal voc. saeng) the future monk. One woman very firmly takes my hand, to lead me right in front of the impressive bass mounted at the bow of the phin prayuk mobile sound system. People often stop the chariot this way. They dance leaning back on to the bass sub, making it impossible for the chariot to move, and therefore making the whole procession last longer. The phin player leads through improvisation. Other musicians then follow his combination of various melodies. The musical flow is thus divided into fixed repertoires, for example, in order of increasing speed: phu thai, lam phloen, molam, lam sing, sam cha, etc. Each of these repertoires is ‘assimilative’, in the sense that it can integrate an ever-changing stock of repertoire. The band then combines an infinite stream of ‘hit songs’ (hit) and ‘melodic patterns’ (lay). If the phin plays a well-known hit, it will mostly stick to the singer’s melody (and guitar solos and breaks), but if it is lay, it will be quite

The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand  273 different. The lay are at the core of the molam genre (Miller 1998, 323– 324).28 They are sometimes of a recent invention, but most of the time they are based on traditional material, and are the basis of most of the Isan hits. There are dozens of these melodies and hundreds of versions of them exist, depending on the place and the teacher that taught them. Phin prayuk is also based on transition consisting of mutual knowledge of complex short transitive musical phrases. In a good performance, the musicians will be at one with each other, playing with the crowd’s mood, and reaching an irresistible continuum of apexes of music and dance. According to the phin player’s inspiration and ability, the flow jumps from one repertoire to another, in a mix including sections of this pattern, interwoven with that one, followed by the entire melody of that song that everybody knows, coming back to another section of the same first melodic pattern etc.; hence the maze, hence the art. After the third circumambulation around the sanctuary, in a last and loudest sound discharge by the phin prayuk band, the candidate is carried on shoulders up the stairs leading to the temple’s main sanctuary. Penetrating the threshold of the closed most sacred space where a congregation of monks will carry out the ceremony of full ordination (pali upasambada, th. upasombot), the music stops and all the dancers scatter. It is difficult to give hints of this art without listening to multi-hour performances and analysing them, but I hope I have managed to give a minimal but true picture of a phin prayuk performance.29

Conclusion When unveiling the trajectory of the twin horn sound equipment, two aspects emerge that are distinct in time and in use. One aspect is top-down: the horn as a tool of US anti-communist warfare. The twin horns were originally used to broadcast ideological propaganda in the context of the Asian battlefront in a global struggle against communism. The Thai central government and its monarchy were Allies in this struggle. They continued the fight when the US officially left Thai soil, and they continued in Phetchabun province up until around 1983. In this context, the twin horn has been an instrument of double-folded imperialistic dynamics: on the part of the US in Thailand and, as a form of internal colonialism, on the part of the Thai state in its inner region, with ideological and technical help from the US. The other aspect began to take shape when Thai/US propaganda made use of regional music and made equipment available to musicians. This was the case for the molam genre, which was among the first regional music genres to feature amplified performances in Isan. From that point on, molam music has never abandoned the technology, and, in terms of its most appreciated styles, it has evolved alongside it. The biggest contemporary molam troupes now use state-of-theart amplification rather than the twin horns during their night-long performances and year-long tours in the country.

274  Pierre Prouteau The generalisation of amplification in the specific context of Phetchabun province could appear only when the civil war was over. The local processional genre of phin prayuk, peculiar to the districts of Lom Sak, Lom Kao, and Muang, was created not long after the area was pacified, and its actors assimilated the twin horn into their rolling sound systems. While a few bands have recently toured the world, in the Thai context, it has little ritual or aesthetic relevance beyond the local level, as the bands integrate into religious and festive events within the province’s different communities. While both aspects of the twin horn’s development in Thailand involved music, one was considered a weapon of propaganda and the other an essential component of an aesthetical and ritual complex. The Thai authorities had used music, even amplified, before the US became involved in Southeast Asia. What changed with US involvement was the renewal of the technologies of sound, the quantity of equipment available, the systematisation and the degree of complexity of its uses. Before the US-led campaigns, Thai propaganda could not extend further than a few provinces around Bangkok. US warfare extended that range at the same time as it transformed the ideological content. Remote regions could be incorporated into state ideology.30 US involvement then had an impact on the Thai Central authorities’ process of integrating the outer provinces into Thainess. Prayuk might be the word embodying the local—and maybe more: the grassroots national—translation of what modernity in sound could be in the Thai context. It blends, without contradiction, the oldest and the newest and fuses it into a genre that allows its practitioners to express themselves on an equal footing with ‘Western’ technological and musical modernity. The US involvement in Thailand had an impact, but musicians’ thoughts go beyond this period of their country’s history and speak on a more general level. None of my interlocutors, at least those who know about it, deny the origin of their gear. They just do not express it as relevant for choosing this model out of other possible models. But all musicians without exception believe that the twin horn’s sound is good and unique. According to the musicians then, US ideology had no connection to the band’s sound and aesthetic. Is the twin horn’s sound then good and unique because of the quality of the equipment, or because it is charged with the density of all its previous uses? Without doubt the US used and even developed its most advanced audio technology tools in the global struggle against communism. But the uniqueness stands on the side of the trajectory of the horn in Thailand rather than in its sound when examined through a global lens. It was a product of the US military-industrial complex in an international context where the latest audio technology pervaded US battlegrounds in multiple parts of the world. Perhaps other musical avatars emerged in different contexts using US audio technology as well. Ultimately, what remains clear is that, at least in the case of phin prayuk’s musicians—and maybe in the cases of all musicians who inherited US technology—the use of the twin horns draws a loud, yet discreet, and highly distorted linkage that weaves them to the history of their country and to the world.

The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand  275

Notes 1 In Thai, “Acan” is a term of respect meaning “professor” and used as title. In this chapter, some titles preceding names are used as polite forms of address to refer to my interlocutors, e.g. “Khun” means “Sir” and “Phi” means “elder brother”. In order to anonymise some interviewees, I give their initial instead of the given name or nickname. 2 The minimal definition of a sound system I propose is: an electronic sound amplification device loudly broadcasting from a public or semi-public space aimed at gathering the maximum amount of people possible. But sound systems are more complex and can be considered as ‘a unique apparatus’ (Henriques 2011, 3): seen through a communication lens, it is a medium that contains ‘information’ that are sounds in all its forms: music, but also, political discourse, trader’s litany, religious repertoire. Anthropologically, it is a collective and hybrid entity composed of a machine and humans, the ones that are gathered around it or more strictly the crew of engineers and/or musicians who use it and make it function. Acoustically, it makes immanent and sensible extreme registers of sound (infra-bass or on the other side of the spectrum, painful shrill) most notably through loudness as well as impressive other acoustic effects like echo and distortion. 3 Considering also that words never carry the same history and web of concepts, as it would be of ‘sound’, ‘technology’, ‘music’ etc. 4 Western influence is of course not new (Harrison and Jackson 2018), but the ‘American Era’ (Anderson 1985) was one of unprecedented involvement in its amplitude and impact. 5 Crypto-colonialism is a term applied to Thailand and Greece by Michael Herzfeld: ‘I shall call it crypto-colonialism and define it as the curious alchemy whereby certain countries, buffer zones between the colonised lands and those as yet untamed, were compelled to acquire their political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence, this relationship being articulated in the iconic guise of aggressively national culture fashioned to suit foreign models. Such countries were and are living paradoxes: they are nominally independent, but that independence comes at the price of a sometimes humiliating form of effective dependence’ (Herzfeld 2002, 900–901). 6 The specification sheet is available at: https://products.electrovoice.com/binary/ CobreflexIIB-eds.pdf and the patented design of the twin horn at: https://patents. google.com/patent/US2751996A/ 7 Testimonies of US soldiers in Vietnam cite these brands when describing the sound systems that were used. 8 I deeply thank Victor Stoichita for attracting my attention on this aspect. 9 The military were not necessarily seen to be the right tool for this, as they were far from tactful, peaceful, cheerful, tolerant, or sensitive in their human relations (Fineman 1997, 173). Researchers, particularly anthropologists, were considered better suited to the job. Drastic US anthropology research plans were implemented, as well as education for Thai academics and students. 10 Besides Thailand having US military bases, there were a lot of other counter-insurgency programmes that made US money pour into the country (for example the Village Radio Project, Radio 909 emitting from Sakon Nakhon, both organised by USIS, but also the Border Police Patrols, Development projects, Research agencies etc.). 11 It remains true that Thailand and its successive kings and governments had fought against the dissemination of communism since the very introduction of the ideology in the country (Barthel 2020). 12 In both Thai and US contexts some linkages can be made with prior uses of amplified sounds in propaganda, most notably by Luang Wichit Wathakan for the first time in Thai history during the Bowaradej rebellion as early as 1933

276  Pierre Prouteau (Barmé 1993, 92), and during the second World War for US (Volcler 2011, 100– 105; 2017, 73–106). 13 To give a hint of the importance of USIS: in 1965 more than 20 million Thais in a population of 35 million are estimated to have watched it according to US numbers—but when villagers were asked about what they liked least, many answered ‘Movie’; ‘because I had seen it already, it makes me dizzy’, or ‘because it was only a film, not the real thing’ (USIS ‘Exploratory Study’, 68). 14 The concept of amplified airborne sounds in Vietnam has been comparatively much more popular (Apocalypse Now [Coppola 1979]) and relatively better informed; see for an example the radio documentary ‘Good Morning Vietnam’, 1972 with French translation, from 55’ to 58’35”, at https://www.franceculture. fr/2016-01-22-good-morning-vietnam-un-documentaire-radiophonique-mythique 15 Cf. the full movie at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0NnwPL-7Dc&t posted by the Film Archives of Thailand. The transcription of the lyrics is taken from the thesis of Wirachon (2017, 116–117). I here thank Tong Anurak for sharing this thesis with me. In 2019, reading the death threats and insulting comments following a post criticizing the Thai monarchy on the social media, I have again encountered this same term of ‘fresh fire’, showing the representation of communism as a threat to the monarchy’s existence, that any threat to monarchy is considered something ‘communist’, as well as the impact and durability of such image. 16 If the sound characteristic of the Thai-US side was that of loudness and omnipresence, their opponents—as subversive counter power—had sound characteristics that dealt with low volume and confidentiality. There definitely were communist radios in addition to quite unknown communist mobile teams; both were also broadcasting molam. An example of communist molam can be found in Wirachon (2017, 118–119; quoted from Khaen 2536 [1993], 68–69) as the version of a song from 1972 entitled ‘Khoy rak cak sieng phin’ (‘Waiting for love along the sound of phin’) played by the famous band Phetphinthong. The communists changed the title and the lyrics while keeping the music (‘Silapin ma laew’, ‘Here comes the artist’). As no recording of the communist version can be found, the following link is the original song by Phetphinthong: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sritsXt2DT4. While it was not broadcast through twin horns, the band playing the original song had been an important influence on the processional bands in a way I will develop into in the following part. The anti-communist molam was actually identical to the communist one except for its content, which expressed the competing ideology. I have heard of molam singers being engaged by the American side as well as by the communists. Some molam bands from Isan were also sent to perform in Laos by the US (Brandon 1967, 298–301). 17 Especially in the upper part of the province, in the districts of Lom Sak, Lom Kao, and parts of Muang district. The lower districts could mostly be related to central culture, yet some Lao-speaking villages are found too with different origins and various demographic concentrations. The presence of Lao-speaking communities is in any case common to the whole of Thailand. 18 A young isolated US officer, Richard A. Virden, was alone with half a dozen Thai staff in Phitsanulok during 1968 up to 1969 only (ADST 2019, 246–248). 19 Whereas he had never visited Phetchabun province before, the King came 13 times from 1963 to 1985, after which he never came back (a few years after the CPT was finally defeated in 1982). He mostly went to visit casualties in hospitals, to inaugurations and local ceremonies, to development projects, and gave out medication to villagers and mountainous populations. 20 The 1972 ‘red barrel killings’ and the 1973 and 1976 Thammasat students’ massacres are amongst other violent political repressions. 21 This was similar to the ‘open arms’ operation during the Vietnam War (Prizzia 1985, 23). The diminution of the CPT’s power was also linked to an internal division mirroring that between China and Vietnam who were secretly fighting in

The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand  277 Cambodia. The CPT being on the Chinese side, Laos and Vietnam closed its borders and its help to them ([Moeanfan] 2005, 13–14). 22 The band also played the song ‘Waiting for love along the sound of phin’, which has been modified by the communists. It must also be noted that it is a common practise to change names (of bands as well as of persons) that will be even more readily adopted when the name comes from the king or a royal figure. 23 Acan Thongsay Thapthanon is still one of Thailand’s most renowned phin players. For details of the story of electrification and of the King’s encounter with Phetphinthong, see interview of Acan Thongsay Thapthanon in the documentary (Y)our Music by Waraluck Hiransrettawat Every (David Reeve 2014); see also https://www.isangate.com/new/artist-isan/95-thongsai-tab-tanon.html (in Thai) 24 Still existing and whose role has been described under the Thai acronyms of Po Co Wo by Benjamin Tausig during the Red Shirt protests (2013, 22, 204–205, 257–267). 25 Also aided by the generalisation of power generators instead of motorcycle and car batteries, which permitted the performances to last much longer with a more sustained sound. The previous gear implied a decline of volume. 26 The need and urge for development, the West as an ambiguous model for society (sakon), even the very concept of ‘Thainess’ are among the national imperatives that have pervaded society for the last century and a half (Harrison and Jackson 2018). 27 Ordinations are the main source of income for phin prayuk formations. More rarely, there are annual district’s level celebrations that may engage the procession bands. The bands can also be engaged for the procession of a few other festivities: Thai New Year songkran, temple offerings, and others. It must also be noted that, starting a few years ago, two phin prayuk bands, Khun Narin Sin and Dao Phra Suk Sin, have been touring Europe and other countries. 28 Albeit useful and close to Phetchabun’s phin prayuk, Miller’s example is for Khaen, relevant for the centre of the Northeast region and does not fully apply to the musical combination of phin prayuk. See also Mitchell (2015, 57–60) with the same caveat. 29 I am here giving the description of the procession, which is only the first step in understanding the whole festivity. The intoxication as well as the music do have ritual functions, but are outside of this chapter’s scope. For an enlivened ordination phin prayuk procession example, see https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Ku_7WFqnK40 by the band Phet Caroen Sin 30 While music was definitely used by the Thai central authorities, I did not manage to find examples of molam used in propaganda by the state prior to US involvement. It was, however, used on numerous occasions during rebellions against the Central state in Isan from the nineteenth century onward. There might have been a reversion, as since then, molam has been used in propaganda on numerous occasions.

References Anderson, B. R. O. 1985. In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era. Translated by R. C. Mendiones. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ADST (Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training). 2019. ‘Thailand country reader.’ Available at https://www.adst.org/Readers/Thailand.pdf (last accessed 15/04/2019). Barmé, S. 1993. Luang Wichit Wathakan and the Creation of a Thai identity. Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Barthel, A. 2020. ‘For “Public Happiness and Prosperity”: Introduction and repression of communism in Siam (1922–1930)’. Moussons 36: 221–245.

278  Pierre Prouteau Bizot, F. 1993. Le Bouddhisme des Thaïs: Brève de ses mouvements et de ses idées des origins à nos jours. Paris: Edition des Cahiers de France. Brandon, J. R. 1967. Theatre in Southeast Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chaloemtiarana, T., C. Kaset-Siri and T. Nakhata, eds. 1978. Thai Politics: Extracts and Documents. Social Science Association of Thailand. Fineman, D. 1997. A Special Relationship: The U.S. and Military Government in Thailand 1947–1958. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Gaddis, J. 1982. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, R. V. and P. A. Jackson. 2018. The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand. Hong Kong: Silkworm Books. Henriques, J. 2011. Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing. London and New York: Continuum. Herzfeld, M. 2002. ‘The absent presence: Discourses of crypto-colonialism’. The South Atlantic Quarterly 101(4): 899–926. Huff, L. W. 1967. ‘The Thai Mobile Development Unit Program’. In Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities and Nations, edited by P. Krendstadter, 425–486. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Merriam, A. P. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Miller, T. E. 1998. ‘Thailand’. In Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: Southeast Asia, Volume 4, edited by T. Miller and S. Williams, 218–334. Shrewsbury: Garland Publishing. Mitchell, J. L. 2015. Luk Thung: The Culture and Politics of Thailand’s Most Popular Music. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Olaniyan, T. and R. Radano. 2016. ‘Introduction: Hearing empire—imperial listening’. In Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, edited by T. Olaniyan and R. Radano, 1–22. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Prizzia, R. 1985. Thailand in Transition: The Roles of Oppositional Forces. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Randolph, R. S. 1986. The United States and Thailand, Alliance Dynamics 1950–1985. Berkeley: University of California Press. Steingo, G. and J. Sykes. 2019. Remapping Sound Studies. Durham: Duke University Press. Swearer, D. K. 2010. The Buddhist World of Southeast Asia. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tausig, B. 2013. ‘(((Bangkok is Ringing)))’. Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Music, New York University. Terwiel, B. J. 2012. Monks and Magic: Revisiting a Classic Study of Religious Ceremonies in Thailand. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. USIS. 1964a. ‘Exploratory study of the impact of a Thai Mobile Development Unit.’ USIS Research Project, Regional Research Office. USIS/Bangkok, 02/1964. USIS. 1964b. ‘The 19th mobile information team trip, Nongkhai, 14/09/1964– 01/10/1964.’ Bangkok (ref. TIC, USIS-KEEP 00182 TIC/cบ). Volcler, J. 2011. Le son comme arme: Les usages policiers et militaires du son. Paris: La Découverte. Volcler, J. 2017. Contrôle: Comment s’inventa l’art de la manipulation sonore. La Rue Musicale, La Découverte/Cité de la musique-Philharmonie de Paris.

The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand  279 Wells, K. E. 1960. Thai Buddhism its Rites and its Activities. Bangkok: Bangkok Times Press. แคน สาริกา [Khaen Sarika], เสียงเพลงจากภูพาน [Siaeng phleng cak Phuphan], กทม [Bangkok], สำ�นักพิมพ์สาริกา [Samnakphim Sarika], 2536 (1993). วีรชน เกษสกุล [Wirachon Ketsakun], หมอลำ� : ภาพสท้อนทางคติชน ความเชื่อ และ การเมือง [Molam: phapsathon thang khatichon khwam choea lae kan muang], วิทยานิพนธ์ ม.ห.รามคำ�แหง รัฐศาสตรมหาบัญฑิต [Withayaniphon, Mo ho Ramkhamhaeng, Rathasat Mahabandit], 2560 (2017). เหมือนฝัน [Moeanfan], บันทึกหลังไมค์ดาวแดง [Banthoek lang may dao daeng], เสียง ประชาชนแห่งประเทศไทย [Siaeng prachachon haeng Prathet Thai], 2548 (2005).

Index

Note: Pages in italics refers figures and pages followed by n refers notes. Abbas, Ackbar 164, 167, 171, 173–174 Abe, M. 91, 97n2 accent 59, 153, 169, 227 Acoustical Society of America 114 Acoustical Society of Japan 113 acoustic ecology (oto no kankyō) 10, 180 Agamben, Giorgio 44 Agawu, Kofi 42 Ahmad, M. 51 airchecks 240, 243, 245, 248 aircraft noise 102, 118 airplanes 113, 263, 276n14 airports 114 Akao Yuichi 248 Akiyama Shunsuke 246 All India Radio (AIR) 11, 199–200, 202, 208, 213, 216n1, 217n7, 217n12 alterity 8, 125–126 Amataya, Zakariya ‘Che’: ‘I See Myself’ 50, 52–54; ‘I See You’ 54–55; ‘I Wish I Was a Sniper’ 46; ‘Journey of a Poem’ 40; The Melayu Review 52; No Women in Poetry 40; ‘One Day’ 47–48; poetic dissonance 5, 40–47, 50–54, 56; ‘Report from A Partitioned Village’ 53–54; ‘That those without tombs might everywhere find their cemetery’ 48–49; ‘Will Bombs Fall on my Playground’ 46 amateur radio broadcasting 200–201, 204–205, 207–209 amateur sound-recording contests in Japan 240–254; audio culture in 1960s and 1970s 242–243; award winners of the AURC 248–250; contests in the 1970s 243–245; as opportunity for self-examination 251–253; overview 12, 240–241,

253–254; restarting the AURC and after 247–248; sound, modernity, and Asia 3; sound recording as a hobby 250–251; transition in the AURC 245–247 amplification 13, 52, 54, 57n6, 225, 257, 263, 265–270, 273, 275n11, 276n14 Anderson, Benedict 264–265, 275n4 Angkan Kalayanaphong 44 anti-noise movements 103, 108, 110, 120n11 Aoki So 158n16 Appadurai, A. 207 Arendt, Hannah 43 Aristotle 41, 46, 57n6; Politics 41, 46 Arnold, David 11, 200 Arnold, Matthew 172 art 84–85, 97n6 Asia: as method 13–15; modern noise 6–8; politics of voice 4–6; sound and modernity 1–4; sound and power 8–11; technology and imperialism 11–13; see also under individual countries Asian sound cultures: amateur sound-­ recording contests in Japan 240–254; Asia as method 13–15; Atarashiki tsuchi’s acoustic construction of Japan 141–159; Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok 220–237; ­corporeal voice in Taiwan and Korea 19–37; early radio in late colonial India 199–217; Japanese Noise music 124–137; Kyoto kimono-making industry 179–194; modern noise 6–8; overview 1–15; poetic dissonance in Thai-Malay borderlands 40–57; politics of voice 4–6; Sinophone

Index  281 politics in Hong Kong 162–177; sound, modernity, and Asia 1–4; sound and power 8–11; Tateyama Noboru and sōkyoku-jiuta 81–98; technology and imperialism 11–13; twin horn in Thailand 257–277; urban noise in modern Japan 101–120; voice of villains and Ryoo Seung-wan 59–76 The Asiatic Review 211, 217n10 Asthana, S. 216n1 Atarashiki tsuchi (New Earth aka The Samurai’s Daughter) (film): acoustic construction of Japan 141–159; music 143–147; noise 147–150; overview 8–9, 141–143, 155–157; voice 150–155 Atkins, E. T. 145–146, 158n17 Atkinson, Niall 46–47 Atkinson, R. 120n3 atouta 85, 87–88 Attali, J. 83, 92 audible formation of empire 168, 220, 258 audio equipment: amateur sound-­ recording contests in Japan 12, 240, 242–243, 245, 248, 253; twin horn in Thailand 260, 265–266, 274 audio magazines 12, 242–243, 245, 250 Audio Union 241, 244–245, 249 Audio Union Recording Contest (AURC): amateur sound-recording contests 241, 244, 253; award winners 248–250; restarting the AURC and after 247–248; sound-recording contests as self-examination 251–253; transition in 245–247 aurality 2–3, 9, 32, 34, 49, 155–156, 221 aural perception 133–134 ‘Autumn Regrets of the Lone Traveler’ (nanyin ballad) 166, 171, 177n5 background noise 6, 129, 147 Bakhtin, Mikhail 74n2 Balázs, B. 152 Balibar, Etienne 43 Bangkok: Chinese broadcast and Rediffusion 12, 220–237, 236n4, 236n6; poetic dissonance in Thailand 42–45, 53; twin horn in Thailand 274 Banxiao 232 Baren 231 Barthes, Roland, Image–Music–Text 74n2 BBC (British Broadcasting Company) 216n5, 222

BBC Empire Service 208, 217n8 Bell, Daniel 248–249 bells 105–107, 148, 153 Berlin 23, 143, 146 Betar Jagat 217n7 Biddle, I. 221 Bird, Isabella 104 Biswas, I. 208 biwa (four-stringed lute) 81, 97n1, 98n9, 132 black cultures 200, 206–207 blind musicians 81–82, 84, 88–89, 97n1, 98n15, 98n18, 142 boat whistles 107–108 Bombay 201–202, 205–206, 209, 214, 217n7 Botan, Letters from Thailand 220, 235n2 Bouanani, Ahmed 44 Bradley, Francis 45, 48 brain function 133–134, 153 brass bands 7, 83 Brayne, Frank Lugard 211, 217n11 Britain see United Kingdom (UK) British Broadcasting Company (BBC) 216n5, 222; BBC Empire Service 208, 217n8 British Empire 203, 215, 217n10 Broadcast Relay Service Ltd 222, 236n8 Brown, L. 75n10 Buddhism 82, 84, 146, 154, 230, 263 Buenaventura 182, 188 Bukhari, A. S. 216n1 Burris-Meyer, Harold 260 Calcutta 201–202, 206, 217n7 Callier, P. 70 Canton (Guangdong) 162, 167 Cantonese language: hierarchy in Chinese writing 165–170; mapping the lost sounds in Hong Kong 174; nanyin and Cantonese culture 170–174; pop music 234; romanization 177n1; Sinophone politics in Hong Kong 8–10, 162, 176; sound and power 8–10; wartime interpreters 35 cars 105–106, 109–110, 114 cassette recorders 12–13, 240, 242–243, 246–247, 249–250, 252 censorship 27–28, 35 Ceylon 201, 206, 217n10 chaebŏl (large family companies) 62, 65–68, 70–71, 75n4, 75n6 Chaliapin, Fyodor Ivanovich 24 Chamberlain, B. H. 158n14 Chandola, T. 181

282 Index Chang Chen 169 Chaozhou dialect 226–227, 229–230, 232 Chaozhou opera 12, 230–232, 235, 236n11 ‘Checkpoint’ (Six-Nature Collective) 50, 51 checkpoints 49, 56 Chen, Kuan-Hsing 14 Chiang Kai-shek, ‘Addressing the youth of the whole country’ (gao quanguo qingnian shu) 28 Chiang Wen-yeh (Kō Bun-ya), ‘Song of the Three Corporeal-Bullet Heroes’ 23, 29 Chi bi zhi zhan (‘The Battle of the Red Cliffs’) 232–233 China: corporeal voice 27–28, 30–31; hierarchy in Chinese writing 167, 169–170; history of Hong Kong 163–165; Japanese war 23, 29; Malay sultanate 45; Sinophone politics in Hong Kong 162–163, 175; sound, modernity, and Asia 4; and Vietnam 276n21 chindon-ya (street musicians) 97n2, 182 Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok 220–237; connecting through pop music 233–234; literary classics and modern literature 232–233; origins of Rediffusion broadcast 222–230; overview 12, 220–221, 234–235; women’s great learning and operas 230–232 Chinese languages: Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok 12, 220–222, 226–230, 232–235; hierarchy in Chinese writing 165–170; ­romanization 177n1; Sinophone politics in Hong Kong 162–163, 165–170 Chinese literature 9, 173, 232–233, 235 Chinese music 12, 89, 226, 233–235 Chineseness 163, 169, 175 Chion, Michael 59, 63, 147–148, 151, 153, 155 chirashi 90, 98n12 Ch’oe Sunsil 62, 75n4 Cho Kuk 62, 75, 75n4 Chow, Rey 164, 168, 175 Chow Yun-fat 169 Chu Yiu-wai 175 cinema see film city music 112–114, 117, 119 city noise 103, 107, 112–115, 117–120 city soundscapes: changing ecology of sound in Japan 103–109; defining

and controlling noise in Japan 109–113; early radio in India 209; in Europe 47; in film 4; re-definition of problem in Japan 113–118; urban noise in modern Japan 7, 101–103, 118–120 civic uplift 208, 211–213, 215 civilisation 7, 47, 102–103, 105–109, 115, 119, 150 class 62, 67, 71, 97n7, 102, 104–105, 107–108, 172 classical music 76n12 Cobraflex IIB 259, 275n6 colonialism: colonial/postcolonial binary 1–2, 4; crypto-colonialism 258, 275n5; decolonisation 5, 14, 62, 258; early radio in India 199–204, 206–207, 211, 215; exoticism 8, 125; Hong Kong 163–164, 167, 169–171; Japan 6, 9, 25, 34, 36, 125, 150; politics of voice 4–6; sound, ­modernity, and Asia 1–4; Taiwan and Korea 4, 20, 25–26, 33–34, 36–37; Thailand 12–13, 45, 227, 273 Columbia 26–28, 30, 33 Comic Market 251 communism: Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok 12, 228; Chinese writing in Hong Kong 167, 169; corporeal voice in Taiwan 27; twin horn in Thailand 13, 258, 260–263, 265–266, 273–274, 275n11, 276n15, 276n16, 277n22 Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) 265–266, 276n19, 276n21 construction noise 103–105, 111, 113 contemptuous sarcasm 5, 65–67, 69, 71 corporeal bullet (nikudan) 19, 22–23, 29, 32–33, 36–37, 37n3 corporeal voice: calling the living to battlefields 32–33; corporeal voice of a war god 20–22; deaf ear in shelter of the silenced 33–36; definition 19; echoes from Russo-Japanese War 22–25; Kobayashi Seizō 25–29; Minami Jirō 29–32; nikusei 4, 19, 21; overview 4–5, 19–20, 36–37; ­phonographic politics 19–37 Cowperthwaite, John 164 Crook, T. 232 crypto-colonialism 258, 275n5 Cullen Rath, R. 14 cultural identity 33, 136, 154, 162–164, 176, 180 cymbals 5, 45, 267, 271

Index  283 Daibō, M. 143, 158n9 Daigo, Emperor 86 dancing 91, 104, 272 Dao Phra Suk Sin 277n27 Das Land ohne Frauen (Land Without Women, film) 159n23 Davis, D. W. 146 deafness 34 decolonisation 5, 14, 62, 258 ‘Deep South’ region, Thailand 42, 44, 52 Delhi 202, 209–210 Deng Lijun (Teresa Teng) 234, 237n18, 237n19 Dent, H. J. 217n9 Derrida, Jacques, Voice and Phenomenon 74n2 dialogue 9, 48–50, 54–56, 151–153, 156 Dibbets, K. 151 diegetic speech 153 Die Tochter des Samurai (The Samurai’s Daughter) 143 digital looms 185–186, 188 digital yūzen 190–194 Disk Union 241 Disney films 69–70, 263 distant listening 207–208 Dolar, Mladen 59, 69, 74n2 double exoticism 8, 125 Dou Wun 172–173 drama 12, 226, 230, 232–233, 235 dubbing 151, 169 Duncan Smith, E. 211–214 Dung Kai-Cheung: Atlas 163, 165; hierarchy in Chinese writing 165–167, 170; history of Hong Kong 163–165; mapping lost sounds in Hong Kong 174–175; nanyin and Cantonese culture 170–173; Natural History trilogy 163, 177n2; other works 163; ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’ 9, 163, 165–167, 170–176, 177n1; romanization 177n1; Sinophone politics in Hong Kong 8–9, 163, 176 dyeing 10–11, 179–183, 184, 189–194 early radio in late colonial India 199–217; imagining radio audience 208–215; from local to global 203–208; overview 3, 11, 199–201, 215; radio historiography in colonial India 201–203; space and place earthquakes 119, 120n10 East India Association 217n10

East/West dichotomy: Asia as method 14; Atarashiki tsuchi and Japan 145, 156; Japanese Noise music 126, 129–130; sound, modernity, and Asia 1, 3–4; technology and imperialism 11; urban noise in modern Japan 102, 107; visuality and aurality 9 Edo period, Japan 7–8, 81–82, 84, 87–90, 92–95, 97, 98n15, 98n16, 104, 134 Edwards, James 130–132 Ehrhardt, C. 225 electronic music 240, 244, 246 Electro-Voice 259–260 emperors 20–21, 32–33, 36, 89 empire: as audible formation 168, 220, 258; British Empire 203, 207–208, 215, 217n10; early radio in India 207–208, 213, 215; East/West dichotomy 4; Hong Kong 169; Japan 9, 20, 32, 156 English language: Atarashiki tsuchi and Japan 142, 151–152; ‘Global English’ programmes 230; hierarchy in Chinese writing 167, 169; Hong Kong 172; Korean cinema villains 5, 64, 71, 74n1, 76n13; Rediffusion programme types 230; subtitles 76n13 Enstad, N. 145 environmental music 244 environmental pollution 104, 107, 109, 113, 118, 243–244 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 118 enzetsu (political speeches) 22, 28 Esormusor, Abdullah 54 ethnography 4, 11, 180, 258, 260 ethnomusicology 41 Europe 1–2, 14, 28, 102, 114–115, 144 Eweler, Ruth 141 exoticism 8, 91, 124–126, 136 extradiegetic speech 153 Fackler, G. 158n17 factories 104–105, 108, 182 Fanck, Arnold 142–144, 146–148, 151–154, 156–157, 158n12, 158n21, 159n22 Fay yen (film) 263 female audience see women Fielden, Lionel 199, 201–202, 208, 215, 217n6 field recording 20, 24, 243 film: Atarashiki tsuchi and Japan 9, 141, 143, 151, 153, 158n11; city

284 Index soundscapes 4; early radio in India 200, 216n4; Hong Kong cinema 173; Korean cinema villains 4–5, 59, 62–64, 71, 75n5; and novels 151; politics of voice 4–5; sound, modernity, and Asia 3–4; sound and power 8–9; travelling cinema 213 fine arts 97n6 Fineman, D. 260 First World War 23, 109 ‘Five Bandits’ (Ojok) (Kim Chiha) 60–62 Flavin, P. 90 Fléchet, Anaïs 8, 125 FM radio 12, 240, 243, 245, 247 free verse 44, 46, 48 Freud, Sigmund 164 Fujioka, W. 244, 254n3 Fujiwara Kujirou 111 Fujiwara no Teika 86, 120n6 Fukushima, K. 98n17 Fusen (Balloon) group 246 gachaman (Nishijin weavers) 183, 188, 193 gagaku (court music) 97n5, 144 Gakusei Audio Rengo (Student Audio Union) 251 Gandhi, Mahatma 199, 215 Garon, Sheldon 1 gaze 149–150 geisha figure 149, 191 geo-body 46 German language 142, 151–154, 158n21 Germany 9, 28, 31, 128, 142–144, 146–148, 150–156, 157n6, 158n18 GGT see Government-General of Taiwan Giachand Motwane 201 Gibson, K. 221 global, and local 1, 3, 203–208 ‘Global English’ programmes 230 Gluck, Carol 14 Godzilla 158n8 Goto, Shimpei 115 Gould, H. R. 10 Government-General of Taiwan (GGT) 26–27 Government of India (GoI) 201–202 gramophones 35, 111, 200, 214, 216n4 Great Kanto earthquake 119 Greece 41 Gua Ceh opera 12, 230–231, 235 Guangdong (Canton) 162, 167 gunshin (gods of war) 19, 21

Gupta, P. S. 215, 216n5 gyokuon (‘jade sound’) 36–37 hand cymbals 267, 271 handlooms 183, 185–187, 194 Haneda airport 114 Hanslick, Eduard 130–131 Haraguchi Hiroyasu, ‘Satin Doll’ 246 Hara Makoto 251; ‘“Feedback 0.14” for UD-35’ 246 Hara Setsuko 141 Harding, Andrew 52 Hareven, T. 188 Hat Yai 49 Haukamp, I. 158n9 Hayakawa Sessue 151 headphones 181, 205 health, and urban noise 105–106, 108–112, 115–117 hearing: as agency 43; Chinese ­broadcast in post-war Bangkok 221, 225–226, 236n12; hierarchy in Chinese writing 168; Japanese Noise music 128, 133; Kyoto kimono-­ making industry 186, 188, 193; and listening 225, 236, 236n12; ­microphones 52; poetic dissonance in Thailand 43, 46, 52; sound, ­modernity, and Asia 1–3; urban noise in modern Japan 110, 112 heikyoku 81–82, 97n1 ‘hell of sound’ (onkyo jikoku) 106, 109, 113, 115 Hemaemool, Uthis, Mirror Reflection 42 Hendy, D. 227 Henriques, J. 275n2 Herzfeld, Michael 275n5 heteroglossia 74n2 hichiriki (reed instrument) 144 Higure Masami 249 Hino Mayuko 128–129, 133, 135 Hirabayashi, H. 151 Hiramatsu, K. 187 Hirano, K. 85 Hirohito, Emperor 36 Hirose Jisuke 189 history writing 10, 167 Hiyama Tamotsu 26 honchōshi tuning 88, 98n14 Hong Kong: hierarchy in Chinese writing 165–170; history of 163–165; mapping the lost sounds in 174–175; nanyin and Cantonese culture 170–174; pop music 234; Rediffusion service 222, 234, 236n11;

Index  285 romanisation 177n1; Sinophone politics and Dung Kai-cheung 162–177; Sinophone politics overview 8–10, 162–163, 176 honorific terms 67, 70–71, 75n10 horns: loudspeakers 214; phonographs 21; ships 149; Tateyama and sōkyoku-jiuta 92; urban noise in modern Japan 105–106, 109, 114; see also twin horn in Thailand Hosoi-san 188, 193 Hosokawa, S. 91 Hsu, Hua 43 ‘huaju’ (drama) 232 Huff, Lee 263 Humphries, Richard, Kingdom’s Edge 56 Hwang Jung-min 64 IBC see Indian Broadcasting Company Ikegami, E. 93 imperialism: Atarashiki tsuchi and Japan 9, 156; corporeal voice in Taiwan and Korea 19–20, 25, 28–30, 32–33, 35–36; hierarchy in Chinese writing 168–169; Japanese 4, 6–7, 9, 19–20, 25, 28–30, 32–33, 35–36, 116, 156, 220; politics of voice 4; sound and power 9; sound, modernity, and Asia 3; technology and imperialism 11–13; in Thailand 13, 220 Imperial Rule Assistance Association 28–29 ‘imperial subjectification’ (kōkoku shinminka) 4, 20, 25, 30, 33, 35–36 incense, listening to 181 India: British colonial novels 156; early radio in late colonial India 199–217; early radio overview 11, 199–201, 215; imagining radio audience 208–215; radio historiography in colonial India 201–203; sound, modernity, and Asia 3–4; space and place; from local to global 203–208 Indian Broadcasting Company (IBC) 201–202, 217n7 The Indian Listener 11, 199, 202–203, 206, 210–211, 217n7, 217n9 Indian Radio Amateurs League 209, 217n9 The Indian Radio Times 217n7 Indian State Broadcasting Service (ISBS) 202–203, 206 indignant sarcasm 5, 67–71 industrialisation 104, 109, 118, 249 industrial noise 111, 113, 149–150, 181

inequality 5, 60, 62, 71 insect sounds 246–247, 251 Institute of Kanda Soundscape Studies 119 instrumental music 97n5, 130, 132 internationalism 13, 207–208 Irie, Yoshiro 158n9, 158n20 Isamu Kosugi 141 Isan region, Thailand 258, 262–263, 265, 269–270, 273, 276n16, 277n30 ISBS see Indian State Broadcasting Service Islam 5, 41, 44–45, 48 Island Funeral (film) 57n5 Ismail, M. 51 Italy 28, 31, 47 Itami Mansuku 142–143, 150, 158n16, 158n20 Itō Noboru 158n16 Ito no shirabe 94 Iwabuchi Toyo 246 Jacobwitz, S. 120n2 ‘jade-sound broadcast’, 36–37 Japan: amateur sound-recording contests 3, 240–254; Atarashiki tsuchi’s acoustic construction of Japan 9, 141–159; corporeal voice in Taiwan and Korea 19–20, 25, 28–33, 35–36; Japanese Noise music 8, 124–137; Kyoto kimono-making industry 8–10, 179–194; modern noise 6–8; sound, modernity, and Asia 4; sound and power 8–11; Tateyama Noboru, quotidian noise, and sōkyoku-jiuta 81–98; urban noise in modern Japan 7–8, 101–120 Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) 24, 246, 251 Japan Columbia 23, 26 Japanese imperialism 4, 6–7, 9, 19–20, 25, 28–30, 32–33, 35–36, 116, 156, 220 Japanese language 34–35, 98n13, 133, 142, 151–155, 158n21 Japanese music 83, 96–97, 132–134, 144, 146, 156; see also Japanese Noise music Japaneseness 8, 101, 125, 136, 148 Japanese Noise music 124–137; ­contrasting Japanese musical sound 128–133; an exoticism 125–126; making of a genre 126–128; ­neurophysiologic justification of aural differences 133–135;

286 Index overview 8, 124–125; positive binder between dualities 135–136 Japan Times 107–108, 120n4 Japan Victor Company 21, 30, 244 Japan Yin Thwe/Nippon Musume (Japanese Darling, film) 152 Jawi 45, 50 jazz music 128, 145–146, 156, 158n17 Jeer, M. 227 Jin-kyung Lee 60, 62 jiuta shamisen 83, 88 Jones, Andrew F. 12 J.O. Studios 142 jugaad (hack) 200, 208–209, 216n3 kabuki theatre 84, 92, 104 Kaguya hime (Princess Kaguya) (film) 142 kakeai (exchange of melodic material) 85, 90, 98n12 Kalayanaphong, Angkan 44 Kamedatomi Co. Ltd. 190–191, 194n6 Kanda, Tokyo 119, 120n9 kanji 24, 28, 31, 36, 37n3 KANTP (Korean Association for the Nation’s Total Power) 29–30 Katayama, M. 158n16 kata yūzen 189–191, 194n6 Katō Kiyomasa 20, 37n1 Kawabe Yūnosuke 182–183, 192–193 Kawakami Shigeyoshi 241 Kawase Satoko 83 Kawazoe Makiko 241 Kelman, Ari 6 kensou (noisy disturbances) 103, 105 kensouon 112 Khao Kho 265–267 kikai nassen (machine printing) 191 Kikkawa Eishi 131–132, 137n5 Kikuhara Hatsuko 96 Kikuhara Kotoji 96 Kikuoka Kengyō, Isochidori 86–87, 87, 88 Kikutaka Kengyō, Mikuni no homare 89, 90 Kikutake Shōtei 95 Kikuzuka Yoichi 95 Kim Chiha, ‘Five Bandits’ (Ojok) 60–62 kimono making see Kyoto kimono-­ making industry Kim Yŏng-jin 60 Kinichi Hirose 112, 117 Kinkyoku chiyo no kotobuki 85, 98n9 Kiyohara Etsushi 252 Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Jens 69–70

klorn pao (free verse) 44 Knudsen, Vern 114, 120n8 Kobayashi Goro 251 Kobayashi Seizō: ‘Addressing the islanders’ (T ōmin ni tsugu) 19, 26–27, 33; ‘Addressing the youth’ (Seinen ni tsugu) 19, 27–28, 30, 32–33; corporeal voice in Taiwan 19, 25–30, 33–36 Kobayashi Shumei 189, 191 Kohata Shigekazu 112 Kojima Tomiko 137n5 Koji Sato 113–115 Kokin waka-shū 86 kokutai (national body) 116 kokyū (three-stringed lute) 83, 97n3, 98n18 Komine Yoshio 246 Korea: corporeal voice and Minami 4, 19–20, 25, 28–32, 34–37; five bandits villainy 60–64; Kikutake Shōtei work 95; Ryoo Seung-Wan and villains in film 4–5, 59–76; The Unjust and Veteran 64–71; voice of villains overview 59–60, 71 Korean Air Nut Rage 62, 75n4 Korean Association for the Nation’s Total Power (KANTP) 29–30 Korean language 35, 63–64, 68, 71 Korean War 61, 260 koto (13-stringed zither): Atarashiki tsuchi and Japan 143–144, 146, 157; early Meiji composers and change 89, 91; Miyagi Michio 142; Tateyama and sōkyoku-jiuta 7, 81–85, 93–95, 97n8, 98n9, 98n18 Koyama, H. 111, 120n6 Kristeva, Julia 74n2 Kurata, Y. 21 Kurihara, Kaname 115–119 Kuri Yoji 246 Kusunoki Tetsuhide 23 Kwan, Stanley 173 Kyoto kimono-making industry 179–194; Nishijin orimono 183–189; overview 8–10, 179–180, 193–194; reconsidering sound 180–183; sound, modernity, and Asia 3; yūzen 189–193 Kyō-yūzen dyeing 180, 183, 189–194 Kyu Hyun Kim 63 LaBelle, Brandon 43, 51–52 Lam, Flora 177n1, 177n4 Lang, Fritz, Harakiri 149

Index  287 language: Atarashiki tsuchi and Japan 142, 151–155, 159n24; early radio in India 213; of film 151; hierarchy in Chinese writing 165–170; nanyin and Cantonese culture 172; ­neurophysiologic justification of aural differences 133–134; and noise 55; Rediffusion and pop music 233; Sinophone politics in Hong Kong 9–10, 162, 176; sound and power 9–10 Lao 263, 276n17 Larkin, Brian 211 laughter 69–70 Laver, John 63 League of Nations 158n18 Leavis, F. R. 172 Lee, Ang, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 169 Lee, Jin-kyung 60 Lelyveld, D. 216n1 Letters from Thailand (Botan) 220, 235n2 Levy, Simon E. 259–260 ‘Li de hu sheng’ (‘beautiful sound’) 12, 220–223, 235 Ling Temco Vought 260 listening: Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok 220–221, 225–226, 236n12; circuits of 12; distant listening 207–208; early radio in India 11, 209, 215; and hearing 225, 236, 236n12; Japanese Noise music 128–131, 134, 137n5; listening in the dark 51–52; listening to the incense 181; ­neurophysiologic justification of aural differences 134; privatisation of 11; senses and sound 13; subjectivity 32–33 Liszt, Franz 131 literacy 12, 232–235 literature 9–10, 12, 232–233, 235 Liu Zhenting 234 Li Yi 233 local and global 1, 3, 13–14, 168, 203–208 logocentrism 74n2 looms 179, 183–188, 192–194 loudspeakers: airports 114; Atarashiki tsuchi and Japan 146; early radio in India 214; Rediffusion broadcast in Bangkok 225; technology and imperialism 11; twin horn in Thailand 13, 257, 259, 263, 265 Luang Wichit Wathakan 264, 275n11 Lucken, M. 128

Machiavelli, Niccolò 51 Machida Hideo 246, 252–253 Macy, Roger 157n2 Madras 204, 216n4 Madras Presidency Radio Club 201 maeuta 85, 87 Malaya 206, 222, 228 Malay voices 5, 40–41, 45, 48, 52 male gaze 149 Manchukuo 147, 149, 153, 157n3, 157n6, 158n18 Manchurian Incident 23, 29, 31 Mandarin 12, 162, 167–169, 177n1, 220, 229–230, 233–235 Mandarin songs 12, 233–235 marching bands 42, 91, 98n17 march music 7, 91–92 Marconiphone set 208 Marcos, Ferdinand 45 martial arts 169 martial law 5, 41–49, 52–56 Martin, C. R. 144, 156 masculinity 149 Mass Communication of Thailand (MCOT) 237n20 Matsu’ura Kengyō 88 McClary, S. 97 MDU see Mobile Development Units Mecca 48 Meiji period, Japan 7, 21, 28, 81–82, 88–92, 95, 97, 102–103, 105, 113, 144, 190 The Melayu Review 52 Melodie des Herzens (Melody of the Heart, film) 152, 159n23 microphones 47, 51–56 Mikawa Toshiji 124–127, 135 military music 7, 35, 83, 90–93, 95 Miller, T. E. 273, 277n28 Minami Jirō: corporeal voice 19–20, 25, 29–36; ‘Displaying the state’s total power’ (Kokka sōryoku no hakki) 20, 29–30, 33–34; ‘Instructions for the nation on the home front’ (Jūgo kokuminkun) 20, 30–34; ‘The Japanese-Russian War and the Present Incident’ 29 Minezaki Kōtō 85 Minoura, K. 186–187 minshingaku 89 Misawa Katsue 137n4 MIT see Mobile Information Teams Mitchell, J. L. 277n28 Miyagi Michio 83, 97, 141–144, 146–148, 150, 155, 157

288 Index miyako-bushi onkai 94, 98n15, 98n16 Miyamoto Tsuneichi 137n4 Miyazaki Yūzen 189 Mobile Development Units (MDU) 261–263 Mobile Information Teams (MIT) 261, 261 modernity: Asia as method 14; Atarashiki tsuchi and Japan 149; Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok 12; early radio in India 200–201, 213; Japanese Noise music 136; sound, modernity, and Asia 1–4; sound and power 9; Tateyama and sōkyoku-jiuta 7, 82, 96; technology and imperialism 11; twin horn in Thailand 270, 274; urban noise in modern Japan 6–8, 102, 105–109, 113 modern noise: Japanese Noise music 124–137; overview 1, 6–8; Tateyama Noboru and sōkyoku-jiuta 81–98; urban noise in modern Japan 101–120 modern sound 1, 3, 7, 11, 14, 90, 102, 105 molam 13, 257, 263, 268, 270, 272–273, 276n16, 277n30 Moon Jae-in 75n4 Mori Makoto 191–192 Motosada Zumoto 120n4 Movement for New Japanese Music 82 movies see film MSBR 135 Murph, M. 227 Musen to jikken (Radio Experimenter’s Magazine) 242–243 mushi kiki (insect-listening) 134 music: amateur recording contests in Japan 240, 242–244, 246; anthropology of 258; Atarashiki tsuchi and Japan 9, 143–147, 156, 158n11; Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok 220, 226, 230, 233–235; city music 112–114, 117, 119; classical music 76n12; electronic music 240, 246, 252; film scores 9, 143–145, 147; instrumental music 97n5, 130, 132; and Japanese Noise music 8, 130–132; jazz 128, 145–146, 156, 158n17; localised ontologies 258; military music 7, 35, 83, 90–93, 95; and noise 7–8; Plato and Aristotle 46; and poetry 41, 56; pop music 12, 83, 127, 172, 230, 233–235; ­postmodernism 8; pre-modern

musical meaning 84–88; sound, modernity, and Asia 4; street music 104, 182; Tateyama and sōkyoku-jiuta 81–82, 84–88, 97; twin horn in Thailand 13, 274; urban noise in modern Japan 104, 112; see also Japanese Noise music Muslim voices 40, 43, 48–49, 52 Muzak 260 Naficy, Hamid, An Accented Cinema 59 Nagata Shigeho 246 Nagoya 105, 148 Naitō, T. 144 Nakajima Yoshimichi 101, 120n1 Nakamura Hiroshi 27 Nakashima Utashito 90–91, 94 namaroku (amateur sound-recordings) 12–13, 240–241, 243–251, 253 nanyin (southern sound) 10, 163, 165–167, 170–176, 177n1 Naowarat Phongpaiboon 44 nationalism 9, 59, 89, 91, 116, 147, 199, 225, 264 nation-state 46, 116 Natsume Chiyoko 246, 249–250 nature 6, 10, 129–135, 137n5, 181, 231 negative hallucination 164, 171 Nehru, Jawaharlal 199, 215 nervous system 108, 110 neurophysiology of aural differences 133–135 newspapers 28, 203–204, 207 New York 109–110 NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) 24, 246, 251 niagari tuning 88, 98n14 Nihonjinron (theories of Japaneseness) 101, 136n3 nikudan (corporeal bullet) 19, 22–23, 29, 32–33, 36–37, 37n3 nikusei (corporeal voice) 4, 19, 21; see also corporeal voice Nishijin district, Kyoto 179, 182–189, 184, 193–194 Nishijin Ori Kōgei Bijutsukan 188, 194n5 nobat (royal drums) 5, 45 No Blood, No Tears (film) 63 Noda Ichiro 241 Nogi Maresuke, General 19–23, 25–26, 29, 32 noh theatre 92, 104, 144, 185 noise: Atarashiki tsuchi and Japan 143, 147–150, 158n11; defining,

Index  289 understanding, and controlling noise 109–113; definitions 6, 182, 227; Japanese Noise music 8, 131–132, 135; Kyoto kimono-making industry 10, 181–182, 186–189; and language 55; modern noise 6–8; and music 7–8; poetic dissonance in Thailand 41–42, 47, 52, 55; re-definition of problem 113–118; Rediffusion, Chinese Sound and Thai State 227; sound and power 9; Tateyama and sōkyoku-jiuta 83, 92–93; urban noise in modern Japan 7, 101–120 Noise music see Japanese Noise music noise pollution 107, 111, 118–119, 244 noise prevention 114, 116–117 Nojiri Shūichi 185–186 Nophadol Duangphon 266 North/South binary 1, 4, 14 Novak, David 3, 6, 14, 126, 180–181; Japanoise 126; Keywords in Sound 3, 120n1 novels 151, 156, 233 Ochoa Gautier, Ana María 2, 93 Ockey, James 48 Ogasawara Naganari 21, 23 Ogawa Genji 249 Ogi Masahiro 244–246 Oikawa Tadao 254n2 Okeh 31, 33 Okuyama Ichiro 248, 252 Olaniyan, Tejumola 168; Audible Empire 3, 168–169 ongaku (music) 112 onkyo jikoku (‘hell of sound’) 106 onkyou (sound) 112 onshoku (sound colour) 131–132 opera 172–174, 226, 230–231, 235 orchestras 133, 144, 157 organic noise 104, 111–112 Orientalism 9, 144, 148–150, 156 orimono (weaving) 180, 183–189, 193–194 Orinasukan 185 Osaka, Japan 105–110, 114–115, 119 othering 2, 144, 156 Overseas Rediffusion Ltd 222, 228 overtones 132 Oyama Iwao, General 25 O Yo Sin 266–268 Paquet, Darcy 60 paralinguistic interjections 69 Park Chung Hee 61, 71

Park Geun-hye 62, 75n4 Parkinson, Adam 190 pathos 134 Patton, Simon 177n1, 177n4 P.C.L. (Photo Chemical Laboratory) 142, 152 pentatonic scale 270 Phao Siyanon 228 phenomenology 129 Phet Caroen Sin 268–270, 277n29 Phetchabun province, Thailand 13, 257–259, 265–266, 269–271, 273, 276n19, 277n28 Phetphinthong 266, 276n16, 277n23 phin (three-stringed lute) 266–268, 268, 269–273, 277n23 phin prayuk 13, 257–258, 262, 263, 266–268, 268, 269–274, 277n27, 277n29 phono-capitalism 34 phonocentrism 74n2 phonograph 4, 11, 22, 120n2, 206–207 phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’ 19–37; calling the living to battlefields 32–33; corporeal voice of a war god 20–22; deaf ear in shelter of the silenced 33–36; echoes from the Russo-Japanese War 22–25; Kobayashi Seizō 25–29; Minami Jirō 29–32; overview 4–5, 19–20, 36–37; sound, modernity, and Asia 4 photography 216n4, 250 Phu, Sunthorn 44 physics 112 piano 95 piazza 47 Pinkerton, A. 201, 215, 216n5 pinyin 177n1 Pioneer 252 PIP (Psychological Indoctrination Program) 260 pirate media practices 216n3 pitch 24, 63, 66–71, 132 place 169, 203–208 Plato 51, 56; The Laws 46; Republic 50 Plourde, L. 180–182 Podesva, R. J. 70 poetic dissonance in Thai-Malay borderlands 40–57; the microphone 51–55; not the ‘deep south’ 45–48; overview 5, 40–42, 55–56; sound, modernity, and Asia 4; from voice to dialogue 48–50; voice and political subjectivity 42–44 poetry 4, 41, 49, 55–56, 60–61

290 Index political speeches (enzetsu) 22, 28 politics of voice: corporeal voice in Taiwan and Korea 19–37; overview 1, 4–6; poetic dissonance in Thai-Malay borderlands 40–57; voice of villains in Korean cinema 59–76 pollution 104, 107, 109, 111, 113, 118–119, 243–244 polyphony 9, 42, 169 pop music 12, 83, 127, 172, 230, 233–235 Porath, N. 9 postcolonialism 1, 4, 20, 45, 163, 175–176, 213 post-developmentalism 60, 62 post-industrial society 248–249 postlinguistic voice 69–70 postmodernism 7–8, 124 Potter, S. 207–208, 217n8 power 1, 4–6, 8–11, 41, 63, 154–155 power looms 179, 183, 185–188, 193–194 Prasong Hongsanan 228 prayuk 269–270, 274; see also phin prayuk pre-modern music 84, 97, 97n5 processional bands 257–259, 266–268, 270–271, 274; see also phin prayuk propaganda: Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok 12, 225–226, 228; early radio in India 199–200, 213, 215; and power 154; twin horn in Thailand 13, 258, 264, 273–274, 275n11, 277n30 Psychological Indoctrination Program (PIP) 260 psychological warfare 258, 260, 263–264, 267 public address systems 119, 257, 260, 262–263 public health 105, 111, 115–117, 213 Punk 127 Qiong Yao, Yan yui meng meng (‘Misty rain’) 233 Quintero, M. 182, 188–189 quotidian noise 7–8, 93 racial equality 25, 33, 36 Radano, Ronald 168; Audible Empire 3, 168–169 radio: amateur sound-recording contests in Japan 12, 240, 242, 245, 248; Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok 12, 220–230, 235; ­corporeal voice in Taiwan and Korea 22, 29;

early radio in late colonial India 3, 11, 199–217; origins of Rediffusion broadcast 222–230; radio historiography in colonial India 201–203; technology and imperialism 11; twin horn in Thailand 275n10; urban noise in modern Japan 111, 120n2 Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) 172 radio waves 206, 209, 222 Rancière, Jacques 41–42, 48 Randolph, R. S. 262 reception reports 206, 206, 217n9 recording contests see amateur sound-recording contests in Japan recording industry 19–20, 23, 30, 34–35, 127 records 27–28, 35, 214 rediffusion 222, 223, 236n3 ‘Rediffusion’ broadcast: Bangkok coverage area 224; Bangkok’s urban phenomenon 223–225; beautiful sound implications 228–230; Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok 12, 220–221, 234–235, 236n8; Chinese Sound and Thai State 226–228; connecting through pop music 233–234; literary classics and modern literature 232–233; origins of Rediffusion broadcast 222–230; programme types 230; terminology 236n3; timetable 229; women’s great learning and operas 230–232 Rediffusion Ltd 222, 234 regimes of knowledge 2–4, 14 Reith, John 216n5 rhythm 91–92, 98n17, 130, 132 Rice, T. 225 ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’ (Dung Kai-Cheung) 9, 163, 165–167, 170–176, 177n1 Rock music 127–128 Rokuhan 244, 247–248 Roland 248, 251–253 Roosevelt, Theodor 37n4 rural audience 200, 208, 210–215 rural uplift 214 Russo-Japanese War 22–25, 29, 158n18 Ryojun (Port Arthur) 20, 22 Ryoo Seung-bum 64–65, 75, 75n11 Ryoo Seung-Wan: The City of Violence 60; Crying Fist 60; The Unjust 5, 60, 63; Veteran 5, 60, 63; voice of villains in cinema 5, 60, 63, 71, 75n3

Index  291 Sabata Toyoyuki 137n4 sacred sounds 4, 25, 32 Saeki Akihiko 190–192 Saiburi River 53, 53 Saito Kikuo 187–188 Sakai, Naoki 14 Sakaisuji, Osaka 105–109, 115 Sakakeeny, Matt 14, 180; Keywords in Sound 3 Sakurai Tadayoshi 29; Nikudan (Corporeal Bullets) 22–23, 32, 37n3 Samoe Sin 262 San Guo (‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’) 232 sansagari tuning 88, 98n14 Sapir, Edward, ‘Speech as a Personality Trait’ 5, 70 sarcasm 5, 63–65, 67–68, 71, 75n10, 76n13 Sato, Koji 113–114, 117–119, 120n7 Satou Takeo 112 sawari (touch) 132 scales 83, 89, 98n15, 98n16, 270 Schafer, R. Murray 41, 46, 168, 181; The Soundscape 6, 119, 168 scores 9, 143–145, 147 Scotland 186 Sebata Hideo 247 Second Sino-Japanese War 20, 25–27, 31, 35 Second World War 31, 36, 113, 136n3, 260, 275n12 Seidensticker, E. G. 120n10 Seki Masami 247–248 self-writing 175 senses 10, 13, 101, 180–181, 189, 193, 221 Serres, Michael 42, 51–52 Sewol Ferry 62, 75, 75n4 shakuhachi (bamboo flute) 132–133 shamisen (three-stringed lute) 81–85, 89, 94, 97n8, 98n14, 98n18, 104, 132, 145–146 shamisen kumiuta 96 Shanghai 145, 157n3 Shanghai Incident 23 Shichigosan festival 247, 254n8 Shih Shu-mei 10, 162–163, 169, 175–176 shimai (dance) 92 Shinozaki Koichi 241, 246 Shinrindo LLC 192 Shintō 154 Shirane, H. 86 shobai (trade) 193 shōka (singing education) 22

shumianyu (literary language) 9, 162 Siam 45, 48, 56n2, 220, 227; see also Thailand Siege of Port Arthur (Ryojun) 20, 22 silence 5, 32, 52, 114, 193 silent film 147 silk 183–189, 192 singing 103, 173 Sino-British Joint Declaration 163, 165 Sino-Japanese War 30, 91 Sinophone politics in Hong Kong 162–177; hierarchy in Chinese writing 165–170; history of Hong Kong 163–165; mapping the lost sounds in Hong Kong 174–175; nanyin and Cantonese culture 170–174; overview 8, 162–163, 176; sound and power 8, 10 Sinophone theory 10, 163, 169, 175–176 Smilor, Raymond 109 Smith, A. 91 social media 43, 276n15 Socrates 41, 46, 50 sōkyoku-jiuta 7, 81–84, 86, 88–91, 93–97, 97n2, 97n4, 98n15 Somchai Neelaphaijit 44 ‘song siang thang sai’ (‘transmitting sound by wire’) 12, 223, 235 sonic agency 43 sonic ecology 102–109, 118–119, 120n3 sonic modernity 11, 200, 215 sonic realism 213 Sonnenschein, D. 153 Sony 244–245, 247, 249 sound: Asia as method 13–15; changing ecology of sound 103–109; modern noise 6–8; politics of voice 4–6; reconsidering sound 180–183; sound, modernity, and Asia 1–4; sound and power 8–11; split of sound and script 165–170; technology and imperialism 11–13 sound and power: Atarashiki tsuchi’s acoustic construction of Japan 141–159; Dung Kai-cheung 162–177; Kyoto kimono-making industry 179–194; overview 1, 8–11; Sinophone politics in Hong Kong sound film 147, 155–156, 159n23 sound hunting 3, 241 soundproofing 110, 113, 118 sound-recording contests see amateur sound-recording contests in Japan soundscapes (definitions) 6, 104, 181

292 Index soundscape studies (saundosukēpugaku) 10, 180 sound studies 1–4, 10–11, 14–15, 60, 83, 101–102, 168–169, 200, 221, 258 sound systems 13, 257–258, 263, 266–269, 271–272, 274, 275n2 soundtracks 143, 145, 148–149, 154–155, 158n11 sound waves 112–113, 204, 206 souon (noise) 111–112 South Korea 4–5, 60–64, 71 space and place 11, 200, 203–208 spectograms 72–74 speech: Atarashiki tsuchi and Japan 150–155; depersonalisation of 54; recording 4–5, 19; tempo 63, 71; textual speech 153, 155; voice of villains in Korean cinema 63, 65, 67–71; see also corporeal voice static and interference 42 steamboat whistles 107–108 steam locomotives 246–247 Steingo, Gavin 2–3, 102, 221, 258; Remapping Sound Studies 2 Stereo magazine 242, 245 Sterne, Jonathan 2, 90, 168; The Audible Past 168 street music 104, 182 street noise 103–104, 113 Strickland, C. F. 211–212 Suan Ngeun Mee Ma 42 subjectivity 32, 42–44, 55, 127, 131 subtitles 76n13, 151–152, 158n21 Sueoka, Shinichi 120n11 Sugano Okihiko 243, 246 Sulong, Haji 48–49 Sumida River 107–109 Sunthorn Phu 44 Suzuki Hideo 137n4 Suzuki Koson 83 Sykes, Jim 2–3, 102, 221, 258; Remapping Sound Studies 2 synthesisers 248, 251–253 Syukri, Ibrahim 45 Taiwan 4, 19–20, 25–27, 33–37, 169 Tajima Shosen 250 takabata (treadle loom) 183 Takagi Isamu, ‘Shi “daishizen” (Poetry “Great Nature”)’ 246 Takahashi Rensen Co. Ltd. 191 Takahashi Seisuke 191–192 Takahashi Yoji 247 Tak Bai Massacre 43, 57n4

Takemitsu Tōru 132, 134, 137n5; November Steps 132 talkies 8, 22, 29, 141, 151, 155, 157 Tamori 247 Tano Kōji 135 tape recorders 12–13, 240, 242–243, 246–247, 249–250, 252 Tasaka, Y. 147 taste (as sense) 180–181, 189 Tateyama Noboru: Gaisen rappa no shirabe 83, 90, 92, 93; quotidian noise and sōkyoku-jiuta 7, 83, 90–97 Tausig, Benjamin 277n24 tebata (handloom) 183 technology and imperialism: amateur sound-recording contests in Japan 240–254; Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok 220–237; early radio in late colonial India 199–217; overview 11–13; twin horn in Thailand 257–277 technoscapes 207 tegaki yūzen 189–192 tegoto 84–85, 87, 87, 88, 90, 90, 92, 93, 98n12 tegotomono 84–85, 87–88, 90, 97, 97n5, 98n12, 98n15 Teichiku (record company) 29, 31 telephone 11, 22, 120n2 television 62, 75n5, 235 tempo of speech 63, 71 Teng, Teresa (Deng Lijun) 234, 237n18, 237n19 Ten Years in Thailand (film) 42 textile industry 182, 187, 190, 192; see also Kyoto kimono-making industry textual speech 153, 155 Thailand: Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok 12, 220–237; national anthem 42, 56n3, 229; poetic dissonance in Thai-Malay borderlands 4–5, 40–57; Rediffusion broadcast and Bangkok’s urban phenomenon 223–225; Rediffusion, Chinese Sound and Thai State 226–228; as Siam 45, 48, 56n2, 220, 227; twin horn in Thailand 3, 13, 257–277 Thai language 12, 226, 228, 235 Thainess 227–228, 270, 274, 277n26 Thai Rediffusion Company 228, 236n8, 237n21 Thai TV Company 235, 237n20 Thak Chaloemtiarana 264 Thaksin Shinawatra 44

Index  293 theatre 92, 155, 157, 216n4 theatrical speech 153 Thompson, Emily 104, 120n8 Thongchai Winichakul 42, 45–46, 57 Thongsay Thapthanon 266, 277n23 Tiananmen Massacre 165 timbre 131–132 The Times of India 11, 199, 202–207, 209, 211 Todorov, Tzvetan 125 T od̄  o ̄-za 81–82, 88, 97n1 ‘Toen thoet chao Thai’ (‘Wake up Thai people!’) (song) 264 Tōgō Heihachirō, Admiral 19, 23–26, 32 Tōjō Hideki 30–31 Tokutake Naoto 250–251, 253, 254n9 Tokyo: Atarashiki tsuchi and Japan 143, 145–146, 148; enzetsu (political speeches) 28; urban noise in modern Japan 103–105, 107–109, 113–114, 118–119, 120n10, 135 Tokyo University Orchestra 251 Tomita Isao 246 Tomiyama Seikin 96 Tomizaki Shunshō 96 Tomizawa Yasuo 251–253, 254n9 tongsu literature 173 Torigoe Keiko 119, 193 Towira, Pimpaka, Island Funeral 43 traffic noise 102–107, 109–110, 113–114, 118–119 trains 106, 110, 114, 118, 148, 181, 212–213, 250–251 transportation 103–106, 108, 111, 113–114 treadle looms 183, 185 Tsuburaya Eiji 158n8 Tsunoda Tadanobu 133–134 Tsu Wei (Zi Wei) 234 tunings 88, 98n14, 98n15 twin horn in Thailand 257–277; design 275n6; images 259, 261; overview 13, 257–259, 273–274; sound propaganda and amplification 265–270; twin horns and phin prayuk set-up 271–273; twin horns as weapon of propaganda 259–265 Ueda Hikoji 247 Uehara Rokushirō 98n15 Ueno Park 181 United Kingdom (UK): corporeal voice in Korea 30–31; early radio in India 208; history of Hong Kong 163–165, 167, 172; noise and class 104

United States (US): corporeal voice in Korea 30–31; early radio in India 205; sound studies 1; twin horn in Thailand 3, 13, 257–258, 260–267, 273–274, 275n10, 275n12; urban noise in modern Japan 102, 109, 114–115; Vietnam War 257–258, 261, 275n7 universality 2–3, 10, 14, 179 The Unjust (film) 5, 60, 63–67, 69–71, 75n3 urban elite audience 11, 82, 84, 86, 200, 208, 214–215 urbanisation 42, 110, 118–119, 221, 223–225 urban music 103 urban noise: Kyoto kimono-making industry 10–11, 179–180; Tateyama and sōkyoku-jiuta 7, 83, 94, 96 urban noise in modern Japan 101–120; changing ecology of sound 103–109; defining, understanding, and controlling noise 109–113; overview 7–8, 101–103, 118–120; ­reconstruction and re-definition of problem 113–118 US Information Service (USIS) 262–264, 275n10, 276n13 Utz, Christian 136 Veteran (film) 5, 60, 63–65, 67–71, 75n3, 76n13 Victim, Mr A. 107–109, 120n4 Victor 21–25, 30, 244, 252 Vietnam War 257–258, 261, 275n7, 276n14, 276n21 Village Radio Project 275n10 village uplift 211 villains, voices of: English language media 74n1; examples 75n6; five bandits villainy 60–64; overview 5, 59–60; The Unjust and Veteran 64–71 Virden, Richard A. 276n18 visuality 2–3, 9, 60, 71, 155–156, 169 vocal tract 63 Voeglin, S. 93 voice: Atarashiki tsuchi and Japan 143, 150–155, 158n11; corporeal voice overview 4–5, 19; poetic dissonance in Thailand 41–44, 46–50, 54, 56; and political subjectivity 42–44; politics of voice overview 4–6; from voice to dialogue 48–50; voice of villains in Korean cinema 59–60, 63, 70–71; see also corporeal voice

294 Index voice-over narration 151, 153–155 volcanoes 148, 150 Volcler, Juliette 260 vowels 133–134 Wada Norihiko 244–246, 250 Wakabayashi Shunsuke 243 waka poetry 86, 98n13 Walkman 11, 248 Wang, David Der-wei 163 Wang Zhuqing 233–234 warfare: corporeal voice in Taiwan and Korea 22–23, 25–28, 31–33, 35–36; twin horn in Thailand 3, 13, 260, 273–274; war damage in Japan 114 Watanabe, T. 120n5 Watsuji Tetsurō 137n4 weaving 10–11, 179–180, 182–189, 192–194 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong: ‘Photophobia # 1-4’ 43; ‘Song of the City’ 42 Weheliye, Alexander 206–207 Weidman, A. 59, 155–156 West/East binary see East/West dichotomy Western music 7, 81–84, 91–92, 94, 129–134, 144 whistles 107–110 Williams, Raymond 172–173 Wirachon Ketsakun 276n15, 276n16 wireless internationalism 207–208 ‘Wireless Notes’ (later ‘Wireless News’), The Times of India 199, 202–206, 208–209, 211

women: AURC award winners 249; Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok 12, 230–232, 235; learning from Gua Ceh and Chaozhou operas 230–232; unheard voices 46 Wong Bik-wan, Children of Darkness 176 working class 62, 67, 71, 172 World Soundscape Project 119 writing, Chinese 162, 165–170, 173–176 ‘xiao’ (filial piety) 231–232 Yamada Kōsaku 142–148, 156–157, 158n9, 158n15, 158n16 Yamagata Takahisa 241, 248, 250 Yamamoto Shoji, ‘Kogai (Pollution)’ 245–246 Yamazaki Masakazu 248–249, 252 Yasar, Kerim 120n2 Yeoh, Michelle 169 Yokoi Yayū, Ongyoku-setsu 88 Yomiuri News 21 Yomota, I. 149 Yoo Ah-in 64, 67, 75n11; Burning 75n11; Punch 75n11 Yuji Keigo 20–21 Yung, Bell 173 Yu Siu Wah 172–174 yu ̄zen dyeing 179–183, 184, 189–194 Yūzō Murayama 182, 190, 194 Zhang Ziyi 169 Zivin, J. 208, 211, 215, 217n6, 217n11, 217n12