Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan [1 ed.] 0415633451, 9780415633451

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Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan

This book argues that sound – as it is created, transmitted and perceived – plays a key role in the constitution of space and community in contemporary Japan. The book examines how sonic practices reflect politics, aesthetics and ethics, with transformative effects on human relations. From right-wing sound trucks to leftwing protests, from early twentieth-century jazz cafés to contemporary avant-garde art forms, from the sounds of US military presence to exuberant performances organized in opposition, the book, rich in ethnographic detail, contributes to sensory anthropology and the anthropology of contemporary Japan. Joseph D. Hankins received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2009 and is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. His research investigates the politics and aesthetics of stigmatized labor in Japan.

Carolyn S. Stevens holds degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Columbia Universities and is Professor in Japanese Studies and Director of the Japanese Studies Centre at Monash University, Australia. She is the author of On the Margins of Japanese Society, Japanese Popular Music and Disability in Japan (all published by Routledge).

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Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan Edited by Joseph D. Hankins and Carolyn S. Stevens

R

Routledge Tavlor & Francis Croup

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 selection and editorial material, Joseph D. Hankins and Carolyn S. Stevens; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of the editor to be identified as author 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. All rights reserved. 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. 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 Sound, space and sociality in modern Japan / edited by Joseph D. Hankins and Carolyn S. Stevens. pages cm — (Routledge contemporary Japan series ; 49.) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Ethnology—Japan. 2. Senses and sensation—Japan. 3. Ethnomusicology— Japan. 4. Auditory perception—Japan. 5. Musical perception—Japan. 6. Popular music—Japan. 7. Popular culture—Japan. 8. Social movements— Japan. 9. Japan—Social life and cusotms. I. Hankins, Joseph D. II. Stevens, Carolyn S., 1963– GN635.J2S68 2013 306.0952—dc23 2012051062 ISBN: 978-0-415-63345-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-76129-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by FiSH Books Ltd, Enfield

Contents

1 2

Acknowledgements List of illustrations Contributors Notes to the reader Introduction

JOSEPH D. HANKINS AND CAROLYN S. STEVENS

x xi xii xiv 1

Publics that scream, publics that slumber: Sound and the tactics of publicity in the Buraku liberation movement

20

Facing the nation: Sound, fury, and public oratory among Japanese right-wing groups

37

4

The political affects of military aircraft noise in Okinawa

57

5

Distraction, noise, and ambient sounds in Tokyo

71

6

Sounding imaginative empathy: Chindon-ya’s affective economies on the streets of Osaka

89

3

7

JOSEPH D. HANKINS

NATHANIEL M. SMITH RUPERT COX

LORRAINE PLOURDE

MARIÉ ABE

The swinging phonograph in a hot teahouse: Sound technology and the emergence of the jazz community in prewar Japan 108 SHUHEI HOSOKAWA

References Index

127 140

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to first thank Peter Sowden from Routledge for taking on this project and his assistance in seeing it to fruition. An edited volume is always the product of collaboration, and thus we must first thank our contributors whose lively ideas and writing have made this project possible. This group of papers arose from a panel from the 2009 American Anthropological Association Annual meeting that was first envisioned and organised by Joseph D. Hankins, Lorraine Plourde, and Nathaniel Smith. The original panel included presentations by Abe, Hankins, Plourde, and Smith, with Stevens as discussant. Cox’s and Hosokawa’s papers were added soon afterward to fill out the volume. The editors gratefully acknowledge the permission granted by Inomata Hajime of Tozaiya Co. Ltd. to reproduce the image of the chindon-ya group Chindon Tsûshinsha.

List of illustrations

3.1

3.2

3.3 3.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1

7.2 7.3

A prefectural police officer observes a Dai-Nippon Aikokutô sound truck during the 2008 G8 meetings in Sapporo The leader of New Right group Issuikai performs street oratory atop a print of George W. Bush on a Sapporo sidewalk A trio of Aikokutô sound trucks, parked in front of Ikebukuro Station on August 9: “Anti-Russia Day.” An activist-orator speaks from atop the right-most vehicle Funakawa holds a broken Tibetan flag after his clash with the anarchists Chindon Tsûshinsha on the street Members of Chindon Tsûshinsha interacting with passersby Unidentified listeners looking out of their window at the sound of chindon-ya outside A 1935 advertisement for Savoia, near Ginza, with a photograph of Bing Crosby Advertisement for Black Bird, a jazz kissa in Ginza A 1939 advertisement of Loy, near Ginza, emphasizing its audio set, RCA6B5PP, the only set available in Japan

38 39 46 53 90 97

103 113 116 118

Contributors

Marié Abe is Assistant Professor of Music (Musicology and Ethnomusicology) at Boston University. She holds an MA and a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a degree in sociology, anthropology, and ethnomusicology from Swarthmore College. Her scholarship explores politics of space and sound, critical cultural theory, and Japanese popular performing arts.

Rupert Cox lectures in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. He received his MA and PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh, finishing in 1998. He has lectured in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester since 2002. Major publications include The Zen Arts: An Anthropological Study of the Culture of Aesthetic Form in Japan (Routledge, 2003) and The Culture of Copying in Japan: cultural and historical perspectives (Routledge, 2007, edited volume).

Joseph D. Hankins is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. He received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He has published on multiculturalism in Japan, sensory aspects of difference, and the politics of sympathy. He is currently finishing a monograph on social stigma, labor, and political mobilization in Japan.

Shuhei Hosokawa is Research Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. Born in Osaka in 1955, Hosokawa earned degrees from the University of Tokyo and the University of Fine Arts and Music of Tokyo (Tôkyô Geidai). Previous academic posts include the University of Fine Arts and Music of Tokyo, the University of Michigan, and Tokyo Institute of Technology. Noted publications include Rekodo no Bigaku (The Aesthetics of Recorded Sound, Keiso Shobo) and Karaoke Around the World: Global Technology and Local Singing (co-edited with Toru Mitsui, Routledge), plus numerous articles and chapters in Japanese, English, Spanish and Italian.

Lorraine Plourde is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Media, Society, and the Arts at Purchase College, State University of New York. She received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University in 2009 and her MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of Washington. Her research

Contributors

xiii

interests concern avant-garde and experimental aesthetics, sound studies, anthropology of the senses, and animal studies.

Nathaniel M. Smith is currently the Japan Foundation Faculty Fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He holds a BA in Foreign Language from UC Riverside, an MA in International Relations from Waseda University, and an East Asian Studies MA and PhD in anthropology from Yale University. His primary research concerns the political activism and social worlds of Japan’s right-wing groups.

Carolyn S. Stevens is Professor of Japanese Studies and Director of the Japanese Studies Centre at Monash University, Australia. She holds degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Columbia Universities. She is the author of Japanese Popular Music: Culture, Authenticity and Power (Routledge, 2008), and Disability in Japan (Routledge, 2013). She is also the editor of Japanese Studies and the President of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia (2011–2013).

Notes to the reader

This volume uses the Hepburn system for transliteration, except in cases where words have entered common use in English (Tokyo, for example). Japanese names are presented in the order of family name first, personal name second, as is Japanese linguistic custom. We have, however, followed individual preference for the transliteration of names of Japanese authors who have published in English. Translations, except where noted otherwise, are by the author. Due to constant changes in the overseas currency market, monetary figures in the text appear in yen; in May 2012 the Japanese yen was trading at 80 yen to the US dollar.

1

Introduction

Joseph D. Hankins and Carolyn S. Stevens

Introduction

In recent years, a sonic war has been waged aboard Japanese public transportation. Recorded and live announcements, musical station alerts and the rhythmic and ever present “gatan goton . . . gatan goton” of the train against the tracks fill the spaces where commuters sit in obligatory muted silence. Within this space, the use of portable media players has exploded over the past ten years, with an increasing number of headphones “leaking” sound into the otherwise hushed spaces of train or bus interiors. This leaking sound (moreteiru oto) has met with resistance. As one blogger vents on the Onisoku blog, devices designed as a “musical instrument for solitary enjoyment” have become “tools for invading the privacy of others” (Onisoku 2007). Community groups have come together to develop strategies for eliminating this problem, individuals have gone on tirades against these “sound leakers,” and concerned citizen groups have lobbied public transportation companies to hang posters that depict “sound leakers” as inconsiderate and selfish.1 All the while, the culprits, seemingly detached and aloof from their surroundings, blithely leak their music into public interiors. Let the ear now wander to a cold, dark Japanese winter night. Cutting through the crisp air is the ubiquitous chant “i-shi ya-ki . . . imo . . . oimo . . . ” (literally, “stone baked potatoes, potatoes”). A form of idôhanbai (mobile sales) common throughout Japan, roasted sweet potato trucks offer warmth and nourishment to combat the nip of the night air. While simple in its preparation, yakiimo is a specialist tidbit with distinctive aromas, flavors and textures that arise only from the slow stone heat, not easily replicated at home. Vendors troll residential areas slowly, with their amplified chant rolled out across a playback loop. The sound is loud enough to make its way into homes, announcing the seller’s approach and calling for the neighborhood’s attention. There is enough time to gather change and meet the seller on the street, alongside other hungry neighbors. Unlike the leaking headphones that divide, this sound draws people together. Those not in need of food might still pause to imagine the sweet warmth of the potato in their hands and mouth, remembering special times in the past when it was enjoyed, perhaps as a childhood treat; others may not register the sound if absorbed in other domestic activities. Either way, the truck continues to move on through the

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neighborhood, verse lingering in the air, “i-shi ya-ki imo . . . oimo,” layering the sound against the landscape and the thoughts of local residents. Aboard trains in Japan, sound sits at the center of a roiling battle about propriety, the ethics of belonging and public space. Calling forth from sweet potato trucks, sound navigates the divide between public and private, fomenting a sense of neighborliness tied to a modern nostalgia for the past. In both cases, sound rests upon particular historical moments – of technological advance, citizen activism and assertion of individuality; or intimate publicity, spatial grounding and a nostalgic modern – that characterize present-day Japan. Together, they accentuate the vitality of sound in granting force to sociality and space in contemporary Japan, and they invite a further examination of the role of sound, and the practices that grant it meaning, in the constitution of sensibilities of civility, political aspiration and aesthetic habit that enliven an object called Japan. This book seeks to provide just such an examination. Each of the essays in this volume approaches a similarly situated sound, be it the sound of right and left-wing activisms, cultural celebrations and musical enjoyment or of a manipulation of people’s capacity to listen. The essays explore, across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the lives of sonic practices in social movements, popular culture and avant-garde art forms, fleshing out a sensory context to politics, aesthetics and ethics in contemporary Japan and illustrating the rich ways in which sounds commingle with human relations. Together, they pursue these questions: How is it that sonic practices create and characterize social actors? How do they inspire political movements seeking to provoke change? How do they work to form ethical and aesthetic sensibilities of the modern Japanese landscape? This volume is an examination of the social life of sound in modern Japan, the practices and actors that sustain it and the spaces it exposes.

Sonic practices

Key to the conversation common to this volume is the concept of “sonic practice.” Provoked by the specific situations described in our chapters, we posit this general term as a means of approaching the active, embodied practices involved in making sound meaningful. This includes practices that produce sounds and allow for their perception. It also includes, more fundamentally, practices that construct the frameworks in which sound comes to have effect – practices which presuppose and characterize actors and contexts as much as they do sounds themselves. We contend in this volume that the meaning of sound is never to be found solely in production, transmission and reception. Rather, weaving insight from work in linguistic anthropology (cf. Bauman and Briggs 1992; Gal 2003; Silverstein 2003) into work on the senses that locates meaning within use (Classen 1990; Howes 2003), we submit that 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. Working from this conceptual starting point renders prominent the ways in which signification is the

Introduction 3

product of interaction; it steers clear of any presumption that the cultural significance of sound is mediated entirely by audition, or, further, that we can presume sensory channels as universal in the first place; and it necessitates an examination of the production of social and spatial relations alongside any examination of the production of sound. In using the term “practice,” we highlight the embodied forms of perception, thought and action that grant significance to sound. Taking cue from Mauss’s assertion that techniques are actions both “effective and traditional” (2007: 55), we conceptualize Bourdieu’s expanded notion of “practice” (1977) as a site where structure and agency exist in co-constitutive tension with each other. Embodied practices of perception, thought and action draw upon, and thereby render effective, enabling conditions. They also entail, manipulate and extend those conditions for future practices. Located at the center of this dual moment of presupposition and entailment, practices constitute an immanent location for the constitution of significance. At times these practices are intentional and conscious, but, as Bourdieu reminds us, they are never solely that. It is within these practices, as exhibited in human interaction, that the frames granting significance to sound are negotiated. Let us take the Tokyo subway as an example. We can understand as a practice of sonic reception the umbrage taken in the face of leaking headphones. This umbrage is, for many, a visceral response beyond explicit intentional control. The response operates at the level of an acquired, automatic self-regulation, i.e. of habit, throwing the body into agitation whenever exposed to music making its way out of another’s headphones. It is a response learned and bolstered within community meetings and by station signage castigating those who allow sound to leak. In these and other settings, people learn the socially appropriate response to leaking headphones, a response which gives sound a particular meaning. Set into relief against a train space presumptively cast as quiet, leaking headphones are an irritant, a violation of personal space and a sign of the rudeness and inconsiderateness of the person under the headphones. The reaction of umbrage also characterizes the actors involved. Not only is the person listening to music cast as a rude and inconsiderate person, but the person taking umbrage is also cast as properly attentive to codes of propriety and engaged in proper practices of quietness. Umbrage as a sonic practice both presupposes these characterizations and institutional bolstering, and further entails them. It is a locus of meaning construction that also helps define the practices of quietness that constitute the norm aboard Japanese trains. Sound plays a crucial role in creating spatial and practical divisions, as media scholar Michael Bull has noted with regard to contemporary urban change: “[t]he erasure, or reconfiguration, of the spaces that we move through is primarily an auditory reconfiguration . . . we have overpowering resources to construct urban spaces to our liking as we move through them, enclosed in our pleasurable and privatized sound bubbles” (2007: 4–5). Fundamentally, the “pleasurable and privatized sound bubble” differs for these different users aboard the Tokyo subway system: one type of person finds solace and comfort in silence and/or

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muted sounds; another is energized, distracted or lulled by his or her own set of sounds. The negotiation between the two constitutes a struggle for sociality played out in space and in sound. Alongside “practice,” we use the term “sonic” to accent sound without presuming the sensory modes required for its production or reception. As Howes notes in Sensual Relations (2003), there is a tendency in recent anthropological work on the senses to focus on one sense at a time. To wit: alongside the burgeoning field of visual anthropology, there are studies of the olfactory, the auditory, the tactile, of taste and even of senses beyond the standard five.2 Howes argues that while these studies lend specificity to particular senses that have gone unnoticed in the unmarked ocularcentrism that characterizes western modernity, they also demonstrate a tendency to reify a particular sense in order to examine its cultural relevance (2003: xii; 6–10). Counter to this tendency, Howes recommends focus on the processes through which senses come to be seen as discrete and interlinked, rather than assume those relations prior to analysis. In order to facilitate such an analysis, Howes, drawing upon the work of Mauss (2007 [1979]), proposes “techniques of the senses” as a locus of anthropological inquiry that keeps the full body at the forefront of attention (cf. Howes 1990). It is this proposition that prompts our use of “practices,” as Bourdieu’s expansion (1977) of Mauss’s inquiry into how people know how to use their bodies, their thoughts and their perceptions. This attention to the role of the body in producing sound as meaningful allows for an examination of how different sensory modes – be they auditory, tactile or other – gain significance within sonic practice. Thus our focus is on “sonic” rather than, say, “auditory” or “acoustic” practices. This choice is born of Howes’s proviso regarding the essentializing risks of focusing on one sensory channel and widens the field of analysis to what might count as sensory experience in different settings and the novel synesthetic possibilities within those settings. For example, Abe in Chapter 6 describes the panoply of sensory modes involved in chindon-ya street performance – the bright costumes, the choreographed dance moves, the feeling of the outdoor air rushing through one’s lungs in singing and shouting – amidst which sound matters. Here and throughout this volume, sound is never a matter of auditory engagement alone but instead comes to significance within a broader range of sensory engagement. The term “sonic practice” is as much about the creation of a context in which sound becomes relevant as it is about the making of sound. We conceptualize this constructed context as both institutional and spatial. The fact that actors produce or receive sounds, as well as the ways in which they produce or receive, lend them character as certain kinds of actors. For example, as Smith (Chapter 3) indicates, standing on a bustling Tokyo street corner calling out nationalist slogans at passersby not only identifies an individual as a member of the Japanese rightwing, it also indexes them as distinct from right-wingers who drive around en masse in sound trucks, blaring similar nationalist slogans. Here the different practices of producing sound characterize these groups and construct a relation between them. In another context, Plourde (Chapter 5) describes the ways that

Introduction 5

training oneself to listen “properly” to a musical genre called onkyô, creates subjects with heightened corporeal sensibilities that extend beyond listening to onkyô. In training themselves to receive sound in particular ways, these listeners fashion themselves as they fashion relations with their sensoria. In both of these examples, sonic practices partake in the creation of the actors that become the context for the production of sound. Reflecting upon work on the social production of space (cf. Lefebvre 1991; Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003; Harvey 1973, 2006; Munn 1986; Trouillot 2003), we likewise pose sonic practices as a means of investigating the construction of spatial contexts for sound. To adopt terminology developed by Lefebvre and further extended by Harvey, in traveling through a perceived container of “absolute,” physical space, and in the processes of its production and reception, sound both carves out a “relative” space by setting actors into relation with each other and creates a “relational” space that characterizes those actors in their relations. Harvey asserts that all such spaces coexist and that it is a matter of an analyst’s focus upon which one becomes most salient. He also argues that while there might be an apparent hierarchy in which relational space includes relative and absolute spaces, it is more productive to allow all three to sit alongside each other in dialectical tension. Following this tripartite division of space, we can usefully imagine the interior space of a Tokyo subway and the ways in which that space is given relational meaning as people are nettled by the sound of leaking headphones. Examining sonic practices, then, serves as a means of pursuing the spaces carved out as the container for sound as well as the relational and relative spaces that sound engenders. The construction of space involved in sonic practices also calls for attention to how such created spaces exist, politically, economically and culturally, in contingent relation to other spaces and how, to quote Feld and Basso, “places naturalize different worlds of sense” (Feld and Basso 1996: 8; cf. Appadurai 1988; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Samuels et al. 2010; Trouillot 2003: 122–124). Cox’s analysis of military plane noise and the public sphere in Okinawa (Chapter 4) can serve as an example. The noise measuring mechanisms and charts and the environmental and architectural regulations deployed on the base and by the Japanese government index Okinawa as a space of geo-political negotiation. Likewise, Hosokawa’s examination of early modern jazz cafés (Chapter 7) presents cafés as venues in which the performance and appreciation of jazz relies upon and establishes relations between the United States and Japan as interrelated but distinct sites of cultural production. Japan becomes relevant as the location of this space of performance and appreciation as it is put into relation with the United States, or, more broadly, with a project localized as “Western.” Attention to sonic practices, then, requires attention to the ways in which venues are granted meaning through their relational human content; it also requires attention to the significance they gain as they are located, politically, economically or culturally, with respect to other locations. As these examples indicate, sonic practices, as a focus of anthropological inquiry, serve as a means of inquiring into the relations among sound, space and

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sociality. They are a site to investigate the material and symbolic modes through which sound has political, ethical and aesthetic effect in modern Japan. They highlight the embodied ways sound comes to have meaning and the construction and characterization of actors, be they individuals or institutions, touched by that sound. Sonic practices also provide an inroad for engaging the ways in which these sounds sit simultaneously within a modern Japan and within a larger field of practices that circulate across the globe.

Social and spatial discourse in the modern era Japan

As we mentioned above, the notion of the public gaze has been much discussed in social theory. Extending that discussion, these chapters underscore the importance of combining the visual with other sensory experiences. Social theory as generated by Western scholars has prioritized the visual; influenced by the primacy of literacy as an indicator of “civilized” understanding, “culture as text” has been a long-standing metaphor for writing ethnography (see Geertz 1973 and Howes 2003). This prioritization of the visual has a history and reach beyond Japan yet significance proper to it. It is our desire to embed sonic practice in this history of social and spatial discourse of modern lives across the globe. Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur, a social role associated with urbanization and modernity in Europe, demonstrates this privileging of sight and space. The flâneur, who in this period of history was almost always a “he,” observes everyday life on the street, digests it and spits it back out in the form of essays, poetry and other writing, creating yet another level of everyday life and discourse. Tester defines “flânerie” as “strolling and looking” (1994: 1, emphasis added). We add to this strolling and looking the qualities of sonic perception, posing sound as an inescapable feature in the experience and observation of urban modernity. Detached from, yet inevitably connected to, the urban environment, the flâneur strolls, observes and writes. In the Japanese context (and remembering that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Japanese intelligentsia were exposed to and influenced by European writers), we can argue that the flâneur sauntered through the seken (in Japanese, the “world” of public society), scrutinizing, making judgments and reproducing them in literary form. Seidensticker’s writings on the celebrated novelist and essayist Nagai Kafû (1879–1959) describes him as “the equivalent of Baudelaire’s flâneur”; he is widely traveled (New York, London and Paris) and he himself, as well as his writings, typify the rise of a leisured consuming class that attend such activities as traditional and “modern” theater and entertainment, dance halls and cinemas (Seidensticker 1991 passim). The social space most closely associated with flâneurism in modern Japan is one deeply rooted in premodern urban culture: the sakariba. Seidensticker defines sakariba as “‘bustling places’ . . . where crowds gather, and where revelry and shopping occur with the greatest intensity” (1991: 40); Sorensen calls them “entertainment districts” from which mass popular culture arose in the seventeenth century (2002: 31). Tada, with his focus on western Japan, defines these as “amusement places” and relates them to earlier centers of religious activity in

Introduction 7

premodern Japan, “where communitas [was] experienced through participation in rituals” (1988: 34). These sakariba are important in the analysis of sound, space and sociality because they constitute the environmental context in which our case studies are embedded: the business district populated by salaried men; the pachinko parlor for which the chindon-ya advertises; the train stations where the right-wing activists protest; and the coffee shops where jazz enthusiasts gather. Seidensticker traces shifts in sakariba over the years, from long-standing areas such as Ginza and Ueno, to more recent additions such as Ikebukuro and Kagurazaka (1991: 40–1). The development of Western style department stores, restaurants and other leisure spots gave rise to a newer kind of flâneurism, as an embodied experience of spatialized public culture, exemplified in the “gimbura” (strolling the Ginza) (Graafland 2000: 139). Kafû famously admired Tokyo’s back alleys, which had their own subtle sounds, sights, smells and tastes. However, he was “[o]ffended and disgusted by the constant din of construction and destruction along Tokyo’s major avenues” (Jinnai 1995: 128). Tanizaki Jun’ichirô (1886–1965), born in the central district of Nihonbashi, fled his native Tokyo after the 1923 Earthquake and settled in Osaka; his descriptions of sakariba in both Tokyo and Osaka contain both expressions of excitement and repulsion for the increasing materialism he felt was associated with the rising middle class culture of leisure and consumption.3 Yoshimi Shun’ya’s book Toshi no Doramaturugii: Tôkyô Sakaraiba no Shakaishi (The Dramaturgy of a City: A Social History of Tokyo’s Sakariba) (1987) examines the development of these areas from the Edo Period (1600–1867) to the booming 1980s. In his analysis, the shift from the formerly dominant Tokyo sakariba of Asakusa and Ginza to the newer centers of Shibuya and Shinjuku represent the change from “modernity” (circa 1910s–1930s) to “postmodernity” (1960s–1980s) (Yoshimi 1987: 332). These substantive shifts in meaning start with a sense of the sakariba as “another world” (Asakasa), transforming to “a place of exhibition” (of the trappings of modernity; i.e. Ginza) in the early period; and a shift from the “illusionary home” (Shinjuku) which is a shared experienced based on a sense of place (Shinjuku) to a “postponed future” (Shibuya) which is individual and placeless. Borrowing Auge’s now famous terminology, the “placelessness” of the postmodern sakariba represents a further trend toward the “event” (dekigoto) as the ultimate urban experience, rather than the “place” (Yoshimi 1987: 332). Taking this analysis a step further, we may come to understand that the lived experience of these city inhabitants is now less rooted to a sense of physical or, in Harvey’s terms, “absolute” space and more in touch with the sensory experience that the space and the sociality has to offer. As we will see from Abe’s work on chindon-ya, the commercial function of sound was integrated early into Japan’s urban landscape and continues today. This movement across space – of being drawn through the water by boat or across the bridge by foot – to the entertainment district with its forest of

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banners and booming drums, must have added to the anticipation of the eager playgoers. Here, nearly all the human senses – sight, sound, touch and taste – came into play. (Jinnai 1995: 98)

Japanese urban public space was, and still is, distinguished by a number of characteristics. Linguistically, there are different ways to describe space as referential to its experience. Take, for example, the terms taishû, ôyake and seken. Each of these terms might be translated as “public” in English; however, each has its own overtones and resonances lost in this translation. As Hankins notes, the term ôyake implies a horizontal camaraderie, but seken is distinguished by the separation of the self from others; he focuses more on the taishû, in terms comparable to “mass society.” Sound and sociality, as intertwined modes through which we experience the world, are two conceptual frameworks by which we understand the way ôyake emerges from seken in modern Japan. We understand the public sphere in other frameworks as well (often visually, transmitted through mass media such as newspapers, magazines and popular art such as billboards and neon signs) but our focus on the sonic framework makes clear certain aspects of being an individual embedded in a complex sociality. For example, to disengage with the public gaze, one can leave the site, or close one’s eyes. The strength of the auditory message, however, can make it difficult for us to “tune out”; if only blaring megaphones and flight noise could be willfully banished from one’s mind! The focus on sonic practices highlights the temerity of the pull of the public sphere on the individual. When the sound is slight, your mind can wander, but when the sound is forceful, you cannot walk away. In this way we can argue that sound creates social solidarity (ôyake) and a critical view of the world (seken) in ways distinct from that of the ocular, and it is effective in its own way as a means to express and to dominate space and social relations.

Four sites, four sonic stories: Tokyo, Osaka, Hokkaido and Okinawa

This volume’s focus on the juxtaposition of space with sonic practice and social relations provokes recognition of the social and spatial variation of “Japan,” which is too often perceived as a monolithic geographic and cultural unit. Our chapters primarily interrogate the two major urban centers, Tokyo and Osaka, but there are also links to a peripheral region, Tôyako, situated in the northern island of Hokkaido. Another chapter concerns sonic practice in Okinawa, the largest of island in the Ryûkyû archipelago. Hokkaido and Okinawa are marginalized sites in the early modern and modern history of the Japanese nation, both of which challenge the image of mainland (Honshû) Japan as the dominant cultural and political trope of “Japanese-ness.” Mainstream space in this volume is represented by Tokyo and Osaka, Japan’s two largest cities, which lie at the heart of their considerable suburban sprawls. In 2005, the city of Tokyo proper had a population of 8,490,000 and the broader

Introduction 9

Tokyo metropolitan region approximately 31,714,000. In the same census, Osaka counted 2,629,000 people within its municipal boundaries and 16,663,000 more widely (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2009). Both Tokyo and Osaka’s greater metropolitan areas are included in the four most densely populated sections of the country (alongside Nagoya and Fukuoka) of over 1,000 persons per square kilometer resident (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2009). Tokyo has a long, celebrated cultural history of space and social relations. Jinnai defines Tokyo as a city whose “essence remains invisible if the basic spatial structure, with its organic ties to nature and the universe, is not understood” (1995: xi). The city of Edo, the name of Tokyo pre-1868, transformed from a fishing village to a national capital under military leader Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616). Ieyasu, wary of his rivals, relocated his capital east to distance his political power from the western imperial residence. Nearly all contemporary accounts of Edo/Tokyo refer to a distinction common to castle towns in the shogunal system between the “high city” (yamate) and the “low city” (shitamachi; see Bestor 1989; Seidensticker 1983, 1991; Jinnai 1995). The “high city” of Edo referred to the hills where the warrior elite were housed (Jinnai 1995: 11), whereas “peasant[s] . . . living in the watery lowlands” constituted the “low city” (Jinnai 1995: 14), located to the east of the castle, partially on reclaimed land from the bay (Jinnai 1995: 16) and were “laid out in regular grids” (Sorensen 2002: 23) that, along with canals, facilitated commerce (Sorensen 2002: 72; Bestor 1989: 31). Shitamachi culture today is a tourist attraction as a place where “authentic” Edo culture is consumed, primarily by sampling delicacies, shopping for trinkets and consuming knowledge about the city’s past at the Edo Tôkyô Hakubutsukan (Museum). Sensually, today Tokyo presents a diverse experience. Japan’s affinity with nature has been often cited as a cultural virtue (Asquith and Kalland 1997 passim), yet Tokyo is one of the most densely built environments in the world. Jinnai sees Tokyo as having lost its close ties to its natural topography: its hills and valleys, its waterways, and an open skyline affording many views of Mount Fuji (1995: 70). The expansion of Tokyo (both building and rebuilding) has hidden this diversity from view and alienated Tokyoites’ connection to nature (Jinnai 1995: 140). Yet, the city presents its own sensory experiences that complement its natural elements, now confined to landscaped gardens (some attached to temples or shrines; others former elite estates, such as Shinjuku’s Gyoen National Garden, located not far from the “vulgar” sakariba Kabuki-chô). Tokyo’s verdant past can also be seen in the mature sakuranamiki (roadside cherry trees) that line the Meguro River running through this “high city” district. Tokyo residents also struggle with nature in the realm of rubbish disposal: Tokyo has some of the strictest recycling rules in the nation, and what can be put out and when is the source of much neighborhood friction. Yokohama residents, for example, still place their plastic bags (properly sorted) under large nets that weight the rubbish to the asphalt. The issue at stake is controlling the extraordinarily large crows that feed on this waste, their “kaa kaa” cawing an auditory reminder of nature beneath the asphalt.

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As Tokyo is the unquestioned cultural capital of the nation, its music and art are often seen as synonymous with national music and art; Tokyo’s truly distinctive sensory characteristics can be thought as thriving in other sonic practices. Many of its mechanical urban sights and sounds include the aforementioned railroad phenomena. The ubiquitous “gatan goton” sound, accompanied by the flashing metallic and colored sides of the trains whizzing past the pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers, and the gentle shake of the ground as an express train passes, inform the senses from early in the morning until late at night. Arguably the most famous of these trains, the Yamanote-sen, circles Tokyo’s central wards in both directions. Shining silver with a strip of “nightingale green” (uguisuiro, a bright yellow-green) these trains constitute the moving heart of the city. Each station on the line is identified not only visually by signs (both inside the train and outside on the platform) but also by their distinctive “melodies”: short phrases of bell music that mark not only the station on the line but also whether or not the train is a sotomawari (clockwise) or an uchimawari (counterclockwise) rotation of the line.4 Osaka is another Japanese city steeped in cultural history and a strong regional identity. Cultural historian Tada Michitarô writes the “real Osaka” was formed from the many different islands and islets nestled in Osaka bay; these eventually were joined through reclaimed land (1988: 36–7). While geographically close to the historical center of religious and political power (Kyoto), it has been most often associated with the vibrant merchant class and was seen as the major trendsetter in “chônin bunka” (commoner culture) in the Edo Period. The great daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), the second unifier of feudal Japan, built his castle in Osaka rather than his native Nagoya to take advantage of the city’s prosperity (Tada 1988: 28). Stocker refers to Osaka as having “second-class, second-city status” (2001: 249), forever in competition with Tokyo. From the ancient period, learned people felt that whether the capital was Nara, Kyoto or Tokyo: “Osaka was worldly and vulgar; the capital was sacred and aloof” (Tada 1988: 40, original emphasis). Tanizaki Jun’ichirô observed that Tokyo fashions were “somber” and Osaka’s “gay” (1956: 30) and is said to have always viewed Osaka with a mixture of amusement and contempt. The Osakan was a penny-grabbing bumpkin who had not learned the fine Japanese art of concealing his emotions; and the Osakan seemed insensitive to the exhilarating succession of foreign influences that was sweeping the country. He was cloddishly behind the times. (Seidensticker in Tanizaki 1956: viii)

Yet, perhaps because of the residents’ open nature, one may say that residents of Osaka relish their city with stronger regional identification rituals than Tokyoites (many of whom are regional migrants with rural attachments). The Kansai dialect, for example, is more distinctive and more proudly spoken than the Tokyo dialect (which, except for some details in pronunciation and phrasing, does not

Introduction 11

vary significantly from the national standard). Home of the cacophonous pachinko game (a kind of Japanese pinball) and other “obnoxious and obtrusive” personalities (Stocker 2001: 250), Osaka’s cityscape has distinctive sights, sounds and smells which have interesting affinities with cultures afar: Sterling, with reference to reggae culture in Japan, writes that these performers “laughingly compar[e] the people of Osaka, where dancehall is presently very popular, with garrulous, expressive Jamaicans” (2010: 128). Tada writes that the many diverse meanings of Osaka popular culture are contained in two dominant cultural tropes: food ideology and manzai (comedy) text (1988: 33). Osaka is the home of the takoyaki (fried octopus balls) and more subtly flavored but resourceful dishes such as dashijako (fish broth) and hama no kawa (sea eel skins) (Tada 1988: 40–42); nothing goes to waste in a Kansai kitchen. Still, Osakans are selective: Tanizaki writes that the Makioka sisters were more “discriminating” as they refused low quality oysters which foreigners ate with “great gusto” (1956: 77), resisting the social pressure to conform. Manzai, Tada’s other cultural symbol of Osakan identity, is a dialogue between two partners, one playing the “fool” (boke) and the other the “wit” (tsukkomi) (Stocker 2001: 251); it is “the cheapest form of entertainment in Osaka” (Tada 1988: 45). Word play (primarily bad puns) and physical comedy are utilized in this genre, echoing Osakan values of thriftiness, earthy humor and direct communication. While manzai gained wider momentum in the 1990s with personalities associated with the talent agency Yoshimoto Kôgyô headlining broadcasts from Tokyo studios, it is still considered an Osakan art form, almost always using Kansai dialect even in front of Kantô (eastern) audiences. One example of this is the vastly successful duo “Downtown,” with tsukkomi Hamada Masatoshi and boke Matsumoto Hitoshi. Their hit variety and music show “Hey Hey Hey Music Champ!” has been broadcast nationally on Fuji Television since 1994 (Stevens and Hosokawa 2001: 231); one of this program’s attractions is the way the boke Matsumoto grills guests in his broad Kansai manner. Other Osakan images which give further depth to its proud localism and its “down-to-earth” embodiment include sports enthusiasts: the devoted fans of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team and Kôshien Stadium, home of Japan’s national amateur championships (Kelly 2004: 80–81). The exuberant shouting of their ôendan (fan clubs), accompanied by percussive additions of whacking miniature baseball bats (Kelly 2004: 81), creates an auditory backdrop to the visual witness of displayed physical prowess. Baseball, along with Osakan food and comedy, are all sensual pursuits that engage the mouth, the ear, the mind and the body. Now to the peripheral sites: Hokkaido was home to a variety of indigenous cultural groups which came to be known as the “Ainu,” a broad categorical term to refer to people who identify separate to the “shamo” ethnicity; shamo is an indigenous term for mainland Japanese. Today, some indigenous activists prefer the term Utari to Ainu as a break from the past when Ainu was often used derisively by shamo. Conflict between indigenous people and the mainland was recorded as early as the fifteenth century (Siddle 2009: 24). The region was encompassed as a domain in 1604 under the military government (bakufu) in

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Edo (Siddle 2009: 24). The area, formerly known as Ezochi, was renamed Hokkaido after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 (Siddle 2009: 28) and the original islanders were “fully dispossessed” of the land in 1872 (Siddle 2003: 452, 2009: 28). Throughout the modern period, Hokkaido was seen as a resource-rich addition to the national polity, providing mainly agricultural assets to the growing nation. Hokkaido was not a target of wartime destruction in the same way that Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Okinawa were but still the area suffered in the same way from an overstretched military economy, and poverty meant that many of the indigenous people left to look for work, an alternative to staying and “peddling sad and tacky parodies of ‘Ainu culture’ as exotic tidbits” for “mainland Japanese tourists” (Siddle 2009: 30). Hokkaido also symbolizes a contested and vulnerable frontier of Japan, due to the continuing dispute between Japan and Russia over four of the Kuril Islands, whose Russian sovereignty is not recognized in Tokyo. Hokkaido is one of the least populated sections of Japan, with less than 200 persons per square kilometer, and the prefecture’s total population was 5,500,000 in 2008 (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2009). This wide-open setting has been commodified in two interrelated ways: as a natural frontier, mediated by hot springs and local seafood restaurants, or through its connection to a mythical and indigenous past through the Ainu “tourist villages” that sell souvenirs in the shape of bears and salmon, which are traditionally associated with Ainu culture and subsistence (Hiwasaki 2000: 399). Tourism is big business; Hokkaido spends more public funds investing in tourist projects than any other prefecture (Hiwasaki 2000: 397). Sensually, Hokkaido has the most northern latitude of the four major islands, and its distinctive climate informs the senses: the Sapporo Snow Festival (held in February) is one of the area’s biggest tourist draws, including an Ice Sculpture Show as part of its offerings. In 2010, over 2,000,000 visitors attended the weeklong festival and viewed 244 snow and ice sculptures over three sites (Sapporo Snow Festival © 2010), most of which are illuminated at night for evening visits. Cited as the “imêji songu” (theme song) of Hokkaido, “Kita no Kuni kara ~ Haruka Naru Daichi Yori” (From the Northern Country ~ A Far-off Land) by singer/songwriter Sada Masashi was the theme song for a hit television drama series (1981–2002) and was also used by the ôendan (fan clubs) of the Hokkaido Nippon Hamu Fighters professional baseball team. The song is instrumental, with Sada (who hails from Nagasaki, in Kyûshû) singing syllabically throughout the song, such as “aaaaa” and “nnnnn” sounds that were thought to represent sonically the sheer vastness of Hokkaido’s space. Used as background music for many media representations of Hokkaido even today, it symbolizes the mainland’s desire to conquer the frontier, and consequently, to control the natural forces within.5 Okinawa is the largest island in the Ryûkyû chain south west of Kyûshû, and it gives its name to this second peripheral region. Okinawa also has a problematic relationship with the Japanese mainland. Allen identifies a local “powerful partisan commentary” that posits a “separate cultural evolution from that of Japan, and

Introduction 13

its exploitation at Japanese hands” (2002: 3) as well as “substantial resistance to the presence of the US [military]” throughout the Ryûkyû archipelago (Allen 2002: 3). First “invaded” in 1609 by the Satsuma clan located in neighboring Kyûshû and finally annexed in 1872 (Taira 1997: 140), there are centuries of conflict between the islands (which had been autonomous prior to the invasion) and the mainland, as represented by the Satsuma who were deputized as representatives of the Edo government. Okinawa is located in a tropical band and its importance to the mainland was not only its natural (primarily marine) resources but also its strategic location to other parts of Asia. Okinawa’s history in the Pacific War as the only region that experienced a land invasion, as well as a longer Occupation and the continuing military presence, highlights its vulnerable position. Okinawa’s burden made international headlines when Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio was forced out of office in May 2010 after breaking a campaign promise to relocate a contentious air base in Futenma. This tells us that while Okinawa is marginalized from the mainstream, it still holds an important place in the hearts and minds of mainstream voters. Sparsely populated, the prefectural total population was 1,376,000 in 2008 (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2009). Tourism and retail are the primary sources of income for islanders (Allen 2002: 15); tourists come from the mainland, and retail businesses often serve enlisted men at the bases, which further tie the livelihoods of the islanders to people from other lands. While this volume’s paper focuses on Okinawa’s mechanical noise, its soundscape has a strong musical history. Shimauta is a genre distinct from mainland folk music and utilizes the ryûkyû onkai (a minor pentatonic scale), distinctive vocal ornamental styles and indigenous instruments such as the three stringed sanshin (Stevens 2008: 25). Okinawan music had a niche audience in the mainland and music was part of the tourist experience since the 1960s, as part of festivals and performances (Figal 2008: 90; see Roberson 2001 and 2006 for details of contemporary Okinawan music, or Uchinaa pop). Tying together the local music scene and the militarized landscape is the celebrated Okinawan Actors School, founded in 1983 (OAS 2010). Highly influenced by AfroAmerican music and fashion due to the proximity of the military bases, Okinawan Actors School graduates dominated mainland charts in the 1990s, and this demonstrates another sonic aspect of the troubled relationship between the US and Japan as heard in Okinawa. From the canals and bridges that divide and connect sakariba in Tokyo and Osaka, to the sparkling ice sculptures of Sapporo and the humid and heavy tropical air in Nawa, Okinawa, the sites chosen for discussion about the way that sonic practices create affective and political communities express the diversity of Japan’s lived experience. For a society that is frequently characterized as “homogenous” in terms of ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity, it is our belief that these sonic stories give a fuller and more detailed view of the variety of ways in which Japanese people experience, and share their experiences about, sound.

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Chapter summaries

The six essays in this volume all focus on the ways in which sonic practices constitute spatial and social relations; they highlight the political, ethical and aesthetic resonances of those relations, within which several themes rise to the surface. First, these essays explore the constitution of social actors – as individuals or as collective entities – and the distribution of agency across those actors. They look at, for example, how it is that an individual can hear a political rallying cry but choose not to listen, to turn away instead; or, how a group characterizes itself in resisting the sounds of a military base. Second, and more specifically, these essays investigate the constitution of publics and the public sphere that characterize modern Japan. They investigate what counts as public, how an entity called “the public” might have effect and the ways this public bolsters claims for a modern Japan. Third, these essays all explore tendencies within practices, i.e. the ways in which these different sonic practices are oriented around and orient actors around political, ethical and aesthetic goals as diverse as the elimination of discrimination, the selling of commodities or the proper appreciation of qualities of everyday sound. The first three chapters provide a contrastive view of sound across a range of Japanese political projects. Starting on the left, Hankins examines the use of sound within two distinct political strategies of the Buraku liberation movement. This movement, which started in the early twentieth century, works to eliminate discrimination against the Buraku people, a Japanese minority group discriminated against on the basis of a perceived affiliation with stigmatized industries such as leather and meat production. The essay looks at two tactics within the movement: kyûdankai or denunciation sessions, which were developed in the 1920s when state aid was neither possible nor desirable, and public seminars, which became popular as an educational tool in the latter half of the century as part of a transition into a kinder, gentler political activism thought to be the future of social transformation in Japan. Hankins makes clear that these practices rest on the efficacious use of sound to transform the political and ethical sensibilities of those whom it addresses. Historically in the denunciation session, activists yell at discriminators with the intention of drawing out the mawari no me, or external gaze, provoking shame and reflection. Mawari no me forcibly pulls those accused into the light of the seken (public); they must atone for their actions and remake themselves into nondiscriminating citizens. The other method, the public forum, is no longer characterized by the break inherent in mawari no me but instead by a horizontal commonality of the public of an ôyake. The public forum, then, provides a political and ethical urging addressed to a collectivity that exceeds any one encounter, and invokes sensibilities of human rights as a basis for change. Smith’s chapter shifts its political focus from left to right to examine two sonic tactics amongst Japanese nationalists. Smith contrasts new forms of nationalist sonic practice that center around individuals and the use of megaphones with the “sound truck,” the archetypical, mobile form of right-wing activism in Japan.

Introduction 15

Providing historical and current ethnographic analysis of these two divergent practices, both engaged in primarily by men, Smith explores the social and philosophical landscape of right-wing activism and advances an argument regarding how the nation, as listening public, is imagined and produced in activist practice. Gender plays an important role in this movement as well: the right-wing, similar to the left wing Buraku movement, is a masculinized political space, with men primarily speaking to men. Women are marginalized in both left and right camps, but they are more peripheral still to the right. The right-wing perceives a “softness” in the Japanese public – that contemporary Japanese society has gone weak on them, and their harsh sound style is a reaction to that softness, an expression of what they believe to be strength. In partial response to these overtones of castration, the men of the right-wing work to take the streets, the country and their national identity back through sound and action. Chapter 4 moves from the urban centers of the Japanese mainland to Okinawa to examine the role that United States military aircraft noise plays in constituting the social and sonic landscape of this archipelago. Cox argues that sounds of US military aircraft in the village of Sunabe, which lies under the flight path of the Kadena airbase, play a part in constituting the temporal and spatial sensibilities of those who live there. He examines the ways in which these sounds are deeply tied to bodily functions and economic and political resources, and productive of detrimental health outcomes as well as social protest movements. Contrasting the reception of this sound by actors on and off military bases, Cox explores the ways in which aircraft sound around Kadena is embedded in the bodies and social forms that give shape to Okinawan public life. Methodologically, Cox relies on collaboratively produced recordings of aircraft noise, as both medium and practice, as a means of probing the contours of this protest and the ways in which sensory experiences come to be patterned. The comparison here between on and off base practices around the production and reception of aircraft sound provides an inroad for investigating the relationship between sound, politics and the Okinawan public sphere. Each of these first three chapters deals explicitly with the political context and ramifications of sonic practices. Moreover, to revisit the themes mention in the first paragraph of this section, they display a careful attention to the formation and sustenance of different types of social actors – the lone nationalist, a left-wing group, the Okinawan public sphere. As Anthony Giddens (1991) has argued in the context of modern urban consumer capitalism, identity is never a natural “given,” something to be pursued actively and be “routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individuals” (1991: 52). We expand this insight to think about all forms of social actors, not individuals alone, and not merely within contexts of consumption. The Buraku activist creates his (or her, but more likely his) self, as a certain type of self, through the performance of a denunciation session or the organization of a public forum. Likewise, an Okinawan who works on the Kadena military base comes to define him or herself, and contexts in which he or she has meaning at all, through practices related to the production and reception of aircraft noise. In particular, each of these essays explores how

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something called a public, as a collective social entity, comes to carry meaning and efficacy in different contexts. These three chapters also examine tendencies or goals to these sonic practices. There is a direction to the politics of the Buraku liberation movement, to the organizing of nationalist groups and to the protests against US military aircraft noise in Okinawa. This direction extends beyond the “identity work” that Giddens describes to the transformation not only of one’s self but also of social configurations of which one is a part. The Buraku liberation movement seeks to create a public opprobrious of discrimination, the nationalist organization a Japanese citizenry with proper respect for the Japanese nation, and the Okinawan protesters a potential end to US military presence on the islands. As Povinelli (2002) and others (e.g. Brown 1995; Keane 1997; Markell 2003) have noted, recognition in general, as well as in more specific contexts of recognizing social minorities such as the Buraku or nationalists, is not simply a process of recognizing something that already exists as a “given” out there in the world. Instead, recognition functions as demands on that something to appear a certain way. In trying to transform their political environments, the various social actors in these first three chapters attempt to transform the conditions under which they are recognized, and the demands to which they are subject. The second set of three chapters shifts the sonic focus from politics proper to aesthetics and the use of ethical imaginaries. This second set maintains an attention to the ways in which social actors are cultivated, the “identity work” that goes into subject formation and the appropriation of agency. For example, in Chapter 5, Plourde describes enthusiasts of onkyô, an audience that “tunes out” so that they can “tune in.” To become part of this audience, individuals must choose to train their bodies to be more sensitive, and more responsive, to the world around them. Plourde notes the claims of the customers of this musical genre that their listening skills have been sharpened through specific training. However, this cultivation goes beyond aural capabilities; for the practitioners of this listening form, heightened listening is equivalent to heightened being. It requires concentration, yet as Plourde’s informants confess, once an individual achieves full listening skills, the effect of the activity is similar to a sort of meditation or a sivasana, where the focus results in physical and mental release. Onkyô awareness differs from the sometimes invasive and coerced consumption of mall music or the melodies in train stations; onkyô demands active awareness rather than a passive absorption. The onkyô audience member’s sense of heightened awareness after the concert can be compared to the deafening ringing in the ears often experienced after sitting through two to three hour Japanese rock concerts, but this after effect occurs in silence rather than in noise. This sonic practice sharpens the senses to an entrance to sensory perception, rather than an escape, and demonstrates the disciplining of aurality in partnership with class identity under late capitalism. In Chapter 6, Abe examines affective engagements within the practice of chindon-ya. Chindon-ya, which dates back to the 1850s, refers to groups of outlandishly costumed street musicians in Japan hired to advertise an employer’s

Introduction 17

business. As Abe notes, after decades of inactivity, chindon-ya has, since the 1990s, undergone a resurgence. Bridging cultural geography and anthropology of sound, Abe’s piece pays particular attention to the production of social space through chindon-ya’s sonic culture. Historically, the popular imaginary of chindon-ya was associated with neighborhood streets, everyday soundscape and the notion of taishû – the popular masses. Abe pursues the question of what types of spatial understanding and “public” emerge from chindon-ya performed in a modern context where neighborhood streets are increasingly regulated, privatized and developed and where the recession era has provided the grounds for ongoing critique of a single, unified taishû. Abe explores this question through the notion of “imaginative empathy,” an ability to imagine the sentiments of invisible listeners behind the walls and to perform music accordingly. By analyzing chindon-ya’s performance tactics through this lens, this chapter explores how chindon-ya’s emphasis on the relationship between affect and resonance elucidates distinct ways of understanding sounds, space and social difference in Japan today. Chapter 7, the final chapter of this volume, moves back almost a century to provide a cultural history of the jazz café and swing music in prewar Japan. In this piece, Hosokawa investigates the material characteristics of the prewar jazu kissa (jazz café) that allowed it to function as a space of good taste to jazz aficionados, and further, to be a mediate space between the cultural sensibilities of Japan and those expressed as from the United States or, more broadly, as “Western.” These jazz cafés were public places where the clients were usually obliged to concentrate, silently, on listening to jazz recordings, mostly from the United States, played through expensive audio sets. Jazz cafés gained in popularity during the 1930s with the rise of student populations in urban areas and the emergence of electric recording technology, and they thrived through to the 1960s and 1970s as meeting places for jazz peers. The recorded music café, in this context, was a symbol of public good taste. Exploring elements that created and maintained this image of good taste (e.g. imported records, expensive audio equipment and the presence of waitresses) Hosokawa explores the café’s role as arbiter of several different distinctions – that between Japan and the West, amateur and aficionado, and superior taste and common consumption – as a means of understanding the relationship among aesthetic sensibilities, transnational relations and class distinctions within the modern Japanese public sphere. Focusing on sonic practice, the six essays in this volume explore how social actors are created, characterized and assert authority; what type of actor, spatially and socially, something called a “public” is; practices with a reflexive goal – be they political, ethical or aesthetic – toward which they are oriented. In combination, working across these various themes and across different ethnographic and historical contexts, these pieces develop a sonic tapestry of modern Japan and the rigors and successes of everyday life, within its spatial and social contexts, as it is moored within practices of sound.

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Conclusion

To listen is to seek to understand, but to listen is also to witness, and to accept, question or reject the interlocutor’s meaning. Taken together, these chapters show the conflict and the overlap of space and sound and how useful they are in throwing into sonic relief social relations that give form to modern Japan. Sound both creates and maintains solidarity as well as demarcates ideological divides. We have developed the concept of sonic practices as a locus for anthropological inquiry, linking sound, space and sociality. We pursued how it is that these practices, which are not reliant on the sense of hearing alone, give shape to crucial political, ethical and aesthetic aspects of contemporary Japan. And we have provided a sonic contextualization for different regions of Japan, discussing the diversity of practices and histories that weave together a contemporary soundscape in these cities, regions and this nation-state within a broader transnational context. Against this backdrop, this volume brings together six essays whose contents range from hard to reach groups like the Buraku liberation movement and the nationalist right-wing to practitioners of minimalist forms of music and jazz aficionados of the mid twentieth century. This grouping works to supplement current work on the anthropology of the senses, developing ideas of how to frame the broader life of the body in anthropological inquiry, placing that work in conversation with the anthropology of Japan and investigating how these practices contribute the formation of an object called Japan, which is available for study in the first place. Let us end by returning briefly to the relaxed Tokyo subway rider, headphones on, music cranked up and sound leaking out into the offended space around them. We can see the ways in which sound here can facilitate absence within presence, being there but not being there; how it foments cleavage across space and social relations as well as solidarity. In the various chapters of this volume, we can see how these cleavages and solidarities operate across political, ethical and aesthetic registers in different regions of Japan. In drawing the readers’ ear to the sonic practices that comprise aspects of modern Japan, this volume issues a call for more attention to be paid to the variety of ways social actors present their ideas, their desires and their values in a public arena and how they themselves are constituted in that act. We hope that by responding to this call and listening carefully along the way, we can learn more about the complex and diverse society that we call contemporary Japan.

Notes 1 2

For specific examples of sensory regulations, see these websites outlining subway manners: http://www.tokyu.co.jp/railway/railway/manner.html#main01 and http://www.tokyometro.jp/anshin/kaiteki/poster/index.html A partial list of these sensory contributions includes: on visual anthropology, Edwards and Bhaumik (2008), Strong and Wilder (2009), and Wright (2009); on olfaction, Classen, Howes, and Synott (1994), Corbin (1988), Drobnick (2006), and Rasmussen (1999); on audition, Beck (2007), Bull and Back (2004), Corbin (1998), Erlmann

Introduction 19

3 4 5

(2004b), Feld (1990), and Thompson (2004); on the sense of touch, Classen (2005), Paterson (2007), and Taussig (1991); on taste, Farquhar (1994), Korsmeyer (2005), Reed-Danahay (1996), and Stoller (1989); and on a “sixth sense,” Howes (2009). For a critical view of Tokyo’s prewar urban culture, see Tanizaki’s Naomi; his masterpiece The Makioka Sisters is set in Osaka, and Some Prefer Nettles involve settings in both cities as well. Listen at http://www.japan-railways.com/yatej.htm The authors thank Shuhei Hosokawa for providing this ethnographic suggestion.

2

Publics that scream, publics that slumber

Sound and the tactics of publicity in the Buraku liberation movement Joseph D. Hankins

Mobilizing a sleeping audience

In a large Tokyo auditorium in late 2005, Chin-sung Chun leaned forward toward the microphone from where she was sitting on a stage in front of some 200 audience members and cleared her throat. The speakers crackled to attention, at the ready to amplify the words of the UN Special Rapporteur on Discrimination Based on Work and Descent out across the room in front of her. For 30 minutes the special rapporteur spoke, detailing recent developments in how the UN was handling this newly established category of discrimination, Discrimination Based on Work and Descent, and giving her impressions of the previous three days, which she had spent touring neighborhoods of the Japanese Buraku minority group, meeting with leaders from their political movements, and sampling traditional Buraku food and cultural activities. Chun’s presentation was one of a set of presentations at this public forum, which had been organized by two Japan-based non-governmental organizations to commemorate the 57th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Entitled “Towards the Elimination of ‘Discrimination Based on Work and Descent’,” this public forum was the final event of this three day visit to Japan by three foreign dignitaries, Chin-sung Chun among them, each of whom worked on aspects of this newly established form of discrimination. Sukhadeo Thorat, from India, was a scholar of Dalit issues; Abdul Kamala was a graduate student in Kenya working on caste issues among different African tribes; and Chinsung Chun, of Korea, was the newly appointed United Nations Special Rapporteur on “Discrimination Based on Work and Descent.” The public forum was an opportunity for these visitors to share their impressions of what they had learned and compare the Buraku situation to forms of work- and descent-based discrimination in their home countries. It was also an opportunity for Special Rapporteur Chun to give her status update on the UN’s current work on this category. The consolidation of the UN category of “Discrimination Based on Work and Descent” in 2002 represented a major political success for the Japan-based Buraku Liberation League (BLL) and partner organization, the International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR), the two primary Buraku political organizations. The creation and utilization of this

Publics that scream, publics that slumber 21

category is the culmination of almost a decade of lobbying on the part of these organizations, with far-ranging effects. It opens an avenue for these organizations to frame their political constituents, not in the previously available terms of race or ethnicity, but in the terms of work and descent, terms the organizations found to be closer to the lived experience of Buraku people. In so doing, the new category provides the organizations with a novel channel through which to apply pressure to the Japanese government to create anti-discrimination legislation. It also serves as an umbrella under which to foster and extend solidarity work to groups facing similar forms of discrimination worldwide. The possibilities of international solidarity and the use of UN human rights mechanisms were the subject of the public forum. However, if the presentation of this new category of discrimination was to convey descriptive information, it was also to foment perlocutionary effect. The public forum was an enactment of the promises of “Discrimination Based on Work and Descent”: it presented in its execution the engagement of the United Nations; it offered, in the demographics of its speakers, paths to new solidarity. It also – in being spoken and amplified out to an audience of over 200 people gathered by the leadership of the BLL, IMADR, and the associated Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Institute (BLHRRI) through publicity in their newsletters, on their websites, and through their organizational networks – was a volley into the future political possibilities of this momentous achievement. This was not only an event that allowed for new political solidarity among already committed political activists; it was also an event intended to rally a public to political and social change. This chapter turns attention to those on the receiving end of these amplified words. Who are they; what is this group to which IMADR and BLHRRI announce themselves and the inception of a new category of discrimination; what is their role in the struggle for political change? As I sat in that auditorium on Saturday, December 10th 2005, listening to the reports of the foreign guests and comments by the Buraku movement leadership, I made a tally of people in attendance, themselves a sample of the wider political network generated by the circulation of newsletters and accessibility of internet content. In total, there were 203 people present. Of those, two were IMADR staff (myself included), and ten were what looked to be college students (six women and four men around twenty-years-old). The remaining 191 people cut a strikingly similar figure. They looked to be Japanese men, between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-five, all wearing suits despite it being a Saturday. Even more striking than the proportion of ties, though, was the proportion of closed eyes and bobbing or hanging heads. At one point during the two-hour forum, I counted 154 seemingly asleep faces, a prodigious percentage of an audience of 203 and a silent and potentially daunting index of an inattentive audience for presenters and organizers hopeful of creating and propelling a political movement. As I interned with IMADR over the following two years, the sight became even more striking: the sleepers were not limited to one particular event; they were present, in large numbers, at almost every IMADR event. This one slumbering audience was but a sample of IMADR’s larger public, but a sample they were: the sleepers were endemic to IMADR’s audience.

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What does it mean for a political movement to address itself to a public that is, at least in part, asleep? What implications might this hold for the future of that movement, for its history, and for the public that it engages? This chapter pursues these questions through an attention to sound and the way it is produced, received, and used within the practices of Buraku political strategy. Born out of the intersection of two divergent sonic practices, the sleeper represents a critical moment for Buraku politics, in the midst of optimism born of increased international support and tempered by a dwindling budget. The sleeper also provides, more broadly, a moment to reconsider the role of the public in this nationally circumscribed and yet transnational social movement. My argument unfolds over five stages. First, I examine the cultural context of public slumber in Japan to understand it better as a practice of sonic reception. Second, I return to the public forum and examine how the practice of sleeping might lend meaning to the sounds of the public forum and the space that it generates. Third, I contrast the sonic qualities of the public forum with those of another Buraku political strategy, that of the denunciation session, or kyûdankai, and investigate the publics invoked by each strategy. Fourth, I make clear some of the practical and historical connections between these two political strategies. Finally, I end by outlining some of the problems these connections raise both for the contemporary Buraku movement and for social scientists of the public sphere. In my comparative moments I pay particular attention to the use of sound as a means to accomplishing political ends – both how that sound is used, and how sound is constructed in creating publics. Throughout my analysis, the figure of the sleeper, as a form of sonic practice, serves as an inroad to investigate the social and material processes through which the Buraku political movement constitutes and imbues with agency certain political subjects, be they publics or individuals. By examining the sonic practices that underlie the constitution of the sleeper, I examine the working assumptions about the possibilities of social change: that is, how to align individual volition with public obligation in order to transform current social structures. At the same time, I examine the changing tools with which a viable politics is built.

Public slumber

In what follows I examine sleep as a practice that, when confronting the sounds of a public forum, gives particular weight and meaning to those sounds and to the larger context, both spatial and institutional, of the public forum and political efforts of the Buraku liberation movement. Following the argument of the introduction to this volume, I take, in my examination of the politics of the Buraku liberation movement, sonic practices as a central analytic for understanding how sound comes to have meaning as it is contextualized spatially and socially. Rather than understanding sound merely from the standpoint of production, transmission, and reception, I focus on the practices that give sound significance, be it as production, transmission, or reception. This focus on practices leads to an examination of significance located within interaction; it provokes an understanding of

Publics that scream, publics that slumber 23

the production, transmission, and reception of sound as practices that potentially involve the full body, rather than one sensory mode, i.e. audition, alone; and it necessitates the examination of the production of spatial and social relations alongside any examination of sound. In what follows, I examine sleep as a sonic practice, as a technique of receiving sound that conveys upon that sound particular meaning and characterizes social and spatial relations of the public forum. In Japan and other countries alike, sleep maintains a varied relationship with sound. As the proliferation of sound blocking machines attest, it is a commonplace for people to feel they cannot fall asleep if it is noisy. Alarm clocks and phones blurt out a huge range of sounds to rouse people from their slumber. Rumblings of trains or other fixtures of urban settings interrupt precious sleep. On the flip side, while sleep is presumed to require silence, human sleep itself is rarely an entirely silent affair. Sleep is a practice of sonic reception; the significance that it grants sounds, and the significance that it itself takes on are dependent upon the way sleep functions as a practice, how it locates actors, and how it is contextualized. It might seem intuitive that sleeping during a meeting, such as the above public forum, should be problematic. However, this intuition is perhaps a little slower coming if given the fact that sleeping in meetings and in public is a practice not uncommon in Japan (cf. Steger 2003). This fact points out that sleep, as a practice, takes on meaning within interaction, rather than being fixed across scenes of encounter. It prompts then a different set of questions: if sleeping in public is a prevalent fact of life in parts of contemporary Japan, what might it index at a public forum? What nuances are conveyed about a sound when the practice of reception that confronts it are this pervasive sleep? The answer to these questions reveals as much about the political movement as it does about the characteristics of public sleep. Inemuri – to be present but sleeping, to be dozing off. The existence of this lexeme in modern Japanese would seem to suggest that “present sleeping” is so frequent a phenomenon, and so frequently a commented upon phenomenon, that it warrants a shorthand. Brigitte Steger makes a similar argument in her article, “Getting Away with Sleep – Social and Cultural Aspects of Dozing in Parliament” (2003), in which she traces out a set of rationales for prominent public sleeping in Japan. In her article, she follows a well-publicized bout of Diet members sleeping in televised parliament sessions. As Steger describes, the Japanese weekly magazine Shûkan Hôseki published a series of articles charting what they labeled to be some of “the greatest sins of politics and bureaucracy that damage Japan.” These articles, which berated the Diet members for “being lazy” or “insufficiently devoted to their jobs,” included not unusual pictures of Diet members sleeping during session as well as responses from the Diet members to a written challenge of this behavior issued by the Shûkan Hôseki. In their responses, the members of parliament either ignored the charges (instead diverting attention to other aspects of their careers), dismissed the accusations as false, or explained them as symptomatic (not of a lack of attention to the job, but instead the opposite: overzealous devotion to work, i.e. “tight schedules and heavy workloads at night,” Steger 2003: 183).

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Steger continues to provide what she terms social and cultural substantiation of this justification, referencing a publication boom in the 1990s describing the benefits of daytime sleeping and recommending grabbing sleep where possible at work,1 and referencing a set of traditional sayings that she interprets as justifying if not recommending diurnal naps.2 While the articles from the Shûkan Hôseki indicate that sleeping on the job can be the subject of castigation, Steger’s article also shows that there is a set of readily available, circulating arguments justifying such sleep. The books, sayings, and religious injunctions that she references may not describe the sleeping habits of the vast majority of Japan nor necessarily transform the long-standing sleeping behavior of masses; however, they do provide a set of pseudo-scientific arguments that people can use to justify sleeping in public. They also contribute to a general milieu in which such a practice is at least defensible if not exempt from reprehension in the first place. To say that public sleep is prevalent, though, is not to say that it is not laden with other characteristics, characteristics that help define the institutional and physical spaces in which this practice occurs and the actors involved. Take three situations that Steger references as not uncommon examples of public slumber: The sleep of a businessman during a board meeting, the sleep of a university professor at a faculty meeting, and the sleep of a parliamentarian during a session of the Diet. Each of these situations, as well as the sleep that happens in each, is marked by a coherent set of implications and expectations. First of all, sleep is not evenly distributed across the different actors in these situations. As Steger points out, and is readily evident even in the description of the forum above, it is hardly ever women who have the luxury of sleep in these settings (2003: 191–2). It is not the so-called “office-ladies” who are present at board meetings primarily to serve tea that take the time to snooze. Their sleep would readily be seen as offensive, and it would not be embarrassing for any man at the meeting to point such a fact out (Steger 2003: 194). Nor is it any younger, more junior member of the company environment, male or female that might sleep at a board meeting. Younger executive-track men or women are present in these meetings with something to prove. They cannot afford the luxury of a nap during a meeting, be it in recompense for a previous night’s drunken revelry or for an all-nighter devoted to work. Left then are the executives, the higher-level managers, the CEOs, the bosses. These men are the people who face either no chastisement if they fall asleep during a meeting or have recourse to justifications should there be an attempt at rebuke. Indeed, sleep functions as an index of their elevated status. Particularly within the now fading lifetime employment system, they could afford not to know the minutiae of company goings-on. On the other hand, they are also the men whose allotment of authority renders them embarrassing to wake up. Steger provides a prime example of this group of people: a senior professor who falls asleep during office hours with a student. The student makes small noises but is unable to subtly rouse the professor and opts to wait out the allotted meeting and then leave quietly, never to confront the professor. These situations, in which sleep is prevalent and goes without castigation, are marked by a pronounced set

Publics that scream, publics that slumber 25

of social hierarchies. It is the senior male professor, not the “office-lady” ready to serve tea, who can avoid reproach precisely because of the authority they garner; the activity of sleep presumes and entails their authority and the “office-lady’s” lack of it. Sleep is intimately bound to hierarchy, and frequently a gendered one at that. If such characteristics form the background of public sleep in Japan, i.e. of being prevalent and redolent of hierarchy, what about its obverse, wakefulness? A different example taken from IMADR’s activities proves illustrative here. In early 2006, not too long after the commemorative public forum, I attended a different large event alongside other IMADR staff, a meeting of non-governmental representatives geared toward discussing impending restructuring of the United Nations’ human rights instruments, including the replacement of the Commission on Human Rights with the Human Rights Council and the attendant restructuring of the Special Rapporteur system that in part had fueled successes around “Discrimination Based on Work and Descent.” The Japan branch of Amnesty International, in cooperation with IMADR and the Tokyo-based United Nations University spearheaded the organization of the event, which involved over 200 participants from a wide range of Japanese NGOs as well as the UN. The three days of meetings consisted of an opening plenary session, smaller breakout sessions geared to specific aspects of the UN restructuring, and a final plenary session that included report-backs from the breakout sessions. I attended this meeting as one of six representatives from IMADR, and my primary responsibility was to audio record the sessions so IMADR staff could review them later, as necessary. This task left me with plenty of time to be attentive to other aspects of the interaction. In physical, spatial layout, the large-group sessions very much resembled the public forum on discrimination based on work and descent. Speakers were seated on a raised stage at the head of a large room, with paper name placards hanging from the tables in front of them. These people took turns presenting on their assigned topics out to the group of assembled NGO representatives, who were in turn seated at tables in rows facing the stage. The proceedings went in accordance to a pre-arranged schedule and were kept in order by an emcee who introduced the event and each speaker, and who helped field questions during the slated question and answer session. So far this description is equally applicable to the NGO plenary session and to the public forum. Also similarly, the NGO meeting cost ¥2000 a person to attend and had been advertised throughout the network of Japanese NGOs and in IMADR’s newsletter to a wider public. There, though, the similarities end. In contrast to the audience of the public forum, this audience of activists was completely awake for the duration of the events. More than that, they actively drew attention to their wakefulness by taking notes, asking questions, disputing points, and offering opinions, even going so far as to offer the “aizuchi,” i.e. the back-channeling (expected in Japanese) responding sounds such as “naruhodo,” “sô da ne,” “nnnnn,” or “eeeee,” all of which constitute a set of sonic practices vastly different from that of sleep. This was a group of people – some of whom were known to IMADR and to each other and

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some of whom were not – who showed signs of active, volitional engagement in the discussion at hand and who showed signs that they would carry that engagement back to their lives and work beyond this forum. In this practice of sound reception, sound is made meaningful as long as people are awake and attentive. Even if this NGO meeting was not a fulfillment of the promise of the public, it certainly, as an instance of the same type of genre as the public forum, served as a basis of comparison against which the organizers of the public forum could judge and strategize around their audience. It set a standard of wakefulness and engagement available for subsequent comparison. This brief description of the life of public sleep in Japan and of other public venues in which IMADR engages provides some sense of the characteristics that inemuri inhabits in wider public discourse. Inemuri is constituted both with a sense of the commonplace and with a bolstering set of justifications that actors can differentially deploy: justifications ranging from Confucian injunctions to recent pop culture support of daytime sleeping, depending on and constituting their position within a hierarchy, often with gendered overtones. Here we can see characteristics of the practice that demarcate inemuri from engaged wakefulness as well as from suimin or “deep sleep.” Whereas suimin is to happen in a private space, away, as much as possible, from sonic disturbances, inemuri is a type of sleep that can occur in public that characterizes that public as much as itself in the enactment. Inemuri indexes a privilege of being able to tune out during business hours or in other public spaces where sleeping would render one vulnerable. This is a privilege occupied audibly as much as visually. More often than not, it is the sound of breathing, ranging from soft airy noise to abrupt snores, that draws attention in a public space, rather than the visual impact alone. One might be able to look away from such a display of privilege, but it is less possible, for example in the public forum, to tune out the sounds of (a man) snoring. This contextualization lays the groundwork for understanding the relationship of sleep, space, and social relations in the Buraku liberation movement. Laden with hierarchical and misogynistic overtones, the practice of “present sleeping” might indeed serve as a double slap in the face to a movement proclaiming the equality of all and the importance of universal human rights. In many regards, an inemuri public stands at odds with the public the Buraku liberation movement hopes for itself. The ways in which these nuances may or may not be problematic for the liberation movement are the subject of the next section.

Public forum

In many ways, the overt attention of this public audience, and of the public of which it is a sample more generally, does not matter to the political project of the Buraku liberation movement. There are many ways in which politics happens without or around the attention of those in attendance, based on the fact of attendance alone. Each audience member has contributed ¥2000 to attend, contributing regularly to the coffers of the Buraku liberation organizations. Similarly, IMADR employees meticulously count the number of audience members, to report later in

Publics that scream, publics that slumber 27

their annual board meetings and incorporate into newsletter descriptions of the event. In both cases, the actual attention of the audience members is irrelevant. In terms of money and numbers, audience members, somnolent or wakeful, are counted as part of the Buraku liberation movement’s public: they are used to fund further activities, and they are used as evidence in other arenas of political intervention. At the same time, though, the liberation movement, in its rhetoric and in the ways in which it orients the space and sound of these public forums, expects a space of attentive, engaged, and equal interaction. In its use of words and sound, organizations like IMADR posit an ideal public very similar to that described by Habermas as characteristic of modern nation-states (1989). In his work on the public sphere, Habermas traces out the historical conditions under which the circulation of rational critical discourse among Western bourgeois citizens, typically unmarked as landowning and thereby white and male (Habermas 1989; cf. Fraser 1992; Warner 2002 for critique), generates the ideal of a public sphere. As I explore below, the audience of the liberation movement’s public forums is constituted as a sample of a wider circulation-based public that presumes equality of volitional membership and proffers the possibility of attentive engagement but, at the same time, lays bare the ways in which such engagement is systematically not required for the public to have political effect. While the public forum endeavors to project equality of engagement, its rhetoric and performance create space for audience members to tune out. The sleeper, as a practice of sonic reception, serves as an entry point for understanding how this functions and how the spatial and social relations of this particular political tactic come to have effect. The public forum is not too dissimilar from any academic or even business conference involving a panel of speakers in front of an audience. The genre of the interaction is similar: an emcee introduces a set number of speakers to an audience; those speakers speak for an allotted time and leave some time at the end of the event for questions and answers. The sociolinguist Erving Goffman refers to this type of interaction as a “podium event” (1979: 14) where the interaction is not between mutual conversationalists but between speaker and audience. Goffman argues that this type of event is fundamentally asymmetrical, that though there is a question and answer session provided at the end during which audience members are nominally granted a voice, the interaction framework overwhelmingly provides one type of actor with the authority to speak. As an example of the equality that the Buraku political movement projects upon its public, I would like to examine this asymmetry, alongside two ways in which the movement attempts to minimize this asymmetry. The first has to do with the practices that generate the auditory environment of the public forum; the second with how the event itself is described. I then turn to examine how, despite these maneuvers of equality, there is opened for the audience the possibility of sleep as a receptive practice. Employees of the Buraku Liberation League or of IMADR arrive at a public forum venue minimally one hour before the event is scheduled to begin. They unlock doors, turn on lighting, set up a welcome desk, and they prepare the sound

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equipment. This last task is a fairly elaborate procedure – it requires securing and testing both wired and wireless microphones and testing the sound quality in all parts of the room, setting up auxiliary speakers if necessary. The staff also prepares recording equipment: typically two digital recorders that will record simultaneously, with an extra set of batteries should they be needed. This auditory set up, and the practices that enable it, both underscore and allow for the communicative expectations of such public events. Interaction is structured according to, first, a presenter/listener pair-part structure characteristic of these “podium events.” The majority of the microphones, and all of the most reliable, wired microphones, are at the front of the room, to be used by invited speakers and by the emcee. This arrangement mirrors the spatial arrangement: there is a stage at the front of the room, and an audience in loosely concentric arcs expanded out from it. Sonic practices here align with spatial ones to contribute to a relationship between those behind and those in front of the podium. Both the visual and the auditory forms here contribute to the idea of a unidirectional communication of message from the “podium” to the audience. The presentations themselves bear this ideology out. Each presentation lasts approximately 30 minutes, encapsulated on either end with introductions and thanks from the emcee. No presentation, both at the above described public forum and more generally, incorporates time for direct audience response or involvement during the presentation itself. At the particular forum in question, the presentations are scheduled directly after each other; the question and answer period is reserved for the end, following all the presentations, and is allotted 20 minutes, provided that the presentations, which are given precedence, do not exceed their time limits and encroach upon that time. This formula varies some from event to event. Sometimes, like at the activist conference I mention above, question and answer sessions follow each individual presentation, with more general questions addressing all speakers held to the end. However, in all of these cases, the sonic practices involved here in the production of sound presume and entail a unidirectionality of message and a fixity of role inhabitance. Other sonic aspects of the forum, however, undercut this linearity. One aspect, the question and answer sessions, presume and entail the possibility of access to sonic production for any person present, though it would be in a sense limited by the formal presentations. The wireless microphones, not quite as reliable as the wired ones, are available for circulation among all participants in the forum; both invited presenters and invited audience. Likewise, the organizing staff is careful to make sure that sound blankets the space, thus diminishing the auditory effect of unidirectionality emanating from the stage. Sound comes from all directions, belying the visual centrality of the stage. After the presentations, the IMADR staff circulate these microphones among the assembled audience, offering the possibility for any participant in the event to assume the role of addresser, for whatever limited a time. For this brief period, these practices undercut the staid roles of presenter and audience, projecting instead a uniformity across the actors and the promise of access to either role. Instead of concretely fixed roles of presenter and audience, there is the possibility for any participant in the event to assume the role

Publics that scream, publics that slumber 29

of presenter. There is a projected uniformity across the actors, on top of which is constructed the differential access to wired microphones and visual centrality or to presenter and audience roles. The assertion is that anyone could potentially be a presenter. This possibility is well circumscribed in the event of the public forum itself. The question and answer sessions only exist if presentations do not run over their allotted time. There is, no matter the presence of the question and answer session, a differential access to the role of the presenter at any of these events. Furthermore, those that speak during the question and answer session can be cut off if time were to run out or the organizers think that what they are saying is not worth the time of those assembled. While the question and answer session, combined with the universal blanketing of a space with sound work to create this interaction as one in which access to role inhabitance is equally distributed, this intimation and its practical reality are palpably circumscribed. However, these events are cast as part of a pedagogical process, which, over time, serves as a second means of undercutting the linearity of these interactions. The Buraku liberation league anticipates a cline of interest, participation, and knowledge with regard to their central anti-discrimination work. As Tomonaga (1984), long-time head of the Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Center, outlines in his statement of Buraku liberation and human rights strategy, these events are conceived of as moments in which the more knowledgeable and the more interested have greater access to the role of speaker, while the audience member is presumed to be, overall, less interested and less knowledgeable. The scheduled presenters present, and the organizers organize, with the aim of cultivating greater interest and involvement in this anti-discriminatory movement. At the same time that the movement is reliant on the interest and involvement of these audience members, it is also in an instructive role vis-à-vis them. While each audience member may not have access to the role of the presenter, over time and education, those roles are potentially available. Indeed, at the above public forum, the final presenter cast himself as once one of the suited businessmen in the audience. Over time, he learned more about the movement, chose to become more involved, and now stands on the stage with greater access to produce sound for other’s reception. In these two ways – by emphasizing the question and answer session through sonic tactics of parity and by deploying a temporal scheme that offers the possibility of equal role inhabitance over time – the Buraku liberation movement works to downplay the structural differences among the different roles at these events and works to create social relationships of horizontal commonality, a goal emphasized in the language they use to describe these events. In the newsletters, emails, and websites advertising these events, the movement organizers use the phrase kôkai shimpojium, or public symposium. The two kanji that comprise the word kôkai are, first, kô (also read ôyake, as noted in the introduction as meaning public) and the second, kai (or hiraku, which means to open). Drawing on the work of Mizoguchi (1995) and Yoshida (1972), Ikegami Eiko, in her 2005 book Bonds of Civility, traces the usage of the word ôyake in Japanese back to at least

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the seventh century and argues that for the duration of its use, this term has indicated a sense of “horizontal commonality.” IMADR and the BLL use this term to refer to all of the activities they host that are open to people beyond their own staff and to include potential strangers. It implies a sense of indefinite openness, being inclusive not just of any particular person reading the message but of an indefinite set of others – a projection beyond physical readership. The language ideology and the auditory ideology in effect here are consonant: horizontal commonality is presupposed as prior to mediation. At the same time that this fledgling horizontal commonality opens demands for individuals to be attentive and active participants in events like the public forum, it also opens possibilities for the practice of sleeping to occur in the first place. Take for example the further sonic practice of recording. The presence of a digital audio recorder at events like the public forum indexes a wider public beyond that of the immediate interaction. All public forums are recorded, some presentations and question and answer sessions are uploaded as is, to be available on the website of the organizations; others are synopsized by the staff and included in the weekly and monthly movement newsletters. In the recording of sound, there is a presupposed iterability of message. The message both is and is expected to be, in Goffman’s terms (1986), delaminable, or separable, from the frame of immediate interaction and transposable across the network of circulation. The message conveyed by this public is cast as general, at the boundaries of the human, as the circulation of recordings both indicates and emphasizes. This level of generality goes beyond any one particular sensory medium. The message is as easily conveyed in sign language (when interpreters are present at these events, which is more and more the case) and in written media. The qualities of each semiotic medium are downplayed in the search for fungibility. These sonic practices themselves undercut the specificity of medium. It is in this general, “delaminable” form of address that the sleeper finds a home. The breadth of addressivity places any one member of the public alongside an indefinite number of others. In this process of interpellation, no one is solely responsible for responding; rather it is the broad group that is hailed. In that space the sleeper as a role becomes possible. Furthermore, just as there is an unequal distribution of the authority to inhabit the role of presenter, there is an uneven ability to inhabit this role of the sleeper. While those who are speaking are under greater demands to remain awake and provide evidence of their attention, those in the audience are relatively free of those constraints and more able to flout civility and sleep. When they do so, they bring along the more widely held characteristics of public sleep – inattention, hierarchy, gender inequality. Their practice of sleep in this interaction calls into question the projected commonality of the ôyake by inserting a sense of hierarchy that defies both that sense of equality and the pedagogical project of the forum. Instead of speakers being the teachers, with the authority to decide how the group’s time should be used, the practice of sleep serves a refusal of that authority and a statement that the audience instead occupies that authority. The practice of sleep works to reverse the social and spatial relations set up by the practices of the forum. It offers a threat

Publics that scream, publics that slumber 31

to the promise of commonality, and it either adds fuel to the pedagogical flame – these sleepers need to be educated! – or calls the entire project into question. This challenge to the Buraku political project of the forum intensifies if we consider why the sleeper is there in the first place, a question which takes us to the second sonic and political strategy, the denunciation session.

Kyûdankai

While the public forum is something familiar to an academic audience, the kyûdankai, or denunciation session, offers a picture of something vastly different. The kyûdankai is a political tactic born of out the early Buraku liberation movement of the 1920s. Then, as now, Japan lacked specific anti-discrimination legislation, and in the face of this absence, the Buraku political movement developed the denunciation session as a means of countering discriminatory behavior (Yagi 1976: 1). Inspired by Confucian techniques of self-critique, these denunciation sessions were to serve as a tool to force offenders to consider their actions, realize the discriminatory nature of those actions, apologize, and remedy their ways. Over the past 90 years, the denunciation tactic has changed in substance and grown more codified; however, the basis of its effectiveness has remained the same: place an offending actor in a position where they meet with public disapproval and encourage their introspection and revision of their behavior by cultivating external scrutiny. One primary way in which this is done is through the use of sound. In the first several decades of its use, the denunciation tactic was comprised of the following set of events. Someone would either witness or suffer discrimination because of their status as Buraku; they would then report that event back to their neighborhood branch of the political organization, then called the Suiheisha or Leveller’s Association. The political organization would gather people from its membership and from the neighborhood together, an assembly enabled by the small cramped spaces of Buraku neighborhoods and by the rapid spread of Suiheisha branches throughout mainland Japan. Then the assembled people, wearing coordinated headbands and placards displaying such phrases as sabetsu yurusuna or “we won’t tolerate discrimination,” would go en masse to the workplace or home of the alleged offender and ask the offender to recognize and apologize for their action. If that recognition was not forthcoming, the assembled group would scream at the actor in question, drawing attention and scrutiny from people in the surroundings, or in the words of the movement, drawing the mawari no me (“the surrounding gaze”) or further, the attention of the seken.3 These terms, mawari and seken, might equally be translated as public (as is ôyake) but with very different connotations. Mawari is spatially rooted to the place of use; its referential content made sensible only through indexical cues. Seken is a further abstraction of this, still conveying a sense of scrutiny, with an abstracted sense of spatialization – the surrounding world. Key to the potential success of the kyûdankai is the division between the mawari and the offender. Rather than relying on a notion of “horizontal commonality” as does ôyake, the

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public of the mawari relies on a fundamental divide between offender and others, a fact made explicit in the Buraku Liberation League’s denunciation guidelines:

Instead of simply getting angry at the offender, work to create an environment in which such actions are inexcusable. It is important here to make the offender seem isolated from that environment. If a person refuses to attend a kyûdan session, publicize the events of the incident, making as plain as possible the problems involved, gain the participation of a representative from the government, and use the public disapproval you generate to demand reflection on the part of the offender.4 (Buraku Kaihô Dômei Chûô Honbu 1991)

Here, as in the public of the public forum, there is a pair-part structure consisting of two roles – offender and the denouncer. In this case, though, there is no possibility that all actors in the engagement would have equal access to these roles. Whereas in the public forum the discussion session at the end gives time for audience members to take the microphone and inhabit the role of the presenter, in the kyûdankai there is no space for the offender to step aside from this role into which he or she has been recruited. Perhaps at a future time this person can be part of the scrutinizing public here interpellated, should the pedagogical promise of the kyûdankai hold forth. At no time, though, could the offender occupy the role of the denouncer. The kyûdankai is conducted by Buraku people alone. In this interaction, this person is the object of scrutiny, and if the job is done correctly, the object of opprobrium. Sound in this context takes on a set of characteristics strikingly different from those of the public forum. In the form of a yell of denunciation, sound is constituted as an immediate relationship between two parties; it indexes wrongdoing and difference. Here, the directionality and relationality of the sound is key. This set of interactions is not susceptible to the same kind of delamination, to use Goffman’s metaphor, and iteration, of tape recording and circulation. Certainly one could tape record one of these sessions and circulate it, but the meaning and effect of those recordings would be very different from those of the public forum. The subsequent listeners would not be recruited to the role of the addressee as they are in the clip from the public forum. Imagine hearing the reproduction of a crowd of angry and hurt Buraku people screaming, you apologize for doing this to us. Listening to such a clip, though, subsequent listeners would never be included in that particular second person pronoun you, unlike the example of the human rights clip where we, as humans, could be called upon. In the case of the kyûdankai, listeners instead stand by in the safety of the third person, and the clip would be about something else. Frequently too this is the case. Third party evaluations of the denunciation sessions have circulated widely in popular media over the past century, frequently cited as evidence of the Buraku political movement being “scary.” With the opposite valuation, Buraku activists will sometimes assess the proceedings of a kyûdankai to see what went well and what could be improved. In this case as well, though, they are not the addressees of the

Publics that scream, publics that slumber 33

kyûdankai but appraising the particular instantiation for its effectiveness. The message of the kyûdankai is not general as it is with the public forum. It is deeply embedded within the interactive space of the event itself. The sonic practices that comprise the kyûdankai create a very particular relationship between speaker and addressee that is not extendable beyond that interaction without extrapolation from the original message. Furthermore these practices create a relationship between the offender and the space around him or her. Correctly executed, the kyûdankai places the offender at the center of a spatially rooted, scrutinizing public, based less on the circulation of text and a promise of commonality as in the public forum than it is on the immediacy of interaction and the sense of estrangement.

Enter the sleeper

It is hard to imagine sleeping through a denunciation, and indeed there are no recorded cases of this. Sound is loud and personal; the relationship between the different actors too close. Sleeping during a public forum, though, is a different matter. The sound is not as loud, nor as personalized. Attention can be deferred or allowed to wander. Despite the absence of the sleeper from the kyûdankai, though, this set of practices lies at the intersection of these two central strategies of the Buraku liberation movement. The sleeper, audience to the public forum, is, most typically, an end product of the denunciation sessions. An example from 1975 elucidates this point. In 1975 it came to light that a private detective had assembled a list of all Buraku districts throughout the country and sold it to companies. He had noticed that something close to 99 per cent of clients who asked for a background check on a potential marriage partner did so to see whether that person was from a Buraku family (cf. Uesugi 1988: 333). Similarly, companies who asked for background checks on potential employees were looking for the same information. He surmised, correctly, that he could make a large amount of money if he “put together a full list of Buraku districts.” This he did, compiling different versions specific to different regions of the country. When the BLL learned of this situation, they quickly organized a kyûdan session, found the man who had created the lists, and discovered that over 200 companies purchased them, including some of the top business names in Japan. In the proceedings, the BLL organized local and national newspapers to evoke public censor and raise awareness of Buraku issues across the country. During the kyûdan session, they had company representatives not only admit that what they had done was wrong and hand over copies of the lists but also vow to work proactively against discrimination from that point forward. The BLL website gives this incident as an example of the potential successes of a kyûdankai. In describing this incident they say, responsibility does not end only with the person who bought the lists, thinking it was their duty as an employee. That is only where the work begins.

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From there, move on to explain the discriminatory environment of the company, and work to change that. Gain the support of the workers, even if they had no part in the incident. Ask the company to conduct Buraku study sessions. And, what you must be most persistent in, have the company join with the BLL and work together. (Buraku Kaihô Dômei Chûô Honbu 1991)

This was exactly what many of the companies who had purchased the lists did: varying somewhat from company to company, they organized human rights and discrimination training for employees, incentivized that training with bonus and credited work time, and paid for annual subscriptions to BLL publications. Additionally, reformed companies came together to organize as a Dôwa Mondai Kigyô Renraku Kai (abbr. Dôkiren) or Industrial Federation for Dôwa Issues.5 This organization, which still exists and has grown larger over the years as more companies bend to public pressure and join as a sign of recognition of their discriminatory acts, helps coordinate human rights training for member companies, incorporates BLL programs into that training program, and maintains coordinated contact with the BLL in order to educate themselves and the public for the elimination of discrimination. Here lies the answer to the origin of the sleeper. These businessmen are, for the most part, employees of companies that at some point committed an act that became the object of a BLL kyûdankai. In that process, their employers negotiated a deal with the BLL that included the development of human rights training for employees of the company, frequently incentivized through work credit or simply made obligatory for all employees. These programs would serve as signs that the companies were sincerely committed to the struggle against discrimination. Thus constituted, the sleeper exists at the intersection of two sets of desires: one, the desire on the part of the Buraku political movement to eliminate discrimination and two, the desire on the part of employees to get paid. The company’s human rights promotion systems translate between these two sets of desires, linking them in newfound ways. These kinds of systems translate the BLL’s desires for companies to work against discrimination into the desires of employees to fulfill company requirements, earn extra work credit, or simply not to stick out amongst other employees who for the most part attend these events. These systems are themselves governed by a desire on the part of the companies to be “socially responsible” and, more pragmatically, to avoid the very vocal critique the BLL has shown it is capable of mustering. This point of translation, however, does not require of the employee any further signs of engagement in human rights issues than attendance. They must attend, to fulfill work requirements, but they do not have to listen. What does not carry over in this intersection, then, is the immediacy of sound and of social relations; the material and symbolic processes that constitute the public forums instead give rise to the possibility of inattention, and to the possibility of the sleeper. The kyûdankai, as political tactic, offers Buraku people recourse to action and response to discrimination in a way that Japanese legislation does not. It

Publics that scream, publics that slumber 35

provides a point around which Buraku people facing discrimination might join together with others facing similar discrimination. However, in doing all of this, it also generates a public for the Buraku liberation organizations that need not be interested in the message of those organizations. This public might attend these events, or receive newsletters, but in no way actively engage with the messages entailed in these communicative attempts. The culmination of the kyûdankai trajectory in the human rights forum allows for the existence of the sleeper. It also creates that sleeper as problematic beyond whatever implied hierarchical, gendered, or disaffected connotations he might carry. The practice of sleep serves as a challenge to Buraku political strategy, in the best case providing fuel for further pedagogical efforts, and in the worst, serving as an indictment of kyûdankai and public forum alike.

Conclusion

The sleeper lies at the intersection of two of the primary political strategies employed by the Buraku liberation movement. As a form of sonic reception, the practice of sleeping simultaneously indexes the transformation of the Buraku public sphere and calls that transformation and the politics behind it into question. A focus on sleeping, as a sonic practice enmeshed in the constitution of a politically solvent public, opens an analysis of the process of and the stakes behind building a politically solvent politics using dramatically changing tools. In this chapter I have focused on sleeping as a sonic practice with the aim of understanding the shifting terrain of contemporary Buraku politics. Prompted by the sonic contrasts between two of the primary Buraku political strategies, I have used sound – and the practices of production, transmission, and reception that serve to make it meaningful – as an inroad into this inquiry. I delve into sleeping as a sonic practice to sketch out a political and social history to sonic attentiveness and then turn to an examination of how such attention, in the form of publics, is cultivated in Buraku political strategies, namely the kyûdankai and the public forum. It is possible to read a temporal shift in strategy off the comparison between public forums and the kyûdankai, brought into view by my focus on the sleeper. Indeed many people within the Buraku organization narrate just such a temporal shift: that is, that the time of the kyûdankai as a viable political strategy is at an end. The strategy is operated by coercion and is less necessary and appropriate in a world with functioning human rights mechanisms and in which it is increasingly likely that Japan will soon enact anti-discrimination legislation. The kyûdankai is not proper to this contemporary moment; instead the movement needs to shift entirely to the push for legislation and for public forums – to generate a public based on volition and horizontality, enacting the world that they seek to create (cf. Chûô Riron Iinkai 1994, Tomonaga 1984, Uesugi 1988, Yagi 1976). In this description, the appropriateness of sound to context is called into question. The grounds that served to contextualize the kyûdankai as a viable political practice no longer exist.

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What the argument of this chapter has shown is that a swift dismissal of the kyûdankai, as a rough strategy for rough times now past, elides ways in which elements of the kyûdankai live on in current political practice. As I have shown, in tracing the origins of the sleeper, the public forum is not simply a modern replacement for the outmoded kyûdankai. The public forum itself is now both made possible and troubled by the kyûdankai. The kyûdankai lives on within the public forum in the form of the sleeper, in ways that recommend deeper consideration on the part of the movement of the connection between these forms and that recommend deeper examination on the part of the social scientist of the nature of publics and their mobilization.

Notes 1

2

3 4 5

For example: Inoue’s 1996 Hirune no Susume [In Recommendation of Afternoon Naps], Matsubara’s 1993 Atama wo Yoku Suru Tanmin-hou [The Short-sleep Method that Makes you Smart], Sakai’s 1991 Atama no Yoku naru Yo-jiken Suimin-hou [The Four-hours Sleep Method to Become Smart], and Torii’s 1995 Inemuri Ni-fun de Genki Ni-jikan – Desuku de Utatane Dekiru Sarariiman Hodo Shigoto ga Dekiru [Two Hours Fit with Two Minutes’ Sleep: a Salaryman Who can Sleep at His Desk Does a Better Job]. For example: Nemuri wa hyakuyaku no chô [Sleep is the best of all remedies] and Shokugo issue manbyôen [A nap after a meal cures 10,000 illnesses]. See Corbin 1998, p. 210ff, for a further discussion, in a different context, of the role sound can play in foment public humiliation. This and subsequent quotes are the author’s translations. Dôwa is the administrative term for Buraku. Buraku neighborhoods that registered themselves with the government to receive state aid between 1969 and 2002 were labeled Dôwa areas; and their issues, Dôwa issues.

3

Facing the nation

Sound, fury, and public oratory among Japanese right-wing groups Nathaniel M. Smith

From the truck

We roll through the streets in a hollowed-out carapace of a former tour bus. The windows are large and a good deal higher than the surrounding traffic; I can imagine they once afforded tourists an impressive, if fleeting, view of the scenery of some notable corner of the Japanese archipelago. Now, they offer us a vista of Sapporo, the largest city on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. Usually people avert their eyes from sound trucks on city streets. Perhaps the reason people are looking at our sound truck instead of turning away is my uncommonly foreign face on the other side of the thinly tinted glass. Or maybe it is because this part of Sapporo – the sanctioned area for protests at Ôdori Park – has become something of an activist circus, as groups with diverse political bents jostle for attention during the G8 summit, the proceedings of which are safely ensconced two hours outside the city at the Lake Toyako resort. There are three of us in the large blue bus, followed in a somewhat smaller four-door utility truck by several more military fatigue-clad activists. The men are from the Aikokutô or, in proper form, the Dai Nippon Aikokutô – the Greater Japan Patriots’ Party.1 The Tokyo-based group drove up a passenger van but brought the bus and smaller truck by ferry a few days in advance to save money on gas and avoid expensive highway tolls. As we continue for another revolution around the long greenbelt that comprises the park on the south side of the city, the driver of the bus, Hasegawa, attempts to roil people assembled in the park he assumes are leftists. He scolds them in language that conjures Imperial Japan with the same slogan that is festooned on the side of the four-door truck: “Traitors to the nation! Return to Tokyo and stop sullying Japan!” Hasegawa growls this in a guttural, masculine drawl, extending key vowels for effect, before screaming the last blast, “You should be ashamed of yourselves!”2 The sound of Hasegawa’s voice mingles with its heavily amplified counterpart emerging from speakers atop the vehicle. Another activist in the smaller truck screams back, repeating the call. Their amplified invective ricochets among buildings as we crawl along the perimeter of the park, audio-delay producing an echo chamber effect in the gulf between the call and the response, the naked yell, and the filtered howl.

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Figure 3.1 A prefectural police officer observes a Dai-Nippon Aikokutô sound truck during the 2008 G8 meetings in Sapporo (photograph by the author)

At the next intersection, Hasegawa executes a well-worn trope of sound truck activism: find a roadblock and go through it. Ignoring the batons and waving wands of the officers directing him to turn, our bus advances, sometimes slowly creeping, at times lurching forward. The attacks, though feigned, are still menacing. As Hasegawa draws to a halt, uniformed police surround the bus. Behind them, plainclothes officers confer via radio with remote commanders. On the sidewalk, another clutch of plainclothes cops with matching department-issue “casual” garb – utility vests and baseball hats – film and photograph the scene. A few curious civilians look on with them. Soon, several men in suits – the ones in charge – come to the bus window to speak with the driver. Instead of talking, Hasegawa launches into a full volume speech directed at the citizens within earshot and the police surrounding the bus. He begins by restating his support for the police, “We are Aikokutô and we support the police as they try to keep the terrorists at bay!” But quickly he moves to direct orders, “We demand that terrorists be shot on sight – defend your nation and do your duty! Shoot the terrorists!” The “terrorists” he refers to are the assorted leftists and peace activists in the park.3

From the sidewalk

Along the street below, members of another group, Issuikai, give speeches and hand out leaflets.4 They number just four activists from Tokyo, including the group’s leader Kimura, and Miyamoto, an activist from Sapporo. Others from

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39

affiliated groups will join later in the week. Discreet speakers rigged along the roof rack of Miyamoto’s cream-colored passenger van are wirelessly connected with two megaphones facing opposite directions on the sidewalk. Activists at either end of the sidewalk speaking area offer passersby fliers with a point by point explanation of Issuikai’s stance on the summit. Group leader Kimura, clad in loose-fitting traditional Japanese summer garb and sandals, sets into a fortyminute elaboration of his group’s position: Japan must reject the neo-colonial global economic system administered by the G8 and enforced by the United States military. As he talks, Kimura paces back and forth over a large poster of George W. Bush affixed to the sidewalk earlier in the day. Across Bush’s face is a large red “X” and characters that read “War Criminal.” In contrast to the Aikokutô, Kimura’s speech is addressed more to other activists than to the citizenry of Sapporo or the police. As he excoriates the system of international governance that he insists the G8 represents, he offers the theme of anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism as a bridge between activists of differing ideological persuasions. Markedly, he engages the Left and anarchists in a broad appeal to their potential to enter into global politics. “How can Japanese like us intervene in the world system dominated by the United States and Britain?” he asks. Here on the sidewalk with Issuikai, Kimura shoots me a jocular glance after each trenchant point about US hegemony.

Figure 3.2 The leader of New Right group Issuikai performs street oratory atop a print of George W. Bush on a Sapporo sidewalk (photograph by the author)

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Kimura updates the long-standing nationalist trope of “Japan versus the Anglo world” with references to the Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, and economic liberalization policies spearheaded by former Prime Minister Koizumi to make his case for a more independent and proactive Japan. Beyond the geopolitics of war and neoliberal capitalism, Kimura turns to the issue of climate change, first chastising the US for failing to support the Kyoto Protocol and then criticizing the Japanese government for letting them. Were it not for several of his phrasings, people on the sidewalk that afternoon might have mistaken Issuikai for another leftist group. Observing from just beyond the immediate sidewalk area, however, a special detail of agents from the National Police Agency – who followed us all the way from Tokyo – would make no such mistake.

Sound, fury, and oratory

Right-wing groups are the most prominent political actors in contemporary Japanese cities, but their activism is an idiosyncratic mix of pre-war ideology and post-war geopolitics. This chapter introduces two prominent forms of right-wing activist practice in Japan that are structured around sound: coordinated parades of “sound trucks” and regularly scheduled street oratory sessions outside train stations. The auditory dimensions of the public sphere in Japan is informed by the amplified activism of the Right, but the modalities of sound and movement engage the Japanese public from multiple angles. Behind externally oriented political messaging, sonic activism helps to shape the social dynamics of their movement and helps activists to construct the illusive object of their activism: the ethnic nation. For passersby, forms of rightist sonic activism are at best annoying intrusions into the soundscape of Japanese cities. At worst, they are violent and intimidating aural assaults. But for the activist, these modes of engagement create an internally oriented dynamic that sustains their social activism. By tracing routes through the city, sound truck parades produce emotionally powerful territorial understandings of Japan. These parades allow the activist to connect places of nationalist veneration like Yasukuni Shrine with sites of protest, such as foreign embassies and companies targeted by the Right. Amid a strictly regulated mass media, forms of street oratory procure for rightists a direct conduit to urban audiences that, in turn, serve as a means for conceptualizing “the people” of the ethnic nation. Thus, these activist practices create both territorial understandings of the space of the nation and social understandings of the “face” of the nation. The national object of activism as imagined by rightist activists is operationalized by sound and movement through urban Japan. The sound truck parade and street oratory serve as dynamic sites in the production of ethno-nationalist knowledge. Focusing on two generations of right-wing activism – a group formed in the early postwar and a “New Right” group formed in the early 1970s – I began by offering a short ethnographic orientation on how these rightist sonic practices took shape in the scene of the 2008 Group of Eight (G8) meetings in Hokkaido. Next, I will turn to a historical discussion of rightist

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activism and look at the manner by which forms of sonic activism interpellate distinct listening publics to produce distinct spaces for public recognition of rightist activism in contemporary Japan. Returning to the scene of the G8 protests in Hokkaido, I offer further ethnographic purchase on what their aggressive practices of sound and movement mean for how contemporary Japanese rightist groups engage with the publics that motivate and constrain their activism. The imposing visual and phonic display of a screaming phalanx of sound trucks, on the one hand, and the figure of a rightist haranguing passersby outside train stations, on the other, are common urban fixtures for residents and visitors to Japan alike. One might wonder why, if they intend to sway public sentiment, Japanese right-wing groups seem to revel in anti-social behavior and the production of aggressively martial, masculine aesthetic spaces. That this behavior has persisted and even flourished, codified in orientations of style and content, reflects both the importance of trans-group sociality on the Right and, more broadly, the potency of operating from a space of social marginality in political activism.5 Indeed, the very forms of activism that might seem to hinder broader reception of their message are directly tied to the performance of their social and political identity as rightists. The oppositional and confrontational stance of rightist activism reflects at the same time that it affirms what it means to bring a marginalized perspective to bear on mainstream social and political issues. In amplified invective from mobile sound trucks, activists revel in the recreation of territories lost and the reanimation of national martyrs forgotten in postwar Japan. In the figure of a lone activist orator addressing a sea of commuters, they draw from the romantic ideal of commitment in spite of insurmountable odds. Stories of martyrdom and other forms of national self-sacrifice are the cornerstone of Japanese nationalism celebrated at places such as Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine. Rightist practices of sound and movement actively channel these ideals of zealous sacrifice into present-day activism. The right-wing groups are well aware of the negative reception their public activism garners. At the same time, they have not completely abandoned hope that their work might be recognized, or even appreciated, by the laypeople they address. Indeed, many activists describe their own introduction to activism in terms of this very transformation – an awakening from the “hearing public” involuntarily constituted by virtue of proximity to sound, into an active role in the “listening public” that serves to constitute a notion of ethnic Japan. Powerful nationalist genealogies of action and affect are aesthetically anathema to an audience of contemporary Japanese citizens. What passersby find intimidating, off-putting, or simply annoying serves as a kernel of compulsion for the activist. In martial, masculine forms of sonic activism, the vehemence of address is issued toward a public unwilling or unable to recognize its primordial or “true” heritage. The perverse populism of rightist activism in Japan requires – and in turn generates – its “hearing” public, but the success of rightist sonic activism is not measured by a metrics of harmony. Rather, it is most powerful when constructed within an idiom of dissonant marginality vis-à-vis the very public it addresses.

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John Coltrane famously quipped, “The audience heard ‘We’ even if the singer said ‘I.’” (Carby 1999: 12). While this process of affective collectivization may hold true for jazz, musical performance, or even oratory more generally, I suggest that the inverse is more appropriate for understanding the social dynamics of aggressive rightist public activism. For rightists in contemporary Japan, even if the activist yells a collectivizing “we,” the audience is likely to hear a demanding and off-putting “I.” The activist’s “we,” however, refers not only to the imagined ethnic national whole but also to the diverse social networks of the Right, which seek to represent it in their practices of oratory and movement.

The right in postwar Japan

The fact that the Japanese Right is constituted in terms of dissonance rather than harmony reflects the persistence of a strategy that helped rightist groups weather intense social and geopolitical changes at the end of the twentieth century and reflects the context in which they coalesced in the early post Second World War years. Despite images of unity presented in popular media, on the one hand, and the out-sized stature of their coordinated public activism on the other, contemporary Japanese right-wing groups do not comprise a monolithic movement. If the unity of the Right as a social movement had ever been possible, an array of factors in the late twentieth century eroded much of that common ground. Chief among these factors is the end of the Cold War and with it the loss of the threat of global communism as an ideological common denominator. An increased police pressure on rightist activities (particularly those groups associated with organized crime), and the decreased economic power of corporate Japan over the recessionary 1990s saw a weakening of the Right alongside the dilution of its ideological enemies: large-scale unions and leftist organizations. A final but important change was the death of the Shôwa emperor, a beacon of ethnic identity for the Right who had presided over Imperial Japan’s wartime years as a living god and served as a symbolic figurehead during Japan’s powerful postwar recovery.6 As such, rightist groups were buffeted by both the elimination of their ideological grounding (in the figure of the emperor and in the threat of communism) and their sources of financial support (in decreased ties to corporate Japan and to organized crime). Groups that had flourished as money-generating fronts for organized criminal syndicates found themselves under closer scrutiny from law enforcement as companies and individuals found easier recourse against extortion. As a result, many “faux-rightist” groups folded. Groups that had but dallied in extortionary activism were forced to continue with less financial support and manpower. Groups for which remaining active was not in question were often those with strong ideological commitments borne of a longer durée than postwar anti-communism. These were the groups that were to fill the ranks of the New Right. Ethnic nationalist groups that were to become the “New Right” [shin-uyoku] emerged from universities and colleges as part of an anti-student movement movement. Equal parts political, masculine, and religious, these groups drew from campus martial arts clubs and from youth involved in campus organizing for

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conservative new religions like Seicho no Ie.7 They opposed student strikes that had closed campuses nationwide, frightened by what they believed these mass mobilizations augured for the potential of a communist revolution in Japan. Against the archetypical right-wing orientation toward the United States, at least agnostic about the US-Japan security agreements if not abjectly pro-US as a tenet of anti-communism, the young men of the New Right were anti-American like their left-leaning peers. Their opposition to Japan’s support of US actions in Vietnam was cast less as a conflict about Communism than one about ethnicity and the continued domination of Asian nations by white colonialists. In so doing, they rehabilitated heady and idealistic facets of pre-1945 nationalism and pan-Asianism into their “new” ethnic nationalist stance in a way that commented upon both Cold War geopolitics and the internationalist currents of late 1960s student activism.8 Although the early wave of ethno-nationalist student activists emerged at the behest of religious leaders and conservative politicians, groups like Issuikai were soon to promulgate a new activist style given shape by the high-profile ritual suicide and attempted coup d’etat in 1970 of author-cum-activist Mishima Yukio and former student activist Morita Masakatsu. The New Right was media-savvy, literary, and anti-establishment. Like the New Left, they rejected the organizational and ideological orthodoxies of existing activism and instead formed strategic and social alliances with such unlikely bedfellows as leftists and anarchists. Their activism was of a different scale and character than existing rightist groups that had been nurtured at the nexus of conservative politicians, organized crime, and business leaders.9 Though they drew upon a nationalist ideological heritage to answer the moral question posed by US-Japan relations, the violent direct action that became the hallmark of the New Right was in some ways more akin to that of leftist radicals. Not surprisingly, these characteristics made them suspect among existing groups on the Right and brought them under a level of close police surveillance more familiar to leftists than the broad berth which postwar right-wing groups had enjoyed. As activists weathered geopolitical and domestic change at the end of the twentieth century, the models of activism charted by the New Right presented an attractive model for new social and political circumstances. Long-standing patterns, habits, and practices of activism, however, changed only fitfully. Forms of contemporary rightist activism reflect this uneven transition. The distinct modes of public political performance found in the mobile sound truck and static street oratory continue to play a key, if somewhat conflicted, role in orienting how activists engage with and apprehend Japanese society today.

Sound and contemporary right-wing activism

A central issue for activism involves the creation and demarcation of audience. Forms of sonic activism are the primary means that contemporary rightist groups achieve this end. Rightists, in their use of mobility and sound amplification strategies, constitute multiple audiences within specific urban spaces and across the Japanese archipelago. These spatially and temporally circumscribed audiences

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produce a social geography of the Japanese nation that both sustains and constrains rightist activism. The social geographies created by sound trucks and megaphones at once draw from the public at large and from the ranks of rightwing groups. Thus, there is a tension between public activism that is oriented outwardly toward the general Japanese citizen and public activism oriented laterally among rightist social networks. The social geographies created by activism often serve less to create a bond with the ostensible civic audience of their activism than to consolidate the Right as an activist community. The question then becomes, “What is ‘the public’ for a rightist activism that displaces actual citizenry in order to imagine the form of the ideal ethnic nation they might ideally comprise?” The answer, I suggest, is based on the unique ways in which sonic activism allows rightists to apprehend, access, and mediate the object of their activism by becoming an interlocutor between contemporary citizenry and the ideological and historically constructed concept of the ethnic national whole. In a contemporary media climate in which “mainstream” political sensibility either excludes or caricatures the political margins, the sonic practices of the sound truck and street oratory present a unique opportunity for the Right to interact with the public on their own terms.10 As a result, rightist sonic activism is dependent upon the territorialization of space within Japan’s urban environments. For groups in urban centers, this means regularly scheduled public activism. For groups in the countryside, this means gathering to participate in coordinated actions in urban centers like Hiroshima, Osaka, and Tokyo several times a year. Urban activism serves as a means of bringing rightist political messages within earshot of shoppers and commuters in a game of catch-and-release. Outside busy train stations, changing traffic signals pace the dissolution of audiences constituted just moments earlier by rightist oratory. Over multi-hour sessions, stationary rightists carve out a space of recognition for their activism that filters the flow of the urban citizenry moving around them. In sound truck parades, this arrangement is reversed. Martial music and truncated political slogans form involuntary audiences of office workers, only to leave them behind a moment later as the convoy of trucks plows forward. Large multi-truck parades are usually the sign of a counter-protest to disrupt annual events held by political enemies (such as teachers’ unions), impromptu actions against a political enemy, the commemoration of a notable anniversary, or the celebration of some “anti-” day such as the “AntiRussia Day” and “Anti-Communist Chinese Day.” Street oratory, in contrast, happens much more frequently. In Tokyo, the many activist groups ensure that most major train stations have multiple oratory sessions each week. As commuters pass in and out of the amplified bubble of sound produced by rightist megaphones and as sound trucks territorialize contemporary Japan, the aim of the activist is not to form a collection of transient micro-publics. Rather, the object of rightist address is more singular, if more elusive. Although the audiences he creates are temporally circumscribed, the effect of creating these audiences is to continually and cumulatively, in the daily practices of activism, produce spaces of recognition for their ideology and for

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themselves in contemporary Japan. His public is not any one citizen but instead the ideal of a Japanese citizenry writ-large. The sound truck is used as a tool both in parades and for street oratory. Each form of activism engenders a particular relational habitus. Sound truck parades make denunciation public and performative. Although clearly visible and audible, the activist in a sound truck parade expects to be ignored by the general public. He is there to intrude and provoke from his protected spot above traffic. The activist on the sidewalk, however, is disposed to want to persuade, more apt to expect a response for his ground level, eye-to-eye engagement with the public. His audience, after all, is not a political target, but a target for conversion and education. The arrangement of engagement structures the expectations of the activist as he engages with the audience comprised by his sonic activism. In practice, however, these expectations are muddled by the fact that many groups engage in both forms of activism. Perhaps not surprisingly, this means that the activist does not often get the recognition he desires. If, as remarked by Gunter Grass, “the violent and the righteous are hard of hearing,” so too is the disinterested public (cited in Schafer 2004a: 25). As activists engaged in street oratory learn to face the nation, they must directly address an indifferent (and at times even hostile) audience outside the protective steel shell of a van or bus. This aspect of public recognition can be a troubling one for rightists. From a position of disenfranchisement from contemporary public discourse, sonic activism puts them squarely in the public eye (and ear). But the very passersby they directly address, by virtue of fear or disinterest, often ignore them. What distinctions in the activist’s relational habitus are engendered by each mode of activism in managing this problem, and what does it suggest for how activists apprehend the Japanese public?

Sound truck citizens

The sound truck is the archetypal vehicle of rightist activism in Japan. Adorned with slogans and loudspeakers, sound trucks are mobile, highly visible, and in the dense valleys of Japan’s urban landscape, highly audible as they echo beyond the range of sight. They serve as platforms for speech making and as makeshift motels for activists visiting from the countryside. But at their core, sound trucks are intimidating sonic weapons – noisy tanks snarling traffic in front of embassies or assailing companies deemed enemy to the nation. The exigencies of movement delimit the form and content of the political speech that emanates from the sound truck. In lieu of oratory or even full sentences, squads of sound trucks repeat truncated slogans like “Crush the Teacher’s Union!” or “Give back the Northern Islands!” The combined effect of their call-and-response cry is abrasive and violent, overwhelming all other sound. But only for a few minutes, since the sound truck parade moves forward, albeit slowly, leaving only echoing fragments of slogans as it plies the deep valleys of the Japanese city. This hyperbolic, homosocial performance of anger sometimes results in a comical spectacle as screaming lines of vehicles snake through the city. Mocking

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Figure 3.3 A trio of Aikokutô sound trucks, parked in front of Ikebukuro Station on August 9: “Anti-Russia Day.” An activist-orator speaks from atop the rightmost vehicle (photograph by the author)

the powerful and engaging in the occasional display of self-mockery grants the rightist entrance into a carnivalesque political inversion, their electoral weakness overcome by the strength of their sound. At Kasumigaseki, a group of sound trucks surrounded the Japanese parliament, delaying a long line of limousines ferrying politicians to the building. From multiple megaphones, the rightists poked fun at their elected leaders. “Hey! Why are you all riding in hired gas guzzlers!” Another followed, “Shouldn’t you be taking the train or in a hybrid?” “No, no” said another, “ride your bikes!” The final jocular word: “Get yourself some wheelbarrows!” More often, rightists avail themselves of various registers of implied violence in the armored and amplified sound trucks that let rightists perform the violent potential of their activist networks with relatively minimal manpower. Ten trucks (that could be filled with men) present a more intimidating façade than the ten lonely activists required to pilot them. In coordinated multi-truck actions, activists are empowered to assert control over sound and the spaces created by it, letting the volume of their speakers stand in for the volume of their rank. The truck, as a social and symbolic vehicle, affords a particular vantage point on society. Leblanc (1999) writes about how the bicycle prefigures the political activism of Tokyo housewives. The concept “bicycle citizenship,” she argues, reflects the alienation women feel from one kind of politics – that of the male

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dominated national level politics, business, and officialdom she categorizes as “taxi citizenship.” Political potential is instead located in a socially grounded, populist, and feminized political perspective, which finds opportunity in its gendered status. She notes that in this neighborhood-based “bicycle citizenship”:

. . . the housewife acts as if she were a citizen, but she believes that extending the reach of her actions to what she conceives of as political spheres would be defeating. The constraints of politics would strip her actions of their real meaning for the community. The housewife may be said to see herself as a citizen, but with a citizenship that is not valid in the contemporary political world. (Leblanc 1999: 65)

The sound truck is gendered in a stridently masculine register – the vast majority of rightist activists are men. But these are men marginalized from mainstream Japanese society in several ways. Owing to their early postwar history as hired thugs, rightists groups have long been populated by organized crime groups, or yakuza, the membership of which are over-represented by lower socio-economic classes, ethnic minorities such as those with Korean ancestry and burakumin, or a combination of several stigmatized categories, including the stigma accompanying gang membership itself. Adding to this demonstrable minority status is the fact that rightist ideology elevates the figure of the underdog working against seemingly insurmountable odds. Thus, the sound truck not only allows an inversion of the postwar political regime, it redraws activists’ ability to voice their concerns to, and be recognized by, mainstream society. In this way, the sound truck and its attendant activist practices afford these men a unique means of claiming a place at the core of the Japanese polity, and importantly, as the only ones motivated to redress its problems.

The pragmatics of volume and performative violence

The sound truck fulfills another role for activists as a vehicle for them to conceptualize the territory of the Japanese ethnic nation and attempt to restore it to its forgotten ideals. As noted above, the sound truck allows rightists to use volume (in decibels) to make up for volume (of activists). At events like the annual protests in Hokkaido against Russia for what rightists (and, incidentally, the Japanese government) consider to be the unlawful occupation of former Japanese territories, annual protests of the meetings of the Japan Teachers’ Association (on account of their imputed “anti-Japaneseness”), and mobilizations on the anniversaries of the end of hostilities in the Second World War and of the United States’ atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, large numbers of rightist sound trucks undertake joint protests spanning large portions of Japanese urban centers. Like their amplifications of sound, the stark style and large size of many vehicles greatly amplifies the visual impression of the number of activists participating. Although many participants are not full-time activists, several guidance strategies ensure their comfortable participation in the event. The convening group

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distributes flyers and posters to affix denoting the focus of the parade. They outline of the course it will follow and instruct participating activists of the order and content of the Sprechchor, the familiar call and response denunciations that will issue from the trucks’ speakers as they pass through the city. Activists, confident in the special slogans of the day, do not need to be well studied in history or politics to participate. A further incentive that lowers the threshold to full participation in the duties of the day is found in the nature of dress. Members of organizations that amass large groups of sound trucks come attired in faux-military garb, generally tall black leather boots and dark blue or green fatigues embroidered with the name and insignia of their group. These military costumes visually amplify a sense of rightists’ violent potential. The self, however, is the primary target of the symbolic weight of the uniform – military garb steels the resolve of its wearer, heightens his attention to order and discipline, and allows him to fall in line with his comrades, both contemporary and past. Staging activities in Tokyo often take place at the national military shrine Yasukuni or, in the prefectures, among the network of Country-Protecting Shrines (Gokokujinja). After distributing information on the day’s activities, groups arrange themselves for military-style reviews of their rank by their leaders. They are admonished as to their duty and role for the protests. After singing the national anthem, they approach the shrine to pray as a group. Parade routes are submitted to police agencies ahead of time, and the vehicles and bodies of traffic police, riot police, and plainclothes agents line each turn of the course. Activists, emboldened by their numbers, aggressively challenge the officers. The police expect this kind of provocative action and arrests are rare. Instead, these large-scale protests are more akin to protest theater.

Territorializing Japan

As rightist sound trucks visit places of protest that dot the Japanese archipelago, they link them with sacred sites of historical and religious veneration. By connecting these sites with their sound and movement, the sound truck helps rightists reconstitute a national space, and, just as importantly, place themselves within it. Before departing for a day of protest, rightists in Tokyo pay their respects at Yasukuni Shrine, a well-known site for the veneration of soldiers who died across the Japanese empire in service of the emperor and, concomitantly, for its association with the ideological principles of ethnic nationalism that animated Japanese militarism. Materially and symbolically, Yasukuni collects the legacies of Japan’s former territorial holdings as well as the legacies of the men that fought to attain and defend them. Rightist sound trucks act as symbolic vessels for bringing that ideology of martyrdom and martial violence across the urban landscape of Japan. In doing so, it gives rightists an ideologically clear and emotionally powerful claim upon and knowledge of the territory of contemporary Japan. In the tributary movement of their vehicles along these pilgrimage routes, rightists perform a “Mecca-nized” tour of sacred spaces, physically positing themselves in the heroic role of catalytic actors at work to re-animate the ethnic

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nation and dedicated servants of an emperor-centered state that no longer exists. In aggressive clashes with police that flaunt the letter of the law, they assert an ethno-religious identity over and above their juridical one and recreate themselves as imperial subjects instead of citizens who are subject to the strictures of a postwar Japanese constitution written by American occupiers. The timeless identity of the Japanese patriot wins out over an identity politics tied to the activists’ often low social status.

Megaphone citizens and facing the nation

If the sound truck helps rightists perform historical and territorial work, street oratory serves as a platform from which rightists might produce publics from passersby. In essence, the rightists populate the polity – both by confronting a citizenry and putting a face to the nation. Amid the three and half million people who pass through the busy railway hub at Tokyo’s Shinjuku station each day, rightist activists are at work filtering the flows of contemporary Japanese society. By carving out ideological and rhetorical street-side spaces, rightists hope that the noisy din of advertising in modern, capitalist, Westernized Japan might be balanced by their publicly voiced concerns. The content and form of their political speech, like that of the sound truck parade, is channeled by the exigencies of movement. This time, however, the movement is that of society around them. Rightists maintain the hope that their hailing might resonate with a nascent ethno-nationalist sensibility held by someone among the passersby. Street oratory allows rightists to directly address the citizenry of Japan in two ways––to chastise the failings of contemporary Japanese society and to publicly offer a model of national commitment. For many rightists, the orienting rationale to their regularly scheduled oratory sessions is to secure not just their own public face but to apprehend the “face” of the public. In effect, street oratory allows rightists to symbolically engage the “people” of the ethnic nation. With their auditory volume outside high-volume train stations throughout the country, they mediate the flow of the national population through the transportation hubs of urban Japan. “Facing the nation,” then, is forging relationships with synecdochical slices of the national population on the street corners of the city. Although street oratory sessions offer the thrill of guerilla action, that thrill springs from a different sensibility than the excitement of the bellicose roar of the mobile sound truck. For the activists who favor the hand mic and megaphone, sound truck squadrons are a lumbering burden of the past, tied to the stark divides of the Cold War, and beholden to the coterie of strange bedfellows (politicians, organized crime, and industry) that once coalesced within them. As such, although these two kinds of activism are sometimes intermingled, most groups favor one mode over the other. The social geographies of rightist activism are demarcated by the strategies that a group employs to create social geographies in Japanese society. In general terms, the sound truck is most often regarded as a marker of groups closely aligned with organized crime, while the street oratory style belongs to the New Right. In practice, however, the divide is not so clear. In

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the diffuse networks of rightist activism, individual activists from one group often participate in actions sponsored by another, and unaligned free agents join in as well. Arriving to a downtown district by train like any other shopper, in a matter of minutes an individual or a small group can set up a folding table replete with literature and a donation box, unfurl a flag, run it up a collapsible PVC pole, and amplify their speech with a simple but effectively loud combination of megaphone and microphone. This kind of street oratory is perhaps the ideal mode of engagement for groups of the New Right. It offers a direct, ground level interaction with passersby. Since rightists are commonly expected to operate by sound truck, guerilla oratory also offers activists a degree of ideological camouflage.11 In addition to the pared-down bullhorn and microphone style of street oratory, some groups hold oratory sessions enabled by sound trucks, albeit usually smaller vehicles. The presence of the truck speakers offers amplification for the orator while eschewing the protected vantage point inside the moving vehicle. Instead, he stands at ground level upon a plastic beer bottle crate dais or atop of his parked vehicle. On display and under direct evaluation, he speaks in extended oratory instead of the truncated slogans that usually emerge from truck loudspeakers. Activists often remark that becoming too comfortable in sound truck-style activism lessens the intellectual acumen of a would-be orator. It is easy to rely on call-and-response sloganeering or to fall back on the use of recorded speeches while on the move, but facing society in a busy shopping district with nothing but your wits can be daunting. Inexperienced activists often anxiously abort their lectures, but experience accumulates in even the shortest attempt. Activists soon grow comfortable addressing their ambiguously attentive audience with longer and longer speeches, both prepared and extemporaneous. The space of recognition produced by street oratory, however, remains a complicated one for rightists. That the audience is continually present, but constantly moving, might seem to undermine their oratory. There is one audience, however, that all activists learn to depend on: smokers.

Recognition and the “Manner Zone”

After a series of harsh ward-level strictures against smoking while walking, one knows exactly where to find the smokers: the “Manner Zone,” designated smoking areas outside train stations. At larger stations like Shinjuku, smokers in the Manner Zone are insulated in a thick grey cloud as they cluster around large water-filled ashtrays adorned with admonishments on smoking comportment. These Manner Zones are located precisely where right-wing groups park their sound trucks and set up their megaphones for oratory sessions. The effect is salutary for the rightist, so much so that one almost wonders if a resentful, non-smoking city worker deliberately placed these captive listeners in front of long-established oratory areas. For budding activists learning the ways of public speaking, a useful strategy is to focus on the stable smoker since the fleeting walker can make one feel ignored.

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Neither the smoker or the walker necessarily engage with the orator, but they, like any of us, cannot, as Murray Schafer has pointed out, “turn off (their) ears.”12 The walker rushes away and out of view, if not earshot, leaving an orator mired in hopeless repetition if not loneliness, but the smoker offers the orator a three-tofive minute window to complete a comparison between historical and contemporary politics, to comment on the news of the day, or to rail against North Korea. But what is the character of recognition that the smoker affords the orator? He is present. He appears to be listening (in fact he must be, thinks the activist). His presence may be something of a necessary evil borne of nicotine and the successful nanny-state, but his manner in the zone is, well, mannered. Rarely does he talk back, offer a middle finger, or shoot an angry glare – all things the walkers may feel safe enough to try as they scurry along. He is perhaps the perfect listener for the rightist: the smokers’ civic comportment explains his dutiful isolation in the Manner Zone in the first place.

The 2008 G8 meetings and a clash of activist sonic practices

Having examined the dynamics of two emblematic forms of rightist public activism, let us return northward to the island of Hokkaido, where we left Hasegawa at the roadblock. As officers arrived at the window of the sound truck, Hasegawa passed the mic to his navigator and began a rather one-sided exchange with the police. “Why can’t we pass? Is there a legal reason why not? We are patriots and we support you, why don’t you do the job you are supposed to do and clear the park of these anti-Japanese leftists and Marxists?” The more seasoned officers recognized the theatricality of his demand for the police to shoot leftists on sight and chuckled at the absurdity of his comments. Other officers, likely prefectural police, seemed more on edge. The officer at the window ignored Hasegawa’s provocation and issued a directive, “Turn around and continue to the right, around the park, in the designated protest area.” Hasegawa seemed to sense that the patience of the police had started to wear thin. The rightist sound truck retreated, casting its volume higher again in a triumphant return to the park circuit. The Group of Eight (G8) summit held in Hokkaido in July 2008 attracted a variety of protest groups from across Japan and around the world. The official meetings were held at a secluded hotel complex on Lake Toya (approximately two hours from the prefectural capital of Sapporo), and like other G8 summits in recent years, access to the area was severely limited. Protest activities were permitted in the long, multi-block park, Ôdori Kôen, a green strip that bisects the center of Sapporo. There, in the park and on the surrounding streets downtown, an alternate summit of activist groups of multiple persuasions vied for the attention of passersby and tussled, in equal measure, with the heavy police presence and with each other. Among right-wing groups present at the park, those from Tokyo were the most prominent. Hokkaido has only a small cadre of right-wing activists who are not directly affiliated with organized crime syndicates. Local activists claimed that as

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authorities prepared for the summit, rightist groups were pressured by the police not to participate in any protest activities lest they risk having their criminal, quasilegal, and legal money-making enterprises subjected to harsher surveillance. The only large, traditional style sound trucks present in Sapporo were those of Aikokutô. Despite long having a foothold in the prefecture, the Aikokutô men in attendance consisted entirely of activists from Tokyo. A contingent numbering just under twenty made the trek. Issuikai-related people, by contrast, numbered less than ten activists but were joined periodically by associates from other Tokyo groups. The main staging areas for leftist and peace groups were in the middle of Ôdôri Park. Surrounding a small stage with seating for lectures and rallies were tents and informational tables for peace and environment-related NGOs, unions, and minor political parties. The area was occupied in rotation by a variety of groups and attracted audiences large enough to fill the seating area. Anticipating the heavy police pressure in the park, many young activists, especially the counterculture anarchists and punks, had opted to stay at a camp outside city limits to take part in a variety of teach-ins and workshops. During certain parts of the day, usually before or after a demonstration march, groups of anarchists gathered behind the main NGO staging area before heading back to their encampments. Aikokutô’s strategy of circling the park perimeter while enjoining the police to “shoot the terrorists” amassed inside seemed, not too surprisingly, to annoy the activists in the park. The Doppler effect on their announcements gave a reasonable indication of the speed of their progress from the fixed location at the Issuikai oratory position about a block away. At a certain point during the afternoon, Aikokutô’s progress came to a stop. Suddenly, the voice over the loudspeakers began to yell frantically, and the din of other, unamplified, voices screaming back at them was audible across the park. One of Aikokutô’s smaller vans was parked haphazardly alongside where the anarchists were gathered, about fifty-strong. A growing number of police officers were attempting to separate the growing crowd from the van. The anarchists pulled back to the slightly raised area above the curb, but Funakawa, the head of Aikokutô and point-man in the van, was livid. He continued to scream demands that the police arrest the “anarcho-terrorists” for assault and destruction of his property, all while jumping in and out of his van. The crowd became restless, yelling for the “fascists” to pack up and leave (they seemed, at this juncture, to mean the rightists and not the police). Aikokutô had stopped alongside the group of anarchists and began taunting them by loudspeaker at close range. In reaction, one of the anarchists grabbed a Tibetan flag attached to the front of the rightist van and broke the small pole to which it was attached.13 Aikokutô cried foul, screaming that they had been assaulted, and this attracted a large police response. Once enough police officers to effectively separate the two groups had arrived, middle-aged Funakawa jumped from the van, feigning an attack on the entire group of young anarchists. He was greeted with a wide range of boos and hisses from the crowd, and spontaneous eruptions of song calling on the rightists, and soon the police as well, to go home. Then, from the middle of the crowd, a plastic bottle flew forward and

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Figure 3.4 Funakawa holds a broken Tibetan flag after his clash with the anarchists (photograph by the author)

landed with a thud on the roof of the van. Funakawa leapt again for the crowd but was subdued by the police as several long columns of riot police ran in to forcibly separate the actors, pushing back the onlookers and press who had gathered for the commotion. Once the riot police had securely separated the two groups, Funakawa restarted his jeers in earnest from the safety of his sound truck. The police instructed him to move along, but he demanded that he be allowed to file charges against the “vandals and terrorists.” They must, he said, be arrested immediately. Not unexpectedly, this demand was greeted with dismissive laughter from the anarchists, who responded with taunts of their own as they realized they held a stronger position than the rightists. Funakawa was forced to leave the area but only after using his sound truck to one of its original purposes: technological and mechanical might. Although his group of three activists was vastly outnumbered by the anarchists, and in turn many times over outnumbered by the riot police, he

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challenged them all with another round of intense invective. Had his anger been more poorly tempered, he might have driven his van through the row of riot police toward the anarchists. Though he made a slight feint to that effect as he drove away, in this context, under protection of the police state, his only real recourse was to amplify his tantrum to all within audible range. “Aikokutô is off,” he announced stridently, “to the police station to file a complaint! Those responsible for this assault will pay!” Although his provocations had succeeded in spurring an incident, the fact that the group was saved by the police highlighted a rather unflattering view of the Right. Indeed, other activists who flocked to watch offered a harsh evaluation of the scene. Why, they wondered, was Funakawa claiming abuse after provoking a fight? And if he was really serious, why not just ram his vehicle into the crowd of protestors? It was cowardly, they thought, to count on the protection of the police. One activist at the scene trenchantly described what transpired as an allegory for the right-wing in postwar Japan: a blustery, half-hearted attack by an aging activist on leftists not nearly as well-equipped, followed by a sad retreat into the arms of the state.

The ethnic nation, recognition, and the “Manner Zone” revisited

Sound truck parades and street oratory are sonic and spatial modes of activism that conjure very different engagements with––and imaginations of––the Japanese public. The territorializing work of the sound truck gives directives via truncated, staccato blasts of sound that render abstract the individuated listener/citizen. They are taken as part of an amalgamated polity and national territory, not as individual citizens with a right of refusal. When the audience speaks back to the sonic power of the sound truck, it presents a powerful challenge to the activist. The public imagined by the rightist in a sound truck does not need to approve of the rightist. They need only offer their presence. The blare of a sound truck passing through the city comes in portions small enough to be grasped in the few moments it is within earshot. The bewilderment of casual observers in the face of such off-putting and aggressive activism also comes quickly. And yet, activists will tell you that while more accessible activism might generate more support, they are not in the business of catering to the whims of the fickle public. If their message was difficult, it was also just. If it was off-putting, it reflected a mode of engagement that fit their idea of what rightist activism should bring to a contemporary nation they felt had gone soft. As the slogans broadcast from sound trucks do not require contemplation, they also do not require and should not necessarily inspire a response. The sound truck engaged in “streaming street-propaganda” (nagashi gaisen) works to shame and blame objects of nationalist ire but also to draw attention to the performance of rightist condemnation. This type of activism is indeed a facet of “freedom of speech,” but it is not speech intended to engage in a dialogue nor would it necessarily welcome one.

Facing the nation

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The default non-engagement between activists in the sound truck parades and the publics they address owes as much to the fear they instill in the average citizen as it is does to the disdain their ideology invites. The sound truck activist casts a menacing countenance as he barrels down the street toward barricades and enemies, clad in military fatigues and bearing the ideological weight of generations of dead national martyrs. If his actions as a member of the ethnic nation are sincere, then he must be ready to spring to potentially violent action. By contrast, the sidewalk activist places himself in direct interaction with those he can only assume do not agree with him. His style of engagement involves argumentation, story telling, and the careful art of cultivating listeners. In short, he bears the orator’s burden to persuade and engage. But for those weaned on the sound truck’s drive-by shouting, direct engagement with the public can provoke a certain brittleness, reflecting an awareness of the activist’s marginal place in society. This uneasiness fuels tension that at times bursts wildly forward, like the potential violence of a compressed spring. One afternoon, a close informant and long-time activist in his early forties suddenly broke from his speech to issue a verbal assault on a Japanese passerby, “Shashin wo totten ja nê!” Or, in slightly sanitized but still appropriately inappropriate English “No fricking pictures!” The photographer, as they tend to be, was a walker and not one of the smoking inhabitants of the Manner Zone. Had a smoker taken a picture the scene may have transpired differently. The longerterm relationship between orator and his tacit listener might have grounded the live wire of anger. The actions of the picture-snapping walker extracted the rightist from the relational space he had created with those in the Manner Zone, undermining his address of and relationship with what for him constitutes a proxy ethnic nation. Given the burden of oratory over the raucous thrill of sound truck invective, this must also have felt like an affront to the work of the activist, who is normally empowered as he wields sound. Just as the diffuse networks of rightist groups collect a range of diverse characters, however, so too does the timbre of sonic activism depend on temperament of the activist at the microphone. If facing the nation allows it to take shape for the activist, sometimes the unpredictable nature of the public necessitates turning the other cheek. On another day in Tokyo, a suited, middle-aged, but well-built activist named Uemura had his oratory interrupted by a Caucasian couple. Not more than five feet in front of Uemura’s dais, the man posed making goofy faces and a somewhat mocking peace sign with his fingers while the woman snapped several pictures. The smokers in the Manner Zone held their puffs as they waited to see what calamity might develop. Instead of a quick turn to violence or a roar of scorn, Uemura smiled broadly and didn’t miss a beat as he turned to the pack of smokers to ask if anyone else would like to commemorate the Shinjuku afternoon with a photograph.

Notes 1

The Aikokutô was founded in 1951 by former parliamentarian Akao Bin. It was organized around the principle of anti-Communism domestically and abroad, pushing

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2 3 4

5 6

7

8 9 10 11

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for constitutional revision, and enhancing the US-Japan security alliance. The group gained additional prominence in 1960, with the assassination on live television of Japan Socialist Party leader Asanuma Inejiro at the hands of a seventeen-year-old former member Yamaguchi Otoya and for its role in helping to suppress the antiANPO (Japan-US Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security) protests in the same year. See Siniawer (2008) for more on early postwar right-wing activism and violence specialists. A note on translation: while I have rendered haji wo shire as “You should be ashamed of yourselves!” a direct translation as “Know shame!” perhaps better captures the explosive combination of invective and imperative in their cry. Hasegawa’s appellation of “terrorist” refers to formal leftist organizations such as the Chukakuha and Kakumaru, but also to groups of environmental activists, left-leaning fascists such as Toyama Kôichi, and anarchists. That is, “leftist” and “terrorist” are blanket references to those who are not “patriots” in the terms of the Right. Despite the poetic imagery of “one-water-association” conjured by name ideographically, “Issuikai” is in fact more prosaic. “Wednesday” shares the same kanji character as “water.” “One water” refers to the fact that the group initially met on the first Wednesday of each month. The name was normalized among members before anyone thought of anything more appropriate. This has resonances with how language of cultural pluralism is used by United States white separatist movements described by Berbrier (1998) and with the politics of the radical right in western Europe described by Kitschelt (1995). See Szymkowiak and Steinhoff (1995) on the postwar Right, Steinhoff (2003) and Apter and Nagayo (1986) for the Left, Katzenstein and Tsujinaka (1991) on policing of political movements, Hill (2003) and Kaplan and Dubro (2003) on organized crime, Field (1993) on rocky transitions at the end of the Shôwa Era, and Yoda and Harootunian, eds (2006) on the anxieties of millennial Japan. Seicho no Ie, one of Japan’s “new religions” (shinshukyo), was founded by Taniguchi Masaharu in the early 1930s. In the postwar, Seicho no Ie attempted to mount a politically conservative, Emperor-centered response to Soka Gakkai by sponsoring politicians, lobbying activities, and via its student groups, but did not have much success. This was not unlike Asianist aspects of the Beheiren described by Avenell (2010), but it put the New Right at odds with extant rightist activists for whom anti-Communist orthodoxy trumped pan-Asianism. Szymkowiak and Steinhoff (1995) and Siniawer (2008) are good resources on the post-Second World War germination of rightwing “violence specialists” and their ties to political and underworld elements. Szymkowiak and Steinhoff (1995) also address the emergence of the New Right in the 1970s. See Krauss (2000) and Yoneyama (2002) on how Japanese public broadcaster NHK intermingles news and political orthodoxies in sometimes troubling ways. Although in recent years street oratory is rare among leftist groups, even up to and including the Communist Party, in the past those with hand-microphones and megaphones were more likely to be of the Left. As Schafer reminds us, we do not, for better or for worse, have ear lids (2004a: 25). As a case for ethnic self-determination and, perhaps more importantly, a vessel for anti-Chinese sentiment, Japanese rightists have been strong supporters of Tibetan issues.

4

The political affects of military aircraft noise in Okinawa

Rupert Cox

As numerous records indicate, in Okinawa where the proclivities for ancestor worship are strong, land is not a mere plot of soil in which to grow crops. It is not a commodity, something that can be considered an object for buying and selling. If I may paraphrase further, land is an irreplaceable heritage graciously bequeathed to us by our ancestors or a spiritual string that ties us to them. My people’s attachment to their land is firmly rooted and their resistance against the forcible taking of their land is similarly strong. Former Governor of Okinawa Masahito Ota’s Supreme Court testimony (1996)

Introduction

There is a certain ubiquity to the sound of overflying aircraft, which merges familiarly into the sonic traffic of everyday life in urban environments the world over. They may be heard, but they are rarely listened to, except as a problem of “mechanical noise” (Bijsterveld 2001) when their volume exceeds the accepted safe limits of human hearing, as defined by the World Health Organization (2001) at 70 db. Acoustic scientists and doctors test and debate the relationship between measurable volume and human health, as in Japan, as elsewhere, the links between air traffic, economics and population growth make the issue of aircraft noise a political issue. In Japan, a number of communities living under the flight paths protest that their ill health is related to aircraft noise not only with respect to its volume but also to the particular qualities of sounds produced by the material mechanics of jet engines. These factors are part of the communal perceptions of the negative implications of airport operations on shared lives and livelihoods. These factors can act together to produce detrimental health outcomes for those exposed to the long-term effects of aircraft noise, including hearing loss and hypertension related disorders such as heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease and dementia (WHO 2001; HYENA 2006). Many of these disorders are related to disturbances in night-time sleep patterns; a time when aircraft are not flying and cannot be heard except as a memory of the senses. How it may be possible to understand the sense of hearing and its synesthetic relationship with other senses in the absence of sound – that is, as a “phantom sound” – is part of an argument

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I develop in this chapter. In my recent research around the US military airbase of Kadena in Okinawa and at Tokyo’s Narita Airport,1 I have shown how discordance between concerns for the public health environment and the forces of economic progress, population expansion and mobility is a conflict based on the promise of controlling aircraft sound through correlations between the space of audition inferred by scales of acoustic measurements, and the in-habited spaces of and for the hearing body. The case of Tokyo’s Narita Airport reveals the consequences of this promise. Narita is a site where a local farming community, Sanrizuka, has repeatedly opposed Japanese national and commercial interests in the construction and operation of this international airport. Since 1971, the land of the Sanrizuka community has been utilized for two airport runways. One of the ways that they have continued to protest this loss of land and livelihood is by contesting the imposition of a sonically defined “air space” (Pascoe 2001), onto their space of habitation. The notion of air space is defined by acoustic measurements, known as the WECPNL (Weighted Equivalent Continuous Perceived Noise Level) scale that identifies aircraft noise as an external force of technology in the environment, determined as having a predictable impact upon the health of individuals. The use of such scales in studies such as those carried out at Sanrizuka, however, are contingent upon the presence of a sufficient number of human subjects to constitute the forms of sociality that are the basis and outcome of a questionnaire led, statistical study. In Narita, there are only two farms that remain in-between its two runways, directly under the flight pathways for landing and taking off, and their occupants are too few in number to register as social categories normally defined as statistically significant. In the absence of such data, the issue of health as it relates to aircraft noise in this Japanese context eludes categories of medical pathology and state accountability.2 In addition, aircraft sound is only acknowledged as a measurable acoustic phenomenon with a potential for impact on human health whilst a plane is in flight so that once it is on the ground, it is not subject to the same calculation or consideration. The predicament of these two Narita farms and their position vis-à-vis state mechanisms for defining and controlling aircraft sound is not unique but an intense microcosm of a situation experienced elsewhere in Japan, most particularly on the island of Okinawa. There, the issue is the sonic effects of military, rather than civil aviation activity, and its biosocial consequences. Acoustic science survey methods and those methodologies I have applied as an anthropologist of sound reveal how aircraft sounds can be understood as configuring different networks of social and political relations through the resonant materialities of hearing bodies and the physical environment. The question that I address here is about the nature of aircraft sound, which as a matter of frequency and vibration cannot be simply conflated with what is statistically measurable or necessarily audible in the strict sense of listening. It is, I shall argue, better understood in terms of a political ecology and as a spatial affect, approachable and describable through performative modes of sound recording practice. Such sound recording practices, which I shall describe below, create the possibility for what

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Lefebvre (1991) describes as a reconciliation of the lived space of sensory relations with the abstract space of representations – meaning here, the noise maps and survey data produced by acoustic science. The “condensed spatiality” (Pascoe 2001: 97) of sound transduced as digital data in the process of recording can be energized through its playback in spaces of audition so as to provide for the attentive listener an appreciation of how its sensory materialization has political dimensions.

Methods

My field research is led by the example of conducting an anthropology of sound by making sound recordings, which was established through the work of Steven Feld (Feld and Brenneis 2004) and depends on particular kinds of collaboration and dialogue. I examine several of these recordings in greater detail below. The collaborations in question involve processes of shared listening and of “dialogic editing” in the field with subjects3 so that the recordist and then an audience may hear what is heard meaningfully by the subjects of research. In this case, the dialogue also involved intellectual and methodological cooperation with an acoustic scientist, Hiramatsu Kôzô, who had led a detailed survey of the effects of aircraft noise in Okinawa from 1995 to 1999 (Hiramatsu 1997; Miyakita et al. 2002). Okinawan Prefectural authorities commissioned the report in response to the growing public protest at the existence of the US military bases on the island and an awareness of the ill-health effects arising from military aircraft operations. Its findings demonstrated measurably the negative effects of aircraft noise in areas of everyday life (such as sleeping patterns, speech communication and television viewing), general health (high blood pressure, psycho-somatic neurosis and hearing loss), children’s health and behavior (reduced immunity and appetite, inability to make friends) and infant birth weight (increasing rates of low birth weight) (Hiramatsu 1997; Miyakita et al. 2002).4 The research also suggested to Hiramatsu that there was an important link between psycho-somatic conditions, acoustic experience and the symbolic significance of aircraft which could be revealed through an analysis of the history of power relations between the community and various local, national and international authorities and represented by other means than acoustic science. In the course of this research, Hiramatsu found that for the residents of Sunabe village in Chatan-chô, Okinawa, who live most directly under the flight paths of the US airbase at Kadena, the sounds of military aircraft constituted a sense of place in historical time – that is, since the US airbase was built, replacing the Japanese airfield that operated during the Battle of Okinawa – and a sense of time as a confluence of physical memories that are embedded in the body and in social relations. The historical background for the acoustic spatialization of this community through the sounds of war machines begins with the Battle of Okinawa, during which more than 120,000 mainly non-combatant Okinawans died (Inoue 2004: 85). For the residents of Sunabe village, situated at one of the main landing points for invading US forces, this trauma was compounded by the enforced

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utilization of their land for the construction of the US airbase of Kadena following the war. The formation of an opposition group from this community and other districts around Kadena,5 focused on the effects of aircraft noise as a way of channeling concerns about land, livelihood and local as well as island identities. The legal proceedings that the opposition group has brought and are ongoing against Kadena airbase for compensation focus on the methods and technologies applied by them and by the authorities to determine the occurrence and physical aspects of aircraft noise. As I have written elsewhere (Cox 2010), the different sound monitoring devices utilized by the Japanese government and by this group reveal different conceptions of the relationship of aircraft noise to everyday life. For the opposition group, the devices for monitoring aircraft sound revealed their relational position in a mixed and shifting sound world. For the official, military and government representatives, their devices showed how aircraft sound was constitutive of a rational networked system of air space. The legal debate about the data produced by these two devices, points towards the ways that aircraft sound inside and outside the airbase of Kadena transfigured different spaces of sociality and forms of relatedness. It was these spaces and forms which guided the choices about where and how to make sound recordings, for they indicated the locations in Sunabe where aircraft sound was measured and/or made meaningful through survey responses and our own conversations with residents. These conversations also revealed the particular, audible qualities of aircraft sound in Sunabe that dictated choices about recording equipment. The links to these recordings, which are freely available on the internet, are indicated at the end of the chapter, and readers of this volume are encouraged to listen. They are an integral part of the arguments made here for sound recordings as a necessary means of describing sound as a sensory phenomenon. Sound recordings have the potential to overcome the limits of text, which in writing about sound may describe its origins and effects, but text struggles to reproduce sound’s affective qualities as the energies of vibration and frequency. It is these energies, as described in this chapter, that may in certain instances be present in the bodies of listeners even when aircraft are inaudible to the ear and do not register on sound level meters. In other instances, these same aircraft are audible and measurable in ways that concentrate a history of US military activity and Japanese government complicity in land occupation into a spine-tingling sonic rush.

Okinawa: sound and social formations

The social structure and activities of Okinawan citizens’ protest groups have been studied as expressions of Okinawan identities which are constituted in relation to the policies of successive Japanese governments and to strategic interests of US administrations (Allen 2002; Cooley and Marten 2006; Inoue 2004). In the case of air force bases such as Kadena and Futenma, the social formation of opposition to this use of land stands in relation to the legal processes around sound as an abstract entity, as well as to the manifestation of aircraft sound as a resonant

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feature of the lived environment. Hiramatsu’s desire to give voice to the experiences of living with the sound of military aircraft led to his writing the biography of one elderly woman resident of Sunabe, an anti-base campaigner named Matsuda Kame (2001). In 2009, the story was turned into a play and performed at a community theater in Chatan-chô. The translation of acoustic experience into the textual space of an oral narrative and then into the theatrical space of a stage production, is indicative of the analytical as well as presentational possibilities of working across different representational domains in order to understand how sound may be, as David Toop puts it in his imaginative construction of the history of listening from literature and myth, “an absent presence” such that dwelling in every written text there are voices; within images there is some suggestion of acoustic space. Sound surrounds, yet our relation to its enveloping, intrusive, fleeting nature is fragile (a game of Chinese whispers) rather than decisive. (2010: vii–viii)

This indecisive and fragile aspect of listening is evident in Sunabe, as a consequence of the sudden, unexpected over-flights of military fighter jets but is also closely linked to the tenuous social position and conditions of living of the community itself. The land beside the beach at Sunabe, upon which Kadena airbase was constructed in the aftermath of the Battle of Okinawa, consists of significant plots of land owned by residents of Sunabe, as homes, arable land and family grave sites. Depending on the situation of the land, some owners have permission to enter these areas of the base so as to work the land or visit family graves.6 For most though, the land remains inaccessible, visible through the wire fences that surround Kadena, but resonantly tangible by means of the reflected air-pressures of military jets taking off, landing and circling. This persistent sonic activity has been an important factor in the difficult decisions of many residents to sell their land in Sunabe and move elsewhere. The US base authorities have bought up much of this land and created large apartment buildings for “off-base” housing. Alongside and linked to this development, the buildings directly in front of the sea wall at Sunabe have become a popular center for scuba diving tourism. The sonic residues of these demographic and commercial changes in Sunabe are most audible at night, when flights are in principle banned. While these night noises are not the equivalent of the mechanical roar of jet engines, they are often criticized by local residents as a by-product of Kadena’s proximity and its personnel’s activities. This affective impact of Kadena’s “clamor” is one of four broad categories of social and environmental influences indicative of the presence of American bases globally, which also include “calamity,” “contamination” and “crime” (Gillem 2007: 40). An essential material factor linking these developments in Sunabe, and distinguishing it from the management of sonic activity that goes on inside the boundary fence of Kadena, is the differences in urban planning and architectural

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design of these adjacent spaces.7 Mark Gillem has described the decision-making processes and the conceptions of space that lie behind these differences in his book America Town (2007). He notes how the almost complete destruction of all buildings before 1945 on Okinawa meant that the 400,000 acres taken over for the construction of bases led to the creation of spatial settings for personnel that were similar to cold war suburbs in the United States, far different from the living conditions of Okinawans. At the time of construction, the population density was 1,270 persons per square mile in Okinawa (twenty-three times greater than the US in 1955), and this space was forced to accommodate shopping malls, wide roads and parking lots that pushed Okinawans, who lived outside the boundary fences, into ever more crowded forms of living (Gillem 2007: 38). This situation has not essentially changed in the post-war period, and in the stark terms of geographical measurements made since 2000, the average population density of the three districts adjacent to Kadena – Okinawa-chi, Chatan-chô and Kadenachô – are four times greater than on Kadena, with Okinawa-chi being eight times greater in density (Gillem 2007: 239–241). The occurrence of aircraft noise within the closely proximate living conditions of these districts is therefore of a physically different character from that on the base and is a shared aspect of the off-base urban environment that engenders dissipative, fragile forms of sociality. The strains on social life are evident in Sunabe where the leadership and operation of the community center is focused on the management of aircraft noise issues, and individuals and families from the neighborhood are by necessity positioned in relation to this issue, over and above other communal concerns. The on-base social world of Kadena operates within a quite different sonic sense of space and relationality. The base itself is 11,018 acres and dominated by grand vistas of flat, wide, neatly cut grass that appear to extend straight out to the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean and sky. The planes that operate within this space feature as part of a landscape of horizons where their sonic effects may be heard as both trajectories of operational necessity and as narratives of US strategic force and national pride. The term that is widely used by US service personnel to describe these associations is “Sound of Freedom” (Cox 2010), and this term provides a triumphal and progressive interpretation of the overflying military aircraft sound. It has the capacity to periodically define the space within which the sonic effects are manifested as a material extension of the on-base network, which is there to “put planes in the air” (Cox 2010). Aircraft noise has been incorporated into a panoply of other sounds, extended into the experience of everyday life outside the base. The sensory perceptions of what sounds are appropriate and meaningful to social relations are a consequence of the urban design of the base and reproduces a familiar version of suburban America, which is “auto-focused,” “abundantly paved” (within a space of 86 acres in Kadena’s housing area, 40 per cent is paved), “widely spaced [houses],” “extensively lawned,” “increasingly franchised,” and “clearly segregated” (Gillem 2007: 107–113). These economies of scale, which are constructive of the sonic sense of place and on-base social life, are particularly evident in the broadcasting mechanisms applied in the shopping mall, radio programming and public announcements.

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The shopping mall on Kadena is a franchise operated by the Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES)8 and consists of a base exchange, base grocery store and a parking lot, extended in 2010 to increase its capacity from 306 to 875 parking spaces. It is the largest grossing facility of its kind in the world and contrasts dramatically with most of the familiar shopping spaces used by residents of surrounding districts. The exception is the commercial district, built on reclaimed land9 and adjacent to Sunabe, called America Mura (“American village”). Here, as in the mall on Kadena, and indeed in most commercial malls the world over, programmed music creates the conditions for forms of sociality through an “architectonics of commercial space” (Sterne 1997). The argument that these architectonics are a sonic network of predictable and controlled “modern” spaces is clearly made (Thompson 2004), but for Okinawans in the districts around Kadena, this sonic network is also ambiguous, for its controlling aspect may be a familiar relief from the unpredictable occurrences of aircraft sound, as aircraft cannot be heard from inside the shopping centers, but it is also a potentially unwelcome reminder of the pervasiveness of these networks into everyday life. This consumerism and the American origin of these sonic networks is linked to aircraft sound generated from Kadena through a discourse on Okinawan residents’ health and the priorities of the district of Chatan-chô. In an interview, the current head of Chatan-chô’s health division (a position he has held since the time of Hiramatsu’s study) made a direct link between the ubiquity of aircraft in the air space of Okinawa and the developed dependency of Okinawans on an American diet in the post-war period. The problem is such that they are currently placed as the Japanese prefecture with the most health problems linked to obesity. This manager’s perception of a link between public health and aircraft noise is insightful because it informs the priorities for spending in the prefectural health division that he oversees and because he was instrumental in providing access to official information to Hiramatsu and his team. The dangers to public health of US military bases is also an issue for serving personnel and forms a central part of American Armed Forces Network (AFN) radio and TV programming. Risks of depression and suicide constitute the most frequent public safety announcements, being a consequence of the stress experienced by many at Kadena from previous service in the conflict zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Other health and life-style concerns include the need for base members to be aware of playing music too loudly and disturbing neighbors at night. This modulation of sound making as an element of living on Kadena becomes the object of regulation in its work spaces, which are subject to the environmental monitoring and testing standards of a specialist on-base unit. The workshops are designed and organized to ensure that the sonic effects of the machinery do not contravene the safety standards for human hearing, and depending on the kind of work involved, base personnel regularly carry one or more of three possible types of hearing protection. Interestingly, when I visited the base in 2008, many of the workshops exhibited another level of sound management, with self-selected music playing in the workplace. As one serviceman remarked to me

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wryly, when I asked him about the music he was listening to while operating machinery: “I just love to make noise, all kinds of noise.”

The aural border

The music played, made and listened to on US bases since their post-war creation, crosses the “aural border” (Kun 2000) of the base, with many constructive and creative outcomes on the Okinawans living on the perimeters. This crossing has led to mixings between Okinawan folk music traditions and musical styles of the West, which Roberson describes using the Okinawan term for “mixing,” champuru (2001: 211, 214). This sonic intermingling is complex and often ambiguous, as the lyrics and melody create an uncomfortable tension, reflecting the uncertainty of Okinawan’s position in relation to Japan and the world and the difficulty of reconciling past traumas with present realities and future aspirations (Roberson 2001, 2009). Indeed, such ambiguities are inherent in much of the aural culture of US bases on Okinawa, and it would be incorrect to suggest that the mechanical roar of overflying jets provides a simple positive/negative distinction between the US military and Okinawans in ways of listening. Many Okinawans living around the bases rely on them for their livelihood, through direct or subsidiary employment and/or by virtue of the payment scheme through which landowners receive compensation for the US military’s use of their land.10 Similarly, for the US personnel on Kadena, there are aspects of its aural culture that reflect the fundamental obligation of all who serve the nation but are sometimes regarded with a mixture of pragmatism and indifference. For example, the appropriately named “Giant Voice” at Kadena, the first of the recordings in the sound gallery of the Sensory Studies website (http://www.sensorystudies.org), is a daily routine of public announcements which plays the bugle calls for morning reveille and evening “taps,” followed by the US and Japanese national anthems. All personnel are required to stand at attention at these times in respect of the service and sacrifice of their fellow soldiers. The loudspeaker systems that play the “Giant Voice” are located all around the base so that it is audible to all. Inevitably, this means that many living on the outside of the base can also hear these broadcasts, and when the speaker system has been used as part of mock exercises for accidents and attacks on base, it has caused great alarm and upset among the off-base community. Complaints about the excessive volume of the “Giant Voice” were also generated by service personnel and during my field research in 2008. My attempts to record the announcements were stymied on two occasions because the loudspeakers had been turned off by the general in command, in response to the complaints about the negative effects on airmen’s sleep and therefore of the potential impact on operational efficiency. The affective (non)-presence of the “Giant Voice” is a good example of what Attali (1985) is referring to in his argument about how a system of sound making and management (like Kadena) may communicate models of sociality. Similarly, Thrift’s discussion of the “spatial politics of affect” also makes it clear that such

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tactics may be a vehicle for channeling violence through military technology and involve forms of bodily conditioning (2004: 64). This leads us to a consideration of the recent applications of the US administration’s sonic violence in the war on terror and in particular Susan Cusick’s important paper about “music as torture” (2008). Her discussion revolves around the question of musical affect and whether we should look to the type of music that was being played repeatedly and at such volume inside closed metal containers, or to the structural position of the detainee – isolated, tired, possibly naked and hungry – for an understanding of the principles of the exercise and the experience of the subject. Thinking about the use of sound as a weapon, Steve Goodman (2009) has developed a complex theoretical argument around the political and commercial applications of frequency and vibration as forms of “sonic warfare.” These are elements of sound that are measurable as acoustic phenomena, but as they lie at the boundaries of what is understood as audition, they are difficult to relate to the experience of sound as documented and understood by questionnaire surveys and therefore do not feature as causal factors in the numerical equations that constitute the basis of legal action in Japan. The measurement that is at the basis of these equations and assessment of the effects of continuous exposure to aircraft noise over a long term is the Weighted Equivalent Continuous Perceived Noise Level (WECPNL) scale. It is a scale that can be used to show how measurements taken in Kadena-chô over a two month period in 2002 demonstrated a 21 per cent increase in the number of times aircraft noise exceeded 70 db, resulting in a total of 23,418 times (Gillem 2007: 43). In 2009, a plaintiff group formed of 5,519 residents from the districts around Kadena used these kinds of calculations to win a nine-year court action (Sumida 2009) about the ill-health effects of long-term exposure to aircraft noise.11 Such actions and judgments depend on the topographic contours of sound as it is transfigured from the data of measuring devices into noise maps and graphs and are part of the computations made through the US military software in their “Air Installation Compatible Use Zone” (AICUZ) program. This program is designed to control development on US bases by tracking and mapping noise patterns generated by aircraft activity but does not extend to the areas off-base, which exist for the most part as blank spaces on their maps (Gillem 2007: 41). The blank spaces on the map reinforce the impression of Kadena as an enclosed heterotopic space, constructed of clean boundaries and straight edges, resisting movement and operating as a secluded platform for putting planes in the air. In these analyses, the airspace that defines and is defined by the passage of aircraft is encoded in numbers as altitude, speed, duration and decibels, making sound a virtual object. In the case of Kadena aircraft sound, this encoding brings together airforce strategy, the social structure of the base and acoustic science so as to construct a network of relations that is directed towards fixity and stability. The fragmented, point-by-point lines which depict airspace are also the gestural threads of pilots and electronic guidance systems, made apparent by the sonic signature of the aircraft engines and apprehended through the visualizing schemes of engineering and biomedical science. These flight paths seem to be an

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example of what Ingold calls “lines in a hurry”; lines that want to get from one place to another in as little time as possible or in an exact time (2007: 73). But the felt, environmental evidence of that movement through the air are waves of sound that reverberate and resound through the features of the land and the bodies of listeners as ghostly lines, “phenomenon of experience that cannot be unequivocally determined” (Ingold 2007: 50). The point here is that the architectonic and technical control of the elements that are a feature of on-base sensory relations among service personnel and pilots cannot extend to the movement of air as sound which escapes the boundaries of the perimeter fence, changing the physical nature of the border.12 The airspace described by the sense of aircraft sound as it is heard outside Kadena’s border is a space which pertains to this escape and to different networks of relations that are a cultural manifestation of a history of loss and traumatic memory.

Phantom sound

Questions about memory are often discussed in terms of objects and images and their capacity to contain, congeal and solidify remembrances. The question that arises here in the contested space of Kadena and its neighbor Sunabe, where wartime remains are scarcely visible and mainly covered by the cold war architecture of a military installation, is how it may be possible to identify and use sound in order to reconstitute the materiality of memory.13 The recordings I have made which are available on the Sensory Studies website (http://www.sensorystudies.org) and are outlined here, describe the memory of the post-war as part of a sensory perception of the lived environment. The recordings were made with the intention of extending debates in the anthropology of the senses not only by acknowledging but also by questioning the emphasis on the patterned organization of sensory experience. They therefore follow the arguments made by Seremetakis (1993) about the “memory of the senses” as ephemeral and shifting, requiring a consideration of movement and responses and relations over time as well as across space. As medium and practice, these recordings render the significance of aircraft sounds in terms of a relationship between their existence at a quantifiable level and at multiple levels of sensory experience. That is to say, that they exist as the function of recording technology and epidemiological data and also as sounds which cannot be digitized or inscribed because they are memories of the senses, subject to the changing condition of the body. The disintegration of these bodies over time, like the absence of aide-memoires from the battle of Okinawa, are signs for the community of the relevance of a form of remembrance that is ephemeral and uncertain but also tangible in its effects, reflecting their own acoustic experiences. This sense of uncertainty that is evoked when aircraft fly overhead cannot be tied to any objective of the aircraft, whose missions and flight schedules are always unknown. It is a correlative of the qualities of sound as they are heard in this space and of the position of the listener. In Sunabe, the precarious position of the listener as someone possibly contesting the use of his/her land by the US

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military is accentuated by the sonic properties of aircraft noise resounding in their spaces of habitation. The recording project attempts to manifest as digital data, with the capacity for playback in a space of audition, the particular qualities of aircraft sound in this space that resonate in the bodies of listeners as a memory of the senses, such that they are present even when they are absent. What I mean by this is the way in which the acoustic signatures of the aircraft taking off and landing in this place exist as phantom sounds, present in the anxiety produced by the constant state of expectation and knowledge that its arrival will produce involuntary, unpleasant physical sensations as muscles tense, hairs stand up and the stomach turns. It is in this sense akin to the state of fear that Brian Massumi (2005) has described in analyzing the color-coded scheme of terror alert used by the Bush administration. The persistent state of “high” alert indicated by the color red has no specific object; indeed, he argues that the colored alert creates fear precisely because it is empty of semiotic content. Thinking about the ephemeral nature and qualities of sound as it is made and perceived as energy in this environment can help us understand how the relationship of Japan to the US military, the work that is done in their name and the memories of the Pacific war are embedded in sensory modes of perception. Aircraft sound’s capacity to focus destructive energies at community relations illustrates the extent of Japanese and US government complicity in perpetuating the iniquity of land occupation through its very nature as acoustical energy. The sound of aircraft turn the land and sea of Sunabe into mediums of sensory experience which agitate the memory of past events and activate cultural beliefs in the space between the sea and the land. This is the space of the ino or lagoon, a practiced place for fishing and harvesting the products of the sea, where the vitality of the community is located and where the second recording of jets taking off early one summer morning was made. The movement, volume and depth of sound on this recording is a function of microphone and editing technology that accentuates features of the aircraft sound which may not be immediately obvious to a first time listener. These features – the way that the approaching aircraft initially sounds like the sucking hollow of a wave from the beach; the sudden, violent, crackling increase of sonic energy; and how the roar hangs in the air for two or three minutes after the aircraft has passed – can reveal the ambiguity of the relationship between the measurable tracks of the aircraft’s sonic movement and the auditory consciousness of a listener in place. The Sensory Studies website (http://www.sensorystudies.org) contains the recordings described here, under the heading “Pencil of the Sun.” The sounds of aircraft taking off and landing from Kadena is the most distinctive but not the only way that aircraft sound manifests itself in the aural life of residents in Sunabe. The second recording referred to here is of Harrier jets flown by marine pilots; it is less voluminous and sudden than the first recording but is indicative of the pervasive and residual nature of aircraft sound in Sunabe. This is because the marine pilots who fly these jets are always on short-term attachments, do not know the proper flight paths and make their Harrier jump jets hover over the

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neighborhood. This third recording is made from the kominkan or “community centre” in Sunabe and is the point from which most of the sound level meter readings, monitoring the volume of aircraft overflying the area, have been recorded. As forms of ethnography, the descriptive qualities of these recordings are animated through their performative playback. This may mean the presentation of recordings as part of the research outcome and accompanying text but can also include the setting up of a situation where local residents can listen to recordings that are designed to focus in on elements of their experience. Playing back sound in this way is not like looking at images because the object of attention is only present in its passing and sensible in its entirety. It therefore cannot be subjected to the same sort of detailing scrutiny that is claimed for the observational practices of looking at and through images. Listening to sound recordings made with an ethnographic purpose requires a sensory engagement with the immediate and passing impression of sound as well as with its textural depths, not as a mode of signification but as an immersion in a sensory world. The problem and challenge for such an anthropology of and by sound is, as Steven Feld has commented, that . . . [t]he axiom of much work has been: when a sound is not complex in the material aspects of its acoustic organization, assume that its social meaning is essentially shallow. Musical meaning, in this view, is essentially “in the notes” and not “in the world”. (Feld 1990: 80)

The last recording I examine is of sounds that are musical but also in the world and acknowledge the absent presence of the dead while actively constructing a sense of the future. The sounds that this recording reproduces are actively made by and for the community of Sunabe themselves. Eisa is the Okinawan-term for an annual summer festival of song and dance that takes place during o-bon: the period when the ancestral spirits return to the family home. Eisa is performed by groups comprised only of community members and features the music of the sanshin, a three stringed instrument resembling the Japanese shamisen, together with drums and chants. In Sunabe Eisa music is heard against a background of the swell and waves of the sea. This sonic combination was the most frequently nominated “favorite sound” of Sunabe residents. I recorded Sunabe’s Eisa group performing one evening while they were processing the streets behind their sea wall. This sea wall is where the microphone is set up, at a fixed point from which you can hear, as residents do, the group approaching and passing by as they move through each street of the neighborhood.

Conclusion

A cogent critique of these recordings may be that what we hear is a function of the various technologies and spaces of reproduction from the microphone, digital compression and editing system, these speakers and the acoustic parameters of

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this room. These may lead to the charge of sonic fetishism, something David Tomas (1996: 119) has accused Steven Feld of doing, or to a kind of naïve realism when there is not a proper acknowledgement of the risk that the technological specificity ascribed to the media may result in the conflation of the realm of the aural with what the technology makes audible. The danger here is that our understanding of hearing is reduced to listening only to recordings. My response to the first charge would be that there is more potential with what may be done in a recording, as well as with a recording, than can be subsumed by a neo-colonial critique of a CD as a form of oppressive power. Second, not all sonic events registered by the auditory nervous system, and reproducible in some fashion by recording technology and practice, can be made sensible in anthropological terms; nor should they be attempted. Another descriptive practice, writing, drawing, photography, film or performance may be more appropriate either on its own or in combination. These recordings formulate different kinds of lines: the lines of the US invasion and the boundaries of their bases, the mapped traces of flight paths and sound level readings and the threads of sensory memory that may be manifested through playback and pathways of layered remembering. They bring back the presence of bodies not as legible objects but as dark and ghostly impressions, full of uncertainty and doubt but resonating with the movements of the Okinawan light and air. In the case I have described here, there is a way of hearing a specific kind of sound, the sound of US military aircraft over a specific space: that of Sunabe. This can be apprehended by sound recording technology and practice, precisely because hearing in this environment is an uncertain, ambiguous and at times deeply troubling activity. What is heard in the sky over Kadena is understood by residents as an acoustic object; it exists in the measurements and visualism of diagrams used in legal proceedings. But conceived as an object, it tells neither us or them anything about the way in which hearing is bound up in the different social circumstances and sensory memories of all who hear, from Sunabe residents to all of you listening now.

Notes 1

2

3 4

This chapter is based on research arising from a “Wellcome Arts Trust” funded project, an art-science collaborative exploration of the acoustic environment of the working life of the farm belonging to one of the farming families living between the two main runways at Narita International airport. Other research for this chapter is derived from a British Academy small research grant. This information was provided by Professor T. Matsui of Kyoto University’s Environmental Health Division. He conducted a study at Narita that used the WHO criteria of environmental noise effects on somatic conditions, finding a statistical correlation between sleep disorders and the operation of the airport. Problematically, however, this “dose-response” effect took place essentially during those hours when aircraft were not flying, between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. See Cox 2010 for further explication of this process. This study analyzed 350,000 medical records, sent questionnaires to 1,580 school children and parents and surveyed 4,245 residents. It concluded that 480,000 residents

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(38 per cent) of Okinawa lived in areas with noise levels exceeding Japanese environmental standards. This group is named Kadena Bakuon Soshô Genkokudan (The plaintiffs group against aircraft noise of Kadena Airbase). Probably the most well known returning landowner is Chibana Shôichi, who on May 14, 1996 was allowed to bring his family onto their plot as a return to ancestral land. Interestingly, the anthropologist and former US marine Christopher Nelson credits his meeting with Chibana as a turning point in his attitude and interest in Okinawan identity (2008: 19) The understanding of how changes in architectural forms and materials have effected changes in practices of listening and conceptions of noise have been described by Emily Thompson (2004). The AAFES, established in 1895, has a total monopoly on the provision of what are called for planning purposes “community centres” on US military bases worldwide (Gillem 2007: 89). Christopher Ames’ doctoral thesis has shown how this space is not subject to the same environmental considerations that are an expression of the historical memory of Sunabe because the land of America Mura is an artificial construction (2008). There are approximately 3,000 landowners (out of a total 32,000) who oppose leases to Kadena. There have been some concessions because of their protests, and now they can farm a total of 110 acres of their land on the base, although some landowners are refusing to lease land plots under Kadena’s runway (Gillem 2007: 239). The court rejected their case for the suspension of night-flights, however, between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. When we talk of sound here we are not talking of a thing opposed by another thing but of a relational “between.” An interesting historical and literary parallel to this situation in Kadena is the description by Ballard in his autobiographical novel Empire of Sun of the runway built on a “carpet” of Chinese laborers (Pascoe 2001: 32).

5

Distraction, noise, and ambient sounds in Tokyo

Lorraine Plourde

Introduction

How do we listen to the city? What is the relationship between listening practices and the urban soundscape? Does our sensory experience of the urban environment have a bearing on how we listen to and engage with live music? The past ten years or so has given rise to a growing body of interdisciplinary research concerning aurality, hearing, and “auditory culture” (Bull and Back 2004; Cox and Warner 2004) evoking what Veit Erlmann has referred to as a “resurgence of the ear” (2004a: 2). More recently, there has been an expansion of such scholarship concerning historical analyses of noise as a social problem (Bijsterveld 2008), sound and urban space (LaBelle 2010) as well as meditations on quests for silence amidst a seemingly intrusive and inescapably noisy soundscape (Foy 2010; Keizer 2010; and Prochnik 2010). This burgeoning research prompts us to ask if our urban environment has actually become louder and more intrusive or if developments in media technologies have provoked urban dwellers to become more aware and sensitive towards their aural landscape. How do these issues then emerge in contemporary Japan, a country that is often spoken of as a “sound saturated society” (oto zuke shakai)? In the public spaces of urban Japan, one’s every movement is mediated through sound. Japan’s soundscapes – subway melodies and announcements, seemingly ubiquitous Muzak or background music (abbreviated to BGM in Japanese), automated crosswalk jingles, and raucous political announcements transmitted via loudspeakers – are frequently described by city dwellers as cluttered and chaotic, yet there is little ethnographic research that explores the broader cultural implications of the aural landscape of everyday life in contemporary Japan. The general public in Japan has been characterized as passive and unable to resist or “assume control” over such urban noise (Yano 2005: 196); however, many of the musicians and listeners I spoke with revealed a very different and much more critical engagement with Tokyo’s soundscape. Rather than passively accepting Tokyo’s dense soundscape without any critical reflection, listeners and musicians in Tokyo’s experimental music scene were highly conscious of the impact of the urban soundscape on modes of performance and listening as well as everyday life more generally. This chapter investigates the

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linkages between experimental listening practices and the sounds and noises of urban space in contemporary Tokyo. I situate my argument concerning onkyô (a genre that could be defined as a minimal, improvised form of electronic music) listening practices in relation to discourses of putatively “Japanese” modes of listening, as well as culturalist explanations for the general acceptance of noise in Japanese public spaces. How are such onkyô listening practices – often framed as “serious” (majime na) listening – informed by the distracted environment of the city and the listening habits our engagement with the urban soundscape ultimately engenders? How might the urban soundscape facilitate or otherwise influence the development of new auditory practices? As noted in this volume’s introduction, sensory engagement with the city has historically taken on numerous forms including the quintessential figure of high modernism, the flâneur, who aestheticized public space through his detached gaze. Michael Taussig discusses how Walter Benjamin likened the bombardment of advertisements and billboards confronting the distracted urban walker to the tactile effect of Dadaist cinema (Taussig 1991). If subjectivity and selfhood in modernity are defined by the distracting and fragmenting shock effects of navigating the urban metropolis, then how are we to explain the current sensorial engagement with the contemporary city? How do people make sense of navigating everyday life – including aurality – in a “sound-saturated” environment such as post-economic bubble Tokyo? In this chapter, I examine the relation between Tokyo’s dense and intrusive soundscape with the emergence of modes of listening that produce refined or heightened senses such that the listener hears the sounds of the urban everyday in a more critical fashion. My analysis draws upon an examination of the demands that onkyô places on the sense of hearing and the act of listening. I explore listeners’ assertions that their sense of hearing has changed as a result of listening to onkyô, as well as the broader implications of losing and regaining one’s senses and the disciplinization of aurality in recessionary Tokyo, including the ubiquitous presence of Muzak in Japan, a sound which is not meant to be listened to actively but heard or registered only as background. What sort of social and spatial conditions must exist for listeners and musicians to notice a change in their hearing, and, implicitly, a heightening or refining of the senses? This chapter will focus ethnographic attention on sonic practices that fall outside of everyday or ordinary musical contexts, including sensorial engagement with city sounds and experimental listening practices (i.e. listening to music which is indistinguishable from the ambient sounds of everyday life in Tokyo). By considering the presence of environmental sounds in Tokyo’s soundscape, this chapter engages with the highly subjective nature of sound, in particular, the politics of the urban soundscape. When does sound become noise? Noise 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. Information theorists have considered noise to be an interference or disturbance in transmission; “a signal that the sender does not want to transmit.” Acoustical

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science, however, interprets noise as that which is opposed to sound, the antithesis of “desirable” sound. In addition, urban noise is often equated with crowds and the masses; thus, pointing to noise’s potential as a social threat.1 Ultimately however, the border between sound and noise (or music and noise) is a highly subjective demarcation and often culturally contingent.2 As I will show, the ambiguous divide between “musical” sounds and city sounds during onkyô live performances creates an environment leading to what some listeners referred to as “changed hearing” (mimi ga kawatta). By focusing on the co-constitutive dimension of live performance sounds with that of the aural landscape, this chapter explores new modes of perception in relation to Tokyo’s soundscape and the listeners’ engagement with sounds of the urban everyday.

Modernity and the senses

Modernity is frequently characterized by a regime of vision in which the gaze comes increasingly under surveillance. The question of control, surveillance, and the disciplinary gaze also speaks to the increasing disciplinization of aurality in modernity. An obvious example here is Muzak, a form of corporate-sponsored programmed music that Jacques Attali views as “contributing to the establishment of a system of eavesdropping and social surveillance” (1985: 8). For Attali such mass-mediated music, with its explicit linkages to practices of mass consumption, serves to silence everyday noise through repetition.3 It is perhaps more accurate to think of the sensory effects of modernity “as a vast reorganization of sensory experience” (Hirschkind 2004: 131), facilitated by the development of new technologies such as film, the railway, and the expanding role of advertising and consumer culture.4 The ocularcentrism of modernity is characterized as one in which social actors are increasingly subjected to surveillance and the disciplinary gaze; I would argue, however, that sound and aurality are similarly imbricated in modernity, in conjunction with the eye. Along these lines, it is critical to recognize that the senses are “multiply related” and necessarily act in concert with one another (Connor 2004: 153). As such, we never interact with or confront our surroundings via only one sense. Sensory perception, as recent scholars such as David Howes have argued, must be examined through intersensoriality or the “multi-directional interaction of the senses and of sensory ideologies” (Howes 2005: 9). This is not to simply suggest, however, a stable egalitarian relationship between the senses. As I will show in this chapter, the senses are not bounded discrete entities. Modes of aurality and visuality are both implicated in the sensations and bodily experience of modernity; the visual regime, however, has typically been characterized as a Western and thus implicitly superior faculty, while aurality is interpreted as the lesser and often “non-Western” faculty (Hirschkind 2006). The ear has long been viewed with suspicion and derision and as the lesser of the senses. Listening and hearing reflect distinct processes yet their differences are nevertheless often elided and explained interchangeably as the same process or faculty. Jonathan Sterne discusses the distinctions between listening and hearing,

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noting that “listening is a directed, learned activity: it is a definite cultural practice. Listening requires hearing but is not simply reducible to hearing” (2003: 19). Sterne explains that the difference between the two faculties lies between activity and capacity. As my discussion of the intersection of onkyô listening practices and the intrusion of the cityscape will reveal, the process of listening hinges on a learned ability to listen properly. Listening in this context requires attentiveness not only toward (musical) sound but also toward the distractions and intrusions of urban sound more broadly. The mode of listening to onkyô – in which the listeners physically and sonically detach themselves from the continuous aural stimulus of the city – demands attention and concentrated listening on the part of the spectator, yet the audience members’ contemplative listening is confronted with the sounds of the city spilling over through the walls of the performance space. Such acts of listening perhaps complicate the division between processes of attention and distraction as critical to urban sensory engagement.

Sensory experience in the city: distraction, attention, and shock

The experience of modernity has long been framed as one of distraction, fragmentation, and shock, though scholars and theorists have disagreed over the nature of such forces and whether they are ultimately liberating or “regressive” to the individual.5 For Benjamin, distracted perception was a liberatory outcome of mechanical reproduction and one that surpassed earlier modes of aesthetic reception, primarily paintings that would “invite the speaker to contemplation” (1968: 223). Whereas prior to technological reproduction, a painting would “invite the spectator to contemplation” (Benjamin 1968: 238), a film literally overcomes the spectator and forces him to confront it, thereby radically refiguring and “interrupting” the spectator’s “process of association” (Benjamin 1968: 238). In contrast to these earlier contemplative modes of perception, the film spectator has no choice but to respond in a distracted manner, due to the disconnectedness and velocity at which the images are projected. Michael Taussig discusses Benjamin’s idea of tactility and distraction for the urban pedestrian, noting that he took a “cue here from Dadaism and architecture, for Dadaism not only stressed the uselessness of its work for contemplation, but that its work ‘became an instrument of ballistics’” (1991: 149). With its radical and violent techniques of dissemination, Dadaist art “hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality” (Benjamin 1968: 238). For Benjamin, the sense of distracted reception was inextricably linked with the experience of walking in the modern city, “the type of flitting and barely conscious peripheral-vision perception unleashed with great vigor by modern life at the crossroads of the city, the capitalist market, and modern technology” (Taussig 1991: 148). Benjamin does not directly engage with the aural dimension of the modern city that confronts the distracted walker; instead, he points to a sense of tactility emerging from distracted vision, in this case, the urban flâneur’s engagement with architecture, film, and advertisements (Taussig 1991: 149).6

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Can we speak of a tactility of sound that the contemporary pedestrian encounters, akin to Benjamin’s discussion of the tactility of distracted vision as a constitutive sensation of urban modernity? Given the predominance of pedestrians and commuters drowning out city noise with headphones – yet also provoking an aural disturbance to those in close proximity as we see in the discussion of “headphone leakers” in the introduction to this volume – are such practices indicative of “ubiquitous listening,” (Kassabian 2001) an effect of the growing omnipresence of music and sound in everyday life? How is this form of distracted listening different from the distracted vision that Benjamin spoke of in relation to capitalist modernity and advertisements in the city streets? How does ubiquitous or distracted listening thus play out in the context of experimental music in sound-saturated contemporary Tokyo, a city that is both celebrated and bemoaned for its intrusive soundscape?

Onkyō as experimental form

It is difficult to precisely trace the emergence and contours of the genre known as onkyô, improvised music that is not only sonically ambiguous and difficult to categorize and pin down, but also with practitioners who themselves vehemently criticize and reject their supposed membership in the genre.7 It is important to note that the term onkyô did not emerge out of a consensus by the musicians and performers involved. The term is also problematic on a linguistic level, as the Japanese word onkyô refers to sound and the sonic. As many Japanese music critics and musicians have argued, to refer to a musical genre, which is always already defined by sound, by the term “sound” is tautological and repetitive. Shuhei Hosokawa likens the emergence of onkyô as a categorized genre in the 1990s, to the development of J-pop as a musical genre that first emerged at HMV records (n.d.). Indeed, it is often said that the term onkyô first emerged as a genre category at Paris-Peking Records in Tokyo by the store’s owner. Musician Otomo Yoshihide is later credited with using the term while on tour in Europe – a term he now laments using – at the time referring to improvised music sessions in Tokyo. By 2000, with the opening of Off Site (a free gallery, performance space, and bookstore/music shop) in Tokyo, onkyô, as it was now loosely termed, would soon find an aesthetic home, whether wittingly or not. During Off Site’s five-year existence, the notion of onkyô and its accompanying discourses of “attentive” or “serious” listening gradually began to be circulated and consumed throughout Tokyo’s experimental music circuit. Public talk events and dialogues were often centered on themes seemingly spurred on by Off Site’s experimental aesthetic such as notions of listening (chôshu), sound, and space that were believed to be fostered and encouraged by the performance venue. In the process, the very notion of “listening at Off Site” began to be concretized and consumed, much to many performers’ chagrin. As foreign media coverage of onkyô began to increase, listeners in Tokyo began to take note of Off Site’s presence, tucked away near the central Yoyogi Station in Tokyo. By Off Site’s final year in 2004, as curious listeners began to increase in number, many performers and regular audience

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members had come to bemoan a lack of spontaneity and experimentalism that had developed as Off Site’s popularity had increased.8 As a minimal form of electronic music that demands a heightened sense of listening, onkyô emphasizes sound texture, gaps, and silences rather than melody or rhythm. Instruments ranged from the traditional – saxophone, guitar, and harp – to the more experimental. Such performances now included turntables without records, an empty sampler, and even an amplified fluorescent light tube, which emitted soft flickers of sound in conjunction with the unstable flashing of light penetrating the audience’s eyes. The majority of music performed at Off Site was generally referred to in Japan as improvised music (sokkyô ongaku); and yet, the form known as onkyô became inextricably linked with the space. Citing Erlmann, Marina Peterson writes that experimental improvised music suggests the ‘global imagination’ that arises from a “cosmopolitan, democratic and free sociality” (2007); and yet, onkyô, with its attention to silences, pauses, and gaps, was continually and problematically evoked as evidence of a putatively “Japanese” aesthetic, despite the strong transnational presence of improvisational musicians, many of whom collaborated with Off Site’s regular performers.9 As I argue, onkyô performance and its associated listening practices which led many listeners to proclaim a change in hearing, reveal the complex relationship between distraction and contemplation in urban settings, including the possibility of refining sensory perception and awareness. In addition, the discourses surrounding listening practices at Off Site – often framed in culturally essentialist terms – evoked commonly held yet problematic notions regarding the process of listening in Japan and the notion of acceptance towards noise in urban public space more generally. Like Muzak, onkyô is a decidedly urban form, and in the case of the latter, is often spoken of as being heavily informed and shaped by Tokyo-esque qualities (Tokyo-teki jijô).10 Opened in 2000 by artist and now full-time musician Itô Atsuhiro, Off Site operated as both a live performance space and gallery and emerged as both a response and critique of Tokyo’s long-standing tradition of rental galleries and music live houses in which performers pay rental fees in order to perform or exhibit their work. Itô designed Off Site in opposition to the structure of most art galleries where spectators abruptly leave after viewing the artworks; he instead chose in favor of a more inclusive gallery in which spectators were encouraged to linger at the café upstairs following music performances. Located near Tokyo’s Japan Railway Yoyogi station on the Yamanote-sen amidst a cluster of postwar style apartments on a small side street, Off Site’s banal exterior – it was, in fact, a detached apartment – belied the “strange and curious” auditory happenings and events regularly occurring inside the space.11 Because Off Site was located in an apartment with poor sound insulation and in dramatically close proximity to neighbors, musicians and listeners had to comply with rather unusual sound restrictions. All of the live performances had to be at such a low volume that outside sounds such as traffic, pedestrians’ footsteps, or traces of conversations, would frequently filter in and often commingle with or overpower the sounds of the performance itself. Off Site itself provoked intersensorial

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responses in the listeners. Steven Connor points out that perhaps, paradoxically, the more we focus on one sense in particular, “the more likely it is that synaesthesic spillings and minglings may occur” (2004: 153). He notes that, “to look intently may be to grasp and consume; to be surrounded by sound is to be touched or moved by it” (Connor 2004: 153). During Off Site’s early days for example, a wall clock had to be removed because it became too loud and disruptive during performances. The smallness of sound and its extremely subtle shifts in development thus became one of onkyô’s most discernible characteristics, and the form became aligned with Off Site in media coverage and public discourse, including Tokyo’s regularly occurring public dialogues or round-tables (known as taidan or zadankai). The owner Itô, however, persistently denied a causal relation between the space itself and the emergence of the musical form. Instead, he emphasized the accidental eventfulness (dekigoto) that permeated performances at Off Site – such eventfulness refers to unexpected sounds from the outside (soto no oto) entering the performance space, as well as unexpected reactions and responses from the listeners, which, as I will show, were not always viewed favorably by the musicians.

Onkyō and the senses

Through its inextricable linkages with Off Site, onkyô gradually became known as a form that takes up background and ambient sounds as co-constitutive with its reception. Because many listeners spoke of a “change in hearing” (mimi ga kawatta) as an effect of Off Site’s performance environment, we must examine the sensory and spatial ideologies surrounding the space itself. What exactly is at stake in the listener’s claims to have honed or regained their senses? Off Site’s deliberately minimalist architecture and décor – with its blank white walls and concrete floors – invokes the “white cube” aesthetic that Brian O’Doherty referred to as the guiding aesthetic principle behind gallery spaces. He explains the connections between the architectural structure of the church with that of the art gallery:

A gallery is constructed along laws as rigorous as those for building a medieval church. The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is polished so that you click along clinically, or carpeted so that you pad soundlessly, resting the feet while the eyes have at the wall. The art is free, as the saying used to go, “to take on its own life”. (O’Doherty 1986: 15)

The notion of a gallery wherein art being exhibited operates autonomously by taking on a life of its own refers to the disciplinary ideology undergirding the model of the white cube. As Jim Drobnick argues, by shutting out and sanitizing the space from light and smell, thus maintaining an aura of neutrality and disconnectedness from the social and economic sphere, galleries operate as

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“single-sense” structures designed to “compartmentalize, isolate, and train perception” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett cited in Drobnick 2005: 267). Itô designed the ground-level performance space and gallery in the classic form of the white cube gallery; a windowless confined space with blank white walls and concrete floors. Yet while the space itself let in no outside light, thus, evoking a sense of visual neutrality, sounds from the outside frequently filtered into the performance space; one of Off Site’s unique characteristics embraced by musicians and listeners.12 According to Itô, Off Site listeners understood the minimal sound conditions of the space and did not experience the live environment as one of restriction, yet many listeners and musicians I spoke with frequently invoked notions of tension (kinchôkan) when speaking about their experience at live performances. One listener (and musician) explained the inherent tension in the space itself as imparting a sense of pressure (atsuryoku), noting, “It’s narrow and cramped, and completely white.” He made sure to note that this was not necessarily a negative sense of pressure but rather a more productive and challenging sense. Others I spoke with echoed these sensations of tension and pressure, in part due to Off Site’s cramped surroundings in which listeners sit immobile in uncomfortable chairs, often awkwardly close to other listeners. This tension was palpable prior to most performances as audience members would often sit quietly in their chairs waiting for the concert to begin, in a state of suspended silence. O’Doherty’s comparison of churches to modernist galleries, where “one does not speak in a normal voice; one does not laugh, eat, drink, lie down, or sleep” (1986: 10) evokes similar sensations to that of listeners silently waiting in the performance space. The palpable tension in the performance space was frequently punctuated by unexpected sound events (dekigoto), referred to using the anglicized term hapuningu (happenings) by Itô. Such events revealed the porous borders not only between the inside and outside of the performance space but also the arbitrary divide between “music” and “sound.” As Ito explained: “Sometimes during extremely quiet performances, you might hear the sound of a squirrel outside, or heavy rain, that would overpower the performance, to the point where you couldn’t even hear the performance.”13 The welcome addition of such ambient city sounds was complicated by the concomitant presence of human sounds – an audience member falling asleep and snoring during the performance, for example – which were not always welcomed by the musicians. Such sounds co-existed uneasily in the live performance space. Although the musicians desired contemplative listening, the (often barely audible) performances occurred alongside outside ambient sounds filtering into the space that passed in and out of the listeners’ consciousness; which begs the question, were Off Site listeners really listening to the music or just simply listening? Here, focused, contemplative listening unwittingly converged with the sonic distractions of the tactile urban landscape. If they were unable to concentrate on the performance, whether due to the musicians’ use of silences or if the music became indistinguishable from the intermittent non-intentional sounds – a watch ticking, the air-conditioner humming, outside traffic – did this not ultimately affect their ability to concentrate on the music? And indeed we are reminded again of

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Crary’s notion of modern distraction as an effect of attentiveness; the more you pay attention, the more distracted you become (1999: 49). Some of the musicians and listeners I interviewed were cautiously open to the intrusion of such ambient city sounds seeping into Off Site’s performance space. For them, however, the notion of outside sounds was a somewhat restricted category. It did not include the sounds originating from the audience’s bodies, such as those who drew attention to themselves by breathing heavily, snoring, or accidentally dropping a beer bottle. Both listeners and musicians at Off Site drew distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable sounds. As one musician explained: “The sounds of cars or air-conditioners during a performance are fine, but not people’s voices.” There was an implicit sense among musicians then, that human sounds (snoring, talking, dropping a beer bottle, etc.) carried a sense of intention and ultimately posed a jarring threat (aesthetic and practical) to the concentrated listening that was such a crucial component of onkyô. Non-intentional ambient sounds of the city however, were seen as acceptable. Onkyô could co-exist alongside the sounds of an air-conditioner, but sounds such as voices or the sound of snoring carried the weight of human agency and intent, which were ultimately perceived as violent intrusions. Because of these non-intentional forms of ambient sounds at Off Site, many listeners and musicians felt their sense of hearing had dramatically changed over the course of its five-year existence. Some listeners described the process of listening to onkyô as a test of endurance or perseverance, a sentiment that reflected characterizations of onkyô as a form of music requiring the listener to “strain their ears” (mimi wo sumasu; literally, “to [clear] one’s ears”). One listener explained his listening techniques during performances by a musician known for extremely abstract performances with extensive use of silences: In Sugimoto’s performances, there might be ten minutes of silence and you have to really be patient (gaman suru), but of course, during those times, I would start to focus more on listening to the outside sounds. And because of that, my sense of hearing has really changed.14

For this listener, the distraction of ambient sounds paradoxically served to strengthen his attention towards the musical performance, ultimately refining his aural sensibilities. Another regular listener explained how she noticed that her hearing had changed dramatically after the venue closed down:

What I realized afterwards, was that after going to Off Site, my hearing improved greatly. I was able to hear a lot of different things. I think that was a result of going to Off Site and hearing such small sounds and the kinds of echoes of the space.15

Such perceptual changes however, were intertwined with awkward tension that was especially heightened during sparsely attended performances. The possibility or threat of such unwanted sounds as well as the expectation of their irruption was heightened in the space’s tense, nervous environment.

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Soon after Off Site’s closing in 2005, one of onkyô’s most prominent performers, Otomo Yoshihide, explained, “if it was five years ago, I would have never heard the subtle sounds of which I’m now constantly aware.”16 Similarly, a regular listener at Off Site explained how his hearing has radically shifted since attending performances at Off Site, and he is now able to hear much more delicate sounds (sensai no oto). He explained:

Before, I didn’t appreciate sounds that had no connection to ‘music,’ such as a clock ticking. At the very least, I didn’t understand the condition of these sounds. Even now, however, I still hate violent sounds, such as people’s voices, especially in patronizing tones, as well as the announcer’s voice inside the subway.17 Aside from these sounds, I’m not bothered by any other sounds.18

At Off Site, why were certain sounds (urban soundscape) deemed as acceptable while others (audience member talking or the sound of snoring) were seen as distracting and a threat to concentrated listening?

Attentive listening

The process of listening in contemporary Japan is typically articulated in a specific cultural framework and listeners are often problematically framed as “serious” (majime) listeners, prone to attentiveness and heightened studiousness towards the musical material itself.19 Such discourses frequently arose in discussions concerning listening practices at Off Site. Looking back at Off Site’s final years of operation, musician Otomo Yoshihide noted how Off Site’s first few years were the most creative and interesting time period. During this time, onkyô had not yet become rigidly fixed into an established and marketable category and genre, and, most importantly, it was unclear – for the performers as well as listeners – as to how one should listen to onkyô: During the early period, the audience had no idea how to listen to this type of music. By the end of Off Site’s operation however, there was a sense of ‘how to listen at Off Site’ which became well known and the style itself became somewhat fixed.20

Otomo also emphasized that the sound itself shifted over the course of Off Site’s existence. Indeed, many observed that performances had actually become quieter as time went on, as the notion of Off Site perhaps became more solidified as Otomo noted.21 Jonathan Crary writes, the process of maintaining attention implies “disengagement from a broader field of attraction, whether visual or auditory, for the sake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli” (1999: 1). Listening at Off Site, however, reinforces yet goes beyond this model of disengagement. Accordingly, some listeners made it a point to close their eyes during the performance because, as one listener told me, it was easier to concentrate on the

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“incredibly delicate, small sounds” if one’s eyes were closed. If one’s eyes are open, as she explained, the performance isn’t as interesting and it becomes difficult to focus and concentrate on the restrained sounds of the performance. As she explained, closing the eyes, however, also evokes the sensation of having a dream, which was made more surreal by the existence of external factors such as outside sounds. In this sense, the surreal and distracted quality of dreams is evoked by the audience member’s act of closing their eyes. Ultimately, while they tried to sequester themselves from visual input, they could not disengage from surrounding sounds. Their auditory attention was repeatedly challenged by the interruption of events occurring within the space – an audience member snoring, moving their chair, or arriving late, for example – as well as outside sounds penetrating the space. Many listeners I spoke with were not only listening closely to the music being performed as it intertwined with the outside sounds but also were actively aware of the acoustic dreamlike effect of such sounds on the walls of the performance space. One listener commented on the perception of sound within the architectural space:

I’m really listening, but there’s a kind of pressure, you know? I’m still not sure what that is. As I’m listening, though, the sounds become kind of overturned (hikkurikaeru) and confused. For example, sometimes I can hear the sounds of the door, a chair or a bike from outside all come to the front of the space. If I had to compare this effect to an artist, I would think of M.C. Escher. Sounds from the middle of the space, the back, and front shift and become reversed. That kind of thing happens a lot at Off Site.22

Onkyō is not ambient music

Despite the aesthetic value placed on environmental sounds intertwining and overlapping with the sounds of the performance, onkyô was never intended to serve as background music, or music to be ignored, in the vein of Brian Eno’s ambient music. Instead, the act of concentration (shûchû suru) in listening became the perceptual focus desired by the performers. Most of Off Site’s performers and audience members were well aware of the lineage of avant-garde performance and environmental sounds out of which Off Site emerged. Such a trajectory includes not only John Cage and Fluxus but also composer Brian Eno whose notion of Ambient music, as a form of music that encourages and supports multiple “levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular,” invokes the ambiguity of background music, regardless of whether it should be ignored or listened to. As he explains in his manifesto, “it must be as ignorable as it is interesting” (2004: 97). Eno defines ambience as “an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence; a tint.” (2004: 96). His notion of Ambient music was strongly opposed to the Muzak Corporation’s use of background music to add “stimulus” to the environment, a technique that encourages “repetitive consumption” (Attali 1985: 111). His Ambient music manifesto notes:

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Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to “brighten” the environment by adding stimulus to it – Ambient Music is intended to induce a calm and a space to think. (Eno 2004: 97)

Interestingly, the concept of Ambient music first emerged serendipitously during a period of sickness and immobility for Eno; having broken his leg, he recalls lying in the hospital bed listening to harp music at a low volume. He describes his attention shifting to the way in which the ambient harp music intermingled with the sounds of rain and traffic (Roquet 2008: 94). While Eno’s notion of Ambient music aesthetics as a form encouraging thought without enforcing a specific ideology of listening (“as ignorable as it is interesting”) might appear to evoke a similar perceptual awareness as that experienced at Off Site, they remain conceptually distinct forms. Itô maintained that the modes of listening fostered at Off Site – the reception of environmental sounds alongside musical sounds – were not ambient but perhaps culturally ingrained. He argued that in Japan such listening is cultivated early in life, noting that most Japanese have these aural memories from their childhood. Off Site has, according to Ito, perhaps reawakened these earlier modes of aural perception, learned early in life but forgotten amidst the din and roar of the urban soundscape.23 Which prompts the question, how has the practice of listening in Japan been articulated and how do we explain the discourse of listening as a culturally specific faculty?

Listening and the environment in Japan

The sensorium in Japan has often been framed, both in and out of Japan, in terms that maintain a sense of cultural distinction between Japan and the West, projecting these two spatial and legal entities as separate cultural objects.24 Popular (and often culturally essentialist) explanations for Japanese modes of listening, for example, often proclaim a heightened sensitivity and perceptual awareness towards certain sounds, often associated with nature, that are not valued or recognized by non-Japanese as meaningful sound. Many of my informants similarly argued for a cultural essentialist explanation of Japan’s soundscape, often claiming that the very notion of noise in Japan differs radically from notions of noise in the West. During my interview with a musician and regular Off Site listener he explained: “Japanese people don’t make a distinction between a particular noise being seen as ‘music’ versus interpreting other noises as annoying (jama).” 25 Such perspectives continue to circulate within Japan and were often proffered as explanations for modes of listening at Off Site. The notion of a “natural” auditory awareness in Japan towards sounds that might be categorized as noise (such as insects buzzing, the tinkling of wind chimes, and so on) extends to discourses about traditional Japanese music as well. Extramusical sounds, such as the

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sympathetic buzzing vibrations of the shamisen strings (a phenomenon known as sawari), are often cited as an example of the acceptance towards noise as music within traditional Japanese musical aesthetics (Galliano 2002: 7). Some musicians with whom I spoke about Tokyo’s auditory environment confirmed such notions of a uniquely “Japanese” perceptual awareness of sound, including nature sounds. I spoke with a sound artist who detected a shift in the quality of noise in Japan’s public spaces across the past several decades. He lamented the loss of sensory engagement in contemporary Tokyo towards what he framed as traditional Japanese sounds, such as wind chimes. For this artist, he felt that such sounds are not only being displaced by the constant din of urban noise, including Muzak, but the sounds themselves no longer retain any aesthetic value. Such sounds are tied to nature and they are now potentially seen as disruptive public (urban) noise.26 The hierarchical nature of such divisions – “good” sounds vs. “bad” or “intrusive” sounds – as well as the nostalgic view towards sounds that are seen as disappearing evokes the work of Canadian composer and theorist R. Murray Schafer, whose theory of the soundscape was predicated on a distinction between hi-fi (rural) and lo-fi (urban) soundscapes. Schafer first coined the term soundscape in the 1970s to refer to the natural acoustic or sonic environment. His subsequent research in acoustic ecology grew out of a concern for preserving the natural sonic landscape, believed to be threatened by industrial modernization and noise pollution. Schafer’s notion of soundscapes thus contained a strongly pedagogical dimension of listening to the world in a very particular way, a mode that was also highly prescriptive. Schafer advocated “earcleaning” exercises as a means of documenting and attentively listening to sound in order to cope with a “busy, nervous society” (1977: 208). He argued that the most important listening exercises are ones that “teach the listener to respect silence” (Schafer 1977: 208). According to Schafer, ear cleaning is a “systematic program for training the ears to listen more discriminately to sounds, particularly those of the environment.” (Schafer 1977: 272). Schafer’s research on soundscapes, while important in its calls for engaging with our sonic environment, has long been criticized for privileging (or romanticizing) rural landscapes, while denigrating urban soundscapes.27 His negative articulation of urban soundscapes as “lo-fi” suggests that such environments, brought forth by the Industrial Revolution, produce a sense of “sonic compression,” thus creating barriers between urban listeners and their environment which, he argues, ultimately weakens the listeners’ sense of spatial identity (Arkette 2004: 162). One of the most emblematic sonic effects of the Industrial Revolution was the drone or what Schafer refers to as the “flat line.” Schafer observes that continuous sound, such as that produced by machines, is not found in nature and lacks temporal presence: there is no sense of duration with the flat line in sound. We may speak of natural sounds as having biological existences. They are born, they flourish and they die. But the generator or the air-conditioner do not die; they receive transplants and live forever. (Schafer 1977: 78)

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While artists and audience members alike often explained to me the ability to hear nature as meaningful sound as a uniquely Japanese cultural trait, similarly, a general acceptance or tolerance for noise in public space is also often problematically explained as a “cultural inclination” (Dolan 2008: 663).28 Tokyo’s heavily saturated urban soundscape is the source of constant frustration and anxiety for many of Tokyo’s residents, including many musicians and artists with whom I spoke.29 Their complaints often cite the constant noise – whether Muzak in cafes, train jingles, or politicians screeching their message via megaphones – as one of “idiocy” or one of “sickness,” as philosopher Nakajima Yoshimichi has argued (1996). Such responses in relation to Tokyo’s urban soundscape complicate the idea that Tokyoites are passive and unable to resist their aural environment, as previously noted. Many of the listeners and musicians I spoke with were not only conscious of such sounds but adapted techniques to cope with such sounds, techniques which extended to listening practices at Off Site.30 The oppressive nature of the urban soundscape was also often equated with the physical and mental exhaustion of navigating everyday life in Tokyo. As we discussed the rise of “healing music” for example, Itô explained city residents in Japan – in particular Tokyo residents – to be living a constant state of exhaustion, positing that the cacophony of the aural environment amidst an unstable economy perhaps explains the rise in “healing” products, especially the genre known as “healing music.”31

Conclusion

As a now defunct obscure performance space on a small Tokyo side street, Off Site nevertheless articulated larger discourses over environmental sound, public noise, and the increasingly intrusive nature of Tokyo’s soundscape, in particular, Muzak. Despite (or perhaps, because of) Tokyo’s dense, cacophonous soundscape, listeners and musicians at Off Site claimed a physical transformation and refinement of their auditory perception. Such sensory awareness towards urban sound occurred, surprisingly, through detaching themselves from the urban environment. As both a rejection and continuation of the white cube gallery model, listeners at Off Site were challenged by the controlled and restrained environment, one which forbade smoking, talking, and, implicitly, sleeping. Because of onkyô’s extremely muted and sparse sonic and physical gestures, many listeners disengaged with the visual dimension of the performance, a process that allowed them to maintain focus and auditory attention. To concede such a shift in sensory perception, as many listeners and musicians admitted, implicitly denotes an initial loss and later regaining, or in this case, a reorientation of the senses. As Nadia Seremetakis writes, “[t]o claim to have lost the senses, is to objectify them, to render them a discrete article that can be detached, then disposed of and eventually reappropriated.” (1994: 123). Yet, what allows for the initial loss of hearing in Tokyo in the first place? In the case of Off Site, onkyô musicians call for active sensory engagement with Tokyo’s non-intentional sounds yet reject sounds by the listeners themselves. Such a call is perhaps an implicit critique of the disciplinization of aurality in late capitalism and could be interpreted as a critical reaction

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and response to the pervasive presence of Muzak and urban noise in general within Japanese public space. As Connor, Hirschkind, and others have argued, navigating and taking pleasure in the city is crucially dependent on “subterranean forms of auditory knowledge and skill” (Hirschkind 2006: 21). Such auditory knowledge, or ear training, was cultivated by onkyô listeners in a manner perhaps recalling Schafer’s notion of “ear cleaning,” necessary tactics for those living in “busy, nervous” societies. Listeners occupied a flaneur-like position at Off Site; they were detached and present at the same time. The practice of concentrating on the silence ultimately made them more aware of the dense soundscape around them. Thus, rather than dismissing Tokyo’s urban noise as a “sickness,” city sounds filtering into the performance space perhaps provoked new modes of listening. The city is no longer a “lo-fi” drone for Off Site listeners but is made more alive and vibrant. For Benjamin, the advertisement “hits us between the eyes,” but perhaps urban sounds can achieve the same tactile effect. Can we say that the sounds heard at Off Site had the tactile potential to hit the listeners between the ears? The politics of listening that emerged at Off Site and their intersection with culturalist discourses concerning “Japanese” modes of listening reveal that sound is never a “neutral phenomenon” (Arkette 2004: 160). Sound is imbued with social and cultural meaning, its reception under continual negotiation and contestation. Sounds of Tokyo are hierarchically ordered, a sentiment that unfolded inside the blank walls of Off Site’s performance space. Thus, despite the framing of onkyô as an uncontrolled and free form in which ambient, non-intentional sounds can and should be allowed to enter the boundaries of the performance environment, the very notion of ambient sounds was not all inclusive in the case of Off Site. This “auditory discrimination” – in which the bodily presence of the audience is denied and/or downplayed in the face of the more valued ambient sounds of the cityscape – reveals the tenuous margins of the category of the urban soundscape as well as the impossible divide between music and non-music. Perhaps we can explain onkyô listening as a critical response to what some have called “ubiquitous listening” (Kassabian 2001), here, referring to the omnipresent nature of foreground music in capitalist environments. Background music, and urban noise in general, has become a naturalized part of the acoustic environment, seemingly sourceless and invisible, “posing instead as a quality of the environment” (ibid.). This sheer ubiquity has necessarily provoked and informed the conditions of our listening; we can thus only listen in a distracted manner. As urban noise becomes more immediate and intrusive in public space, perhaps our critical engagement (or disengagement) with city sounds, as in the case of onkyô, will provide the conditions for new sensory engagement with urban soundscapes.

Notes 1

For work on the rupture of civil society in opposing the public, see Canetti (1962 [1960]), LeBon (1960 [1895]), Mazzarella (2010). For work on noise as a social threat, see Attali (1985) and Russo and Warner (1987).

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Here, we can think of the recent outcry over the sound of the vuvuzela at the 2010 FIFA World Cup. In this case, much of the public’s antagonism (often by Westerners, perhaps unfamiliar with the sonic dimension of these trumpets) towards the sound was one of noise pollution; the noise of the vuvuzelas was not only perceived as distracting to the spectators but was also seen as a threat to one’s health on the level of noise pollution. 3 In his essay, “One-Way Street,” Benjamin strongly recommends writers avoid background music: “In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semirelaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.” (1978: 80) 4 Tom Gunning argues that this transformation of modern bodily experience resides in “techniques of circulation” and mobility which were directly facilitated by the development of the railway system and the advent of motion pictures (1995). 5 In contrast to Benjamin’s notion of the distracted and absent-minded viewing public turned critic as one of liberation, Adorno viewed distracted listening as regressive listening. With the commodification and standardization of popular music, listening, Adorno argues, has become “arrested at the infantile stage,” wherein the distracted audience isn’t actually listening, but is listening atomistically, as childish consumers. Thus, “regressive listeners behave like children” by focusing on fetishized (i.e. atomized) elements and motifs that come to stand in for the whole. 6 In his discussion of modern distraction, Jonathan Crary argues that attention and distraction are not mutually opposed; distraction is an effect of promotion and regulation towards maintaining attention. His analysis uncovers a seemingly contradictory element of modern attention. For Crary, the notion of attention implicitly contains a sense of both tension and suspension; it evokes the sense of “holding something in wonder or contemplation” (1999: 10). The “attentive subject is both immobile and ungrounded,” yet because attention is also informed by a sense of suspension, otherwise figured as interruption or disturbance, attention contains within itself the “negation of perception itself” (1999: 10). 7 See Plourde (2008) and Novak (2010) for broader ethnographic analyses of Off Site. 8 Some regular Off Site performers I spoke with noticed a distinct change in the audience’s listening habits during its five years. Off Site’s history began to be reexamined during its final year of operation (2004–2005) which was rejuvenating (moriagatta) and provided a powerful sense of ending, which perhaps explains the increase in new audience members during its final year. 9 Similar to the type of experimental music discussed by Peterson, music performed at Off Site evoked a non-hierarchical aesthetic; musicians performed on the same level with no leader or conductor. Such forms are often referred to as non-idiomatic improvisation, in contrast to idiomatic improvisation, which is ultimately concerned with expression of a particular idiom or form such as jazz or flamenco (Bailey 1992: xi). Many of the performers at Off Site had no formal musical training (although some had visual arts backgrounds), and some preferred to refer to themselves as artists, rather than musicians. 10 Muzak, or more disparagingly, elevator music, refers to a mass-produced form of music that has now become a necessary backdrop to consumer and retail culture. While not unique to Japan, it is arguably heightened to a spectacular degree and is one of the most audible (and most criticized) facets of Tokyo’s soundscape. See Lanza (2004) and Vanel (2008). 11 After Off Site closed its doors in 2005, a regular performer I interviewed used the phrase “strange and curious” (fushigi na) to refer to Off Site as we discussed the auditory possibilities of the space.

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12 In addition to shutting out light, aromas were controlled as well. In contrast to much of Japanese public space, smoking was not permitted in the first floor performance space at Off Site. This gave the space a radically distinct sensation in comparison to the sensory dimensions of most entertainment spaces in Japan, which are sensorially defined first and foremost by veils of smoke. The lack of smoking at Off Site imparted the space with a sense of neutrality, an “olfactory nowhereness” (Drobnick 2005: 267), one that perhaps contradicted the emphasis on the freedom of the space and its embrace of outside environmental sounds. 13 Personal communication 18 July 2010. 14 Personal communication 20 March 2006. 15 Personal communication 15 August 2005. 16 Personal communication 8 June 2005. 17 His mention of “patronizing tones” refers to the Japanese command form (~nasai), a grammatical form that is often used by parents when scolding their children. For this listener, this form affects a kind of violence on the receiver, and for him is akin to disruptive, violent noise, thus, unwanted sound. 18 Personal communication 23 October 2005. 19 The studiousness of the listening public in Japan can be compared with the figure of the otaku, an obsessive fan and collector of manga and/or anime, usually male. In the case of Tokyo’s experimental music scene, I rarely heard listeners referred to as otaku. Instead, the term “maniac” (maniakku) was often used to refer to listeners who are obsessive in collecting knowledge (including recordings) about musicians and/or attend live performances to a heightened degree. 20 Personal communication 8 June 2005. 21 Through conversations with regular Off Site musicians and listeners, I found that many were conscious of the scene and sound becoming stagnant, with even the owner agreeing. By the end of Off Site’s operation, however, a wave of new, younger audience members – many of whom were Itô’s art school students – discovered Off Site and became regular audience members. Indeed, in its final year, Off Site was visibly rejuvenated as word spread of its impending closure, thus perhaps drawing a new wave of listeners hoping to see the space before it was too late. During this time, as one informant explained, there was a palpable sense of ending, thus participants, including music critics and the musicians themselves, began to reexamine Off Site’s history and development. 22 Personal communication 20 March 2006. 23 It should be noted that I am not invoking onkyô itself as a distinctly “Japanese” genre (it was, in fact, a transnational collaborative musical form), but rather, the way in which the act of listening at Off Site often provoked discussion of what many claimed to be “Japanese” modes of listening. 24 Comparative research concerning language use in Japan focuses on language practices and socialization, arguing that Japanese tend to be more listening oriented, while Americans are more speaking oriented. This pedagogy was thought to contribute to the attentive behavior of many onkyô listeners, who had been trained from an early age to “properly sit down and listen quietly,” as a regular musician at Off Site explained to me. 25 Linguist Tsunoda Tadanobu, for example, argued that the Japanese are linguistically and neurologically unique and radically distinct from Westerners; a distinction that includes a “natural” auditory predisposition towards hearing “noise” (chirping of cicadas, for example) as music or meaningful sound (1985). It is important to note that Tsunoda’s scholarship emerged during the bubble economy era of the 1980s, a period during which discourses of so-called “Japaneseness,” (nihonjinron) flourished in Japanese popular media and continue to circulate to some degree. 26 He had planned to hang wind chimes outside his residence, for example, but was scolded by his wife to take them down, as she explained that such sounds would be

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perceived by neighbors solely as noise and would be unwelcome. 27 Sophie Arkette argues that Schafer’s “urban prejudice” informs his negative and static view of city sound “whereby industrial, commercial and traffic sounds are deemed sonic pollutants, and subsequently allotted to the garbage heap.” (2004: 161) 28 Despite legal restrictions on amplified sound in public spaces in Japan, themselves based on sound control regulations in the US, they remain generally unenforced or ignored (Dolan 2008). See Dolan (2008) for a legal and historical discussion of noise regulations in contemporary Japan. 29 It is notable that in the immediate aftermath of the March 11, 2011 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake, calls for self-restraint (jishuku) in Japan, especially Tokyo, referred to nationwide energy reduction as well as sonic restraint and austerity. Such calls implicitly evoke the idea of urban noise as pleasurable or celebratory as the discourse of jishuku was couched in the rhetoric of “collective mourning.” See Belson and Onishi (2011). 30 Many of my informants were radically opposed to the very notion of background music and would only listen to music at home while devoting one’s full attention, rather than passively playing music in the background. 31 See Roquet (2008) for a fascinating discussion of the recent “healing boom” in Japan, focusing in particular on what he refers to as “ambient literature.”

6

Sounding imaginative empathy

Chindon-ya’s affective economies on the streets of Osaka Marié Abe

Introduction

Three brightly costumed performers stood in front of young and curious domestic tourists in central Osaka. They were in an indoor entertainment theme park called “Paradise Shopping Street (gokuraku shôtengai),” replete with faux-shops reminiscent of an outdoor shopping arcade from the 1920s and 1930s. The leader of the troupe, Hayashi Kôjirô, began a performance, introducing his group with a melodious and eloquent speech. We are chindon-ya, a ludicrous roadside advertisement business with musical instruments (narimonoiri kokkei robô kôkokugyô). We’ve been in this form since the Meiji Period (1868–1912), allowing Shiseidô, Lion [a wellknown personal care and pharmaceutical company], and Asahi Beer to grow into [the large successful companies] they are today. But we have remained as we were, quite modest.1

Chindon-ya, which dates back to the 1850s, refers to groups of street musicians in Japan who are hired to advertise a business. The employer varies daily and can be anything from a local supermarket or a pachinko slot machine parlor, publicizing opening sales or a special discount on a particular product such as cell phone plans or even happy hour at a bar franchise. Costumed in both vividly colored historical dress and contemporary clownish attire, they parade through the streets, not to sell products themselves, but to draw customers to an establishment by playing an assortment of instruments. The typical instrumentation includes Japanese percussions and Western melody instruments, such as clarinet, trumpet, or saxophone. There is no singing or playing jingles; usually the leader of the group delivers advertising speeches between tunes, while others hand out flyers to the passersby and chat with them about whatever client they are advertising that day. Speaking on behalf of chindon-ya as a whole, Hayashi rather unabashedly and humorously took credit for Japan’s economic success. Claiming responsibility for nurturing a few of the largest corporate companies that have achieved global success over the past hundred years, Hayashi situated chindon-ya at the root of

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Figure 6.1 Chindon Tsûshinsha on the street (photograph by the author; permission kindly granted by Inomata Hajime of Tozaiya Co. Ltd.)

the development of Japan’s capitalist modernity. However, while boasting of chindon-ya’s contribution to the companies that lead and support the nation’s economy today, Hayashi also set chindon-ya apart from corporate conglomerates as if to take the side of the “people,” implicitly drawing a social division between a popular mass and corporate capitalism. While Shiseido, Lion, or Asahi may have expanded over time, Hayashi maintains that chindon-ya groups have stayed the same, still true to their popular roots – chindon-ya practitioners themselves have often been socially marginalized in history, but their sonic and visual presence became synonymous with the everyday life of the working class majority by the 1930s.2 Combining humorous overconfidence and modesty in his rhetoric, Hayashi created an air of familiarity and feelings of affinity between chindon-ya and the audience, assuring that the chindon-ya performers are on “their side” of the corporate-proletariat divide. Thus offering a sense of shared alliance and intimacy, the troupe performed short songs with the banjo, accordion, and trumpet to entertain the audience for small tips. Although this indoor performance is atypical of chindon-ya activities (namely advertising for clients on the streets), Hayashi’s self-introduction highlights chindon-ya’s dilemma: it is inextricably embedded in capitalist modernity, yet it is often closely associated with those marginalized by corporate capitalism. Furthermore, Hayashi’s validation of chindon-ya today through a historical

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narrative highlights the shifting conditions of the streets in which their activities take place. In the 1950s, there were an estimated 2,500 chindon-ya performers throughout Japan, and they were a familiar sight and sound in popular everyday life. Chindon-ya was once considered an emblem of the everyday soundscape, neighborhood streets, and taishû – the popular mass or the “people.” Today, however, chindon-ya exists in the midst of city streets saturated with technologically mediated sounds, forces of urban development that have re-zoned and paved the small alleyways, and the acute sense of widening socio-economic gaps among the Japanese population that has made the term “taishû” almost obsolete. As the neighborhood streets change, and the homogeneously conceived notion of the popular mass is disintegrating, what do we make of chindon-ya’s sustained presence on the streets in Japan today? From listening to chindon-ya’s sounds, what kinds of understanding of public space, sociality, and listening public emerge in the contemporary soundscapes of urban streets in Japan? In this chapter, based on fieldwork conducted primarily in Osaka between 2006 and 2008, I argue that turning attention to chindon-ya’s sonic practices challenges a dominant linear narrative that equates the development of a neoliberal capitalist economy to the abstraction of urban landscape and the dissolution of public intimacy. Such teleological discourse reduces space and sound to be both a result and a mirror of economic and political power. Listening to chindon-ya’s sounds, however, allows us to understand the significance of what Henri Lefebvre calls “representational spaces”: spaces of the lived particularities and contradictions concealed within the homogenizing conception of abstract space (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]). Inherently social and spatial, chindon-ya’s sonic practices elucidate complex social relations that actively produce a dynamic understanding of public space. I conducted the majority of my fieldwork with a particular chindon-ya group called Chindon Tsûshinsha – the troupe described above. Led by Hayashi, this Osaka-based troupe is widely respected by many chindon practitioners in Japan for their great financial success, a high level of performance, and the largest size troupe, consisting of twenty-six full time members who earn their livelihood through chindon practices. Following Steven Feld’s assertion that sound provides critical insights into ways of being and knowing in a specific sociocultural context (Feld 1994, 1996), I provide ethnographic analyses of chindon-ya’s sonic practices in order to examine the notions of public space and listening public that are heard, seen, sounded, and imagined through chindon-ya’s advertisement enterprise. Across this chapter, I move through the historical, the social, and the sonic. First, I give a historical overview of the spatial aspects of chindon-ya to contextualize the changing geographies of public space and sociality in which chindon-ya has been situated. Then, I explore the social by examining how sensitivity to listeners’ sentiments informs chindon-ya’s improvisatory and creative musical practices that negotiate and produce social spaces, as well as its conflicted goals of the pursuit of profit and the production of collective intimacy. Lastly, focusing on the sonic, I examine the relationships among sound, space,

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and sociality and ask who constitutes the listening public that is made audible by chindon-ya’s sonic practices.

Shifting geographies of modernity: streets, public space, and sociality

It [chindon-ya] was not music that controlled space; the way the music coexisted with the landscape was refreshing to me. (Ôkuma 2001: 10)

Paradise Shopping Street (gokuraku shôtengai), the indoor theme park I described at the beginning of this chapter, was designed as an imitation of a typical city street of Osaka in the late Taishô and early Shôwa periods (1920s–1930s, when chindon-ya enjoyed great popularity). Owned by Sega Corporation, one of the largest multinational producers of video game software and hardware, it opened in 2004 in one of Osaka’s most popular tourist destinations, Dôtonbori. A bustling shopping and entertainment quarter (sakariba) since the Edo Period (1603–1867), Dôtonbori was a host to five theaters for kabuki and jôruri (traditional puppet theater music), all of which closed during the economic downturn in the 1990s. Today, many of the individually owned shops have been replaced by larger chain stores and pachinko parlors, which blast music and sales pitches from speakers projected outward onto the street. Famous for bright neon signs and large-scale billboards, Dôtonbori is visually and sonically saturated, teeming with young shoppers and domestic tourists. With its longstanding history of popular performing arts and commerce, one might assume that Dôtonbori makes a good ground for chindon-ya’s street routine. However, members of Chindon Tsûshinsha gave me evidence to the contrary. Due to the local shop association’s policy banning chindon-ya, coupled with tight police surveillance of the foot traffic in the area, chindon-ya are not allowed in Dôtonbori. Chindon-ya practitioners have found themselves banned from the streets outside and, instead, performing indoors in a commercially designated site for entertainment. The long-term economic recession further impacted the Dôtonbori area, and Paradise Shopping Street went bankrupt in 2008, only four years after its opening.3 At a first glance, Dôtenbori’s troubles can be read as a story of how the “street,” the locale where chindon-ya thrived in the 1930s, became abstracted, commodified, regulated, and eventually eradicated as Japan’s economy developed. Indeed, significant shifts in the Japanese urban landscape have taken place since the 1930s, changing the conditions and understanding of the public space in which chindon-ya did their business. While myriad changes warrant detailed analysis, for the purpose of this chapter, I will briefly outline the general changes most relevant to the analysis of chindon-ya’s street routines. Due to the forces of modernization and capital accumulation that propelled its economy, the Japanese urban landscape has shifted drastically in the past several decades. In major cities like Osaka and Tokyo, postwar city planning and zoning policies transformed wooden houses into denser concrete housing complexes;

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small side alleyways into wider paved roads; and open-air black markets into regulated and enclosed shopping venues. Typical housing for the lower and middle class population shifted from nagaya (long wooden one-story houses occupied by multiple households, divided by thin walls) to the nuclear family’s apâto (apartment) around the 1930s. After the postwar reconstruction and during the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, danchi, or multi-story concrete housing complexes, proliferated across cities and suburbia (Sugiura and Shimizu 1986: 73; Moroi 1991). These physical changes affected the acoustic environment for chindon-ya; as I will discuss later, they had tangible consequences on the ways in which chindon-ya performed, as the permeability of sounds through porous wood decreased and the reflection and reverberation of sounds increased in the concrete landscape. Shifting geographies of modernity changed not only the acoustic environment for chindon-ya but also the cultural understanding of public space and the sense of sociality on the streets. While there are several terms in Japanese used for “street,” the ones that have historically been closely associated with chindon-ya tend to be narrow, small pedestrian streets, such as yokochô and roji, roughly translated as “side alleyways” and “back streets.”4 These side alleys, often formed by passageways between low-income housing structures such as nagaya, have historically been considered the “place of everyday life” (seikatsu no ba) and a discursive site where sociality was produced among the working class “public.”5 The disappearance of these neighborhood streets through urban development in the postwar period was in turn often perceived as the abstraction of social relations and the alienation of public space. For example, retrospectively commenting on his photography of a small alleyway with children at play taken in 1957, the photographer Tanuma Takeyoshi observes that Roji (back street) is a story of human sentiments. Roji . . . is my favorite place that smells of people’s everyday life. However, at the peak of the bubble economy, roji was erased, and nagaya turned into apartments. There, the everyday life of warmth no longer exists. (1996: 41)

Privatization of what was once “public” space and increasingly tight police regulations on performance or commercial activities on the street added to such discourses of the capitalist economy leading to the abstraction of public space and public intimacy.6 As Japan went through a long period of economic crisis after the collapse of the economic bubble, the sense of social fragmentation deepened even more. Following a series of events that afflicted the national psyche such as the Great Hanshin Earthquake, the Sarin Gas Attacks, and a widely publicized Okinawa rape case in the mid 1990s, sensationalist media coverage of the crisis of public sentiment proliferated further.7 Together with the neoliberal policies that widened social economic gaps within the population (kakusa shakai), the postwar myth of Japan as a homogeneous, class-less nation crumbled. Together with neoliberal

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policies put forward by Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirô (in office 2001–2006) and the shift from the industrial to consumer and information industry, the persistent economic recession has brought an end to the lifetime employment system in Japan that supported its prior economic and moral stability. Instead, the Japanese market economy has become increasingly dependent upon flexible labor. Today, there are reportedly almost 500,000 furîtâ, i.e. people between the age of fifteen and thirty-four who lack full time employment or are unemployed or underemployed.8 Sabu Kohso describes the visibility of furîtâ on the streets: “Today’s young people . . . tend to hang out on the streets instead of shopping in fancy stores. More and more they are beginning to look like what they really are: street kids” (2006: 416). Many of these furîtâ find themselves on chindon-ya territory, working similar jobs publicizing businesses through the distribution of free tissue flyer-packs and holding advertisement signs. In some ways, these narratives of spatial and social alienation offer insights into the larger historical shift that Japanese cities have undergone. Chindon-ya’s sonic practices, however, question the teleological narrative that attributes the demise of public space and sociality to the expansion of corporate capitalism. Under this assumption, chindon-ya becomes simply nostalgia, indexing a disappearing “popular mass” with social warmth, on the verge of vanishing along with the dynamic sociality of side alleys. But chindon-ya did not simply become abstracted into the commercial space or become a remainder of the romanticized notion of social warmth that once existed in small alleys and neighborhoods. In fact, after decades of inactivity, chindon-ya has experienced a resurgence since the early 1990s. Despite being labeled as anachronistic and obscure, some chindon-ya troupes today have achieved financial success, generating up to one million dollars in annual income. Furthermore, chindon-ya aesthetics have been taken up by various contemporary musicians and refashioned into hybridized musical practices.9 After all, the chindon-ya performers we met earlier continued their usual advertising business on the streets throughout Osaka and beyond, even after the imitation side alleyways of the Paradise Shopping Streets disappeared. What makes chindon-ya viable and sustainable as both an aesthetic and economic practice today, when the initial conditions in which it developed no longer hold true in contemporary Japan? The key to answering this question, I argue, lies at the intersection of the political economy and economies of affect. In the next section, by way of introducing the Chindon Tsûshinsha’s street routine, I will discuss how the pursuit of profit and creation of social warmth interact with each other in chindon-ya’s sonic advertisement business.

Imaginative empathy: the feedback loop of the pecuniary and the social

As evident in the fact that chindon practitioners refer to their practice as a distinct gyôkai (industry or trade), chindon-ya is considered first and foremost a business, rather than a musical genre or folk performance art. Kobayashi Shinnosuke, one of the founding members of Chindon Tsûshinsha and an experienced chindon-ya

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clarinet player, defined chindon-ya as a “sound business,” rather than music business. As such, they perceive themselves to be firmly positioned outside the music industry; chindon-ya troupes are not selling their music per se but are using music in the commercial interest of their clients’ businesses. And to conduct this sonic advertisement business soundly, according to Kobayashi, chindon-ya needs to achieve their twin goals: “chindon-ya has two aspects – to bring joy and pleasure to people we’ve never met before, and to publicize the client’s business.”10 On one of my last days of my fieldwork, I asked the Chindon Tsûshinsha leader Hayashi a final question: what does he consider to be the most important value in being a chindon-ya? What is the key to achieving the twin goals? Without hesitation, he answered: Definitely, the ability to imagine. To imagine the state of mind of people. Inside their heart – of people in front of us, of people inside their houses, or perhaps I might somehow intuitively feel them even though they might not even exist.11

“Reading the mind” (kokoro o yomitoru), “reading the atmosphere” (kûki o yomu), “imagining the listeners’ emotional state”: these were recurrent phrases in the conversations I had with chindon-ya practitioners throughout my fieldwork. I was struck by how profoundly these entrepreneurial street performers cared about the sentiments of those their sounds reached – not only the passersby on the street but also shop owners, office workers indoors, and invisible inhabitants behind the walls in the residential areas. To be effective in their business meant cultivating the ability to imagine who might be listening, caring about what the listeners’ sentiments might be, instilling joy or spirit in them through music, forging interpersonal connections with and among the audience, and navigating the urban public space accordingly. In other words, the production of affective interpersonal relationships is at the heart of chindon-ya’s musical advertisement enterprise. I call this discourse and practice of caring about and imagining listeners’ sentiments imaginative empathy. Imaginative empathy informs social, spatial, and sonic aspects of their performance practice; for the chindon-ya practitioners to feel that they had a successful performance, their playing must create sound that resound in the listeners’ hearts (kokoro ni hibiku, kokoro ni jîn to kuru). Through this notion of imaginative empathy, I extend ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes’ call to problematize the widely received understanding of Marxian cultural theory that assumes that capital erodes the bonds of sociality.12 Instead, advocating analyses that take into account both political economy and sociality of musical practices, Stokes argues that ethnomusicologists should consider how “relationships between sentiment and commodity form in a rather more sympathetic and productive manner than that habitually associated with Marxian cultural theory” (2002: 139).13 As a musical practice whose commercial enterprise is inextricably linked with the production of affects, or what Michael Hardt calls “affective labor” (Hardt 1999), chindon-ya presents a compelling case through which to analyze the relation between capital and the “social warmth”

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(Stokes 2002: 146), or a sense of collective intimacy forged through social encounters and relations. A closer ethnographic look at chindon-ya’s business practice and their particular structure of financial transactions illustrates how the affective labor of chindon-ya’s sonic practices reconciles the alleged tension between the production of social warmth and pecuniary pursuits. Chindon Tsûshinsha does not have a set price for their performances. Potential clients, storeowners, and larger advertisement and event organizing companies call their office to negotiate the business deal. Many factors determine the final cost: the hours, the length of campaign if it is for more than one day, the size of the troupe, the distance of travel, the type of performance, and the relationship between the troupe and the client. That said, on an average street routine gig, the troupe charges a flat fee of approximately ¥20,000 per member, which is usually paid in cash at the end of the day. The pay comes from their clients, not from the potential customers on the street with whom they interact and for whom they are performing. With no direct compensation from their immediate audience, the chindon-ya troupe is free to orient its performance around developing social connections with the listeners outside of business relations. It is precisely this mediated relationship between chindon-ya practitioners and passersby that allows chindon-ya to be both closely embedded within the commercial enterprise of advertisement and able to develop social warmth with people around them. Interviews with both employers and chindon practitioners reveal how their economic success is inextricably linked with the production of affective interpersonal relations. For instance, the owner of a hair salon in a lower-income neighborhood in Higashi (Eastern) Osaka City explained to me that his primary motive in hiring the troupe for his store’s opening was to “enliven the neighborhood.” By hiring chindon-ya, he not only gained new customers, but he also created new alliances among neighboring shop owners, who all benefited from the chindon-ya’s presence as the troupe brought a sense of festive liveliness to stimulate local commerce. Similarly, a pachinko slot machine parlor owner who hired chindon-ya told me that he did so partly to create a friendlier façade for the local customers who may otherwise have a negative impression of the establishment, which is often associated with gamblers and organized crime. Thus, while chindon-ya’s clients’ interests are primarily economic, these interests are achieved via the production of social warmth; they are equally invested in producing social warmth and creating relations with its surrounding businesses and residents by hiring chindon-ya. On the part of chindon practitioners, interpersonal communication and social connection is privileged over masterful execution of performance and gives them a sense of reward and success. Seto Nobuyuki, a clarinet player working with the troupe for the past twelve years, confirmed this for me: “You can get as much done during the break as while walking down the street, because that’s when the passersby come over to us to chat.” For Seto, how many people he gathers for face-to-face conversations is a more tangible sign of accomplishment than the financial return brought to the employer: “It’s fine if I don’t get around to deliver

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Figure 6.2 Members of Chindon Tsûshinsha interacting with passersby (photograph by the author; permission kindly granted by Inomata Hajime of Tozaiya Co. Ltd.)

the sales pitch and just listen to people’s life stories and gossip. It’s fun to connect with people. That’s the best part of being in the chindon-ya business.”14 It is this conviviality that further draws the audience. This conveys another layer of productive feedback loop, where social warmth and pecuniary pursuits are mutually constitutive.15 Sustained through this feedback loop, chindon-ya navigates the various forces that inform and inflect the public space of the streets. Guided by imaginative empathy, they improvise their performances accordingly, determining where to go, how long to stay in one place, where to take a break, what to play, and how to perform. While some choices, such as the size of the troupe, gender balance in the group, and costumes, and the like, are made in advance based on the employer’s request, most of the performative aspects of their sonic practices – such as repertoire, dynamics, timbre, duration – are highly improvisatory. I now turn attention to the ways in which imaginative empathy informs chindon-ya’s physical negotiations in their street routine performances.

Sounding imaginative empathy

Among the troupe Chindon Tsûshinsha’s wide range of activities (which may include entertaining foreign guests at receptions, workshops for school children,

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dinner shows, and festival performances), the most common form of business practice remains the street routine called machimawari or “going around town.” The troupe usually starts their day at the store, then walks through nearby neighborhoods for several hours, playing music, delivering fliers, and conversing with passersby to spread the word about whatever client that hired them for the day. Except for starting and ending the day in front of the store of their employers, the routes and their schedules are never pre-determined; the itinerary is impromptu. During their street routine, chindon-ya practitioners walk down the streets while playing music and giving out flyers. This is called nagasu (to let flow). Occasionally, they stay in one spot for anywhere between five to fifteen minutes. They do this often at an intersection; this is called itsuku (to settle). While settling on a street corner, the troupe often delivers speeches about the employer’s products or services they are advertising. These activities are repeated in different neighborhoods throughout the day, with a short break every hour. It is no simple task for chindon-ya to navigate the urban streets. One veteran troupe member, Kawaguchi Masaaki, spoke of how seemingly wide enough shopping arcade streets are in fact filled with informal and complex territorial lines, leaving very little space available for them to walk through. The unspoken rule, according to Kawaguchi, is that in front of each shop, there is a one-meter radius semicircle that is felt to be the shop’s territory. Although legally a public road, overstepping such territorial boundaries would upset the shop owners – therefore hindering the relationships between them and chindon-ya’s employer as well as between the chindon-ya and those shops, who may be their potential clients in the future. Sensitivity to physical spatial dynamics is evident in the practitioners’ constant scanning of the surroundings. While walking, they not only look to their immediate surroundings but also at a distance, above and behind: the tenth floor verandas of a huge apartment complex; the glass window two floors above street level; from which people poke their heads out and look down; and a storefront thirty meters behind where they have passed, where their sales pitch sparked conversations among passersby. It is necessary for them to gauge to whom their sounds are reaching, how their presence and sounds may be affecting listeners, and how they might create relations with listeners by walking over to them to talk or making eye contact and waving. In addition to these unspoken social and acoustic dynamics that govern the urban streets, chindon-ya are constantly negotiating the official regulations enforced by the police. Since the 1960 implementation of the Road Traffic Law, chindon-ya’s activities became more and more strictly regulated.16 It is required by law that they obtain permission from the local police to march through particular areas in groups, potentially obstructing traffic. In reality, however, chindon-ya practitioners do not necessarily always follow this rule, receiving only implicit police approval. Due to the ambiguity in legal regulations, chindonya’s activities do not always neatly fit into the legal categories of street activity provided by the police. In many cases, the police prefer not to enforce any regulations in the interest of avoiding potential complications; by covertly asking

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chindon-ya not to submit applications, the police will not be held responsible even when chindon-ya cause trouble, which is seldom the case. In turn, chindonya keeps their sonic and physical presence modest, particularly around police stations and officers on duty. Public space as audible through chindon-ya’s sonic practices, therefore, is not a homogeneously conceived, abstract space as many argue. Instead, much like Lefebvre’s notion of representational space, chindon-ya’s micropractices elucidate the dynamic and ever-shifting forces that govern the everyday lives on the streets, while their clandestine, conjunctural relationships with the law enforcement reveal the porousness and contradictions of allegedly public streets as conceived by city planners and law makers. Physical space is negotiated through not only bodies but also sounds. For example, chindon practitioners suddenly stop their drumming and playing when passing in front of the client’s competitors, especially if they have been hired by the other business in the past. When they are advertising for a pachinko parlor, they stop and quietly walk past other pachinko parlors in town to avoid inciting unpleasant feelings of competition and annoyance. In quiet residential areas or near hospitals, sometimes the troupe also stops sounding their instruments for the same reason. Chindon-ya’s performance choices are informed by intimate knowledge of the geography and demography. For instance, in the Harinakano neighborhood in southern Osaka, where there has been an out-migration of youth to other parts of the city, the veteran clarinet player Kobayashi played tunes that would appeal to the elderly who have stayed behind in the neighborhood. Most of the pieces were enka songs (sentimental ballads popularized in postwar Japan), to which some of the passersby mouthed the lyrics. Likewise, knowledge of the local population’s daily schedule is also an important factor that determines chindon-ya’s performance choices. Before the troupe leaves for a machimawari gig, they look at the map of their destination to have a rough idea of how they might walk through the neighborhood in order to strategically arrive at certain locations at a specific time. For example, on one occasion, the troupe timed their eight-hour performance so that they would pass by a large electricity company’s entrance gate at lunchtime to catch the businessmen taking a break outside; they preferred to walk through residential areas in the early afternoon, when housewives were at home; and they wandered towards grocery stores by the late afternoon to catch housewives shopping for dinner. At each location, the troupe adjusted the volume of their performance to the surroundings and the reactions of the passersby. When staying put at a busy intersection in a densely populated area, the chindon drum player played with enough volume to cut through other competing sounds. In contrast, when walking through a quiet residential area during the day, she was careful not to bang on the larger drum, which has a deep resonance. Hayashi elaborated on the drummer’s sensitivity to volume: “In quiet residential areas, you can hear small sounds. So if you play loudly, people won’t come out [of their home]. You have to play it with sensitivity and delicacy so that our sounds touch their hearts. Otherwise you’ll be annoying them.”

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Referring to the importance of various improvisatory practices that are grounded in imaginative empathy as discussed above, Hayashi likened chindonya practices to other performance styles that require such skills:

[Is chindon-ya] self-expression? Maybe. But it’s more like film music. Adapting to each landscape and atmosphere, we think of what kind of sounds would touch [people’s] hearts. Like a jazz improvisation session. You have to walk from genba [place where things happen] to genba, and decide [how to perform] based on inspirations you get right there and then. What you play is based on what bubbles up in that spot.17

Constantly negotiating the social and acoustic dynamics that govern the public space, imagining the sentiments of the listeners (who may be on the street or at home), listening to surrounding soundscape, and adjusting their performance practice real-time to each conjuncture, chindon-ya creatively and flexibly sound out a site-specific, improvised performance of imaginative empathy that would “touch people’s hearts.”

Public intimacy and listening publics

The notion of sound “touching” a listener – a physical metaphor for the effect of sound on one’s affect – shows how sound can be a significant dimension through which a sense of intimacy can be produced.18 R. Murray Schafer explains: “Hearing is a way of touching at a distance and the intimacy of the first sense is fused with sociability whenever people gather together to hear something special” (Schafer 2004b: 9). This attention to sound’s ability to reach across physical boundaries and elicit embodied sociality across distance, between people as well as between the living and the inert, underscores chindon-ya’s sound business. This sound’s ability to produce embodied sociality and affective responses among listeners becomes particularly relevant when listeners at a distance can be touched by chindon-ya sounds without seeing the chindon-ya performing. Film editor and theorist Walter Murch argues that this gap, between what one hears and what one sees, can produce “mass intimacy,” highlighting the sound’s ability to speak to a large number of people in a such a way that each viewer feels the filmmakers are speaking to them alone.19 Murch explicates how sounds can achieve this effect:

This metaphoric use of sound [without its literal source visible on the screen] is one of the most flexible and productive means of opening up a conceptual gap into which the fertile imagination of the audience will reflexively rush, eager (even if unconsciously so) to complete circles that are only suggested, to answer questions that are only half-posed. What each person perceives on screen, then, will have entangled within it fragments of their own personal history, creating that paradoxical state of mass intimacy where – though the

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audience is being addressed as a whole – each individual feels the film is addressing things known only to him or her. (2005: 1)

In a similar way, chindon-ya’s sounds, heard by an indoor listener who does not see the sound source, produce a sense of mass intimacy that each listener interprets in a personalized way. For instance, during one of the machimawari gigs in a residential area, I saw a woman in her sixties who came out of her apartment wearing an apron and sandals. Seeing me following the troupe from over twenty meters behind with a video camera, she walked over to ask me what the chindonya troupe was advertising that day. After I told her that there was a new Korean style barbeque restaurant that is opening near the train station, she said: Ah. I felt so melancholic listening to their sounds. Funny how they sound so festive, but it reminds me of my childhood friend who just passed away. She and I used to go see chindon-ya on the streets all the time when we were little.

Another woman, who was on her way home from a grocery store with burdensome grocery bags in her hands, then responded to her about her own childhood memories of chindon-ya. The two women, who didn’t seem to know each other previously, began to chat. They were still deeply in conversation when I looked over my shoulder a few blocks down the street. The elderly woman, who “heard” her own memory in chindon-ya’s sounds, was compelled to go outside and consequently was brought into an unexpected interaction with another woman. Chindon-ya’s sonic practices, then, elicit not only personal and affective responses but also facilitate social relations among those who would not be interacting with one another otherwise. Murch’s and Chion’s insights offer us an analysis of how the particular ways in which chindon-ya sounds and is listened to produce sociality. Catering to the listeners in particular places, chindon-ya practitioners sound out imaginative empathy to create a sense of collective intimacy that resonates across both the individual listener’s personal history and public urban streetscape. Imaginative empathy, then, works both ways: chindon-ya practitioners address listeners at large through their sounds, imagining the listeners’ sentiments; in turn, the listeners hear the sounds in ways that they imaginatively make relevant in their personal stories. Chindon-ya’s sonic practices forge collective intimacy, or what Lauren Berlant calls “public intimacy” (1998), and thereby highlight the significance of affect and sound in the production of the “public” – or more specifically, listening public (chôshû). In her discussion of public intimacy, Berlant poses critical questions that span the issues of the private and the public, spatialized politics of the institution and the “street,” and the individual “differences” and the discourses of the collective, the State. She writes:

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How can we think about the ways attachments make people public, producing trans-personal identities and subjectivities, when those intimacy, state policy, and mass-mediated experiences of intensely disruptive crises? And what have those formative encounters to do with attachments come from within spaces as varied as those of domestic the effects of other, less institutionalized events, which might take place on the street, on the phone, in fantasy, at work, but rarely register as anything but residue? Intimacy names the enigma of this range of attachments, and more; and it poses a question of scale that links the instability of individual lives to the trajectories of the collective. (Berlant 1998: 283)

I suggest that sounds can ask powerful questions about public intimacy, as their physical and acoustic properties reach individuals across physical boundaries, and their affective qualities elicit kinds of attachments that enable individuals to forge unexpected social relations and collectivity. In this light, chindon-ya’s sonic practices provide a productive lens through which to explore Berlant’s questions of public intimacy in contemporary Japan, where the homogeneous and monolithic notion of taishû, which chindon-ya was once closely associated, has become obsolete. Who, then, have been assembled through chindon-ya’s sonic practice to constitute the listening public today? While speaking of the way he perceives sounds and space, the customers’ affect, and his role in reaching out to them, Hayashi offered a lengthy comment on the social differences audible in the listening public produced through chindon-ya’s sonic practices: After all, I am playing to the people [who are] at home. It took me 20 years to realize that: [I need] to make them want to come outside. [To do that I have] to understand who is at home during the day on a weekday. [I have to] look at the atmosphere of the town, and [their] income. Happy healthy people are out at work. Those who are home are the sick, housewives, unemployed, physically disadvantaged, the elderly, grandchildren. It’s rare to find a happy full-time housewife. [Housework is] heavy work, and the husband is busy and rarely home. They are doing laundry sadly. So we take them outside and make them feel like something good could happen. It’s almost . . . like visiting hospital rooms to cheer them up. It’s like a mental hospital of the town. It’s rare to find happy people around here . . . We have to make sound that would make the depressed want to come out.20

Here, I note the chindon practitioners’ sensitivity to geographically delineated differences produced in the register of gender, class, physical ability, and age. Imaginative empathy allows chindon-ya, an enterprise inextricably embedded in consumerism, to make visible and audible those who are excluded from the production forces of the economy, and bounded within the physical confines of walls and segregated neighborhoods marked by gender and class. The listening

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Figure 6.3 Unidentified listeners looking out of their window at the sound of chindon-ya outside (photograph by the author)

public that chindon-ya’s sonic practices cater to, in other words, reveal the socially and economically marginalized in contemporary Japanese urban life. Chindon-ya practitioners’ creative and empathetic sounds bleed over such delineating lines, reaching across the physical boundaries in hopes that their sounds might invite them outside of their rooms to the veranda or to the street to forge new social relations with chindon-ya, among themselves, and with local commerce. Chindon-ya’s sonic practices grounded in imaginative empathy, therefore, make audible social differences that are often drowned in noises, hidden behind walls, or marginalized from the labor force. Take for example the one-month long chindon campaign to sell prepaid cell phones launched by NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Co.) in Kamagasaki. Kamagasaki is the largest yoseba (a gathering place for day laborers) in Japan, with an estimated 25,000 transient population living in an area 500 meters by 500 meters, and it is known for its roughness. NTT specifically targeted day laborers in Kamagasaki neighborhood, who often do not have a registered address, bank account, and/or credit card number required for monthly contract plans. Every day, the troupe was given 420 flyers and 2,000 candies with promotional wrapping and was asked to walk through Kamagasaki to hold conversations with the locals. They spent most of their morning near a public unemployment office engaging with unemployed day

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laborers, who came up to the troupe to get the candy and start conversations. While some showed interest in the cell phone plans, others quickly moved on to have conversations with the members, particularly female members, seeking human interaction rather than business transactions. Hayashi said that the chindon-ya troupe, skilled at reaching out to the socially marginalized, would be the only advertisement medium by which large corporations might establish a physical presence in this segregated neighborhood.21 True enough, chindon-ya’s ability to gain acceptance by the locals and relate to them was valorized by NTT not only to publicize their cell phone plan but also to conduct market research on the difficult-to-access population. Although the chindon-ya did collect the potential customers’ information desired by NTT, such as age, gender, and their previous knowledge about the particular cell phone plan, chindon-ya’s sonic practices ultimately invited conviviality with and among the Kamagasaki locals on a personal level. This was yet another example of creating a sense of affinity and intimacy through these unexpected encounters grounded in imaginative empathy. The acoustic and affective permeability of chindon-ya sounds, therefore, enables us to listen to the politics of exclusion in contemporary Japanese urban life. Echoing Hayashi’s remark quoted at length above, other Chindon Tsûshinsha members mentioned that the neighborhoods where they are well received tend to be lower-income neighborhoods in Osaka, such as zainichi (resident Korean) neighborhoods in Ikuno Ward or the day laborers’ district Kamagasaki. Particularly in Osaka, these spatialized differences are often produced along ethnic and class lines.22 Empathetic relations in these areas are particularly noted by the troupe members as strong and important, as well as rewarding when successfully established.

Conclusion

As I have shown, chindon-ya’s sonic practices offer a conception of public space that is not physically delineated, officially regulated, or immediately visible. Contrary to a teleological narrative, in which capitalist modernity abstracts lived urban spaces through urban development, privatization, regulation, and gentrification, chindon-ya’s sounds proffer a historical continuity in the understanding of streets as always heterogeneous and dynamic space produced through social relations. Through their attention to the forces that create the particular site of performance and their creative and flexible improvisatory practices, chindon-ya’s sonic practices make explicit the otherwise intangible sentiments, forces, and relations that are in fact palpable in what constitutes the everyday urban space of streets. As such, chindon-ya’s practices of imaginative empathy challenge the physical separation of public and private space; streets become a site of social warmth and affection when home is considered a place of isolation.23 While studies on portable musical technologies such as car radios and the Walkman show that sounds transform public space into private space (Bull 2003, 2004a, 2004b), chindon-ya’s sounds reframe the very location of “public space.” Their sounds, when reaching listeners who have been excluded from the labor force and

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marginalized geographically in particular neighborhoods or behind apartment walls, extend the notion of “public space” from the physical streets to the domestic spaces behind apartment walls and social relations themselves. Chindon-ya’s sonic production of imaginative empathy does the cultural work of creating sociality through drawing people into activities in which they did not intend to participate. In doing so, chindon-ya practitioners usurp and blur the separation of the space of sociality and the space of alienation through sounds by negotiating invisible, unspoken rules of territoriality shared by people who live or own businesses in the particular neighborhoods. As in the case of the housewives behind the walls, or the day laborers in the segregated neighborhoods, chindonya sense and hear those who are invisible and silenced. Imagining their sentiment, chindon-ya practitioners make them audible and put them into social relations. In this way, the commercial enterprise of chindon-ya becomes the catalyst for the production of a listening public through unexpected social relations spanning class, ethnic, and territorial boundaries. This could perhaps be one of the reasons why chindon-ya, an outdated advertisement medium in the age of internet and TV commercials, has garnered attention and financial viability today in the times of the crisis of public sentiments. The question, however, arises: what is the cost of selling their smiles? While chindon-ya’s sonic production of sociality reveals the porousness and heterogeneity of social space and contradicts the notion of homogenizing abstract space, the fact that chindon-ya ultimately seeks profit through this production of sociality puts them in a highly contested, ambiguous position. Chindon-ya’s vested interest requires that, while chindon-ya’s sonic practices enable the production of public intimacy and puts forward a dynamic understanding of social space, they are simultaneously luring their listeners into being the consumers in the capitalist economy. Perhaps it is this contradictory ambiguity that enables the contemporary chindon-ya practitioners to simultaneously contest the homogenizing discourse of abstract space through their sonic practices, and to stay relevant and financially sustainable in the very economic forces that produced spatialized social differences in the first place – including the furîtâ, the day laborers, and the chindon-ya themselves. Kawaguchi’s comments highlight how chindon-ya practitioners both capitalize upon and struggle with this contradictory position in their everyday practices in order to make ends meet: “There are both positive and negative images [of chindon-ya]. It’s a battle every day for us, figuring out how we navigate through them, and survive and sustain ourselves.”24 The imaginative empathy involved in Chindon-ya’s sonic practices compels us to question not only the incommensurability of money and sentiment but also the interpretation of space as a physical enclosure onto which social differences are mapped. Listening carefully to chindon-ya’s sonic practices, what we hear resounding in the streets, through the windows and into the living rooms, is an understanding of space that is actively produced through an articulation of social relations that are otherwise silenced, contained, and regulated within physical boundaries. This dynamic and inclusive sense of space is where we hear affective

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economies and political economies in a productive feedback loop, sustaining and amplifying of chindon-ya’s sound business.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

This quote comes from his troupe’s performance at Ebisuza, Osaka on January 25, 2007. Here, Hayashi is riffing on the phrase “ludicrous roadside advertisement business with musical instruments,” which was coined by an innovative precursor of chindon-ya, Tanba Kurimaru, around the 1890s (Horie 1986: 70). Due to the relative lack of historical records of chindon-ya and its predecessor, their marginalized social status as well the marginalized capital form of its business within the society are a complex and sensitive subject among chindon-ya practitioners, popular journalists, and scholars alike; see Abe (2010). This followed shortly after the closure of the famous popular restaurant Kuidaore just a few feet away on the same main riverside street. The automated doll in the storefront “Kuidaore Tarô” became a symbol of not only Dôtonbori but also Osaka as a city, and its closure elicited various obituaries and media attention, lamenting the end of the era/place. Mizuuchi, Katô, and Ôshiro note that while roji means alleyway or small side streets in standard Japanese, in Osaka and Kyoto it refers to the space that includes nagaya houses as well as small pathways that connects them and the small plaza space in the back of the house, away from the main street (2008: 167). In many photography books that capture the urban cityscapes (mostly Tokyo) from the 1950s and 1960s, these alleyways are often captured as a place of “human emotions (ninjyô),” trivial life happenings, play, and social relations. With this assumption of alleyways as a site of production of everyday life and affect, Endô Tetsuo advocates a “yokochô gaku” (side-alley-ology) as a way to rethink Japanese urban sociology (1998). In their discussion of youth movements in Japanese public space, Hayashi and McKnight (2005) assert that public space in Japan has shifted in the postwar era from being a heterogeneous space of resistance to a homogeneous space of political and social control. This sense of alienation is evident in the film-based fûkeiron (landscape theory) of the late 1960s. Characterized by the propensity of human-less scenes in the everyday urban landscape, this cinematic technique critiqued the increasing control over territorialized space and the consolidation of postwar state capitalism (see Roquet 2008). See Allison (2009, 2012), Roquet (2008) and Leheny (2006) for more on this social malaise in Japan. Furîtâ is a hybrid loan word, combining the sounds of the English prefix ‘free-’ (as in freelancing) with the German word ‘Arbeiter’; a freeter is someone who freelances without fixed and permanent employment. Among these what I call “chindon-inspired” musicians are a Okinawa-based folk singer Daiku Tetsuhiro; a progressive rock/avant garde band Cicala Mvta, led by a chindon clarinet player Ôkuma Wataru; a chindon-rock band Soul Flower Mononoke Summit; and many others. Kobayashi Shinnosuke, personal communication, August 26, 2007. Hayashi Kôjirô, personal communication, July 24, 2008. Stokes provides a close reading of Marx that enables a more productive analyses of affect and capital: “Marx’s notion of commodity form’s contradictory histories might be more responsive to the question of historical difference and the shaping of modern identities in the idiom of closeness and social warmth.” (2002: 161) For another discussion of affect and capitalism, see Ettlinger (2009: 92–97). Seto Nobuyuki, personal communication, July 20, 2007.

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15 The metaphor of feedback loop has offered a conceptually and acoustically productive lens for scholars who have spearheaded studies of sounds, or acoustemology, as well as anthropology dealing with musical culture; see Keil and Feld (1994), Keil (1995), Condry (2006), and Novak (2013). 16 Seto Nobuyuki, personal communication, July 20, 2007. 17 Hayashi Kôjirô, personal Communication, March 22, 2007 18 Henri Lefebvre also writes of the effect of musical resonance to create sociality: “it is in this way, and at this level, in the non-visible, that bodies find each other” (1991 [1974]: 225). 19 Composer Michel Chion has theorized the effect of sounds heard without its visible source as acousmêtre (1994,1999) in relation to technological mediations such as radio or telephone. Addressing the particular way of hearing that was enabled by such technologies, Chion highlighted the sensory experiences of modernity through this notion that is here further expanded by Murch. 20 Hayashi Kôjirô, personal communication, March 22, 2007. 21 Although the contemporary chindon-ya practitioners are not necessarily from the socially marginalized groups, the historical association between chindon-ya and the underclass or socially marginalized have often been mobilized by both listeners and practitioners in creating the imagined alliance. For more discussion on chindon-ya’s social positioning and its relation to the marginalized population today, such as the day laborers, see Abe (2010). 22 With a large influx of migrants from Okinawa and Korea into Osaka since the 1930s, there are numerous pockets of ethnically segregated neighborhoods in Osaka. Furthermore, compared to Tokyo which underwent major rebuilding after the 1945 Air Raids, Osaka has retained some of the historic neighborhoods that segregated people of different castes (Mizuuchi et al. 2008). 23 This calls for reframing of space of public intimacy as suggested by Berlant (1998). 24 Kawaguchi Masaaki, personal communication, March 15, 2007.

7

The swinging phonograph in a hot teahouse

Sound technology and the emergence of the jazz community in prewar Japan1 Shuhei Hosokawa Introduction

The ubiquity of recorded sound is one of the most prominent characteristics in auditory life in the twentieth century. Due to its repeatability, mobility, and materiality, recorded sound has altered not only the spatial and temporal conditions of sound production and consumption but also the economic, industrial, technical, aesthetic, conceptual, and social conditions of such sonic practices as composition, circulation, and perception. New technology always provides new cultural context for sound experience (Gitelman 1999, 2006). This seems to be almost a truism but merits further examination. Every time a recording is re-played, it articulates new alliances between space and body, voice (or instruments) and ears, creation and industry, and performance and listening. It has been widely argued that recording/reproduction technology has exerted a profound, if not deterministic, impact on the practices and meanings of performing, listening, and hearing, as well as on the music industry, the repertoire of public and private performance, and the definition of genres. By separating the site of performance from that of listening, the recording technology creates new sets of “interrelationship between genre, circulation, and place” (Novak 2007: 30). This chapter argues for attention to the crucial role of a particular social space, generally called jazu kissa, or the “jazz teahouse,” in prewar Japan, made possible by transformations in recording technology. Still common today, the jazz kissa is typically a space where clients concentrate on listening to jazz recordings played loudly on a prohibitively expensive audio set. It is different from other kinds of cafés and clubs where jazz (and other genres) are piped in as background music, places where bands play live, or DJs cut and mix jazz or other records for dancing and as background for audience chatter. In contrast to these establishments, which exist across the globe, jazz kissa distinguish themselves by the presence of vast record collections and superb sound systems, with clientele who principally, and often exclusively, visit such kissa to listen to the collection of jazz recordings. Among the spaces where recorded sounds resonated around the world, the jazz kissa, a space designed for genre-specific intensive listening, is rather particular. Empirically speaking, there are no counterparts to the jazz kissa outside Japan. Until the 1970s, it was not only a leisure space for aficionados but also a pivotal

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place for many members, including the musicians, of the local jazz community to approach both classic and contemporary recordings. Since the 1970s the jazz kissa community has decreased in size, in part due to increasing access to imported records as well as the increasing appeal of other music genres. While decreasing in number, however, some hundreds of jazz kissa still operate nationwide (see Jazu Hihyô 2005; Molasky 2010). The birth of the jazz kissa was almost synchronous with the emergence of a jazz community in Japan and its fluctuating popularity is broadly reflected in the particulars of that jazz audience. The jazz kissa constituted a base for a national jazz scene while defining both jazz and its history. It also contributed to distributing and evaluating jazz recordings and nourishing a sense of collectorship and connoisseurship. It is inarguably fundamental for the development of a Japanese jazz community. This chapter will focus upon the prewar jazz kissa, examining the sonic formation of modernity, which entailed the significance of sound-reproduction technology, urban bourgeois consumerism, local uses of American records, and the jazz-as-art discourse and connoisseurship (see Atkins 2001: 74ff). Some of these topics are applicable to the postwar fan communities of other genres and/or in other historical periods with little alteration, but others are linked specifically with the cultural conditions of the 1930s. What is most relevant in my argument is that in the 1930s, the genre of jazz was still nascent and unstable in Japan, as it was elsewhere. Borrowing Miriam Silverberg’s phrase “Japanese modern within modernity” (2006: 13ff), I pursue two fundamental questions: what is the role of Japanese jazz within global jazz history, and what role do the sonic practices particular to the jazz kissa have within (Japanese) modernity?

The emergence of the jazz kissa as a site of sonic consumption

Postwar jazz kissas (especially during the 1960s) have been remembered affectionately by many fans and owners from the 1980s on. Their anecdotes narrate how these consumers are even more stuck emotionally to the (lost) places than to the music re-played there. They are not only “jazz freaks” but also “jazz kissa freaks,” a subset of the former fandom. Most of them call their favorite jazz kissa a “cradle” or “the roots of their jazz life.” The first systematic survey of the postwar jazz kissa is Eckehart Derschmidt’s treatise (1998) in which the author outlines its development from the school (where jazzmen learned the new styles through the imported recordings in the 1950s), to shrine (where jazz was worshipped as an expression of black heritage in the 1960s), to bar (where jazz constituted the soundscape for an urbane atmosphere in the 1970s), and to museum (where jazz recordings were archived in the 1980s); these shifts were in accordance with the changing customers’ tastes, the spatial functions, and the wider cultural position of jazz music. Schematic though this survey might be, it is a good starting point for reflecting on the close link between listening experience of recorded sound and commercial space. In contrast to the abundant literature on postwar jazz kissa, references to prewar

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jazz kissa can be scarcely found, for several reasons. The first is the discontinuity of networks before and after the Second World War. Except for Yoshida Mamoru’s Chigusa (which was located in Yokohama and closed in 2007, reopening in 2012 on a neighboring street), none of the prewar jazz kissa reopened after the war, primarily because many of them had lost their collections to the air raids during the war. The second reason is the on-going marginalization of prewar jazz in postwar jazz kissa, which was pushed out by emerging audience preferences for bebop and subsequent styles (glossed over as “modern jazz”). Prewar jazz is not “modern jazz,” and this sub-genre was gradually excluded from the average kissa collection (although there were a few kissa in Tokyo that specialized in “old-time” jazz). The emergence of LP and stereo turned the 78 inch recording and the phonograph player into antique items. The third reason is a belated re-appraisal by music critics of jazz kissa as a space unique to Japan. Attention to domestic jazz history expanded as late as the 1970s when jazz journalists as well as fans started appreciating the high quality of Japanese jazz players (Uchida 1976; special issue of Jazu Hihyô 1972). While Yoshida was fortunate enough to be interviewed and publish his life history as a respected owner of the oldest jazz kissa existent, no other veterans were summoned up to participate in this revival. It was probably difficult for even Yoshida to reunite his old comrades after a rupture of thirty years. The nostalgic memoirs on jazz kissa became popular after the late 1980s, two decades after its 1960s heyday. The “hot” atmosphere of jazz kissa in the sixties is closely connected with the memory of a disturbed yet vital youthfulness for both writers and readers alike. Books on jazz kissa evoked this generation’s collective memory. Their prewar precursors, unfortunately, had no such chance of resurrection and have fallen almost entirely into oblivion. Jazz is the first music genre where the recording is the principal medium for its sound circulation, conceptualization, evaluation, and historiography. A jazz record contains sonic information that is decoded in a variety of global contexts. The actual sounding changes, however, according to the audio set and acoustic space, and its significance is dependent on social and cultural contexts. Global and local jazz history is therefore inseparable from the economy of commodities and sound-reproduction media. The use of records in jazz kissa is peculiar within jazz (record) history and history of sound reproduction in terms of the public-ness of the record collection and its listening experience, as well as the way these experiences were augmented by the presence of high-end audio and charming working girls. The kissa also represents a peculiar space in Japanese modernity, often symbolized by public establishments such as cafés, cinemas, recording studios, revue theaters, radio stations, train stations, department stores, high-rise buildings, concert halls, sports stadiums, beaches, and boulevards. These “imported” spaces, praised enthusiastically by journalists, functioned as façades for a new lifestyle in the 1920s and 1930s and the sensations of this new way of life, which were characterized by increasing consumerism. Among these spaces, our jazz kissas, which were less outstanding than many of the others listed above, were characterized by the use of audio technology, imported music and drink, intensive listening, and bodily fixation.

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In sum, I will discuss jazz kissa from a dual perspective – which includes global/local jazz history and Japanese modernity. Linking the two is recognition that the jazz kissa was a strategic point of the cultural contact between the US and Japan, as demonstrated below.

Sonic technology and the jazz kissa

Three features of the prewar jazz kissa in particular located it as a solidly modern phenomenon: namely, Americanism, coffee, and technology. Americanism here is simply defined as things and thoughts clearly or vaguely associated with American culture. For a decade or so after the Great Kantô Earthquake in 1923, the term “jazz” did not only designate a type of American music but also all the latest fads and fashions (with connotations of speed, shock, vulgarity, eroticism, consumerism, and so on), and it is those “abuses” (from today’s point of view) that legitimize the endowment to that decade of the title “The Jazz Age.” As elsewhere, jazz was the most evocative symbol for things American, either good or bad, at that time. Though having been imported since the early Meiji Period (1868–1912), coffee wafted an urbane and exotic flavor before the war (for example, take Hattori Ryôichi’s 1939 hit song, “From a Cup of Coffee”). While gradually integrating into the local culture, coffeehouses were still regarded as “modern” in the 1930s, although this aspect almost disappeared after the war with the popularization of coffee-drinking. Sound-reproduction technology has always been related to modernity, since the first experiments with it in Tokyo in 1878. During the Meiji Period, tinfoil and disc apparatuses were novel attractions at local fairgrounds and expositions. Later on, many modern establishments such as department stores and coffeehouses played phonographs to create a kind of sonic wallpaper for the venue. The mid-1920s marked the emergence of electric recording, with the consequent diversification of equipment ranging from high-end to popular-end models. On the global level, electric recording technology, due to its wider dynamic range, made the industry larger (following a slump after the Great Depression) and enlarged the catalogue to be competitive in a whimsical and unstable consumer market. Changes for record manufacturers were coordinated with increases in the sales of record players. On the one hand, cheaper types were designed for the mass users; on the other, we also saw that expensive ones encased in furniture quality settings were purchased by the seekers of “high fidelity.” Jazz kissas were equipped with this latter type. Next, my investigation into the relationship between the jazz kissa and Japanese modernity focuses on these three elements – Americanism, coffee, and technology – as they are intermingled with one another in social and musical space.

From Paris to Chicago: the teahouse as a students’ den

Let me focus on the first of the three above-mentioned elements that made the jazz kissa modern, coffee-drinking, to give a sense of the types of spaces to which it gave rise, and how they impacted the development of the jazz kissa.

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Americanism as used here is emblematic of the wider phenomenon of the Westernization of Japanese culture and society in the mid to late nineteenth century. Westernization affected many aspects of everyday life in Japan, but the prewar kissa illustrated a particular trend in this process, which was the early adaptation of European style café culture with its concomitant sensuality, followed by a turn towards a more “authentically” American culture which was perceived as more genuinely sensual than European style cafés. The custom of coffee-drinking entered Japan with Western culinary customs and became popular slowly through its adaptation by the aristocratic and imperial families and the (upper-) middle class. The late 1920s and the 1930s saw the popularization of coffee-drinking in urban areas, which coincided with the importation of jazz sounds. It is not coincidental that both – gusto-olfactory and auditory sensations – had certain sensual affinity and shared the image of modernity. The first coffeehouse in Japan was founded in 1888 (Kôhî Kaikan Bunkabu 1959: 16). Since then, it functioned as a window for the urban bourgeoisie and middle class to encounter Western objects and practices, such as coffee, English tea, milk, tables and chairs, new kinds of fashion, waitressing, the wearing of western aprons over dresses, social dancing, and phonographs (Wada 2005). Regular customers included members of the urbane populace that longed for Western (and especially Paris-flavored) culture, such as students, intellectuals, literati, artists, bohemians, and returnees from the West. One of the most famous cafés in the 1910s, Café Printemps, was established in 1911 in Tokyo’s new and elegant area of Ginza by a painter who had just returned from Paris. The clients included famous poets and artists such as Tanizaki, Kafû, and Hakushû, who enjoyed this “Tokyo’s Paris.” In the same year, Café Lion opened in Ginza. Larger and less pretentious than Printemps, it attracted students and other curious youth. This was the prototype of the large franchised café that sprung up in the following decades. The third café established in the same year, also in Ginza, was Café Paulista, famous for its aromatic Brazilian coffee. This shop was a precursor of the more cozy coffeehouses built after the 1930s. In Osaka, a café called Kotêji (“cottage”) is known for its phonograph that encouraged the clients to dance. Some of the early cafés might have had phonographs, but it was not until the 1923 Earthquake that playing phonographs became a sonic practice de rigueur for cafés (Tamaki 1936: 34). The post-Earthquake period saw a new type of café develop, where the presence of charming waitresses was central to its appeal. The first of this kind was the Café Tiger, which opened in 1924 in Osaka’s leisure area. Its popularity stimulated other shrewd entrepreneurs to open large eroticized cafés in Osaka, Tokyo, and other urban areas. Veering away from faux-French snobbism that they perceived at other cafés, they began selling the erotic service of waitresses in their own dimly lit shops. These waitresses sometimes danced along with the records and sang with customers who tipped for this special service (these practices were later prohibited by the authorities). In these places, the phonograph played popular songs loudly to create an upbeat mood and to create a veneer of privacy, to mask the intimate conversations between the waitresses and their customers. In this situation, few

The swinging phonograph in a hot teahouse 113

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would have paid attention to the background music. The music re-played was just on the margins of customers’ aural perception (or out of their aural focus), creating an “adequate mode of listening” (Stockfelt 1993) in those cafés. Another use of phonograph was brought about in the Osaka café Cottage around 1923. It was the first place where waitress-dancers (also called “taxidancers”) were asked to dance with customers in the Western style of social dancing. As the cultural historian Nagai Yoshikazu argues, before the war Western social dancing was constantly under police surveillance because of the coupling and touching of the male and female dancers, which had not existed in Japanese stage and folk dancing; this was usually regarded as obscene. The dancing couples had to listen to the recorded rhythm carefully but paid little attention to the title and the musicians (different from the typical customers of jazz kissa discussed later) because the type of rhythm and tempo determined their bodily movement (many dance discs thus indicated them on the label) more than the title

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and the artists. This novel attraction was soon adopted by several other nearby cafés (such as the Paulista, the Parisien, and the Union) (see Nagai 1991: 60ff). The growth of café industry perfectly coincided with the emergence of new consumerism, new social and sexual mores, and popular culture and contributed to its dialectic process. With the boosted eroticization of the cafés through their waitressing practices, one of the era’s most representative professions, the so-called “modern girl,” came under media and even police attention. These waitresses epitomized the intersection between a new sexuality and modernity (Silverberg 2006; Sato 2003). Nevertheless, not all the cafés made the transition from snobbism to eroticism. Many coffeehouses, differentiating themselves from more vulgar spots, maintained a sophisticated atmosphere found in past cafés. Low sofas, soft lighting, reproductions of Western paintings and a phonograph were among the standard items that made the spaces feel cozy. They were often called teahouses (kissaten or kissa for short), although no clear-cut division between the café and the kissa was possible because both employed waitresses and served coffee and tea. For this reason, the two terms were colloquially interchangeable. In the 1930s, Tokyo’s most concentrated kissa district was Kanda, an area with a large student population since the 1880s. Along its back streets were scattered twenty to fifty chic kissas; all of which loudly played the phonograph (Kon 1986 [1929]: 159). Many of the kissa were owned by amateur restaurateurs or those who happened to have enough assets to rent a small space in college and commercial areas. They were less profit-seekers than they were “hobbyists” (shumijin), according to a frantic kissa-enthusiast Uekusa Jin’ichi, an off-beat jazz and film essayist active in the 1960s–1980s, who boasted of visiting over 200 kissas in Tokyo before the war (Uekusa 2005: 160). As an analogy, think of a second-hand bookshop run by a bookworm. Owners with a hobbyist or a collector attitude might be satisfied trading their favorite objects without much profit, instead enjoying the peer socializing in a niche community, which could afford such pursuits. Meanwhile, the erotic café operated on, and profited from, the seductive relationship between the waitresses and the customers. The kissa, or at least those frequented by a flâneur like Uekusa, drew upon the personal relationship between the owners and the customers. The regular customers were usually attracted by the taste of owners and knew them personally. It is natural that some kissa, to be distinctive from the competitors and to satisfy the penchant of the owner, started specializing in a particular genre of record collection and a good audio set. There were two privileged genres: Western classic music and jazz. These were favored almost exclusively by the urban young bourgeoisie and functioned as marks of class and taste distinction from the amorphous mass. According to Yoshida Mamoru, 1929 saw the establishment of the earliest jazz kissa such as Black Bird in Hongo (near the University of Tokyo) and Duet in Shinbashi (near Ginza); these were followed by Brunswick (Kyôbashi, near Ginza), Yutaka (Ginza), Duke (Shibuya, a major railway terminal), and Yoshida’s own Chigusa (Yokohama) (1985: 16ff). Some played jazz and Western classic music alternately to attract and retain customers of both genres,

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while others insisted on enshrining one genre playlist (for example, there was one tango kissa, Mado, in Shinjuku, Tokyo). Kissa came into vogue around 1934 as the newspaper Miyako Shinbun headlined: “here comes the age of kissaten” (April 2). The article says that the saturated (and boring) eroticism of the café had caused many customers to shift to less erotic kissa. In the same year, the students were prohibited by the authorities from entering cafés, bars, and dance halls (as part of a national moralization campaign) so that the “healthier” kissa might receive many of them (Tokyo Asahi Shinbun 1934; Ishûin 1939). With this influx of young customers, however, kissa ironically transformed into a delinquent space and the press repeated the same old story of decadent waitresses (and students) as they had the few years before regarding cafés. Another contemporary newspaper differentiated “pure kissa” (jun kissa) as family-oriented venue from “service kissa,” whose business was enhanced by the added value of waitresses and music (Chûgai Shôgyô 1936). Record kissa fell into this latter category. Venues advertised in dance magazines were probably relatively keen on the music selection and therefore were frequented by the core cohort of jazz listeners. About seventy jazz kissa in Tokyo, six in Yokohama, and four in Osaka and Kobe were advertised or mentioned in nationally published dance magazines, but the real numbers are likely to be higher than these figures because jazz fandom only overlapped partially with dance enthusiasts, so while dance magazines were the principal sites for jazz articles and record reviews, they did not cover their activities completely. One of the possible reasons for the flourishing of the record kissa before the war was the strict restrictions on live performances in cafés and similar venues. The dance halls were rather exceptional (as they were under the strict surveillance by the police); no other places presented European and American music other than in licensed stage and movie theaters, and public halls. In 1935, the leaders of the concert-music world (the composers Yamada Kôsaku and Moroi Saburô, the critics Horiuchi Keizô and Shioiri Kamesuke, among others) discussed the possibility of café concerts with the authorities for the first time (Ongaku Shinbun 1935). They especially pleaded for licensing the performance of Western classical music, trying to persuade the police of the positive moral and cultural effects of good music on a public audience. They also proposed this to help create employment for the former cinema musicians made jobless by the diffusion of talkies. Instrumental music was allowed on a trial basis by the authorities, but live performance scarcely flourished in the cafés and teahouses. The reasons are unclear whether the authorities indeed discouraged (or tacitly prohibited) the café owners from commencing this new type of attraction, or few musicians and/or listeners were interested in new performing venues.

The four elements of jazz kissa

“Sure! Jazz + Girls + Atmosphere”: thus read an Anglicized advertisement of Black Bird, a jazz kissa in Ginza, defining the venue’s symbolic parameters (Dance and Music 1935).

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Figure 7.2 Advertisement for Black Bird, a jazz kissa in Ginza. Source: Dansu to Ongaku (Dance and Music), September 1935

As it boasts, a typical prewar jazz kissa had four characteristic elements: a record collection, audio equipment, waitresses, and clear spatial distinctions (primarily, the separation of activities between the interior and exterior). Each of these items appealed to customers in different ways. Record collections

A vast record collection is essential for any jazz kissa (see Hosokawa and Matsuoka 2004). Any kissa provides lists of their record collection for the customers to browse and from which they may make requests. The owners are necessarily devoted collectors and derive their authority in part from their ownership of the kissa and from their personal collections. Terada Masahiro (owner of Duet) wrote about the discreet pleasure of the collector: “It is the excitement and thrill only shared with other record maniacs to discover his favorite players performing his favorite pieces in a new catalogue, and then to highlight the

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desired items in red” (Terada 1935). It is easy to imagine that his kissa was a meeting spot for record collectors. Duet listed part of its record collection in its advertisements, and enthusiasts came from afar to listen to specific records. When a reader of a dance or jazz magazine wrote to inquire after a specific record, the magazine would answer by naming the jazz kissa where it is known to be archived. Jazz journalists therefore had to memorize the collections of principal kissa and visited them regularly to check their latest acquisitions. Yoshida Mamoru sometimes asked sailors to purchase rare items for him in the US. “If I missed the latest, I felt I would have been out of date,” he recollected (1985: 21). He once displayed a large poster that announced his acquisition of the awaited Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” (Brunswick); to acquire it quickly he paid ten times what would have been expected for a domestic release. The Brunswick label, which specialized in releases by African American musicians (Kenney 1999: 162–164), was especially fetishized by Japanese fans (as was the Blue Note Label in the age of the LP and CD). “Negrophilic” listeners (see Hosokawa 2007) were thought to frequent places such as Brunswick (in Kanda) and Ellington (in Nihonbashi). Audio sets

Some kissa advertised the brand names of audio they equipped (such as Credenza or RCA, for example). The expensive audio set was one of the principal alluring attractions for the customers. A colossal phonograph was usually installed on a podium and sometimes spotlighted in the dim space as if it had been an altar. Some Western classic kissa owned two phonographs to avoid the interruption in each turn of the 78s and advertised it “continuous play of two machines.” A kissa even took its name after a high-end brand of phonograph they showed off: Colstar (see Hosokawa and Matsuoka 2008). Some customers were so audio-obsessed that they would question the owner in detail regarding the type-number and the manufacture year of the machine like “a policeman interrogating the civil register” (Hori 1936: 138). The volume range of the equipment was also part of the audio attraction of record kissa. Pianists would frequent kissa to listen to music as loudly as in the concert hall. The majority of customers presumably owned no particularly wondrous audio equipment or record collection and lived in acoustically modest houses, but they were eager to listen to the latest recordings played in pristine audio condition. The jazz kissa enlarged the audio communities to aspire to membership in a non-affordable layer of society. The set’s brand name functioned as a hook for beginners who were trying to emulate the advanced, and the set itself further signified the active listening of the consumers who, through their sonic practices, gained personal pleasure through the concerted efforts of listening. As David Morton argues, the concept of high fidelity is inseparable from that of high culture: “[t]he influence of high culture music in the development of recording technology greatly exceeded the economic importance of classical record sales or the size of the audience for such music” (2004: 16). The high-fidelity hobby in

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the 1930s, Morton continues, was the “province of an elite group of relatively wealthy record buyers,” and they used “high culture as a point of reference, ensuring the continued association of high fidelity technology with high culture music” (2004: 33). He provides the example, in an American context, of Western classic music as the “high culture music.” In a Japanese context, however, American jazz along with European classical music belonged to this elite province. Prewar jazz kissa were the first sites that displayed jazz and Japanese audio magazines as items of high-cultural status. These publications were launched at first in the 1950s (part of self-assembling radio and wireless hobbyists) and the 1960s (for buyers of readymade apparatuses) and usually used classic music and jazz as sound check examples. The affinity of jazz with high fidelity (and necessarily with high culture) can be proved by the lengthy audio section of Japan’s longest running jazz journal, Swing Journal (published from 1947 to 2010). “Popular” music in the original context can thus ascend to the same level of highbrow culture as another genre (in

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this case, classical music) because of a different cultural configuration through the sonic practice of listening, reading, and being in a particular space. Kissa girls

In prewar record kissa, there were two types of female employees: those who served drinks to the customer (“kissa girl” or “service girl,” as they were nicknamed), and those who operated the phonograph (“record lady,” “record girl,” or simply “reko-chan”). The former were not different from waitresses one could see in other types of teahouses. They were not expected to court their male customers like their counterparts in more sexually exploited cafés but were at the center of, or at least constituted part of, the appeal of jazz kissa. The majority of kissa ads featured the portrait or silhouette of young women, and gossip about the waitresses circulated in abundance in dance magazines. One kissa owner adamantly called the waitresses “items for viewing, like gold fish,” referring to the pastime of viewing carp in Japanese gardens (Chûgai Shôgyô 1936). Although this statement sounds like the “voyeuristic commodification of women’s bodies,” the owner’s emphasis was put elsewhere: his waitresses, unlike those in erotic cafés, should not be touched, or “eaten,” by the customers. He hoped that the indirect relationship of the viewer and the viewed could make the mood of kissa wholesome. The utility of these “service girls” were thus exposed under the male erotic gaze. Terada, the owner of Duet, one of the most collector-oriented kissa, admitted his venue’s success was dependent on the “service girls.” The clientele therefore did not consist merely of “real” listeners but of those passing time with looking obliquely at girls. The second type of female employees, “record girls,” sat beside the phonograph and responded to requests from the customers, handling the discs and the phonograph. They were regarded as “intelligentsia pros” who

could pleasingly and freely converse with the youth and the gentlemen who are high-class record fans, to put it in a chic idiom, discophiles; as discographic connoisseurs, [they] have a good knowledge of what discs might suit a customer’s taste. (Nawa 1934: 95)

Their role resembles the sommelier in a wine bar or today’s DJ: music specialists with particular training. Basic English reading skills were compulsory because they had to read the label description; that meant most of the “record girls” would have been graduates of women’s colleges, the highest level of education for women at that time. They were expected to be as knowledgeable about the music as the customers. A newspaper article caricaturized them as follows:

In every teahouse record girls are found in the most prominent point. Sitting beside the luxurious RCA phonograph, they pretentiously read books like The Complete Anthology of Meiji and Taishô Literature. They never look at

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the customers’ seats. Such a posture is so effective for ladies with icy intellectual faces, like those crafted of ivory; every teahouse employs ladies whose faces look so hard and grim, [they discourage] customers [from] coming closer. Their faces are as expressionless as a dahlia. (Kokumin Shinbun 1935)

If a record girl shifted her gaze to a customer’s seat, this journalist dramatized, the whole space would become electrified, as if an astrologist had observed an annular eclipse for the first time in ten years. That is to say, the “record girls” were typically bright yet pretentious women. The psychologist Inui Takashi, who was a Western classic music kissa fan before the war, writes that students who wanted to attract the attention of record girls showed off their instant musical knowledge and spoke pretentiously to them, requesting a number in its original title, in French or German, for example. Unlike courtship in erotic cafés, their romantic games revolved around intellectualism (Inui 1989: 36). Knowledge, or lack thereof, was the source of much record girl gossip: one girl succeeded by secretly browsing a concise dictionary, while another was criticized for mistaking requested records or misunderstanding technical terms. Thus the boys mocked the girls’ ignorance (and in turn, unwittingly mocked their own superficiality). The customers generally had mixed feelings of affection, envy, jealousy, distance, and condescension towards these intellectual girls. Such ambivalence to highly educated women was not rare in the male dominated society. Interior and exterior

Along with the record collection and the audio set, the advertisements of record teahouse often touted the sophistication of the interior and exterior design of the kissa, claiming styles such as British, Spanish, French, Renaissance, New Secession, and Le Corbusier. For example, the “American-Spanish” style of a Western classic teahouse was decorated with “cylinder pillars densely varnished, ivory-colored uneven walls, small oval tea tables, low chairs covered with darkcolored velvet, and gold-rimed small white cups” (Inui 1989: 38). A classical music kissa Candle (in Kanda) was “a building in Western country house style constructed with rough-hewn and smoky logs” (Abe 1934: 117). The kissa’s “outlandish” atmosphere was doubtlessly crucial for a music journey faraway in the fantasy of customers. The style of the interior and exterior was to demonstrate publicly the good “taste” of owners.

The rise of the swinging kissa

The rise of jazz kissas from 1934 or so coincided with the rise of swing music in Japan (Hosokawa 2007). In the mid thirties, swing advocates in the US promulgated a “swing as American modern music” discourse which was key to the argument that swing is an art not because it “jazzes up” European classic music

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(Paul Whiteman’s arrangement of Schubert, for example) but because it magnificently expresses African American aesthetics of dynamic rhythm and blues melody, improvisation skills, ensemble techniques, and original instrumentation. American swing advocates first had to reject the notion of “jazz” as dance music, which had prevailed in the 1920s. Dance music was for them a pale imitation of European music, only adding soft syncopation (“sweet jazz”); later they had to confront the so-called jitterbugs, or young dance maniacs who danced to swing music. In other words, in the battle of enthusiasts, the first inning was a stylistic battle (European influenced sweet jazz versus American-brewed hot jazz), while the second a practical one (listening versus dancing). Japanese enthusiasts subscribed to American journals and were quite savvy in the latest American trends. They often summarized translations of interesting articles in Japanese dance magazines, and the philosophy of American swing promoters caught on with Japanese counterparts. In October 1938, one of the major dance magazines, Modan Dansu [Modern Dance], not only changed its title to Modern Dance Variety but also changed its editorial strategy to increase music coverage. They embraced swing more than ever before, featuring on their cover a host of American luminaries: Benny Goodman (January 1939), Tommy Dorsey (June 1939), Louis Armstrong (July 1939), Gene Krupa (August 1939), Maxim Sullivan (October 1939), Bunny Berigan (December 1939), Artie Shaw (November 1939 and July 1940), Glenn Miller (June 1940), and Billie Holiday (August 1940). Such line-ups of American stars in Japanese magazines were essentially the same as the line-ups in American journals. Ways to simultaneously appreciate swing and belittle sweet jazz were also adopted from the American model. For example, Kôno Ryûji (a postwar jazz record producer for Victor) was enchanted by the supremacy of swing improvisation as follows: When I listened to the records made before the emergence of the term “swing”, I found them very boring because they didn’t value improvisation. Those musicians just calculated the bars written on paper in advance and were strictly constrained note by note, following the notation. All they did was render audible the written notes. (Kôno 1941: 111)

Kôno thus celebrated the thrill of improvisation that could be felt only through intensive listening. Because swing aesthetics provide a foreground for the personality of the soloists, serious listeners searched for detailed information on a record’s list of participating musicians. A Japanese record reviewer of Teddy Wilson’s music expressed pleasure at identifying the soloists judging only from the tone, phrase, and other details (Miki 1939: 8). Miki’s pleasure is closely related to the “blind-fold test” (guessing the names of recording players without looking at the label or other information) invented by jazz journalist Leonard Feather (Down Beat) around that time. A “structural listener” (as per Adorno) like him could score each solo of a Teddy Wilson Orchestra’s recording. Swing fans

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thus had an alternative knowledge and sensibility system which was previously unfounded in classical music connoisseurship. Swing aficionados rejected trendy dancing in Japan as well as in the US, demonstrated by the awkward Anglicized and mis-spelled ad of Duet shows: Jazz for dancing, Oh! Nit! [Not!] Jazz for listening, Yes, Of course, Oh Kee! [Okay!]

(Jazz, May 1935)

Thus it is possible to say that the attentiveness of jazz kissa patrons had a strong affinity with swing as art discourse. Without any visual or bodily interference, the customers could concentrate on the sound per se. The sound-reproduction technology enabled “pure” audition. Terada was proud that his customers were not “those who stomp with rhythm” but “maniac[al] collectors of jazz records.” Terada’s implication is that jazz kissa, different from dance halls, realized an ideal mode of listening. Jazz music, he believed, should be appreciated as an art form that demands concentration, reminiscent of Plourde’s onkyô enthusiasts (this volume); the separation of the rest of the body from the sound intensified the experience. In Japanese ballrooms, swing was rarely played because prescribed British-style choreography popular in such locations had little allowance for improvisation. This stylistic rigidity in part resulted from the attempts of dance teachers to establish an image of wholesome value for social dancing, which was always under attack from nationalistic and morality groups. Even in the late 1930s, the majority of music played in the dance halls was non-improvised. There were no “jitterbugs” in Japan before the war. The dance scene and the music scene were separate, possibly even neglectful in their distinctions. The contempt of swing enthusiasts for social dancing was often found in dance and jazz magazines but no counterattack was publicly made by the dancers; they kept silent. Probably the dancers might have thought that few music lovers would know the pleasure of dancing. Listening and dancing were two separate practices jazz sound could trigger.

Record-centric genre

Jazz history as we know it today was written by pivotal figures in swing journalism, mostly wealthy Jewish-Americans. They collected and researched “race records,” discs principally targeted at the African American market, which were distinct from the White American one. They wrote a convincing account of an evolution from New Orleans to Chicago and New York, based on a narrative mode similar to existing European music history – genius, masterpiece, tragedy, school, and style. Their goal was to prove the African American musicians’ “natural” creativity. However, they prioritized recorded performance over composition, emphasizing the prominence of non-repeatable improvisation:

This rebellious new jazz criticism, strongly dependent upon the recorded music, at least at the start, thereby placed a social and intellectual distance

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between the listener and the musical performer. They created a canon of what they regarded as artistically significant jazz recordings. (Kenney 1999: 16; see also Rasula 1995)

These jazz experts regarded recorded performance in a similar way as European music historians treated published work. They were the first to research systematically recording dates, places, and personnel as meticulously as European music historians sought the data of publication, first performance, opus number, and so on. Records for swing fans were more than merely a vehicle for sound; they were the central media for the sonic experience. Their respect for recordings is expressed in the following collector’s request on sleeve notes: Recently more people buy records judging not their melodies, but the quality of recording members and technique; therefore, the sleeve notes should mention not only the name, style, and curriculum of personnel but also commentary concerning the arrangement in the progress of performance such as the organ harmony backing the solo and the modulation to certain tonality. It must interest the audience. Figures of social dancing steps (which were once faddish) or the same old notes would decrease the interest in record. Providing good and enlightening sleeve notes means gaining a new, expanded fandom. (Inayoshi 1939: 32ff)

Such a technical commentary was not required for sweet jazz fans; the textual model undoubtedly included just the notes on concert music published regularly (such as the first and second themes, recapitulation, rondo form, impressionism, leitmotiv, and so on). Inayoshi’s expected readership was familiar with terms such as organ harmony and modulation, or those who already understood the basic of Western classic music. Good sleeve notes, he must think, can show how jazz is not simply dance music but elaborated art music. The discography is essential for any record collection like cartography is to mountain climbing. The magazine Modern Dance Variety featured special dossiers on numbers such as “St. Louis Blues” (December 1938), “Tiger Rag” (January 1939), and “Blues” (November 1939), as well as on artists such as Duke Ellington (April 1939 and August 1940), Louis Armstrong (July 1939), Benny Goodman (March 1939, October 1939), Artie Shaw (October 1939), and Teddy Wilson (December 1939). In each dossier, the discography was central. Making a (quasi-) complete list of one particular artist and/or piece necessitates patience and passion akin to those of a bibliographer. It requires a special skill of reading and arranging the data, and its systematic work belongs to the high-cultural province. Not coincidentally, in prewar Japan, discographies existed for only European classical music and jazz (and tango); domestic artists were excluded by discographers because of their supposed lower cultural status. A discography was not only needed by private collectors but also by the jazz kissa owner. The discography helped the owner and private collector develop

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their collection; for example, Chigusa in Yokohama boasted of collecting eightyfive discs of “St. Louis Blues,” more than thirty copies of “Tiger Rag,” and twenty-five of “Dinah.”2 This owner must have consulted the various discographic sources to purchase them. Many of the items were collected not because of the quality of performance but because of the rarity of the item. Modern Dance Variety in fact featured two consecutive issues of “rare records” (June and July 1940). Serendipity is basic to collectorship. Collectors were not always distant from their surrounding political reality. A Benny Goodman collector asked the corresponding record company to re-issue old quality recordings with new notes, rather than new releases of American recordings, which must have been very difficult to purchase under wartime restrictions (Inayoshi 1939). Thus he proposed that fans should re-listen to old records with renewed musical knowledge. Another fan proposed that under the war economy restrictions on the import of luxury items, each jazz kissa should specialize in different areas, to maximize Tokyo’s public record collection availability (Utsuno 1939). Under this emergency state, jazz listeners expected jazz kissa to be a privately run, yet open-to-public, sound archive of a genre neglected by media for the lay listeners and the professionals alike. There was no other public institution where jazz records were systematically purchased. In North America and Europe, the most faithful swing fans organized fraternal – here the gender implications are intentional – groups generally called “hot clubs” (or hot societies) to exchange information, enlarge audiences, present concerts, publish jazz bulletins, and so on (Lopes 2002: 159–163; Gennari 2006: 76ff). Japanese jazz and swing fans knew about foreign hot clubs and their activities through imported journals but did not (or could not) set up a counterpart probably because the number of aficionados was too small or because jazz was not already embedded in wider society. Instead, jazz kissa functioned as a substitute for hot clubs by presenting regular record concerts of the latest acquisitions with the owner’s comments; sometimes customers borrowed records, and owners taught the beginners how to appreciate jazz music. Through the sonic practices of listening, and studying the music through aural and visual training, the jazz kissa became a hub for the socialization of jazz listeners. Since there are few general self-descriptions of Japanese jazz fandom, we can hardly know the details of their community. Questions such as how the jazz fandom was spread outside the jazz kissa and in the non-metropolitan areas, how the listeners protected and considered themselves under anti-American pressure from the mainstream society, and how they appreciated domestic gigs still remain unanswered.

Conclusion

If records are essential for jazz experience and historiography in the US, its birth country, why was Japan the only country to establish such a social space as argued above? Why didn’t Paris or Boston have jazz record cafés, in addition to clubs with live gigs? There are of course no definitive answers to these questions, but the following are my hypotheses for the singular social conditions by which

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jazz kissa came into existence in prewar Japan: first, the urban bourgeoisie audience to which the majority of jazz listeners belonged was attracted to the European (chic) spatiality of coffeehouse. This was complemented by the practical difficulties such as legal prohibition of live performances in relatively small venues. Furthermore, the dominance of British pre-choreographed style in dance halls (a consequence of strict policing) did not allow for new improvised music styles, effectively banning this kind of jazz from the dance hall. There was also a restricted number of swing musicians and bands that could perform in limited performance spaces. The indifference of radio to swing music in general and the expensiveness of records and good audio sets (which included the high taxation of imported luxury items) were also constitutive for the reason for the existence of jazz kissa. Moreover, the lack of record-music lectures (like the Lyceum Circuit in the turn-of-the-century US) hampered the growth of jazz audiences; this is in contrast to those, which were organized for Western classical audiences since the 1910s in Japan. Lastly, the absence of other types of clubs in which to hear jazz, such as “hot clubs,” meant that the jazz community in Japan could only rely on jazz kissa as a space for socialization. A final question remains: why were some jazz record collectors and audiophiles generous enough to open teahouses for aficionados – even if it meant lukewarm profits? Yoshida remembered in retrospect that he had been motivated to do it for nothing other than for his personal gusto (dôraku). Such a justification is typical, if not exclusive, for the hobbyist-turned-professional. Without their gratuitous dedication, Japan’s jazz community would have been much more static, silent, and small. The genre does not only signify a particular sonic form and pattern (produced by its performers) but also a particular set of conditions of listening by the audience. These conditions were concerned with the space, the social nature of listening group, the commodity economy, and so on. The social history of the Japanese coffeehouse, the development of the phonograph as sonic technology, and the growth of this particular music genre would have continued in isolation, never to be intertwined if a number of devotees had not taken action to establish a public space for niche audiences. The social and the individual are embroidered into each other in a balanced historiography: balanced between the theoretical and the empirical, between the macroscopic and the microscopic, between the scenario and the actor. In addition to the political, economic, and legal conditions (constraints, more precisely), personal engagement and effort are influential for the viability of such a small genre community that we have observed. Actors like Yoshida, Terada, and many other nameless enthusiasts who ran jazz kissa are principal to this history, though they have left us few testimonies of their achievements. Next to them are the ranks of devoted customers, yet much less is known about them; the passion of these committed people has been scarcely documented. Despite the risk that this is viewed as an inappropriate ending of academic text, as a jazz listener and outmoded historian, I dedicate this chapter to their undervalued passion.

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Notes 1

2

This chapter has been revised and re-written from my article “Jazu Kissa no Bunkashi Senzenhen” [A Cultural History of Jazz Cafés in the Prewar Period], Nihon Kenkyû, March 2007, (34): 209–248. These three numbers, Yoshida recollects, constituted the top three customer requests in Chigusa and probably the three best-known jazz pieces in prewar Japan. There are numerous recordings of them by Japanese artists made in the 1930s.

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Index

activism, protests 2, 7, 11, 14–16, 21, 25, 32, 37–55, 56 n.1, n.3, n.8, 57–60, 70 n.10 Ainu 11–12 ‘Americanism’: anti 39; pro 111–12 Asakusa 7 Attali, Jacques 64, 73, 81, 85 n.1 audio equipment 1, 3, 5, 17, 18, 75, 76, 108, 110, 114, 117–19, 125 aurality 16, 71–3, 85

Beck, Les 18 n.2 Bourdieu, Pierre 3–4 Bull, Michael 3, 18 n.2, 71, 104 Buraku/Buraku people 14, 20–2, 31–4, 36 n.5, 47 Buraku Liberation League (BLL) 14–16, 18, 20–1, 26–7, 29–32, 33–5 cafés 5, 17, 76, 84, 108, 110, 112–5, 119–20, 124 chindon-ya 4, 7, 16–17, 89–107 coffee in Japan 7, 111–12, 114, 125 concentration 16, 81, 122

dance 4, 6, 68, 112–13, 115, 117, 119, 121–5 denunciation session (kyûdankai) 14–15, 22, 31–6 distraction 74, 76, 78–9, 86 n.6 Dôwa (administrative term for Buraku) 34, 36 n.5

Edo or Tokugawa Period (1600–1867) 7, 9–10, 12–13, 92 European culture in Japan 112, 115, 118, 120–5 flâneur 6–7, 72, 85, 114

Feld, Steven 5, 19 n.2, 59, 68–9, 91, 107 n.15

Giddens, Anthony 15–16 Ginza 7, 112–16, 118 Goffman, Erving 27, 30, 32 Great Kantô Earthquake, 1923 7, 111–12 Great Hanshin Earthquake, 1995 93 Great Eastern Earthquake, 2011 88 n.29 The Greater Japan Patriots’ Party (Dai Nippon Aikokutô) 37–9, 46, 52, 54, 55 n.1 Habermas, Jürgen 27 Hokkaido 8, 11–12, 37, 51–4 Howes, David 2, 4, 6, 18 n.2, 73

International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR) 20–1, 25–8, 30 Kantô region 11, 111 Kansai region 10–11 Kadena Air Base 15, 58–70 Koreans (in Japan) 47, 104, 107 n.22

jazz 17–18, 42, 86 n.9, 100 see jazz kissa jazz kissa (jazz cafés or teahouses) 17, 108–26

Lefebvre, Henri 5, 59, 91, 99, 107 n.18 listening as practice/skill 3, 5, 15–17, 51, 58–9, 61, 64, 70 n.7, 71–6, 78–85, 86 n.5, 87 n.23, n.24, 91, 95, 100–2, 105, 108, 110, 113, 117, 119, 121–2, 124–5

manners (etiquette) 1, 18 n.1, 50–1, 55 Mauss, Marcel 3–4 Meiji Period (1868–1911) 12, 89, 111, 119

memory 57, 66–7, 69, 70 n.9, 101, 110 “modern girl” (moga) as kissa girls 17, 112–16, 119–20. modernity 4, 6–7, 73–5, 90, 92–3, 104, 107 n.19, 109–12, 114 Muzak 71–3, 74, 81, 83–5, 86 n.10,

Nagai, Kafû 6–7, 112 Narita Airport (Sanrizuka) 58, 69 n.1, n.2 nationalism 4, 14–16, 40–3, 48–9, 54, 122 Novak, David 86 n.7, 107 n.15, 108 onkyô (music genre) 5, 16, 72–88, 122 Okinawa 5, 8, 12–13, 15–16, 57–70, 93, 106 n.9, 107 n.22 Osaka 7–11, 13, 19 n.3, 44, 89–107, 112–13, 115

pachinko 7, 11, 89, 92, 96, 99 public gaze/external gaze (mawari no me) 6, 8, 14, 31–2 listening public (chôshû) 15, 41, 87 n.19, 91–2, 100–2, 105 public (ôyake) 8, 14, 29–31 public (seken) 6, 8, 14, 31 public (taishû) 8, 17, 91, 102 public forum 14–15, 20–3, 25–36 public space (see also sakariba) 2, 8, 26, 71–2, 76, 83–5, 87 n.12, 88 n.28, 91–5, 99–100, 104–5, 106 n.6, 125 recording/recording equipment 25, 28, 30, 32, 58–60, 64, 66–69, 108, 111 records (vinyl) 17, 76, 108–10, 112, 116–25 right-wing political groups 4, 7, 14–15, 37–56 sakariba (see also public space) 6–7, 9, 13, 92 Schafer, R. Murray 45, 51, 56 n.12, 83, 85, 88 n.27, 100 Seidensticker, Edward 6–7, 9–10

Index

141

senses/sensory 2–4, 6–10, 12, 15–16, 18, 18 n.1, 23, 30, 57, 59–60, 62, 66–9, 71–4, 76–80, 83–5, 87 n.12, 107 n.19 Shibuya 7, 114 Shinjuku 7, 9, 49–50, 55, 115 sleep 21–7, 30–1, 33–6 sonic practice 2–6, 57, 59, 64, 69 n.2, 78, 84 street (tôri, yokochô, roji) 1–2, 4, 6–7, 17, 37–40, 44–5, 49–51, 54–5, 56 n.11, 68, 75–6, 84, 89–94, 96–9, 101–5, 106 n.4, n.5, 114 Tanizaki, Jun’ichirô 7, 10–11, 19 n.3, 112

Tokyo 3–6, 7, 8–13, 18, 20, 37, 41, 44, 46, 48–9, 71–3, 75–7, 83–5, 86 n.10, 87 n.19, 88 n.29, 92, 106 n.5, 107 n.22, 110–12, 114 15, 124

United Nations 20–1, 25, 59, 63 United States 5, 15, 17, 39, 43, 47, 56 n.5, 62 also see ‘Americanism’ United States military, military bases 13–15, 39, 70 n.8 university students 17, 21, 42–3, 56 n.7, 111–12, 114–15, 120 urban space 3, 6–10, 15, 17, 19 n.3, 23, 26, 40–9, 57, 61–2, 71–6, 78, 80, 82–5, 88 n.27, 88 n.29, 91–3, 95, 98, 101, 103–4, 106 n.5, 106 n.7, 109, 111–12, 114, 125 Weighted Equivalent Continuous Perceived Noise Level (WECPNL) 58, 65 World Health Organization 57, 69 n.2 World War II 12–13, 42, 47, 110, 124 Yamanote Line 10, 76 Yasukuni Shrine 40–1, 48 Yokohama 9, 110, 114–15, 124 Yoshimi, Shun’ya 7