Yoshitaka Mōri. Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes. Editor: Chris Berry, et al., Hong Kong University Press, 2009.
Cultural Studies faces a crisis in Japan. About ten years have passed since it was “imported” from the United Kingdom following two key events: Tokyo University’s 1996 international conference that included five pioneering British scholars, including Stuart Hall, and the publication by two leading academic journals, Shisō and Gendai Shisō, of a special issue on Cultural Studies. The term Cultural Studies has been acknowledged as a new interdisciplinary domain that draws on and brings together a wide variety of scholarly perspectives ranging from literary criticism to sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology, and media studies. It is true that much fruitful research has been achieved. Indicative of the importance of Cultural Studies, most of its seminal texts have been translated in Japan over the last decade.
However, when looking back over the political and academic situation in Japan, it is undeniable that the political project of Cultural Studies has largely failed. In politics, a number of issues have conspired to give birth to a new conservative and ultra-nationalist regime whose key leaders include the former prime ministers Koizumi Jun’ichirō and Abe Shinzō and the Tokyo Metropolitan Governor Ishihara Shintarō. These issues include the ongoing long-term economic recession dating to the early 1990s, as well as the social instability caused by a series of disastrous events, in particular the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the subway terrorism of cult religious group Aum Shinrikyō, and the militarized global atmosphere emerging in the wake of the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Importantly, the new conservative politics has gained enthusiastic national popularity thanks to a successful populist mainstream media strategy. By contrast, it is extremely hard to find a critical space from which Cultural Studies practitioners can now intervene.
In the academic world, through the process of neoliberal restructuring under Koizumi’s regime, almost all traditional disciplines centered on the humanities — never mind new areas like Cultural Studies — are virtually dying because they are not seen as “useful” either for the government or for industry; and more importantly, students no longer find them very “attractive.” Cultural Studies may survive as long as it deals with trendy issues such as globalization, digital culture, animation, TV games, mobile technology and so on, but it can be neither too critical nor political. The university is now subsumed by and subscribes to the logic of market capitalism. For students, it is merely a transitional point where they prepare to go into the business world. In general, the university hardly resembles an independent space where anything, regardless of economic utility and function, can be studied.
In this difficult condition, the “cultural” is gradually coming to be regarded among critical intellectuals in Japan as less important than the political and the economic. For instance, issues concerning an emergent neoliberalist class structure, in which the rich and poor are polarized, dominate policy discussions. In these, the appearance of the freeter, the new class of so-called “freelancers” composed of young and poor people stuck in a series of low-income part-time jobs and unable to break into regular employment, are viewed as socially problematic. At the level of global politics and foreign affairs, the military is being reconstructed under the aegis of United States hegemony, and along with it, North Korea and China — the new antagonists — become the target of problem-solving agendas. Not that any of these questions can be ignored, but the exclusion of “culture” in such debates signals a major shift in thinking, one that gives little place for the “critical turn” that approaches like Cultural Studies offers.
In addition to the backlash against the “cultural,” there are problems within Japanese — and to some extent Korean — Cultural Studies. First, only a few critical studies of popular culture have been seen so far. Instead, most research focuses on colonial history in relation to Korea, China, and Okinawa, on less-known avant-garde styled literature and films, or on over-theoretical postmodernist/deconstructionist arguments. While I appreciate most of these arguments, I must admit that they are not always open to the public, promoting instead a narrow insider-ism. Second, critical studies of popular culture remain underdeveloped. Most studies of popular cultural genres including manga comics, animation, TV dramas, and popular music are disappointingly apolitical, even though they are sometimes categorized as part of Cultural Studies research. They may deal with contemporary cultural phenomena, but they are easily incorporated into the government’s nationalist discourse that tries to promote popular cultural products as a new industrial export through a strategy of national branding.
Third, and most crucially in the context of this volume which interrogates the East Asian region, Cultural Studies in Japan (and in Korea) has not overcome existing national boundaries in its encounters with the nation-state, equating culture instead with monolithic nationally circumscribed cultures. This is especially true when one looks at TV media products such as Japanese TV dramas or the “Korean Wave” (Hanryū). Although much scholarship discusses transnational distribution and production, most of it regards cultural products as a kind of national purism. It seems to me that they are unaware that both the Japanese and Korean nation-states are historically made up of diverse races and ethnicities, and as a result, this scholarship unwittingly helps to hide a very real diversity characterizing the East Asian region and maintain myths of national homogeneity.
This essay is divided into four parts. The first introduces the concept of hybridity. It considers some of the problems associated with its use in the context of Cultural Studies in general, and how it is nevertheless an extremely valuable way to explore contemporary Japan, especially the situation concerning Zainichi Koreans (Korean residents in Japan) who exemplify one of the “in-between” spaces in East Asia of cultural production and consumption. The next three sections look specifically at popular music but in different historical periods. In the second section, I would like to argue that Japanese popular music is a hybrid production at its very inception and origin, or as I call it, “hybridity-as-origin.” In order to understand its character, I introduce two of the most eminent, pioneering composers in Japanese popular music: Hattori Ryōichi and Koga Masao. In the third section, I focus on a more recent music genre, club/dance music, which forms a subcultural phenomenon among young people in Tokyo and Seoul. What I am particularly interested in is the transnational and cosmopolitan nature of East Asian cultural exchange between Japanese and Korean musicians at the production level. In examining this exchange, however, I would like to interrogate to what extent these musicians can or should even be identified as Japanese or Korean. Do these or any other musicians have to be associated with or defined by nationality? Why does nationality even matter? Finally, in the fourth section, through the example of Zainichi musicians VERBAL and Wada Akiko, I would like to question the idea of cultural exchange itself, which is often premised conceptually on the existence of national borders.
Ultimately, I would like to explore the way in which popular music is by its nature always hybridized. It is my hope that hybridity, as I argue it here, could wield political potential at a time when chauvinistic nationalism and militant patriotism are becoming increasingly dominant ideologies in political life. My argument may be still tentative, but it will hopefully have a performative impact in what is a difficult condition concerning politics in general and Cultural Studies in particular. In this way, I would like to delineate an alternative transnational cultural trajectory that is able to maintain a critical stance vis-à-vis all nationalist discourses.
Hybridity: Cultural Studies, Japan, and Zainichi Koreans
This essay considers popular music in-between Japan and Korea. It adopts as its central approach the concept of cultural hybridity in popular culture, which has been used in Western critical intellectual circles since the early 1980s to explain the experiences of second-and third-generation postwar immigrants and what might be identified as their cosmopolitan way of life. In so doing, it has been used to challenge essentialist ideas of race and ethnicity. Following on from Hall’s conception of “new ethnicities” by which a crucial shift is suggested from (black/Asian) identity politics to a more fluid, floating, complicated, and mixed sense of identity and political agency, Gilroy, Mercer, Bhabha, and others have, in varying ways, directed the concept of hybridity and related ideas of diaspora and syncreticism to overcoming the Eurocentric tradition of understanding culture. My argument, needless to say, follows their trajectories.
In the age of globalization, it is a cliché to emphasize the importance and possibilities of hybridity to postmodern capitalist society. However, the concept of hybridity, when unexamined, can be highly problematic. Regarding ethnicity and culture, this concept sometimes too easily celebrates the practice of mixing without implying any awareness of what is at stake and, in so doing, it can simply revive a notion of racial essences, namely, parts of an original and essential culture that are being mixed to create a hybrid. In socioeconomic class and status, hybridity may represent only the cosmopolitan experience of privileged middle-or upper-middle-class people in developed countries. In the context of this chapter, we carefully have to distinguish migrant or diaspora culture of displaced peoples from hybrid cultures of cosmopolitans.
Recognizing these problems, however, I would like to employ and develop the term hybridity because of its use in exploring the Japanese-Korean relationship. To be certain, this concept has not taken root in Japanese public discourses outside of a small circle of intellectuals, despite their enthusiasm. Indicative of how alien hybridity is to mainstream and popular understandings of Japan, consider the following. In 1986, Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro suggested that black and Hispanic Americans were lowering US literacy and intelligence rates and, as a result, he faced strong criticism from the United States government. It is problematic to me that Nakasone later apologized for his comments by stating that Japan is a nation of one “homogenous race” without any ethnic minorities, the logic implicitly being that Japan therefore does not have any problem with racism as such. The myth of one “homogenous race” survives and has even been strengthened under the recent Koizumi-Abe administrations that inherited Nakasone’s neoliberalist policy and racist ideology. The categories of race, ethnicity, and nation are strongly tied to each other, and in most cases they are compatible with the overarching and ambiguous Japanese term minzoku (race). The sociological distinction between these terms has never been properly recognized in mainstream discourse. As long as the myth of Japan as a “mono-race” and “mono-ethnic” nation remains the dominant ideology, it is politically necessary to emphasize the importance of hybridity.
The term hybridity and its equivalent in Japanese, zasshusei, are given specially nuanced meaning because of their zoological connotations. The first character zatsu refers to “mixed,” “rough,” or “wild,” hence the original application of zasshusei only to animals and plants and not to human beings. Notably, the term in its Japanese rendering refers to a mixed existence whose originary parts remain unidentified or anonymous. The hybrid maintains an undelineated and/or underground relationship with these parts whose origins do not really matter but which nevertheless promote a special ability to survive. While the subversive potential is obviously that the biological association of zasshusei contributes to the myth of Japan as one “homogenous race,” the “bottom-up” process that it describes, particularly in the context of culture, lends it a popular attractiveness.
However, the importance of cultural hybridity has been largely ignored in Japanese mainstream media, especially in television, which is central to the promotion and distribution of popular music. There are three reasons for this absence. First, the industry is dominated by those who still believe in the myth of a racially homogenous Japan, with the result that there are only a few non-Japanese and people of ethnic minority origin in the television industry. Second, there is an expectation in this industry that audiences are purely “Japanese.” Due to a lack of a racial imagination coupled with the narrow logic behind the drive to secure ratings and the advertising market, non-Japanese or people whose “hybrid” backgrounds belie dominant perceptions of racial/cultural homogeneity are never thought of as potential audiences and readers of television’s cultural products. Finally, the television industry is subject to the racially defined ideological control of the government which issues broadcasting and business licenses. In short, television tends to exclude non-Japanese both as producers and as audiences because it is basically nationalist. As a means of interrogating and challenging the mainstream media, hybridity should be understood as a political project to discover alternative transnational modes of production, consumption, and distribution.
The concept of hybridity has recently become more significant than ever, because it helps to challenge the logic of the new post-9/11 global militarist order according to which friend-enemy is irresistibly defined by national borders and racial distinction. Under the strong influence of the United States’ neo-con ideology, the Japanese government aims to establish a new military alliance with the United States in order to gain hegemonic political power in the East Asian region. Specific policy aims include the establishment of a proper Ministry of Defense and the amendment of Article 9 of the postwar Constitution which forbids the use of war as a means of foreign policy. According to this logic, North Korea (followed by China) is demonized as a potential “evil” enemy in the mainstream media. This contrasts vividly with the image of South Korea, which for the time being is portrayed as a “friendly country,” thanks to the “Korean Wave.”
Turning our attention to ethnic tensions in Japan caused by the global militarist order, let’s consider the situation of Zainichi Koreans. Those individuals whose descendents originally came from what in the latter half of the twentieth century became North Korea continue to face serious racial discrimination in everyday life, while people tracing their origins to what is now South Korea are often viewed as friends. Of course, this distinction is unreasonable because most Zainichi families came to Japan from a unified Korea prior to its division following the Korean War. Although there has been political tension between South and North Korean Zainichi, by and large they had until recently shared the same experiences, particularly concerning racism in Japan. Now Zainichi communities are completely polarized in Japanese public representation: good Zainichi (South) and bad Zainichi (North).
Crucially, this distinction, which ostensibly favors South-originating Zainichi, is, from their experience, neither comfortable nor desirable. Consider, for example, the minzoku gakkō (so-called “ethnic schools”) established by Zainichi for their children and where the Korean language and history are taught. The Japanese and Tokyo Metropolitan governments have explicitly and implicitly exerted political pressure in an effort to see these schools incorporated more into the Japanese educational system, which, for its part, promotes aikoku-shin, “nationalist” or “patriotic,” education. As regards the influence of the recent “Korean Wave,” the influence on the Japanese populace is only partial, divided as it is along gender lines: women like the “Korean Wave,” but men do not in general. In the sense that the “Korean Wave” helped to change the stereotypical image of Korea and Koreans, it has had beneficial effects. Nevertheless, it often re-essentializes Koreans, imagining them as a unified entity that is then re-projected as Japan’s “other.”
It is beyond the scope of this work to discuss the Zainichi situation in Japan in all its facets. Here, I would like only to suggest that, in the age of globalization, the concept of race and ethnicity is being redrawn to impact on national political borders. One of the important lessons of Cultural Studies I have learned is that national culture is never a unified entity. Instead, it is socially constructed and thus can be challenged, diversified, hybridized, and transformed by different cultures within. By reconsidering the idea of hybridity with specific reference to popular music, I would like to explore and discover some of positive elements characterizing what may be regarded as an emerging cosmopolitan culture.
Japanese Popular Music as “Hybridity-as-Origin:” Hattori Ryōichi and Koga Masao
Let me begin my argument by looking at two famous composers in the history of Japanese popular music, Hattori Ryōichi and Koga Masao. Both of them are distinguished musicians, who are often regarded as the godfathers of postwar music. All the songs they produced are still listened to on TV programs and in karaoke bars, and they are often selected as the best songs in Japanese popular music history. Interestingly enough, both Hattori and Koga spent the early part of their lives in Japanese colonial territories, an experience that overshadowed their subsequent creative careers.
At this point, it is necessary to consider the distinctive character of Japanese popular music as contrasted with its Euro-American counterparts. In the West, the nature of popular music is often understood by ethnic/cultural hybridity. Jazz, rock, reggae, and club music are products of the hybridization of ethnically diverse cultures. Hybridity in the West is further defined when one considers, in particular, “high culture” forms like classical music, which emphasizes the traditional and authentic. Within the Japanese context, however, popular music is distinguished not between “high” and “hybrid” levels, per se, but between Japanese music and Western (mainly English-speaking) music. “High culture,” for its part, is seen as something from the West. The space for hybridized popular music, especially in relation to the Japanese colonial legacy, is further restricted because songs with Japanese lyrics are automatically “nationalized” and labeled as purely Japanese. This particular dichotomy between Japanese (neither Asian nor non-Western) and Western has concealed the “hybridity-as-origin” in Japanese popular music, which, I would argue, needs to be reclaimed.
The quality of hybridity is clearer in the works of Hattori than in the ones of Koga. Hattori, born in 1907, started his career strongly influenced by early jazz. He wrote a lot of hit tunes as a composer for Columbia Records in Japan. One of Hattori’s favorite female singers, Awaya Noriko, released several hit songs, including “Ame no burusu” (“Blues in the Rain”), and she was called “the Queen of the Blues.” During World War II, Hattori moved to Shanghai to play jazz, which was banned in mainland Japan at that time. He composed and played a jazz-styled symphonic music known as the “Ieraishan Rhapsody.” It featured a contemporary trans-Asian hit song, “Ieraishan,” sung by a controversial and transnational actress during the Japanese imperial era, Ri Kōran; also known as Li Xianglan in China, Yamaguchi Yoshiko in Japan, and Shirley Yamaguchi in the United States. Returning to Japan after the war, Hattori became a pioneering Japanese popular music composer, rigorously adapting contemporary Western music such as jazz, Latin music, and blues. Hattori’s music reminds us that early postwar Japanese popular musical tastes were surprisingly cosmopolitan. The style of his songs could be clearly situated within musical networks, in particular jazz, from Singapore and Shanghai. In addition, his lyrics often touched on his experiences in China and the United States, making it possible for us to situate his music in a global musical map.
Koga’s relationship to Japanese colonialism in Korea is much more complicated. Born in Fukuoka in 1904, he moved with his mother in 1912 to Incheon, Korea (his father had passed away in 1908), where he was reunited with his elder brother who had already settled there and who offered to support Koga. He grew up in Incheon and later Seoul for eleven years until he left Korea in 1923. In Tokyo, he entered Meiji University and joined a mandolin club. In 1931, he became a composer for Columbia Records and produced many bestselling records including “Sake wa namida ka tameiki ka” (“Is Sake [rice wine] a Teardrop or a Sigh?”), “Oka o koete” (“Go Over the Hill”), and “Kage wo shitaite” (“Following After Your Image”).
Koga’s music, known as “Koga melody,” is often understood as the “music of the heart and soul of the Japanese” (Nihon-jin no kokoro no uta), and indeed, the influence of musical styles from abroad on “Koga melody” is much less discernable than in Hattori’s. Attributed with rediscovering an ostensibly unique Japanese melody, Koga is recognized as a key contributor to the development of Japanese enka music (melancholic Japanese traditional ballads), a major genre of Japanese popular music. His association with Japanese melody has also led to much controversy, since this factor has also been used to explain his nationalist sentiments. Koga’s biographer, Sataka Makoto, for example, severely criticized Koga’s colonialist tendencies, his right-wing ideological sympathies, and the martial songs (gunka) he composed under the theme of Yamato damashii (the Japanese spirit) during the war.
In a similar vein, but more alert to the complicated nature of Koga’s music in its colonial setting, Korean-Japanese music specialist Kyō Nobuko concurs: “Needless to say, the school in the colony where he studied had music classes in which Japanese songs were taught. Japanese enka could be heard everywhere, not only in Japanese towns but also in theaters and films in Korean society.” In Kyō’s interpretation, Koga was submerged in a Japanese musical environment which was made all the more powerful since, as she argues, Koga was a “homeless” person who had lost his homeland: “He was a young boy who grew up listening to his home country’s old music in a foreign colony” and as such he simply lacked “any concern for Korean society.” In fact, Kyō is not as critical as Sataka, suggesting that Koga’s nationalism, rather than being anti-Korean, emerged from his nostalgic search for his homeland.
As suggested above, Koga’s theory was very problematic as regards politics during World War II. From today’s viewpoint, we can see that it was completely influenced by the right-wing ideology of that time. Kyō is right to observe that Koga did not recognize that he was on the colonizer’s side, but I totally agree that we should be critical of Koga’s political stance.
Shifting our attention, I would like to consider more closely what it means to produce culture, by arguing that popular music is made not only by producers, musicians, singers, composers, and record companies, but also by consumers, fans, and those who love the music. Following the development of literary theory since the semiotic turn that Roland Barthes initiated with the statement of “the death of author,” all texts have to be understood within the context not in which they are written but in which they are read. The practice of reading is not simply passive but also active in that it produces and reproduces meanings in different contexts. In the same vein, audience theory in Cultural Studies (as developed, for example, by Stuart Hall among many others) suggests that, although TV programs are encoded by producers and then decoded by audiences, audiences do not always react as producers expect. The reading of programs differs according to a viewer’s class, race, ethnicity, and gender, and according to his or her particular ideological enclosure. Popular cultural products cannot survive without active audiences who produce their own meanings. Consider, for example, Koga’s experience when Korean residents in Japan visited him just after the war. Because they assumed that Koga must be a Korean-Japanese since he spent his childhood on the Korean Peninsula, they asked him, “Mr Koga, please give us your real [Korean] name. We promise you that we will keep it a secret, but we want you to help us.” Koga later wrote in his autobiography, “they must have believed that I was Korean-Japanese and been secretly proud of me when they were crying due to the racial discrimination [they suffered] in Japanese society.”
I do not try to justify Koga’s ideological support for the war but would suggest that “Koga melody” — listened to by Koreans both in Japan and on the Korean Peninsula — impressed and empowered them even if this was not the composer’s intention. There is inevitably a gap between the encoding process and the decoding one in cultural production. Koga’s experience of music in his boyhood exposed him to a wide variety of different musical trajectories ranging from Western popular music and classical music to Asian continental folk music. For the young Koga, these formed an imaginary Japanese music, a hybridized form that reflected a particular colonial condition. In other words, he may have re-created in the colonial setting a music of the “Japanese heart and soul,” but it was only done by collecting together fragments of other genres and styles.
The hybrid character of his music was recognized by the Los Angeles Times when Koga traveled in the United States: “Mr Koga’s songs themselves are cosmopolitan. While they may contain the rhythm of rumba, tango or waltz, or the fast beat of a march or square dance, they also have the unmistakable lilt of the Oriental song. In other words, he has given the old classic themes modern dress.” This comment clearly suggests how Koga’s music was accepted by different audiences in different ways that went beyond the composer’s intention.
What I would like to emphasize here is that the two composers who are said to be representative of postwar Japanese popular music started their careers influenced by their colonial experiences. This hybridized setting bringing together Japan and the world has often been forgotten and repressed, particularly since enka has come to be recognized as a “uniquely Japanese” form of music. However, as the cases of Hattori and Koga demonstrate, we always need to be cognizant of how hybridity lies at the originary center of culture: the history of Japanese popular music is one of the best examples of this phenomenon of “hybridity-as-origin,” which in turn created different effects, acceptances, and forms of consumption.
Hattori’s and Koga’s extraordinary colonial experiences show us how Japanese postwar popular music was hybridized right from the very beginning of its history. The linear historical narrative of Japanese popular music that we know today is, in fact, constructed only by forgetting “hybridity-as-origin.” The reconsideration of hybridity in music by the transcendence of national boundaries has great potential since it can provide us with a new way of writing history.
In the Age of Underground Personalized Human Networks
Let us now consider examples of transnational popular culture production today. The relationship between Japan and Korea has become increasingly close over the last ten years, in particular, as a result of the popularity of the “Korean Wave,” which completely changed the cultural representation of Korea and Koreanness in Japan. Importantly, the “Korean Wave” helped empower some Japanese as well, since it marked the first moment when many middle-aged Japanese women found their own cultural practices in relation to Korea.
Prior to the “Korean Wave,” few Korean musicians were well known in Japan except for some enka singers such as Cho Yongpil and Kye Ŭnsuk, and as a result, Korean musicians were, in general, represented as enka singers. This may sound strange because in Korea, for example, Cho Yongpil is not only an enka singer but a national pop star who sings more sophisticated, westernized music ranging from rock ‘n’ roll and disco to soul music. In Japan, Cho failed to promote himself as a pop star and is still seen only as an enka singer.
Be that is it may, the example of Cho is suggestive in understanding the stereotypical image in Japan of Koreans and the apparently contradictory position that enka seems to create between Korea and Japan whereby Korean-styled music has been conventionally associated with enka in Japan. Yet the situation is not as paradoxical as it might seem since, although enka is also regarded, as suggested above, as the music of the Japanese spirit, the Japanese people look to their colonial “past” and find in it a lost history and a lost identity. As a result, Korea and the Korean Peninsula come to be regarded in a very nostalgic way. By listening to enka music from Korea, the Japanese are trying to remember something lost after World War II, what Paul Gilroy might identify as “postcolonial melancholy.” Accordingly, people unconsciously try to hold on to what they have already lost, because they do not — and cannot — understand the fact of this loss. This nostalgia is the other side of the coin of prejudice and discrimination against Korean people.
Rather than concentrate and maintain a binary opposition between Korea and Japan in our exploration of enka, I would like to develop a different approach. My proposal is to reconstruct a history of enka from a transnational perspective according to which this music is understood as a hybrid product and by which we can accept and even share each other’s history or experience without any nostalgia or prejudice as though they are our own. Once we understand that even enka started as a transnational and hybrid category, we are able to identify different transnational musical trajectories: for example, Cho Yongpil comes to be positioned in-between Korea and Japan. Accordingly, the history of popular music is not divided by national borders because transnational music “production,” as broadly conceived, precedes national production.
Let us focus on the specific example of cultural exchange in the context of club/dance music, which has gained popularity among young people. This cultural form may not always be visible to the mainstream media, because it inhabits what some cultural commentators would understand as a subculture. Admittedly, the use of the prefix “sub” may look inappropriate today, since the distinction between “mainstream” and “subculture” — or more specifically, major and independent artists/producers — has been increasingly blurred in CD sales.
However, I still want to use the term “subculture” since it pointedly highlights culture which is not conveyed in conventional mass media such as television broadcasting. Instead, these subculture scenes are created by and through new kinds of what I call “people networks,” which includes radio broadcasting, independent flyers and magazines, and the Internet. One of my key concerns is how subculture-styled networks become as influential and even as dominant as mainstream culture. In the field of club/dance music, cultural exchange is more active than ever. A considerable number of DJs are traveling all the time between cities such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Seoul to play music at weekend parties.
One of the most interesting club/dance scenes is Shibuya-kei or “Shibuya-style,” which is now used to describe a kind of fashionable dance music in the Kangnam area of Seoul. Shibuya-kei includes not only underground club music but also some commercially successful groups such as Rollercoaster and the Clazziquai Project. Most of the tunes they have released take the form of well-arranged dance music influenced by different resources ranging from Latin, jazz, and techno, to electronica. It may be difficult to identify this musical style as especially Korean, partly because English lyrics are often used.
To understand why this scene is called Shibuya-kei, we need to look to the history of its emergence and development. Regarding the name, Shibuya refers to a district in Tokyo that is renowned for attracting many young people because of its concentration of fashionable buildings, boutiques, restaurants, bars, CD/record shops, and bookshops. Importantly, music in Shibuya is directly related to other cultural forms like fashion, clubs, and restaurants, with the result that the area name refers to a multifaceted cultural concept.
In the early 1990s, the hit charts in CD/record shops in Shibuya were clearly distinct from those in other districts, for example, Shinjuku, which is much more focused on (male-oriented) jazz and rock. In Shibuya, popular groups Pizzicato Five and Flippers Guitar created eclectically fashionable hybrid music influenced by different musical resources from around the world in a way that might be identified as postmodernist. Coined as the Shibuya-kei by the media, the cheerful and happy sound was enthusiastically accepted by Tokyo’s urban trendsetters.
Shibuya-kei, in fact, coincided with and was influenced by the invention of a different musical category called “J-pop.” According to Ugaya Hiromichi, author of J-pop towa nanika [What is J-Pop?], J-pop was created by FM radio station J-WAVE in the late 1980s when it was seeking to find a new musical category that distinguished Western-sounding Japanese music from exclusively Euro-American music. J-pop was the outcome, and importantly for our purposes, as we will see below, this music made in Japan that sounded like it came from abroad was central to defining the character of Shibuya-kei as non-national. I would like to suggest that this character was only possible because of a particular historical and geographical conjuncture that occurred in Tokyo.
One of the most interesting features of Shibuya-kei is that it expressly showed “respect” for great musicians from the past and who came from all over the world. Shibuya-kei musicians gathered together all kinds of music, and thanks to the prosperity of the late 1980s “bubble economy” that helped make Shibuya area CD/music shops some of the most eclectic in the world in musical genre, they were able to listen to, quote, sample, mix, and dub this music, and eventually create a new hybrid music. In other words, Shibuya-kei music was a by-product of consumerism.
How was Shibuya-kei discovered in Seoul, Korea? What is the difference between Shibuya-kei in Tokyo and its counterpart in Seoul? Yi Ilhwan, a cable-radio producer, suggested that young musicians and directors in Korea, before they entered the music industry, were very much influenced by J-pop in the early 1990s, even though Japanese popular culture was officially banned at that time. They gathered information in a variety of ways, mainly through underground personalized human networks, which I mentioned above. While Korean fans of Japanese music generally listened to more distinctively Japanese music, for example, visual-kei rock bands like X-JAPAN and L’arc En Ciel, people involved in the music industry such as Yi preferred more experimental and cutting-edge music like Shibuya-kei. They bought many Japanese CDs at shops including Hyungje, which secretly sold Japanese CDs in the Myŏngdong district, one of central Seoul’s busiest commercial areas, or obtained them through those who traveled to Japan. In this way, people like Yi grew up with Shibuya-kei music, an influence that shaped their later involvement in the music industry in the 2000s, which included the creation in Seoul of their own Shibuya-kei style of music. Seoul Shibuya-kei must be understood as a product made by those who consumed Shibuya-kei in Tokyo in the 1990s.
New Hybridity through Collaborative Works in Contemporary Music
Building upon the original Shibuya-kei cultural exchanges of the 1990s, some musicians in Seoul have recently started to collaborate with Shibuya-kei musicians in Tokyo in order to explore a new type of dance music and to make live tours together. For example, VERBAL, a member of one of the most famous rap groups in Japan called m-flo, participated as a DJ/mixer in an album produced by Korea-based Clazziquai. Japanese musicians and DJs often go to Korea to give live performances with Shibuya-kei musicians in Korea, while the Clazziquai Project and others regularly go to Japan to organize live events and club parties. Korean club music is now played by FM radio stations and is popular among club people in Japan.
Crucially, when one considers the highly cosmopolitan backgrounds of these musicians, it becomes readily apparent that they cannot be characterized as exclusively Korean or Japanese. DJ Clazziquai, a central figure of the Clazziquai Project, is a Korean who used to live in Canada, while other Korean members of Clazziquai, Alex and Cristina, are still in Canada. Only vocalist Horan lives exclusively in Korea. DJ Clazziquai, moreover, began his career by uploading his works onto the Internet. Only when these tunes gained in popularity online was DJ Clazziquai invited to release his CD in Korea. The story of the Clazziquai Project provides us with a clear example of how digital technology and globalization influence music products and production.
VERBAL from m-flo, which includes Columbian-Japanese vocalist Lisa, similarly, shares in the cosmopolitan experience. Of Zainichi origins, VERBAL’s real name is Ryu Yŏggi. He was educated in an international school in Japan followed by study in the United States and is typical of the new generation of cosmopolitan Zainichi Korean residents in Japan. In a short autobiographical essay, VERBAL described his complicated identity as follows:
Both of my parents are Korean. My father is a second-generation Korean and I can speak Korean a little, and I speak both Japanese and English because I was born and grew up in Japan. I have been wondering where my identity is. I always felt like I was homeless and did not have any place to fit in. I wanted to be able to speak Korean, but after a Korean accused me, asking, “why can’t you speak Korean even though you are Korean?”‘ I gave up studying the Korean language. Then I went to the United States to study at a university where I felt I was neither a Korean nor an American, nor a Korean living in the United States: I was just a Korean born in Japan. English is the easiest language for me. I speak English when I have to discuss complicated issues. However, I am different from Koreans who grew up in the United States, since I was not brought up there. I look like a Japanese, behave like a Japanese, but I AM a Korean.
This statement is revealing, since it demonstrates how individuals negotiate many different national backgrounds to create a new cosmopolitan identity that ultimately cannot be affiliated to any one nationality. What interests me is that VERBAL and DJ Clazziquai positively accept these complicated and fragmented identities and, in so doing, they create new flows of people, music, and culture. In the club music scene, experimental and hybrid music is being created through the collaborative works of different kinds of DJs and musicians from Korea, from Japan, and from anywhere.
Admittedly, one can easily criticize these musicians for their privileged upper-middle-class, bourgeois sentiment. However, there is a dark side to this cosmopolitanism that must be considered. For instance, VERBAL’s essay opens with a personal story of discrimination when he was four years old: chased by junior high school students, he was called ” Chōsenjin! Chōsenjin!” (Chōsenjin is discriminatory epithet for Korean people). Going to an international school and studying abroad not only represents his privilege, but it is also one of the few ways he could escape severe discrimination in his everyday life.
The new sounds of VERBAL’s music demonstrate the significance of personalized human networks, and how national boundaries and discrimination can be overcome. They represent what might be identified as an alternative “Korean Wave,” one that is created through the collaboration of Zainichi and others in Japan. It not only includes music but also the literature of Korean residents and Korean-Japanese in Japan. Highly acclaimed, this writing has played an important role in Japanese literature and, like VERBAL’s music, it is a product of a hybrid culture of diaspora: a taste of Koreanness made in Japan.
Importantly, these new collaborations are not exclusively the products of the younger generation. Consider, for example, the trans-generational collaboration of m-flo and an older female singer, Wada Akiko, who is a television commentator and who is recognized as one of Japan’s pioneer soul singers. She began her career as the “queen of rhythm and blues made in Japan” in the late 1960s and released several hit tunes throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Recently, however, her CD sales have dropped. In May 2005, m-flo, who respected Wada for her achievements as an originator of Japanese soul music, released a new collaborative CD club-music single with her called “m-flo loves Akiko WADA.”
The following August, Wada controversially came out in a weekly journal interview as a Korean resident in Japan. Although the media had always implicitly suggested that she was Korean, she had never explicitly mentioned it herself. This fact demonstrates the strong sense of taboo that characterizes this issue in the media even today. Japanese celebrities of Korean origin are forced to hide their ethnic identity to protect themselves from racist attacks.
It is not clear how the collaboration with m-flo affected Wada’s coming out. What strikes me is that a particular musical form — black music in this case — created both transnational and trans-generational networks. Although Wada has not released any hit songs recently, her music has been increasingly appreciated by young post-Shibuya kei DJs and musicians in Japan. For instance, Konishi Yasuharu released a compilation album, “Free Soul Akiko WADA,” which featured remixed hit tunes of Wada’s from the 1970s. Central to Konishi’s successful revival of Wada’s former music in the form of contemporary dance/disco music was Japanese “black music,” that is, music influenced by American rhythm and blues and soul.
Commercial popular and club music, hip-hop and black music, including soul, R&B, and disco sounds, are sometimes overlooked as merely apolitical cultural practices, especially when we compare them to so-called serious music such as rock, punk rock, jazz, and experimental music. The musicians discussed here — Wada Akiko, VERBAL, Konishi Yasuharu, DJ Clazziquai — are by and large regarded only as commercial musicians who are disinterested in politics, and to be certain, it is unlikely that they would make any political comment even if they were asked to do so. They would claim that they are creating neither Japanese nor Korean music, but only “good” music.
However, it would be wrong to regard them merely as apolitical. From a traditional Marxist perspective, their music is explained simplistically by and has seemingly been subsumed under the silencing hyper-consumer and profit-driven logic of late capitalism. But when the category of race and ethnicity is taken into account, one easily recognizes in popular music a form of politics that is not accounted for in the Marxist framework. For instance, according to some of the musicians I have surveyed here, there is a certain belief that money never discriminates according to race and ethnicity, a conviction that is incidentally shared in the culture of hip-hop people in the United States and Korean residents in Japan. In the same way, nationality does not matter in creating good music. This particular kind of universalism is activated by racial politics, which the old left has sometimes overlooked. That being said, one should not reduce cultural practices that flow through networks of different nationalities and ethnicities merely to politics in a narrow sense. As I have repeatedly suggested, these musicians only want to make good music, not political music. In other words, one must seek to understand how political effects may be generated in a seemingly a political hybrid culture.
Young Japanese musicians’ “shyness” and their “aesthetic values” have often confused cultural analysts who have tended to look only at the surface of their activities. For example, Cornyetz regards Japanese hip-hop/black culture merely as a particular pattern of fetishized consumer culture while missing out most of the radical gestures that can be found in underground hip-hop/black culture in Japan. In fact, since the early 1990s, Japanese hiphop culture has developed its own political language inspired by American hip-hop. Shibuya-kei musicians have recently been involved in politics in their own distinctive way. For instance, Konishi Yasuharu (Pizzicato Five) participated in the anti-Iraq War street demonstration as a DJ, and Ozawa Kenji is organizer of a series of anti-globalization workshops. Nevertheless, these musicians are often reluctant to talk about their political activities in public, so much so that they even hide them. I would argue that it is important to find their different politics hidden under their surface.
Conclusion
The cultural trajectories I have drawn in this essay concern a history of transnational exchange in popular culture between Japan and Korea (and to some extent China, in Hattori’s case). Although these stories are known in Japan, they are often marginalized from the history of Japanese popular music. My attempt has been to recognize and reconstruct new and alternative histories from a transnational perspective.
By way of conclusion, there are three points I would like to make clear. First, all popular music has political elements even though it may appear apolitical at first glance. Some of this music is so commercialized that it cannot be recognized as a form of political practice in the left-wing tradition of Marxism, which totalizes capitalism and reacts to it like an allergy. Nevertheless, there may often be tactical, if subtle, criticism in this music of a dominant nationalist ideology that sees national culture and even popular culture as though these were racially and ethnically homogeneous entities. The attempts of VERBAL and other Shibuya-kei musicians are good examples of this criticism.
Second, the creation of a space for transnational and/or regional East Asian cultural histories presents us with an urgent task. Although Japanese and Korean Cultural Studies have recently tried to look at transnational culture, most only deal with national cultural products such as Japanese TV dramas, the “Korean Wave,” J-pop and K-pop. They may be consumed in transnational or trans-Asian markets, but their production is nationally branded. As a result, the development of transnational markets is easily associated with a new strategy of national branding of cultural exports, which are initiated by national governments and cultural industries. I propose two alternative understandings: (1) transnational cultural exchange, and in particular in East Asia, should be regarded as already interwoven in the processes of production as we have seen in the case of music; and (2) because production inevitably incorporates consumption, distribution, audiences, and fandom into its process, we need to recognize and examine the interaction among these different processes of production of popular culture.
Third, hybridity is not an effect of recent globalization. Rather, it constitutes the origins of all popular culture. Koga and Hattori’s music exemplifies how hybridity makes a contribution to cultural creation at the very start and how, only later, is this hybrid music then adapted into and adopted as national culture. As I have stated, hybridity cannot always be politically critical. It can, indeed, form the basis of a new cosmopolitan commodity that serves global capitalism. The cultural politics of hybridity may not be able to solve all political, economic, and social problems. Yet, the idea of hybridity offers a different understanding of racial politics in everyday life and culture. I want to put forward the political possibilities of this new transnationalism that is grounded in the recognition of the importance of hybridity, because we are now facing an extremely difficult political situation due to increasingly chauvinistic nationalisms in East Asian countries as well as political and military tensions on the Korean Peninsula. My argument hopes to promote not only cultural exchanges such as those I have introduced here, but also intellectual exchanges which transcend nationally bounded Japanese/Korean Cultural Studies.