During my FA23 class, ‘Losers of WWII,’ students wrote a research paper comparing Germany and Japan on a topic of their interest. We were instructed to find a way Germany and Japan were different, and then explore possible reasons for this difference. I decided to write about music, and this blog post is a collection of excerpts from my final research paper.
The 1980s in Japan saw the birth of Enka, an incredibly culturally influential genre of music that employs traditional Japanese instruments in tandem with modern counterparts to produce something that sounds ‘quintessentially Japanese.’ Its lasting influence speaks to Japanese nationalism and how Japan reimagined itself after the war—through the creation of a musical genre that harkens back to a facade of traditionality. Enka songs are more often sung by women, who perform dressed in Kimono—the traditional female garment—and their lyrics call to the beauty of Japanese nature, landscapes, and melancholy. Many refer to Enka as the heart of Japan, despite the fact the genre is just over 40 years old. Germany, on the other hand, doesn’t have a counterpart that is as all-encompassing as Enka culturally. The closest is likely Schlager—which is an incredibly broad category of German popular music that was born from arias in operas. Unlike the relatively recent popularization of Enka in the 1980s, Schlager has much older roots. Why did post WWII Japan specifically see the birth of Enka? What purpose did this music serve in Japan at the time that Germany had less need for? Why has Enka maintained cultural influence whilst Schlager’s renaissance seems to have passed? How do these differences illustrate the ways in which these countries reimagined themselves in the wake of WWII?
Music is an invaluable social process that can help inform our understanding of the political and social culture from which it originated. Differences in musical culture across various countries can be similarly illustrative. Examining the disparity between the musical scenes of post WWII Japan and Germany, for example, can illuminate not only social but political nuances between these two countries. The analysis of Enka, in particular, can reveal popular sentiments regarding nationalism in Japan, as Enka is widely agreed upon by ethnomusicology scholars as one of the key ways Japan reimagined itself culturally after the war. Nationalism and by extension national imagenings—how the citizens of a country imagine that country—are indeed important topics in political science, and I would argue especially important in the post WWII era due to the intensive political restructuring and reordering of the global stage.
Enka and Nationalism
Enka is undoubtedly a method of expression of Japanese Nationalism through the creation of an imagined community. Benedict Anderson, a notable Ethnographist, codified his concept of imagined communities states that nations are imagined communities in which citizens possess an intangible familiarity with those they’ve never met due to the fact they’re both citizens of that nation, and for that concept to exist there must be an other, one to exclude, to foster a sense of internal community. Anderson asserts these boundaries are elastic and that communities are imaged differently even within the nation. The way an elderly woman in Fukushima images Japan may look very different to the way a young upstart in Osaka might. Enka popularized a new imaged community within Japan centered around notions of essentialized Japanese tradition. This is a form of nationalism rooted in an imagined community that appreciates and consumes the flavor of national identity that Enka embodies.
Christine Yano, an ethnomusicologist, explains this concept further in her book Tears of Longing by tying Enka to notions of memory and nostalgia and asserts that Enka is compelling to a Japanese audience because it suggests a forum for collective nostalgia where ‘things Japanese’ are kept separate from ‘things Western.’ They are defined in opposition to the occupying power. It’s not only external comparison, even comparison within Japan Affects the Japanese collective memory. Yano posits “what is past and distant becomes a kind of ‘internal exotic,’ a resource at once removed from people’s lives yet central to their version of national cultural identity.” This is a unique appeal of the Enka genre, which Schlager music does not exhibit and can be another reason Misora Hibari is a revered cultural figure in Japan while Heino is simply a beloved star. There is nothing to suggest German Schlager music serves as an avenue for collective nostalgia among the German population similar to how Enka does for Japan. The genres serve different purposes, Enka is uniquely powerful due to its expressive quality and facilitation of Japanese collective nostalgia and memory, which in turn serves as a form of nationalism.
This expression of cultural nationalism that Enka embodies is likely something Germans would be somewhat uncomfortable with, as notions of German identity are still somewhat tied to notions of Nazism. As Nedelsky’s interviews show, even Germans don’t fully understand what it means to be German and often understand their identity in terms of a European collective, whereas I would argue Japanese citizens are very certain of their Japanese identity. One prominent way National identity is imagined in Japan is through Enka. Yusuke Wajima explains it’s a genre so ubiquitous and regarded as a genuinely traditional musical expression that the concept of “enka-wa nihonjin-no kokoro.” (enka is the soul of the Japanese) is so prevalent that nationally recognized religion scholar Tetuso Yamori wrote extensively justifying the cliche. These notions of collective memory promoted by Enka serve to assert a strong Japanese cultural identity and Nationalism, a kind of Nationalism that Germans simply wouldn’t be comfortable with which can explain the absence of a genre similar to Enka in Germany.
