INTRODUCTION

During my sophomore year as part of my global coursework I took an interesting class examining Japanese popular music and its evolution since WWII. During the class I analyzed the pervasive concept of the “Japanese Woman” and her portrayal through music, noting how how it has evolved from WWII Gunka (war music) to the popular “boogie-woogie” musical style of the 1950s. By examining the two in tandem with one another, they reveal an evolution of the expectations placed on Japanese women’s bodies from the imperial to the postwar era. Not only does this combine my existing interests of music and Japan, but I found this topic particularly insightful due to the in depth examination of singer Kasagi Shizuko—a Japanese icon. I had heard about her from Japanese friends and so the chance to really understand this woman who was dubbed the “queen of boogie” was interesting for me.

In this piece I look specifically at Akemono Kyosei and Fukakusa Saburo’s “Mother of the Imperial Nation” released during WWII in 1938. As well as singer Kasagi Shizuko’s performance of “Jungle Boogie” in 1948 as part of legendary director Kurosawa’s film Drunken Angel:

ESSAY

In Ethnomusicologist Micheal Bourdaghs’ chapter The Music Will Set You Free, from his book ‘Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Pre-History of J-pop’ he highlights the liberation of female bodies through the analysis of popular post-war boogie-woogie singer Kasagi Shizuko. Kasagi is a bombastic performer, with larger than life movements, infectiously playful glee, and a wide-open mouth singing songs that make you want to tap your feet. The postwar era saw an explosion of this tangible style of liberation rooted in the human body. Kasagi embodied this style of liberation completely; every performance she gave served as a reminder of the bodily excess and freedom women now possess. But why was the ability to dance and sing on stage in this manner so liberating for women? The answer to that question lies in understanding their expected role during the imperial period, just a few years earlier. One way to dissect this role is through Gunka, specifically Akemoto Kyosei and Fukakusa Saburo’s Mother of the Imperial Nation released in 1938.


Women in the imperial period had a fixed role to play, and that role is portrayed clearly through the lyrics and musicality of Mother of the Imperial Nation. The song uses a pentatonic scale, lending it a more “traditional Japanese” sound, intensified by the nasally vibrato the singer employs that makes her sound as if she’s wailing. Women are often linked with notions of tradition, and during a time when enforcing the Japanese nation’s collective social and cultural identity was so important, women were given the role of embodying the nation itself—acting as a kind of physical cultural-essence, holding down the fort at home whilst the men were at war. It may seem like men had a larger role to play in the war, but there were clearly divided gender roles, and both were equally important. More than anything women were given the crucial task of creating more soldiers. At this point in 1938 people did not know how long the war would last, and so to ensure a continued supply of bodies for the imperial project, women were of utmost importance. In Mother of the Imperial Nation, the nameless woman laments the loss of her lover who perished as a soldier, but ends the song by vowing to raise his son “strong and proud,” implying that one day this son will join the army and, like his father, fall gallantly in service of the imperial nation. The woman remarks “what call have I to cry? It’s for the sake of the country.” This is the story the empire wished to circulate through this Gunka; a story in which service to the empire is placed above the needs of the individual. After all, the imperial system of kokutai—a collective national body—had no need for the individual. Rather, emphasis and acknowledgment of the individual body would threaten the legitimacy of kokutai and by extension the Imperial project itself. As a result, during wartime, bodies were incredibly constrained. The vision of womanhood presented to us in Mother of the Imperial Nation is limited to a small number of tropes—motherhood most obviously, but more specifically imperial motherhood in service of the state.


This backstory explains why the immediate post-war era saw themes of liberation of the body through movement, exemplified by figures like Kasagi through her energized and flamboyant performances. Her appearance in Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel captures this energy spectacularly. Kasagi, in a dancing-club, is clad in a strapless floor-length dress with a fur boa over one shoulder and a comically large feather in her hair as she sings the Jungle-Boogie. Kasagi is the liberated ‘leopardess,’ howling free with sexual desire. The dehumanization and sexualization of Kasagi through the lyrics demonstrates that, while women enjoyed more bodily autonomy than during the imperial era, the role of the female singer was inherently sexual as well as performers. Kasagi’s physical performance plays into this as well—the wild shaking of her body culminating in “a final orgasmic climax in the vocal shriek” (Bourdaghs) which ends the song, the crouching stance and inviting facial expression as she howls to the band and again to the audience members, the unrestrained grins showing ecstatic glee. She isn’t a solitary entity on stage, she actively interacts with the audience through her body and voice. This happens most notably when Kasagi physically calls to the swaying, all male, likely intoxicated audience when singing the lines “ジャングルで” eliciting an enthusiastic response from the audience members who echo her words back to her—the song relies on this sort of call-and-response between Kasagi and the audience and band members. These facets of her performance all serve to cement Kasagi as “an icon of bodily pleasure” during the postwar era (Bourdaghs). However Kasagi didn’t only demonstrate her bodily autonomy through what she performed, she did it through what she chose not to perform. Bourdaghs mentions that it’s important to note that Kasagi was singing songs written for her by men, thus there will always be a tension between her as a woman and the kind of femininity she was pushed to portray by the men around her. Despite this Kasagi had no problems exercising her authority and controlling her bodily autonomy by refusing to sing anything she didn’t want to, rejecting Kurosawa’s original lyrics to Jungle-Boogie until Hattori toned down the emphasis on physical love.


Kasagi’s music performance style, featuring and celebrating a bodily excess that came to define liberation in the postwar era, is only thought of as a liberation because it’s a complete departure from the very constrained roles women’s bodies were expected to play during the imperial period—the kind of role enforced by songs like Mother of the Imperial Nation. Only by looking back and fully understanding the way women were denied their individual autonomy by the state can we fully come to appreciate Kasagi Shizuko’s flamboyant and energetic style as an emancipation from wartime control and patriarchy, and enjoy her incredible performances and musical impact as the Japanese Queen of Boogie.

Bibliography

Bourdaghs K. Michael. “The Music Will Set You Free.” In Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop, 11-48. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Kasagi Shizuko, vocalist. Hattori Ryoichi, composer. Kurosawa Akira, lyricist. “Jungle Boogie,” 1948.

Fukakusa Saburo, lyricist. Akemoto Kyosei, composer. Scott W. Aalgaard, translator. “Mother of the Imperial Nation,” 1938.

Kurosawa, Akira, director. Drunken Angel. 1948; Toho, 1hr., 38 min.