The Impact of Western Music Culture in Modern Japan and the Formation of Popular Music

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This research aims at studying the process of modernization in Japanese music culture. The author underlines the relevance of popular music in this research field because it can shed light on the issues of discourse, ideology, gender, sexuality, journalism, technology among others. Here the modernization roughly implies the rational structure of sound (Western scales and intervals), predominance of notation, public education, public performance, autonomous aesthetics, and nationalism, all of which were characteristic to Western music culture in the nineteenth century.The author deals, for example, with a history of brassband, school music in Meiji Japan, staple parts of later development of music culture, a process of Japanization of popular instruments such as violin, mandolin, accordion and harmonica in the 1910s, a powerful metaphor of jazz as modernity, the definitive influence of record company on the popular songs since the late 1920s, the industrial and musical changes of popular songs during the modernization, the impact of microphone and the gender difference in popular songs, the relationship between the popular sentiment and the propaganda songs during the wartime (1931-45), among others.