@article{“RatheraHundredSingingLaborersthanaSingleProfessional”:ImaginingtheJapaneseMassesintheUtagoeMovement:2290,
      recid = {2290},
      author = {Lee, Jun Hee},
      title = {“Rather a Hundred Singing Laborers than a Single  Professional”: Imagining the Japanese Masses in the Utagoe  Movement, 1948-Present},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2020-06},
      pages = {385},
      abstract = {This dissertation explores the history of ideas concerning  music in twentieth-century Japan through a singing movement  known as Utagoe (“Singing Voice”) in postwar Japan.  In  view of music in twentieth-century Japan as a discursive  space, this dissertation examines the historical continuity  of what may be termed “musical reformism,” or the  conception of music as both a means and object of reform.   By investigating music as a body of works, set of  practices, and discursive space, the dissertation examines  music in Japan since the Meiji Restoration as a historical  phenomenon of heterogeneous interests, participants, and  historical and current-day implications.

	Though the  Utagoe movement came into being after the end of World War  II, its worldview was greatly influenced by concepts  concerning culture and music in early twentieth-century  Japan.  Shōka, or songs introduced in music textbooks since  the 1880s, represented the first concerted effort to  establish singing as a means of moralization.  Min’yō  (“folk song”) apologists and the shin-min’yō (“new folk  song”) creation movement in the 1920s-1930s sought to  uncover and reinvent the Japanese nation’s historical  essence that was supposedly found in min’yō.  Such an  ambition to re-create Japan’s “national music” also found  expression in wartime singing movements.

	As Utagoe’s  predecessor, Central Chorus (est. 1948) came into being  under the Japanese Communist Party’s renewed emphasis on  culture since 1946.  Though the party’s leadership remained  vague on the question of political leadership on cultural  matters vis-à-vis autonomy of cultural producers, the  Central Chorus appealed to both camps by engaging in both  “cultural operation” activities into the workplace and  intensive musical education.  The Japanese Communist  Party’s elevation of cultural struggle in historical  importance as political struggle allowed formative Utagoe  to legitimate its endeavors in the larger political context  of creating “national music” toward Japan’s political and  cultural independence.

	The life and historical  remembering of “laborer-composer” Araki Sakae (1924-1962)  suggest the persistence of Utagoe’s worldview based on  “struggle” (tatakai).  Araki’s musical works in the last  years of his life vividly reflect the contemporary JCP-line  notion of tatakai, in which the local struggle was framed  as a part of the larger national Japanese struggle against  “American imperialism” and “monopoly capital.”  Araki is  still remembered by Utagoe’s veterans for his aspiration to  effect a social change rather than his compositions  themselves.  Araki’s music continues to be appreciated in  its historical context of the Japanese people’s historic  “struggle.”

	Utagoe’s concept of “national music” (kokumin  ongaku) held that learning national music from other  nations would help create Japan’s national music.   Russian-Soviet songs were by far the most popular, based on  the belief that the Soviet music establishment inherited  both the Russian folk essence and the Russian national  school of music.  However, Utagoe’s national music rhetoric  came under a serious challenge as American folk song  entered Japan as simultaneously a protest music and  commercial music genre in the mid-1960s.  Though “national  music” was removed from Utagoe’s statute 1975, Utagoe’s  official language remains largely nation-based, assuming  universality and timelessness of the nation in  music.

	Utagoe’s musical repertoire also gave rise to  utagoe kissa (“singing voice coffeehouse”), drink-and-sing  establishments by which the term utagoe is remembered  today.  Among the “first-generation” utagoe kissa in  Shinjuku, Tokyo, Tomoshibi (“Lamplight”) is the only  surviving first-generation utagoe kissa through a branch  location.  Having survived the 1960s-1970s when utagoe  kissa was going out of business by dozens across Japan,  Tomoshibi survived as an institution and business by the  hands of the willing staff who engaged in similar  repertoires of music and action as the Utagoe movement.   Tomoshibi’s brand of utagoe, too, would be characterized by  activism.

	Nihon no Utagoe continues in operation in the  late 2010s, still celebrating its history of struggle for  peace in postwar Japan.  Meanwhile, 2000s-2010 saw the  proliferation of utagoe kissa as local events across Japan  for Japan’s post-retirement generations in the late 2010s.   Beyond the confines of nostalgia, they reveal malleable  nature of utagoe in application and vaguely collective  character in aspiration.  To the extent that the typical  organizer of an utagoe kissa event invokes a sense of  community and value of singing a given song in contemporary  contexts, utagoe at large still possesses a tint of  “musical reformism,” still being variably contested and  applied by self-proclaimed practitioners of utagoe.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/2290},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.2290},
}