| This dissertation sheds light on the ongoing public controversies surrounding the popular songs that began to be produced by new record companies in the late 1920s. For the next three decades, these popular songs drew the attention of scholars, journalists, government officials, and others, all of who understood the songs as manifestations of broader social realities. Debating these songs, in turn, gave critics opportunities not only to intervene in the popular musical culture but also to effect social change. In many cases, this took the form of debates on the effects of mass culture on modern Japanese life. In other instances it led attempts to censor the songs themselves. What ultimately lay at the heart of these controversies and the efforts to regulate popular songs were the predominantly class-based anxieties surrounding the rise of a "vulgar," mass culture that threatened to become dominant within Japan's cultural landscape.;Despite the strident calls against "vulgar" music, however, the controversies surrounding popular songs were less a culture war fought between the lower-class consumers of popular songs and their elite critics than they were a series of confrontations that took place within the ranks of Japan's social, political, and cultural elite. This dissertation focuses on the three decades stretching from the late 1920s to the end of 1950s because they constitute the height of these controversies and also because this was the period which witnessed the emergence of a mass consumer, middle class culture. While mass consumption does not become a lived reality for the majority of Japanese until the 1960s, the decades preceding this were the times during which Japanese elites debated the implications of this historic transformation unfolding around them. Within this context, popular song critique constituted an attempt to shape the nature of the mass consumer society that was to come. |
