Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan

Rating:
Summary: Can't give 3 and a half, so it gets 4 stars
Review: E. Taylor Atkins, in his study of the ongoing efforts within Japanese culture to practice original, yet `authentic' Japanese jazz musicianship, provides one of the most cogent analyses we've seen of the authenticity problem in Cultural Studies and American Studies.

It may seem on odd place to start, since its very subject seems `foreign' to American identity. But it is precisely this documented obsession with an ostensibly American nationalist (or ethnonationalist) cultural process in the midst of Japanese exceptionalism that provides such as rich vantage point for looking at issues of cultural nationalism.

Having undergone two periods of `modernization,' [the `opening' of Japan by Commodore Perry, and the post-WWII occupation period] at the hands of Western economic and political powers, the sets of signifiers and cultural accretions onto jazz culture within Japan provide a unique place from which to view constructions of "American"ness, especially those that prize "creativity" and "originality." As jazz remains a hotly contested item in the United States (claims to its ownership and origins often revolve around race) this is no less true that for ideologies in Japanese culture, such as the Nihonjinron popular and academic literature of the 1970s and 1980s which promoted the idea of the proprietary uniqueness of Japan and the "Japanese" way.

Other cultural critics have tried to reductively analyze Japanese jazz and/or culture the same way (noting the influence of some "Zen" or "Space" aesthetic or some such thing) and ignoring other representations of those same aesthetics in other cultures. As Atkins asks--didn't Thelonious Monk in "Misterioso" or Miles Davis in "In A Silent Way" have a sense of "space" (not to mention Sun Ra. Just as in the United States--In Japan and Europe the term jazz simply has not functioned as a stable center of musicological meaning, at least not in the sense of necessary and sufficient criteria, but takes its place along with Hogaku, Gagaku, Shomyo, No, and Kabuki theater music, as inevitably being one thread contributing to and being influenced by cultural turns.

Japanese jazz, at least in its early period, favored and incorporated a wide variety of influences, including both vibraphones and slack-key guitars, and was impacted by economic pragmatics--such as the fact that dance hall musicians were paid by the song rather than by the time--so short songs were encouraged and the development of longer improvisations discouraged. Of course, other institutions, such as the jazz coffeehouse (jazu kissa) flourished as well, though these specialized in recorded music over live muscians.

Atkins tackles the racist notion of a "nation of imitators" head on. Of course, educational and cultural history in Japan has often placed more favor on the group or school or typology rather than the individual. This happens for a wide variety of reasons--but it is precisely that history that needs to be articulated in a critique to flesh out genuine differences-- rather than using them glibly and reductively, throwing words about like kata and iemoto.

Moreover, Atkins makes clear that as in the United States, jazz in its early Japanese period was often associated with marginal cultural and moral elements relative to the elite of Japanese society at the time. With the rise of an urban middle class in the 1910's and the rise first of Osaka, and then China's Shanghai entertainment culture, jazz became increasingly inseparable from social dancing and other activities, at the same time that educational reforms made access to `traditional' Japanese art music more remote. Into the 1920's Japan had a vibrant Jazz Age culture, whose music was a part of imported American products, like any other. Jazz became a volatile subject between "cosmopolitan" and "nativist" impulses.

Identified with U.S. and 'decadent' culture, jazz undergoes repression and then co-optation by the Imperial regime, especially during the rise of the State Shinto movement, even as U.S. martial forms of music had been adopted for training and indoctrination during the Meiji period. More specifically, American jazz undergoes repression, and then Japanese jazz, constructed to fit the pan-Asian imperial ideology of the government and intended to "spiritually mobilize" the population, gains in ascendency. American jazz became known as the "decadent drug," and jazz coffeehouses were raided--dance halls closed.

Over the mid-part of the century, transforming the music of the "enemy" into the "Japanese Jazz" movement involved moving away from "disavowal" to reassertion of nationalist identity, yet always in contradistinction to American identity. No doubt this is tied to the waves of Americanization that flooded Japan after its WWII defeat. Solidiers came to occupy much of Japan, and Japanese authors, scholars, and musicians too wrestled with both national or indigenous images of shame, defeat and disavowal (from Japan's loss and atrocities committed in the name of its Imperial ambitions) and cultural pollution from both the effects of the American occupation and the impossibility of excising or eradicating Japan's own Imperial past from its history. The rise of Decadence, both as philosophy (Sakaguchi Ango) and as practice for "promiscuous youth tribes" (zoku) and authors (like Dazai Osamu) served to hail the outcast as hero against the conservative state, and jazz went hand in hand with that image. Of course, interestingly enough, a similar thing happened at the same time in the United States with the Beat movement and the images that went with it. As often is the case, the mutability of jazz meant it turned again. Soon Japanese national programmers seemed to think jazz could help democratize Japan, or at least satisfy the objectives of the American occupiers. In the United States, jazz had always been deployed and exported as a symbol and testament to American democracy--increasingly so during the Cold War. By all accounts Japan experienced another Jazz (and Dancing) boom as its entertainment industry and middle class recovered from the war in the 1950's, even as 'serious' cultural critics grew uncomfortable with the raucous youth culture it continued to generate. Improvisation and extended bebopping was now part of the game in concert halls. But again this all fell apart with economic changes in the 1960's, and Jazz moved into another new period of authenticity searching as avant-garde movements of the 1970s looked back at previous Japanese musical forms (like Hogaku) to transform.

Even from the earliest days, tendencies in the U.S. to see jazz as subcultural to African-American identity were undermined by a more powerful identification with American nationalism. Seeing themselves as outsiders, Atkins argues that Japanese jazz musicians and affectionadoes' collective obsession with "American"ness and "Japanese-ness" has formed a discursive center from which other facets of jazz culture identify with or react to, rather than disregard completely. In this way, for Atkins an imagined American modernist stability has functioned as a discursive pivot point (or a accreted core) for the reassertion and maintenance of Japanese exceptionalism, which places itself at the center of a "Japanese" worldview, and holding "American"ness at the margin.

This is true even for the "Japanese Jazz" movement, which according to Atkins attempts and fails to successfully articulate jazz in terms of historical Japanese aesthetics, such as the concepts of "mu," "yugen" or "mono no aware." The dialectical paradox of ideological core and periphery is a common theme today in discussing nationalisms, and "Japanese Jazz" is no different. In the end, Atkins is convinced that this separation and definition in terms of difference has always led to a undercurent of sensed failure--or "inauthenticity" on the part of Japanese Jazz. Yet at times he is swallowed up in the very discourses he critiques. In discussing the 1970's movements, he refers to one musician's (Togashi Masahiko) use of Hogaku as "pillaging" and another's (Akiyoshi Toshiko) use of space and minimal instrumentation as "Orientalist." These terms and concepts detract from Atkins's work. His contention that "Japanese Jazz" is an artificial chimera echoes among so many he examines that its quite difficult to hear if alternative readings are available, or whether Atkins' own work suffers from a teleology that all Japanese Jazz is somehow 'doomed' to fail. There is much valuable material here--and we shouldn't discount that. Its just that, along with so many other books on Jazz (and indeed music in general) ---- the most trustworthy history and credible analysis comes early on, and author seems to grow more myopic as the book progresses.

Should be read along with John Dower's "Embracing Defeat," also available on Amazon.com