American Country Music in Japan: Lost Piece in the Popular Music History Puzzle

Abstract

American country music has a surprisingly large number of practitioners and fans in Japan, but the subculture around it has received very little attention from ethnomusicologists or historians of Japanese popular culture. This article looks at the origins of the genre—especially cowboy or “western” music and rockabilly—in the two decades after the war, and attempts to explain and describe how and why it came to challenge jazz as the leading non‐western musical genre for young college age students in the decade before pop music revolutionized popular culture in the mid 1960s. It also discusses possible reasons for the failure of the genre to go beyond its current status as a style of “oldie” for the original fan base, while also exploring its resiliency and continued appeal for the now mostly affluent middle‐class retirees who have so carefully nurtured and preserved it over half a century.