Remapping Country Music in the Pacific

Abstract

Studies that introduced country musicians outside the US have expanded our views on the creators of American country music. They have, however, reinforced our notion that non-US country musicians merely imitate the American “original.” More recent studies have advanced the field by asking how non-US actors use country music to manipulate the borders between their countries and the US by playing country music. Yet they emphasize that non-US actors exclusively encounter US culture through country music. This paper pushes the field forward to mapping country music onto post-war Japan, locating it within a Japanese domestic context, and showing how non-US actors used country to control the ideological context created there. By doing so, it rejects the common perception that the Japanese merely imitated the “authentic” American country music. Japanese men enjoyed American country music not simply because it was American, but precisely because they could make it their own. This paper examines why certain male musicians played country music as they recovered from defeat in World War II between 1945 and the mid-1950s. To do so, it illustrates how men—country musicians and their critics alike—performed and discussed country music during this period. Ultimately, this paper argues that country musicians played country to embody an alternative masculinity that could serve as both a deviation and critique of the expectations and direction of mainstream Japanese society.