Voices in Modern Japan

Abstract

Voices in Modern Japan Raja Adal Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture by Seth Jacobowitz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. Pp. xii + 299. $39.95 cloth. Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents by Hiromu Nagahara. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 273. $36.00 cloth. Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945 by Kerim Yasar. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. xv + 277. $90.00 cloth, $30.00 paper, $29.99 e-book. In these three first books, a new generation of scholars looks at sound, music, and the relation between speech and writing in modern Japan. Seth Jacobowitz focuses on the mediation between speech and writing and, more specifically, on a new belief in the power of realism that paved the way for the realist novel of the Meiji period (1868–1912). Kerim Yasar is also interested in how the voice is recorded, but he focuses specifically on sound—its reproduction and transmission—from 1868 to 1945. Hiromu Nagahara looks at a different set of voices, Japanese popular songs (ryūkōka 流行歌), from their rise in the 1920s to their triumph in the 1970s. In summary, if Nagahara is writing a history of music and Yasar a history of sound, Jacobowitz is writing a media history of literature. Before comparing the three works, however, a short summary of each is in order. [End Page 469] Jacobowitz’s Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture explicitly seeks to rewrite Japanese literature in terms of Friedrich Kittler’s concept of discourse networks, namely in terms of the technological systems that produced it.1 The core of the book is the third part, in which Jacobowitz reinterprets a canonical work of Japanese literature, The Peony Lantern (Botan dōrō 牡丹燈籠). This popular ghost story is often recognized as the forerunner of the style that came to be known as genbun itchi 言文一致 (lit. unification of speech and writing; p. 5), which is credited with producing the vernacular form of Japanese that is widespread today. Jacobowitz argues, however, that the key factor in the production of The Peony Lantern is that it was transcribed by two shorthand stenographers from a rakugo 落語 (form of popular theater) storytelling performance. It was the “transcriptive realism” of shorthand that inaugurated “the literary theories of mimetic capture that decisively contributed to the discourse of realism and the formation of the modern Japanese novel” (p. 124). This third part is preceded by a first part that explores the ways in which such new technologies as the train, the telegraph, and the postal system transformed conceptions of time and space, and a second part that explores the role of phonetic scripts in the debate about the proper relationship between the oral and the written language. It is followed by a fourth and last part that explores the limits of literary realism through Masaoka Shiki’s 正岡子規 poetry and Natsume Sōseki’s 夏目漱石 I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru 吾輩は猫である). In this way, the conceptual framework of this work uses a variety of approaches, from a survey of communication systems of the Meiji era and debates about national language and script reform to, in the third and fourth parts, the impact of these phenomena on modern Japanese literature and its realist turn. Yasar’s work shares Jacobowitz’s concern with transcription but focuses specifically on technologies that record and disseminate sound. We often assume that modern technologies, such as the phonograph, were used to record and transmit modern acoustic practices. On the contrary, argues Yasar, it was naniwabushi 浪花節 (story-singing) performers in the 1910s who became the first recording superstars. The ancient genealogy of modern recording superstars leads Yasar to suggest [End Page 470] that Walter Ong’s concept of a “technologized orality”2 needs to be supplemented by the “residual orality” of the naniwabushi performers, whose practices predated modern Japan. It was these performers, argues Yasar, who “offered a fertile substrate in which the seeds of ‘technologized orality’ . . . occasioned by auditory media could grow” (p. 7). A similar process occurs...