Beat and Square Cold War Encounters

This chapter is focused on the transnational influences of Japanese music during the Cold War and on music’s role in U.S. cultural diplomacy efforts aimed at Japan. This includes examples of numerous American jazz musicians (David Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Herbie Mann) who were sent to Japan and who created musical “impressions” of their experience. A primary focus in on the 1961 Tokyo East-West Music Encounter organized by Nicolas Nabokov and attended by multiple American composers (Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, Colin McPhee) and scholars (Robert Garfias). The chapter then details the broad influence of gagaku on European (Messiaen, Stockhausen, Xenakis) and American composers, focusing particularly on Alan Hovhaness. Experimental composers, such as Richard Teitelbaum, inspired by John Cage’s engagement with Zen also turned toward Japan. The chapter concludes with an extended discussion of the role of Japanese music and Japanese composers (particularly Toru Takemitsu) in the career of Roger Reynolds.

Representing the Authentic from Japanese American Perspectives

This chapter explores the career of Japanese American composer and arranger Tak Shindo (1922–2002). Shindo grew up nisei in Los Angeles. Japanese American musical life is discussed with a focus on the community’s 1933 production of Sakura composed by Claude Lapham in the Hollywood Bowl. Interned at Manzanar during World War II, Shindo began musical studies through the camp’s programs. Although devoted to Latin jazz, he repeatedly served during the Cold War as a Japanese musical advisor for such Hollywood composers as Franz Waxman and Max Steiner (Sayonara, Cry for happy, and A majority of one). Several of his 1950s and 60s albums—combining elements of Japanese music with the big band style—were successful in the exotica genre. Shindo’s self-Orientalism is compared with the musical exoticism of Martin Denny. A brief discussion of subsequent Japanese American jazz follows. The chapter concludes with a profile of the composer Paul Chihara.

Strains of Japonisme in Tin Pan Alley, on Broadway, and in the Parlor

This chapter focuses on the representation of Japan and the Japanese in American popular song and musical theater from 1860 to 1930. The representation of African Americans and of European immigrants in American popular song has received much attention. Comparatively little work has been undertaken on Tin Pan Alley’s engagement with Asians and Asian Americans. Through style and content analysis, the author identifies particular features that served as “Japanese” markers in the music, lyrics, and cover art of these songs. Musical interest in Japanese subjects directly reflected developments in political history and in American conceptions of race. The impact of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, and of the Russo-Japanese War is identified. The chapter is based on a collection of some 375 pieces with Japanese subjects–including parlor songs, show tunes, and piano dances and novelty pieces–that were published between 1890 and 1930 in the U.S.

An Exotic Enemy

The cinema was the most effective medium for anti-Japanese propaganda in the U.S. during World War II and was the site of music’s most important wartime role. From shortly after Pearl Harbor to the end of the U.S. occupation of Japan in 1952, Hollywood produced a large number of films offering negative depictions of the Japanese. Music assumed multiple roles in these anti-Japanese feature films and U.S. government documentaries. Never had Orientalist and racial politics been more clearly evident in music heard by so many as in these productions. These films marshaled preexistent European music, stereotypical Orientalist signs, and traditional Japanese music against the exotic enemy. Select sophisticated examples of musical propaganda are analyzed, offering new perspectives for the study of cross-cultural musical encounters. For many in the U.S., Hollywood film music continues to shape their impressions of Japan and their perceptions of Japanese music.

Introductions and Acknowledgments

Over the course of the past century and a half, numerous composers, musicians, and audiences in the United States have imagined Japan through works created and experienced in every musical genre and medium. Some of these popular songs, film scores, and Broadway musicals reached large audiences over an extended period. The vast majority of these works proved more ephemeral, but nevertheless were culturally significant through their collective impact. This book investigates the reciprocal relationships among this diverse body of musical works, the ever protean political dynamic between the United States and Japan, and the evolving American social climate in which this music was created and experienced. To what extent was music employed to shape American perceptions of the Japanese, and to what extent was American music itself shaped in the process?...

Two Paradigmatic Tales, between Genres and Genders

This chapter focuses on multiple versions of the Madame Butterfly narrative in Hollywood film and on multiple versions of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 silent film The Cheat. One focus is on the relationship between music in these films and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and on how the Butterfly narrative was reworked to project developing perceptions of race and gender. The relationship between operatic and cinematic Orientalist representation is explored in the 1932 Madame Butterfly and the 1962 My Geisha. DeMille’s “The Cheat” inspired works stoking fears of the “Yellow Peril.” The story was transformed into a play (1918). Camille Erlanger’s “Forfaiture,” the first opera to be based on a film, premiered in Paris (1921). A silent film was released in 1923 and a sound film in 1931. In 1937, a French film starred Sessue Hayakawa, the Japanese actor who played the “villain” in 1915. This offers an opportunity to compare the role of music and realization of Orientalism in four genres.

“Beyond Description”

Chapter one places music in the context of late 19th-century Euro-American japonisme. The focus is on American perceptions of and reactions to Japanese music encountered in Japan in the second half of the 19th century. Sources include published and unpublished correspondence and diaries of Americans (from Salem sailors to scholars to Gilded Age socialites) who traveled to Japan as well as travel books, scholarly journals, newspapers, and novels set in Japan. The chapter presents the earliest songs, musicals, and plays representing Japan and Japanese music to the American public. Bostonian Japanophiles are central as are American music educators who worked in Japan. The context in which Japanese music was first heard in the U.S., particularly at World Expositions, is explored. These early and primarily negative reports indirectly reveal contemporaneous American musical values and unintentionally marked Japanese music as an ideal model for later modernist composers.

Conclusions? or, Contemporary Representations and Reception

This chapter focuses on examples of American japonisme and interactions with traditional Japanese culture from the past few decades, thereby revealing connections with older representational techniques and concerns. The chapter starts with an extended discussion of Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical Pacific Overtures and a brief discussion of films during the trade war period. The second section focuses on Weezer’s Pinkerton album as a continuation of Tin Pan Alley exoticism. In the early twenty-first century, multiple female pop stars (Madonna, Katy Perry) appropriated the geisha image in performance. The chapter then turns toward Asian American postmodern attempts to undermine Orientalism, as in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Recently, organizations such as the Japan Society have commissioned numerous American composers to create works for Japanese instruments. In addition, numerous Americans have become professional shakuhachi players and teachers. The chapter concludes with recent examples of japonisme aimed particularly at children (animation, video games).

Singing Sayonara

Postwar Hollywood films offered the most sustained exposure American audiences have ever had to the Japanese performing arts. Following World War II, Hollywood created a new image of Japan, one that replaced the racism it had nourished during the war with depictions emphasizing the cultural refinements of the exotic Japanese. Music was central to this transformation. The primary example is the 1957 Sayonara. Multiple forms of “Japanese” music are heard in this film, creating a complex and contradictory musical portrait. Franz Waxman’s score employs Irving Berlin’s “Sayonara” and numerous folk tunes and includes original music composed for Japanese instruments. Several traditional Japanese performing art forms are encountered as well as Takarazuka theater. Sayonara is but one of the multiple films from the late 1950s and early 60s discussed: Three Stripes in the Sun, Cry for Happy, The Barbarian and the Geisha, Teahouse of the August Moon, The Crimson Kimono.

Japonisme and the Forging of American Musical Modernism

Japanese music played a central role in the formation of American musical modernism. This chapter focuses on the position of Japanese music in the careers of Henry Eichheim and Henry Cowell. For Eichheim, Japan had “a poetry no other country seems to possess.” Inspired by the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, Eichheim traveled to Japan between 1915 and 1928 and composed multiple pieces based on Japanese material. Japan was of central importance throughout Cowell’s life. In the 1930s Cowell studied shakuhachi with Kitaro Tamada who later wrote poignantly to Cowell from his Japanese American Internment Camp. Cowell traveled to Japan in 1957 and 1961 during the Cold War and composed several Japanese-inspired works, including for koto. Juxtaposing the musical journeys of these two composers and proselytizers highlights the roles Japanese music played for those Americans who sought to sound “ultra modern” in the twentieth century.