Michael Bourdaghs's Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon is titled after a 1973 song of the same name by the Japanese rock band Happy End. The members of Happy End, like many postwar musicians, negotiated a complex relationship of admiration and resistance to American cultural hegemony. If rock had to be sung in English to be authentic, then Happy End's decision to sing in Japanese suggests their attempt to create a new authenticity that was not defined in terms of history or tradition (i.e., enka). As Bourdaghs argues, it was a negation of the negated that sought to define a new space outside of the dilemma of the colonialist self or the colonized other. Future rock musicians in Japan would benefit from the creation of this new space for popular music sung in Japanese. Today, we call this space J-Pop.
Bourdaghs subtitles his book a “prehistory of J-Pop” in order to distinguish the popular music that he examines from the unapologetically commercial new sound that came to dominate in the period from the 1990s. Besides shifts in the structure of the market, such as in distribution and media, he argues that the meanings and kinds of pleasures changed after 1991 as teenagers and women joined men as consumers of popular music. More importantly, the engagement with America—through often one-sided cultural flows from the center to the periphery—declined with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a new “geopolitical framework in which Japan is increasingly conceived through a more complex imaginary global map” (p. 4).
The book covers the history of popular music in the period from the end of World War II to the burst of the economic bubble in 1990. Though there are excellent monographs on jazz by E. Taylor Atkins and enka by Christine Yano, there are few academic studies of the history of postwar popular music in Japan. Previous scholarship has focused on either a single musician or genre, but none have attempted to study postwar popular music with the breadth and ambition of this work. English rock musician Julian Cope's book perhaps comes closest in scope to the aims of this work, but for a different audience.
The book is structured chronologically with chapters that selectively focus on what the author openly acknowledges are the artists and works that interest him. Although Bourdaghs asserts that J-Pop exists in a different historical moment from the popular music discussed in the book, the continuities are often elided. As if to keep the music from Japan's past hermetically sealed off from the crass commercial culture of the J-Pop era, there is almost no discussion of pop idols. To this history of popular music in postwar Japan, Bourdaghs waves his hand: this is not the popular music you are looking for. Canonical pop idols—such as Yamaguchi Momoe, Pink Lady, Four Leaves, or Matsuda Seiko—barely merit a mention in the text.
The approach of analyzing popular music as a lens for understanding “the geopolitical situations in which Japanese musicians and fans operated during the Cold War era” makes this an interesting and important work (p. 8). In mapping postwar Japanese popular music through the discussion of these musicians' lives and works, Bourdaghs's writing often veers into some interesting detours. His discussion of Misora Hibari's relation to enka singers leads him to an examination of the rumors that she was ethnically Korean; chapter 4 on mid-1960s “Group Sounds” bands explores how feedback, fuzz, and others forms of guitar distortion celebrated radical politics; and a discussion of melodrama in the fiction of Ishihara Shintarō opens the last chapter on Chage & Aska.
Along the way, the book does not shy away from engaging with broader issues at the intersection of popular culture and theory. In chapter 1, for example, Bourdaghs relates criticism of the corrupting influence of diegetic popular music in film during the Occupation period to the ideas of Theodor Adorno, which helps to better illustrate the larger theme of how director Akira Kurosawa and others sought to distance themselves from the corrupting influences of mass culture. Chapter 3 engages Paul Gilroy in a debate by linking the rise of commercial air travel with the deterritorialization of music, as rockabilly spread across the globe to Japan and returned again to America with the popularity of Sakamoto Kyū's hit song “Sukiyaki” in 1963.
As a Japanese literature scholar, Bourdaghs is most interested in texts—music texts. Rather than focusing on the production or reception of popular music, much of the book is given over to exploring changes in style, techniques, and forms. If you do not usually read music reviews, then some sections of the text's analysis will likely not hold much interest. Despite Bourdaghs's denial that he is neither a musician nor musicologist, the book provides detailed descriptions of the music. These sections throughout the book are often frustrating to read—Bourdaghs's enthusiasm for the artists makes one really want to hear the music.
