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Japan
Organized Panel Session
In early postwar Japan, Nihon no Utagoe (“Singing Voice of Japan,” henceforth Utagoe), a self-proclaimed musical movement, arose in close association with the Japan Communist Party’s call for a popular cultural front. As Utagoe began to align with the peace movement and the labor movement during this period of growth, Utagoe also shared with other contemporary Japan Communist Party-aligned associations a common set of enemies, namely “decadent culture,” “American imperialism,” and “monopoly capital”. In formulating these threats to contemporary Japan, Utagoe’s participants often invoked prewar Japan – the imperial regime and the immediate aftermath of World War II – as shared negative frames of reference for imagining a disaster of national scale whose second coming the Japanese people were to prevent by their own hands. This paper examines the ways in which early participants of Utagoe expressed their historical role in terms of prewar and wartime oppression and destruction, as well as postwar possibilities and the “enemy” forces that may bring war back to Japan, thus internalizing the contemporary party-line Japanese communist worldview. To that end, this paper particularly focuses its attention on the case of Araki Sakae (1924-1962), a mechanic from the coal mining region of Miike who underwent a swift posthumous rise to fame as Utagoe’s representative “laborer-composer”. Writings about and by Araki bespeak a process of enemy- and identity-searching premised upon prewar Japan as a disaster from which to learn, both individually and collectively.
Jun-Hee Lee
University of Chicago