Establishing and Democratizing Music in Prewar Japan

• In Event: Culture and Democracy in the Making of Modern Japanese Intellectuals

Abstract

In the decades following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japanese witnessed not only the transformation of their society into a modern, nation-state, but also the rise of a plethora of professionalized artistic and intellectual circles that came to be recognized as the ‘establishment’ in each respective fields. Recognized by the common suffix "-dan" (“dais”), these included music (gakudan), visual arts (gadan), literature (bundan), and even punditry (rondan). Schooled in the Western canons and associated with the key cultural institutions of the post-Restoration state such as the university, members of these establishments constituted the self-appointed guardians of aesthetic and intellectual hierarchy in modern Japan. During the first half of the twentieth century, however, such claims to cultural supremacy became increasingly difficult to maintain, as both the imaginations and practices of mass consumption threatened to upend the post-Meiji cultural hierarchy as a whole. As a case-study of such dynamic, this paper focuses on the creation and subsequent evolution of Japan’s music establishment during the pre-World War II era. Far from being the monolithic entity that the term “establishment” may imply, this community was shaped, from the outset, by a broad range of participants that included members of government bureaucracy, hereditary aristocracy, and the university-educated “new” middle class. Such diversity, in turn, translated into the articulation of competing priorities for the gakudan as a whole. Nowhere was this clearer than in the seemingly contradictory drive to democratize Japanese musical culture all the while remaining faithful to the conventions of Western art music.

Author

• Hiromu Nagahara, Massachusetts Institute of Technology