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This dissertation explores the history of ideas concerning music in twentieth-century Japan through a singing movement known as Utagoe (“Singing Voice”) in postwar Japan. In view of music in twentieth-century Japan as a discursive space, this dissertation examines the historical continuity of what may be termed “musical reformism,” or the conception of music as both a means and object of reform. By investigating music as a body of works, set of practices, and discursive space, the dissertation examines music in Japan since the Meiji Restoration as a historical phenomenon of heterogeneous interests, participants, and historical and current-day implications. Though the Utagoe movement came into being after the end of World War II, its worldview was greatly influenced by concepts concerning culture and music in early twentieth-century Japan. Shōka, or songs introduced in music textbooks since the 1880s, represented the first concerted effort to establish singing as a means of moralization. Min’yō (“folk song”) apologists and the shin-min’yō (“new folk song”) creation movement in the 1920s-1930s sought to uncover and reinvent the Japanese nation’s historical essence that was supposedly found in min’yō. Such an ambition to re-create Japan’s “national music” also found expression in wartime singing movements. As Utagoe’s predecessor, Central Chorus (est. 1948) came into being under the Japanese Communist Party’s renewed emphasis on culture since 1946. Though the party’s leadership remained vague on the question of political leadership on cultural matters vis-à-vis autonomy of cultural producers, the Central Chorus appealed to both camps by engaging in both “cultural operation” activities into the workplace and intensive musical education. The Japanese Communist Party’s elevation of cultural struggle in historical importance as political struggle allowed formative Utagoe to legitimate its endeavors in the larger political context of creating “national music” toward Japan’s political and cultural independence. The life and historical remembering of “laborer-composer” Araki Sakae (1924-1962) suggest the persistence of Utagoe’s worldview based on “struggle” (tatakai). Araki’s musical works in the last years of his life vividly reflect the contemporary JCP-line notion of tatakai, in which the local struggle was framed as a part of the larger national Japanese struggle against “American imperialism” and “monopoly capital.” Araki is still remembered by Utagoe’s veterans for his aspiration to effect a social change rather than his compositions themselves. Araki’s music continues to be appreciated in its historical context of the Japanese people’s historic “struggle.” Utagoe’s concept of “national music” (kokumin ongaku) held that learning national music from other nations would help create Japan’s national music. Russian-Soviet songs were by far the most popular, based on the belief that the Soviet music establishment inherited both the Russian folk essence and the Russian national school of music. However, Utagoe’s national music rhetoric came under a serious challenge as American folk song entered Japan as simultaneously a protest music and commercial music genre in the mid-1960s. Though “national music” was removed from Utagoe’s statute 1975, Utagoe’s official language remains largely nation-based, assuming universality and timelessness of the nation in music. Utagoe’s musical repertoire also gave rise to utagoe kissa (“singing voice coffeehouse”), drink-and-sing establishments by which the term utagoe is remembered today. Among the “first-generation” utagoe kissa in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Tomoshibi (“Lamplight”) is the only surviving first-generation utagoe kissa through a branch location. Having survived the 1960s-1970s when utagoe kissa was going out of business by dozens across Japan, Tomoshibi survived as an institution and business by the hands of the willing staff who engaged in similar repertoires of music and action as the Utagoe movement. Tomoshibi’s brand of utagoe, too, would be characterized by activism. Nihon no Utagoe continues in operation in the late 2010s, still celebrating its history of struggle for peace in postwar Japan. Meanwhile, 2000s-2010 saw the proliferation of utagoe kissa as local events across Japan for Japan’s post-retirement generations in the late 2010s. Beyond the confines of nostalgia, they reveal malleable nature of utagoe in application and vaguely collective character in aspiration. To the extent that the typical organizer of an utagoe kissa event invokes a sense of community and value of singing a given song in contemporary contexts, utagoe at large still possesses a tint of “musical reformism,” still being variably contested and applied by self-proclaimed practitioners of utagoe.

Note: The exhibition takes place at e-flux, New York. [LINK]
The Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) efforts to purge sites of communism was a global operation—and Japan was no exception. Key officials from the agency described acts of espionage and strategic coordination in the 1950s and ’60s that ranged from the mobilization of controlled media and Yakuza mafia groups, to the violent suppression of socialist movements.^[1] With its title alluding to mind-body dualism, this exhibition contends with past machinations that are still corporeally present, albeit camouflaged in other forms of manipulation and continuing to shift control and coerce power under new terms.
Tracing the journey of the renowned labor anthem The Red Flag sung to the tune of the German folk song O Tannenbaum,Minouk Lim (b.1968, South Korea) suggests how this evocative and emblematic anthem became a vessel for otherwise conflicting beliefs. In this newly commissioned work, Lim extends her research to the transformation of the Japanese Utagoe, or singing voice, movement—socialist choral activities that strove to promote popular unity.^[2] Exhibited as a video and sound installation of the documented performance, Lim’s work stages a car broadcasting live accordion music of Soviet workers’ songs while driving around the Tokyo Imperial Palace, as such choreographing the deterritorialization of history via the subject in motion. The intervention also recalls Bloody May Day in 1952,^[3] when protesters clashed with police forces amidst unified chanting of proletariat hymns.
Known for his appropriation of popular culture and cinematic decoding of heteronormative scripts, Ming Wong (b.1971, Singapore) develops a new project on Japanese soft porn, known as “pink films.” Wong's ongoing research on the Nikkatsu Roman Porno probes the process of pornification in the Japanese film industry during the 1970s.^[4] His investigation touches on a generation of avant-garde filmmakers who began their careers in this genre in order to support themselves, while being engaged in furtive activist groups. From the epics of abrasive left-wing ultra-radicality to those of dirty, misogynist fantasies, the filmmakers incorporated their creative license to vent their frustrations and induce an aestheticized arousal of minds and loins for the market.
The CIA's covert relationship with Italy’s Christian Democrats, which mirrors their veiled involvement with the Japanese Yakuza, supposedly lead to the assassination of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). Ostia (2013), a video work by Yoshua Okón (b.1970, Mexico) depicts this imagined crime scene. On the other hand, Okón’s Salò Island (2013) is a video and sculpture installation indicative of a sadistic and tortuous scene from Pasolini’s film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Situated in “a surreal late-night corporate labyrinth” in Newport, California, the characters reappear as desolate beings bereft of sentient life. It metaphorically infers the past and the future, and echoes how neoliberal capitalism salutes a reloaded fascism.
The Imperial Ghost in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the CIA) features works reacting to anti-communist rhetoric that has suppressed and repressed intellectuals since the 1950s. To ground this narrative within the exhibition, declassified accounts of covert operations by the CIA are displayed as archival documentation.

A prominent personality within the chronicles is former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi (1896-1987), an imperialist and a war criminal who was imprisoned and eventually released in exchange for his espousal of pro-American policies and reforms—further evidenced by his grandson’s position as the current Prime Minister of Japan.
The CIA’s clandestine activities succeeded in transforming economic policies, sovereign histories, and global perception, irrevocably altering the world’s cultural and political landscape. The exhibition considers the incarnations and reverberations of their strategies, and how they continue to infiltrate today’s political imagination.
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[1] See for example: Tim Weiner, “C.I.A. Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in 50's and 60's,” The New York Times, New York, October 9, 1994. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-to-support-japanese-right-in-50-s-and-60-s.html
[2] The Utagoe, or singing voice, movement has its origin in 1947, when the Central Chorus Band of the Democratic Youth League of Japan (Minsei, 1923-present) was formed as a substructure of the Japanese Communist Party. This grassroots public choral activity of “workers’ songs” gained nationwide popularity in the 1960s, spreading across Utagoe cafés with the slogan “Sing with Marx! Dance with Lenin!”.
[3] Bloody May Day (1952) occurred at Tokyo’s Imperial Palace (Kokyogaien) between government and multi-sectoral leftist forces composed of Japanese and Koreans (reportedly led by Minsei and Zengakuren—a communist/anarchist league of students), following the country’s release from American Occupation and the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty (1951).
[4] “Pink films” are low-budget feature-length films made under tight negotiations between cinematic quality versus commercial demand, typically shot over three back-to-back days and nights. The established movie company Nikkatsu Corporation (1912-present) followed this trend and launched the Roman Porno series (1971-1988) which focused on sex, violence, S&M, and romance.
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With special thanks to the Asian Cultural Council and Jaime Marie Davis.
Asakusa Director: Koichiro Osaka
Project manager: Mariko Mikami
Curatorial assistants: Marika Constantino, Sanghae Kwon
e-flux Programs Director: Amal Issa
Office manager: Hallie Ayres
Coordinator: Elysia Tuohy
Exhibition
30 April - 8 June, 2018
e-flux | 311 E Broadway, New York, NY 10002
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 12–6pm
Opening event
Tuesday, April 30 from 6:30–8:30pm
Contact: info@asakusa-o.com