Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The War on Jazz, or Jazz Goes to War: Toward a New Cultural Order in Wartime Japan

The War on Jazz, or Jazz Goes to War: Toward a New Cultural Order in Wartime Japan positions 6:2 0 1998 by Duke University Press. who came to hear me were looking for dreams. I couldn’t appear on stage in monpe. That would be depressing for me and my audience.” But she did not characterize her actions as subversive. “I had no such logic. It was just my character. I do things when I want to do them and if I don’t want t o . . . I don’t.”’ Awaya Noriko’s self-described role as a “patriotic entertainer,” and her insistence that her gaudy style furthered Japan’s “holy crusade” rather than subverted it, are illustrative of a relatively unexamined aspect of Japan’s wartime experience: the positive roles of the arts and artists in a society where free artistic expression was considered dangerous. T h e typical way to treat wartime cultural life is to note the various official bans and unofficial limits on artistic expression and to regard all artistic products of such a society as aesthetically negligible and therefore unworthy of study. T h e few extant surveys of the history of jazz music in Japan write off the war years with the phrase “total jazz ban” (xettaijaxu &zshi) and insist that the music http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png positions asia critique Duke University Press

The War on Jazz, or Jazz Goes to War: Toward a New Cultural Order in Wartime Japan

positions asia critique , Volume 6 (2) – Sep 1, 1998

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/the-war-on-jazz-or-jazz-goes-to-war-toward-a-new-cultural-order-in-DQyumDgEaW

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 1998 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1067-9847
eISSN
1527-8271
DOI
10.1215/10679847-6-2-345
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

positions 6:2 0 1998 by Duke University Press. who came to hear me were looking for dreams. I couldn’t appear on stage in monpe. That would be depressing for me and my audience.” But she did not characterize her actions as subversive. “I had no such logic. It was just my character. I do things when I want to do them and if I don’t want t o . . . I don’t.”’ Awaya Noriko’s self-described role as a “patriotic entertainer,” and her insistence that her gaudy style furthered Japan’s “holy crusade” rather than subverted it, are illustrative of a relatively unexamined aspect of Japan’s wartime experience: the positive roles of the arts and artists in a society where free artistic expression was considered dangerous. T h e typical way to treat wartime cultural life is to note the various official bans and unofficial limits on artistic expression and to regard all artistic products of such a society as aesthetically negligible and therefore unworthy of study. T h e few extant surveys of the history of jazz music in Japan write off the war years with the phrase “total jazz ban” (xettaijaxu &zshi) and insist that the music

Journal

positions asia critiqueDuke University Press

Published: Sep 1, 1998

There are no references for this article.