Kayokyoku and Women in Showa 40’s (1965 to 1974): Karaoke as Musical Practice/Resistance more

Kayokyoku and Women in Showa 40’s (1965 to 1974): Karaoke as Musical Practice/Resistance 昭和４０年代日本における歌謡曲と女性 ̶̶音楽的実践及び抵抗としてのカラオケ̶̶ MATSUMOTO, Masaki 松 本 政 輝 092708 June, 2009 Kayokyoku and Women in Showa 40’s (1965 to 1974): Karaoke as Musical Practice/Resistance 昭和４０年代日本における歌謡曲と女性 ̶̶音楽的実践及び抵抗としてのカラオケ̶̶ 付和文抄訳 A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the International Christian University for the Baccalaureate Degree 国際基督教大学教授会提出学士論文 by MATSUMOTO, Masaki 松 本 政 輝 092708 June, 2009 Approved by —————————— Professor IKOMA, Natsumi Thesis Advisor 論文指導審査教授 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................ 1   PART  I:    WOMAN  AND  SUBJECTIVITY  IN  KAYOKYOKU................................................................. 3   1-­‐1.  FEMININE  EXCESS  SQUEEZED  BETWEEN  MASCULINE  RATIONALITY ........................................................6   Shûchaku-­Eki,  Chiyo  Okumura .......................................................................................................................... 6   Sayonara  wa  Dansu  no  Ato  ni,  Chieko  Baishô ............................................................................................ 9   Tegami,  Saori  Yuki................................................................................................................................................12   Burû-­raito  Yokohama,  Ayumi  Ishida ............................................................................................................13   Komacchau-­na,  Linda  Yamamoto..................................................................................................................13   1-­‐2.  FEMALE  ATTEMPT  AT  “HAVING  THE  PHALLUS”:  EJACULATORY  WOMEN  AND  CONDOMS .................19   Ningyô-­no  Ie,  Mieko  Hirota ...............................................................................................................................21   Koi-­no  Dorei,  Chiyo  Okumura ..........................................................................................................................25   Ai  wa  Kizutsuki-­yasu-­ku,  Hide  To  Rosanna................................................................................................28   1-­‐3.  CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................................................29   PART  II:    KARAOKE  AS  MUSICAL  PRACTICE/RESISTANCE .......................................................31   CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................................39   NOTES.........................................................................................................................................................41   BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................................................44   ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...........................................................................................................................45   和 文 抄 訳 .....................................................................................................................................46   Introduction Music has conventionally been considered independent of the political. The naïve belief in aesthetics in literature and its value inviolable from any political or social partisanship has, however, ceased to convince the contemporary readership by the turn of the century. Critical perspectives have established their home in literary theory, and now one cannot offer a good analysis of any literary work without critique, be it that of feminism, postcolonialism, disability theory, or other. Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality was published in 1991 and quickly became a sensation as well as quite a scandal in musicology, provoking controversies and conservative reactions.1 What McClary offered in her book was a series of musicological analyses but from a gender perspective, something that had never been presented in such a bold, straightforward and non-tangent way. She made it clear that, although it took longer for music analysts to acknowledge this, cultural representation in music, just like any cultural discourse such as literature and film, has influence on, as much as is influenced by, the societal ideologies of a given period of time. What McClary is specifically concerned with is the implications of gender schema in music and music theory. Drawing on some of her analytic methodologies presented in Feminine Endings, I will attempt in this paper to explore a possibility of application of her theory to nonwestern music, especially the genre called kayokyoku or popular music in Showa Japan. Through analysis of select kayokyoku repertories sung by female singers in Showa 40s (from 1965 to 1974), Part I will examine the relationship between woman and subjectivity (or woman and Otherness) and how it has been represented in kayokyoku by Japan’s popular music industry through structuring of narratives (e.g. closure and purge), censorship, foreclosure of gender deviance, and singers’ agency. Evaluating musical practice on the part of female professional singers is one thing, asking questions about music consumption on non-singer women’s part is quite another; and that shall be discussed in Part II, which is an attempt to illuminate the ways karaoke machine and its class-, gender-, and region-specific spread in Showa 40s offered non-singer women a place of resistance and negotiation through karaoke-singing. 2 Part I: Woman and Subjectivity in Kayokyoku The Freudian self is constructed as activity, possession of penis whereas the feminine is the object, vaginal passivity and castrated genitals.2 Thus females supposedly have penis envy, at whom males look and are led to the fear of castration. However, Judith Butler in her Bodies That Matter argues that “[c]astration could not be feared if the phallus were not already detachable, already elsewhere, already dispossessed,” and that the fear of castration is “the spectre of the recognition that it was always already lost, the vanquishing of the fantasy that it might ever have been possessed——the loss of nostalgia’s referent.”3 This fated failure of possession of the phallus on the part of both women and men, and thus the need of reiteration of sexed positions which conceals it, consequently give rise to the negative, misogynous view of the feminine position to which the phallus is attached. She is monstrous, excessive, and thus punishable whenever she seems to have the phallus,4 through the process of which sexed positions in the Symbolic secure themselves and the masculine assures itself of the status of “having the phallus.” In order for her to avoid the punishment, she has to endure the position of Other, the status of spectacle rather than spectator. This figure of the feminine position and punishable deviance from it is found not only within psychoanalytic texts but also in the arts, from literature to dance, painting to sculpture, and most important to our concern here, music. In Section 1-1, I will discuss the issues of identity formation enacted by narrative as well as musical structures of kayokyoku, primarily looking at how “feminine excess” is called for, squeezed and wrapped in “masculine rationality,” and purged for the sake of narrative closure and coherence. Harmony, melody, structure as well as lyrics will be taken into consideration. Then in 1-2, 3 I will examine the repercussions of female attempt at “having the phallus” in music performance, closely looking at the examples of such female singers as Mieko Hirota, Chiyo Okumura, and Rosanna from Hide To Rosanna. Before we begin, I must admit that, although the analytical framework which Susan McClary presented in Feminine Endings is by and large adopted and utilized throughout this paper, there are a few things in kayokyoku to which I do consider McClary’s theory inapplicable. Cadences, or positions of the final chord either on the strong beat (often equivalent to downbeat) or on the weak one (often equivalent to upbeat), are theorized in a highly gendered way and called masculine and feminine endings respectively.5 Masculine endings are considered “normal” and “rational,” whereas irrationality and abnormality, convenient for creating “more romantic styles” for embellishment, is supposed to be expressed by the feminine ones. Even though in most kayokyoku songs masculine endings prevailed, enka and kayokyoku singers had a little more freedom in controlling the ending note than their counterparts in classical, rock, rap or contemporary pop music. They were allowed to postpone the ending note for the length of a quaver or crotchet, sustain it for longer then written or cut it shorter, depending on what seemed to them to be the best way to conclude the song. Although their articulation of the ending note was a trained skill, it was singers themselves who decided, at each performance, for how long the ending note was postponed, or in other words, how far it deviated from the final chord, the position of cadence on which it was supposed to fall. Unique articulations, in other words, beautiful delays, of ending notes were highly praised. And interestingly, the enka and kayokyoku singers often times chose to bring forth the ending note on upbeat, undermining the dominance of harmony over melody and disavowing the gender implications of cadence. 4 Tonality of kayokyoku also needs to be taken into consideration. The mapping of major/minor triads onto masculine/feminine has been prevalent in western music theory,6 and most of the time, it has been understood in terms of hierarchy (masculine/feminine, natural/unnatural, and perfect/incomplete). Following this logic, one might argue that the prevailing popularity of major keys after the year 2000 in Japanese popular music, as well as the disappearance of the practice of deliberate ending-note/cadence misalignment in the course of time, is the aftermath of the masculine takeover of the place of female dominance, since popular music in Japan (including enka, kayokyoku, nyû-myûjikku [new music], folk music and J-pop music) up until the mid-90s was characterized by its strong tendency to favor minor keys. This proposition would retrospectively posit female prerogative in Showa Japan music. But isn’t that yet another Orientalist binarism that views the West and the Orient as masculine and feminine respectively? It seems to be too naïve to say that kayokyoku was somewhat female-oriented or a domain of ancient female prerogative, waiting only to be overcome by the western, modern masculinity. That does not mean that the laws of patriarchy existed in Japan in the exact same way as they did in the West, since it would also fail to do justice to non-western cultures if we assumed a universalizing effect of patriarchy that countries such as Japan also seem to suffer. We cannot disregard the western influence on Japanese cultures and academy throughout history, especially that on Japanese popular music which had been under way since the Meiji period. What I will attempt in the following is, therefore, not to employ the logic of eitheror to determine whether Japan is another western culture or a culture totally different from the West, but rather, to offer an understanding on how each musicological element (harmony, structure, melody and lyrics) in kayokyoku during Showa 40’s contributed to identity formation of the Self in song narratives, introducing the Other only to be purged, 5 through which a Self emerges. That “Self” does not always signify the protagonist of the lyrical story or the singer herself; in fact, the women (protagonist and singer) often seem to identify with the Other, that is, play the role of “feminine excess,” either repressed or foreclosed by “masculine rationality,” which guarantees and consolidates a male spectator’s identification with the Self. Note that song titles are written in italic; lyrics are put in double angle quotation marks «» and lines are separated by semi-colons; prolonged vowels in the Japanese language are indicated with a cap ˆ; a note half-step down is indicated with the word “flat” e.g. e-flat; a note half-step up is indicated with the sharp mark “#” e.g. e#; each chord in a chord progression is separated by slashes /; the chord name of “flat-five” is indicated as “¯5” e.g. Em7¯5; the chord name of “major” is omitted e.g. the C major chord is C, not CM; all the lyrics are translated by the author from Japanese to English; and, each song is divided into “sections” which contain a “passage” or “passages” e.g. in Help by the Beatles, «when I was younger … anybody’s help in any way» is a passage, repeated in «but now these days … I’ve opened up the doors», followed by another passage as they sing «help me if you can … won’t you please, please help me», the two of which comprise a whole section (the introduction «help! I need somebody … » can also be considered a section while at the same time being its only passage). 1-1. Feminine Excess Squeezed Between Masculine Rationality Shûchaku-Eki, Chiyo Okumura The most conventional tonal trajectory begins with the tonic key, travels through other keys, that is, conquers the “feminine” regions, and finally returns to tonic for closure.7 One 6 of the ways in which “feminine excess” is hinted and purged is to suggest a key modulation or enact one, then reject the second key and let tonic take over again. Chiyo Okumura’s Shûchaku-Eki (“Train Terminal”) was released in Showa 46. The song’s primary key is D minor, but in the middle passage on the words, «ichido hanashita ra; nido to tsukame-nai» (“once let go, it’ll never be back again”), the chord progression changes from the preceding Dm/Gm/Em7¯5/A7/Dm(/Dm7), which is quite conventional, to a more dramatic C7/F/D7/Gm progression, suggesting a modulation to D major. The accompanying melody to the section goes down to c at the same time as the introduction of C7 and, by the time F comes in, goes as high up as b-flat; it goes back down to d on D7, then drastically up to upper c. Then the melody gradually regains its stability on «ai to iu na-no atatakai kokoro no kagi wa» (“the key of the warm heart, called love”) in the second half of the passage where the chord progression also comes back to plainness and goes A7/B-flat/A7/Dm, which is followed by the exact same refrain as the beginning (Dm/Gm/Em7¯5/…) with the exact same melody that goes, again, quite conventionally, down the scale from dominant to tonic. That is the structure of each of the two sections of the song. Looking closely at the lyrics and melodies, one might notice that all melodies in the refrains (i.e. except those in the middle passages) end with the supertonic-to-tonic (e to d) shift which is one of the most conventional solution patterns, and those two notes are always accompanied by the conjugate word “verb-kuru” (“come to do verb”). Those who “come” are «kanashii onna» or “sad women” who «yoku nita» or “all look alike,” and their destination is the train terminal or “shûchaku-eki.” The verbs associated with “-kuru” are “to throw tears away” and “to escape from the past.” Characterized by this lyrical and melodic pattern, the refrain clearly shows the presence of the narrative protagonist or Okumura herself precisely at the train terminal, looking at those women who come the 7 same path as she did, and suppressing the explosive emotion, or “feminine excess,” enacted in the middle passage. Temporality plays a significant role here; it is only in the middle passage that Okumura sings about her past. This way, Okumura’s identity is supposed to be fixed at the station/present, utterly contrasted with the love-heart-key/past that in turn always gets overcome by the station/present in the refrain. In some sense, Okumura’s identity at the present seems to consolidate itself through the faint appearance of the Other, her past. That is true to some extent, but I would like to further consider the implication of the word “shûchaku” or “terminal.” Even though the protagonist/Okumura has her past and present, there is no futurity offered to her in the song narrative. In this sense, the train terminal is a metaphor for the dead-end status of her and other women’s life. If the Self that she acquires at the expense of the Other (her internal other), which is already self-destructive, is destined to have no future, no exit, but only offered a fixed identity as a “sad woman,” then, in relation to the male audience, she appears more like a domesticated Other than a standalone Self. If, as Irigaray claims, woman is a “lack,” only constructed as a smaller man with an incomparably smaller penis (clitoris) or a cavity to accommodate a penis in intercourse (vagina),8 then the protagonist/Okumura’s wholeness as a human being is alienated twice; she is reduced to the status of woman, which is also already a product of reductive construction from man. Chiyo Okumura’s Shûchaku-Eki is not alone in deploying this refrain-excess-refrain structure; in fact, this was the most popular musical structure in kayokyoku during its golden era, along with the A-(B-)chorus structure which, though, had yet to wait to flourish and prevail in the world of popular music in Japan in the seventies. Let us leave the latter for discussion in 1-2 and focus on the refrain-excess-refrain structure and its gender implications for now. 8 Among a large number of major hits in kayokyoku that deploy the refrain-excessrefrain structure are Kita-guni-yuki-de and Jetto Saishû-bin by Eiko Shuri, Niji-iro no Mizu-umi by Akiko Nakamura, Burû-raito (Bluelight) Yokohama by Ayumi Ishida, Kyoto no Koi by Yûko Nagisa, Tegami by Saori Yuki, Sayonara wa Dansu no Ato ni by Chieko Baishô, and Komacchau-na by Linda Yamamoto. These songs all contain a middle passage, often characterized by “feminine excess,” placed between refrains that are almost identical to one another in melody and chord progression. The structural layout is not the only thing they have in common, but also the temporal strategy of looking back and the placement of sexuality as a subject matter. Firstly, as we have seen in Okumura’s Shûchaku-Eki, a refrain is assigned the role of looking back at the excess, an emotional explosion, already sung and thus literally constituting the past, and offers a retrospective interpretation of it. This is not only lyrically expressed but also often musically demonstrated by using long notes, decrescendos, sudden reduction in volume, and other such devices. In Kyoto no Koi, for example, a deep ritardando is introduced between the excess and the refrain, and then, the refrain begins a tempo. Secondly, a middle passage, or “excess,” primarily serves to play a sexual or excessively bodily role in a song. In the following analysis of Sayonara wa Dansu no Ato ni, Tegami, Burû-raito Yokohama, and Komacchau-na, we will examine how these two features (temporality and sexuality) of the refrain-excess-refrain structure play a role in structural characterization of female identity in relation to sexuality. Sayonara wa Dansu no Ato ni, Chieko Baishô In Sayonara wa Dansu no Ato ni (“Save That Good-bye for After Dance”), Chieko Baishô sings about how the protagonist/Baishô anticipates a break-up yet still wishes to prolong the relationship for a little while (until the end of dance). The opening passage is 9 in a minor key, starting with a pick-up melody that goes up on tonic triad, but musical scenery drastically changes when the brass sound is drawn down and modulated to a major key, accompanied by the strings that run straight up on high tones and produce long notes, offering an image of heavenly delight. Although this first half of the middle passage, «dare-ni-mo makezu; fukaku ai-shite ta», might not sound as strong as one may expect from “feminine excess,” it is only a prelude to the very passionate, explosive line that follows on the words, «moeru sono me-mo sono te-mo; kore kiri ne», intensified by an almost petrifying crescendo and a tutti unison fortissimo on «kore kiri ne». The emotional explosion is, however, immediately cooled off and resolved by a three-crotchet-long silence, which is then followed by a refrain of the minor-key opening passage. Now, what role does this excess play, squeezed between the refrains? The lyrics are quite suggestive: «dare-nimo makezu; fukaku ai-shite ta; moeru sono me-mo sono te-mo; kore kiri ne» (“I was deeply in love with you; more than anybody; those burning eyes, that hand; they are gone”) and «hajimete kîta; yoru no sasayaki ga; tatoe mijikai yume demo; wasurenai» (“the first time I’d heard; such night-time whispers; even if they belong to my short dream; I will never forget”) in the middle passages from the first and second sections respectively. These passages are the only ones in which Baishô sings about the past, nor does she sing about sexuality in any other passages throughout the entire song. Sexual symbols such as “burning,” “eye,” “hand” and “nighttime whispers” are scattered all over in these passages, thus enacting “feminine excess” associated with sexuality.9 McClary cites Elaine Showalter and says, Over the course of the nineteenth century, psychiatrists obsessed over mechanisms of feminine dementia to the extent that madness came to be perceived tout court as feminine——even when it occurred in men.[note number omitted] Moreover, they came to perceive all women——even 10 apparently “normal” ones——as always highly susceptible to mental breakdown, precisely because of their sexuality.10 Here, Baishô’s past is depicted as sexual, “burning,” and sweet, while on the other hand, at the present, the protagonist retrospectively looks over the past as an anticipating, prepared “I”, aware of the fact that she will be alone somewhere tomorrow («asu wa dokoka de hitori de»). Her depicted “excessive” sexuality belongs to the past, and thus, discarded by the refrain as if the disheartened, no-win “I” were and should be the protagonist’s true self. She is supposed to be calm and only demanding a short-period prolongation of the relationship but not for long enough to bother the man in company. In the course of the song, the audience is kept reminded of Baishô’s sexuality only as something to be repressed, as the “madwoman” to be purged. Her temporary infatuation gets thrown away into the past, which allows us to voyeuristically take a quick look at the freak without having to “identify with the discourse of madness.[emphasis removed by author]”11 There is another freak show in the song, right in the middle, between the two sections where an instrumental performance is inserted. Judging from the lyrical line at the beginning of the second section, which starts a tempo, on the words, «sukoshi kakuteru wo chôdai; yotta-ra mata odori-ma-shô» (“give me a sip of that cocktail; let’s dance again when we are drunk” [author’s emphasis]), the relatively faster instrumental performance squeezed between the sections is the dance scene of Baishô and her soon-to-be-exboyfriend. Again, this interlude, hot and bright, is followed by the second section and, though inevitable as long as it is music in its nature, immediately becomes something of the (musical) past, to which the protagonist refers in saying, “let’s dance again.” This word, “again,” should probably be taken seriously in relation to futurity. Unlike Okumura in her Shûchaku-Eki, futurity seems to be promised to Baishô but as loneliness («asu wa dokoka de hitori de» or “tomorrow, I’ll be somewhere but alone”). But 11 this loneliness, which is supposed to belong to the future, gets postponed each time she begs for more dancing. It is as if the future—loneliness—would never come. While this seems to suggest a lack of ending, or that of a necessary narrative closure, thus slightly opening other future possibilities of Baishô’s life, it also seems to encapsulate Baishô in the status of dissatisfaction. Tegami, Saori Yuki A similar monologue is found in Saori Yuki’s Tegami. In the middle passages where she reaches the highest tones in the song, just like Baishô sings about her past sexual interactions, Yuki sings about her past, her intimate relationship with a man which is now lost, on the words, «futari-de sodate-ta; kotori-wo nigashi; futari-de kaita; kono e moyashimashô» (“this bird that the two of us raised; shall leave this room now; this picture the two of us drew; shall be burned now”) and «futari-de kazatta; rêsu-wo hazushi; futari-de aketa; mado-ni kagi-wo kake» (“this lace the two of us hung; shall be taken off now; this window that the two of us opened; shall be locked now”). Unlike the rest of the song, which consists of only simple and conventional chords such as Am, G and F, the middle passage has a complex chord progression of Dm/C/B-flat/Am/Dm/E7/F/E7. Note that the harmony deceptively modulates to D minor, but the melody stubbornly sticks with the scale of A minor. At the end of the passage, the vocal resolves to e, dominant of A minor, harmonized by the chord E7, v-seventh of A minor, making a “good” typical tension “appropriate” for the reintroduction of the refrain, which then takes an easily anticipated course of resolution to a, tonic of A minor, cadencing, as a matter of course, on Am at the end. Here, the key of D minor is introduced as a potential Other, yet only to be overcome by the resurrected A minor, the primary key of the song, as if that Other (the intimate relationship that the “two of us” used to have, which D minor seems to signify) was only a temporary infatuation and thus had to be purged. Although we can hear Yuki’s 12 high-tone death throe in the ending passage on the words, «namida-de tuzuri oeta; owakare-no tegami», the melody ends on tonic, accompanied by the v-i harmonic resolution, which marks and confirms her death in the status of purged Other, her self-sacrifice for the sake of narrative closure, just as implicated by the words, «namida-de tuzuri oeta; owakare-no tegami» or “inscribed and sealed by my tears; a farewell letter to you.” Burû-raito Yokohama, Ayumi Ishida No harmonic confusion, however, is found in Burû-raito Yokohama by Ayumi Ishida, even in the passages that seem to enact “feminine excess.” It sticks to conventions throughout the entire song, giving not a single hint of key modulation. The middle passage starts with iv (F#m), creates tension by v-seventh (G#7), and then resolves on i (C#m) at the beginning of the refrain. Otherness or a possibility of the emergence of Other, both on tonal and harmonic levels, is foreclosed. Moreover, Ishida sings in the middle passage, «arui-te-mo arui-te-mo; kobune-no yô-ni; watashi-wa yurete; yurete anata-no ude-no naka» (“no matter how far I walk, I walk; just like a small boat; I keep fluctuating, never stable; fluctuate and will end up in your arms”). This “I” asserts the instability of her gait and lack of self-control, hence the need of support from “you,” expressing and affirming the very degradation of Other as her position, excluded and foreclosed in the song narrative. This is the epitome of domesticated Other, hindered even from emerging as Other (emerging as Self is out of question) or creating any obstacle to the course of narrative. Freak shows are performed behind the bars, but for Ishida, the bars are so think that they block her like a wall. Komacchau-na, Linda Yamamoto Komacchau-na by Linda Yamamoto is probably the most telling of the role of narrative structure of music in forming, or ordering, of female identity. That is not because this song employs the refrain-excess-refrain structure most overtly among all the songs 13 aforementioned in the same sense that they do, but precisely because it shamelessly reveals the masculine desire to control and convert women from what purports to be a Self into what can only become an Other. It is not “feminine excess” that appears at the end of the middle passages, but a law, or laws in the plural. It is the law that prohibits a homosexual relationship to one’s mother. It is the law that orders her to couple with someone outside her family. The latter, widely known as incest taboo, combined with the taboo against homosexuality, produces melancholia (that is, being in denial of “the loss of an original love that […] fails to be resolved”12) and, subsequently, leads to incorporation of the lost love object and thus same-sexed gender identification.13 This psychoanalytic account of gender identification and constitution of the subject (gendered as such) is almost painfully portrayed in Yamamoto’s Komacchau-na. In the song, Yamamoto keeps singing «komacchau-na» or “I’m confused about what to do” about date offers and love letters she receives from men. But in each of the middle passages, she expresses her mixed feelings about them and shares with the audience the advice she has gotten from her mother. In the first section, she sings «ureshî yô-na; kowai yô-na; dokidoki shichau; watashi-no mune» (“kind of happy; kind of scared; uncontrollably pounding; is my heart”) and, in the second section, «ureshî yô-na; kowai yô-na; furue-te shimau; naze de-shô ne» (“kind of happy; kind of scared; my body is trembling; but why?”). The first second lines of each of these, depicting Yamamoto’s mixed feelings about men’s advances, are accompanied by a complex chord progression of A7/Dm/Cdim/E7, significantly unconventional compared to those in the rest of the song: an Am/E7/Am progression in the refrain, and a plain Am/C/Am/Dm/Am progression in the second half of the middle passage, with the melody ending on tonic, offering a temporary resolution. The second half of the middle passage is followed by the introduction of the mother’s advice, and the temporary resolution finally finds a home in the law that compels 14 Yamamoto to renounce her primary mother-child relation and find someone outside her family. For Butler, this is not simply a requirement for a deflection of desire, as it is in the case of a prohibited heterosexual union, that is, incest, but compels renunciation of both the (homosexual) desire and the object.14 Following the temporary resolution, Yamamoto sings, «mama-ni kîta-ra; nan’ni-mo iwazu-ni; waratte iru dake» (“I asked my mama; but she didn’t say a word; only giving me a big smile”) and «mama-ni kîta-ra; hajime-wa min’na; sônan desutte» (“I asked my mama; but she said, this is something; that everyone goes through”). “Don’t worry” and “No need to komacchau” are the fundamental message that the mother sends to her daughter. Any confusion, unfamiliarity, and dread—all things that make her tremble and feel “kind of happy but kind of scared” at the same time—must go away. Having heard this advice as Yamamoto’s audience, who could so stubbornly read the subsequent «komacchau-na» in the same way as they have interpreted the same words in the opening passage? She is now a woman, a sexual object, an Other. She grows up through this patriarchal coming-of-age narrative, that is, for women, a slut-making story. Komacchau-na is an announcement of newly-available sexual object to the world. Yamamoto may have really been confused or komacchau; she may have truly been a little girl so pre-discursive that she couldn’t make nothing precious of men’s advances, but she is taught to overcome fear and dread, and to appreciate the male gaze that views her as a sexual object. Ironic as it may sound, her “komacchau-na” becomes only an expression of, or even a token for, her appreciation. Komacchau-na offers a story of female initiation into the discursive field of vision. It deploys, not a faint appearance of Other or a complete foreclosure of it, but rather, a grotesquely portrayed initiation of a girl into the feminine position in the Symbolic order. As a side note, though similarly important, I would like to mention some of the extramusical consequences of the initiation; that is, Yamamoto herself as a singer cannot 15 seem to escape the female position in the Symbolic order even after she stopped performing Komacchau-na. After six years of absence in the top-end of show business, Linda Yamamoto came back on television with completely different looks and fashion style——sexy and scanty—, now enacting the typical “slut” persona who clings to the status of sexual object and cannot have enough attention from men. Her Dô-nimo Tomaranai (Showa 47) and Nerai Uchi (Showa 48) marked her revival and received more than a few nation-wide music awards. But what is this game? If one’s stage performance pleases and appeals to the (supposedly) male audience15 and, in return, she enjoys the fame and applause, does that constitute a fair, win-win case? I seriously doubt that. Culturally available positions for women in the Symbolic order are, in fact, scarce. For example, psychologist Mary Pipher in her bestseller Reviving Ophelia says that “it is impossible to be both feminine and adult,” and introduces psychologist I. K. Broverman’s study in which both male and female subjects were asked to check off “adjectives describing the characteristics of healthy men, healthy women and healthy adults” and the results showed that “while people describe healthy men and healthy adults as having the same qualities, they describe healthy women as having quite different qualities than healthy adults.”16 Pipher continues and says, While the rules for proper female behavior aren’t clearly stated, the punishment for breaking them is harsh. Girls who speak frankly are labeled as bitches. Girls who are not attractive are scorned. The rules are reinforced by the visual images in soft- and hard-core pornography, by song lyrics, by casual remarks, by criticisms, by teasing and by jokes. The rules are enforced by the labeling of a woman like Hillary Rodham Clinton as a “bitch” simply because she’s a competent, healthy adult. [on the same page] 16 If an adult is invariably male, and if a male is invariably adult, then he who is male is genderless by definition. Judith “Jack” Halberstam argues that “[w]e could say that tomboyism is tolerated as long as the child remains prepubescent,” and that “[g]ender conformity is pressed onto all girls, not just tomboys, and this is where it becomes hard to uphold the notion that male femininity presents a greater threat to social and familial stability than female masculinity.”17 Halberstam maintains that […] unlike male femininity, which fulfills a kind of ritual function in male homosocial cultures, female masculinity is generally received by heteroand homo-normative cultures as a pathological sign of misidentification and maladjustment, as a longing to be and to have a power that is always just out of reach.18 Male identification with femininity is, at least in show business, widely accepted, from Shakespearian plays to kabuki, campy male celebrities to drag queen shows. As long as they are expected to return to the region of maleness, or have recourse to it whenever their female-identification is threatened, they are allowed access to femininity. In other words, femininity presented in impersonation, or more precisely, femininity presented in a way that never allows the audience to question the impersonator’s “real” (male) gender, is tolerated. Female identification with masculinity, on the other hand, is either pathologized and harshly punished, or simply overlooked even in the most explicit cases like Bond’s boss, M, in Goldeneye (1995).19 Men can be adults, men can even be women, assuming that their maleness is not questioned——but women are never fully adult or men. That is the axiomatic imperative in our culture, hence scarcity of women’s positions in the Symbolic order. No wonder harsh misogynous criticisms arise when a woman ascends to a position like presidency, medical profession, and literary authorship. 17 Now let us turn our attention back to Linda Yamamoto and consider her survival rate; would she have successfully returned to show business and made her way toward stardom as she did, if she had still been komacchau about the male gaze directed at her? Or in other words, if she had not yet renounced the mother-child relation and her attachment to her mother, that is, if she had not yet conformed to the Law of the Father, would the general public have still celebrated the fact that she was still singing? The field of vision requires one to be symbolically specifiable in order for her to be visible; otherwise, she will stay unnamed and unheard as if she were an incomprehensible “schizo,” a term which does not mean anything but “everything irrational.” Identity politics against racism, sexism, and heterosexism has emphasized the importance of work towards social acceptance and legitimization of the (racial/sexual) differences, thus demanding a rise of their status as black, female, or queer. But how could we naïvely assume that we all identify with the image culturally assigned to us? When you are not comfortable with the positions in the Symbolic order available to you, is it possible to single out the reason, or reasons, why you are uncomfortable with them? Is it because your options are too degraded? Is it because you want more options? Or, is it because you do not feel that you are any of the options in the first place? Akiko Shimizu cites Lisa Walker and says, The visibility at issue here implies social or cultural visibility: ‘To be invisible is to be seen but not heard, or to be erased entirely——to be absent from cultural consciousness’ ([Walker], 1). As is evident in this very sentence, however, the actual visibility of the difference has been assumed as given in this demand for visibility. To be visible is still to be seen, as 18 black or as queer, and the question is how to redefine or subvert the norm that refuses to legitimate or approve the difference that is visible.20 As a passing woman, no matter what biological sex or gender identity she may have, one is confined to the image, or the name, woman, in the field of vision and the Symbolic order. I do not consider it too far-fetched to think retrospectively of Linda Yamamoto’s queer possibility. For we have seen that she could have resisted the Law of the Father. The song showed us, covertly, that she could have really been a pre-discursive being, from which she could have taken any life course if there had not been the Law so strict and threatening. And what if she still feels that the image, or the name, woman, does not belong to her, yet is desperately in need of it in order to continue to be a viable being? How can she survive that? Let us leave this question about how to survive, or how women in Showa 40s survived, such forceful identification with the feminine position in the Symbolic order for later discussion in Part II, and be satisfied with the fact that we have demonstrated how the refrain-excess-refrain structure of kayokyoku played a significant role in female identity formation and how sexuality was strongly associated with the feminine position, the status of Other, to which females were supposed to conform. 1-2. Female Attempt at “Having the Phallus”: Ejaculatory Women and Condoms Although the refrain-excess-refrain was the most frequently used musical structure in kayokyoku, the A-(B-)chorus structure also grew popular during Showa 40s and finally became the successor. A vast majority of today’s J-pop songs employ this structure. Mieko 19 Hirota’s Ningyô-no Ie (Showa 44=1969) and Chiyo Okumura’s Koi-no Dorei (Showa 44) were among the first kayokyoku songs that deployed this structure, though Koi-no Dorei lacks passage B. From which culture the A-(B-)chorus structure originates is uncertain for there are numerous old musical pieces both from the West and Japan, as well as other regions in Asia, that have their musical structure organized as such.21 My intention is, therefore, not to speak of possible western cultural import around Showa 40s, but to focus on the new characteristic made possible by this structure, namely, “chorus,” which is supposed to convey the most important message to the audience. Before the invention of “chorus,” musical pieces were typically composed of a set of phrases of almost equal degrees of intensity, making it difficult to determine which phrase was dominant. One might say “chorus” is similar to what is called “motif” in classical music in that they both get repeated throughout the piece. But what was new about the A-(B-)chorus structure was how the audience’s desire is stimulated, aroused, and directed towards the chorus by the preceding passages (A and B). What tone comes next, what harmony resonates next, and what melody proceeds next are easily anticipated, yet a complete fulfillment of desire on the part of an audience is postponed. Their desire for expected musical articulations gets only partially satisfied in the course of the song. Musical elements in each passage not only give the audience part of what they want, deferring satisfaction of the desire already activated, but also give them other materials which stimulate them further and make them desire even more. This painful manipulation of frustration finally ends at the breaking point, where desire is about to explode. It is the chorus passage that performs this function. It gives absolute satisfaction effortlessly, with the help of preceding passage A, which has introduced the audience to the world of the song, and passage B, which has stimulated their desire to an 20 extent that they can no longer hold it and will take any lavishly ornamented chorus with pleasure. Here, male-centrism can easily be detected. The orgasmic pattern employed by the desire-device of the A-(B-)chorus structure is invariably ejaculatory. It reflects the general, and thus male-centered, view of sex that everything is designed for and leads to an ejaculatory goal. If such a desire-device is contaminated, or inseminated, by the load of male motivation, and if the A-(B-)chorus structure in kayokyoku is no exception, then what are the implications for such female singers as Mieko Hirota, Chiyo Okumura and Rosanna (Hide To Rosanna) whose major hits employed the ejaculatory structure of desirestimulation? Ningyô-no Ie, Mieko Hirota Ningyô-no Ie is one of the best-selling records throughout the history of Japanese popular music. The singer, Mieko Hirota, whose singing skills are still widely respected as highly as the deceased enka legend, Hibari Misora, is still performing at concerts and live shows in her sixties. She is often referred to as a diva, and still has a huge female fan base across more than a few generations. Her styles, both musical and extramusical, attracted many female admirers.Yet her Ningyô-no Ie was one of the first, and most explicit, female expressions of ejaculatory pleasure in kayokyoku. The entire song, on the scale of G# minor, consists of such conventional chords as G#m, C#m, F#, E, D#, G#, B, and B-flat, and tonality never deviates from tonic. All melodic phrases subscribe to harmony and never create a single dissonance. Banality, if you may, is a good description of the song from a musicological perspective. The song nevertheless gives a very dramatic impression, precisely because it deploys the A-(B)chorus structure, enacting the ejaculatory tension-release form of desire. As the song progresses from A to B, and then to the chorus, the number of high tones increases, and 21 finally, Hirota reaches the highest tone of the song, upper c#, at the end of the chorus passage. There is no doubt that Ningyô-no Ie is an ejaculatory piece which stimulates male desire and fulfills it at the end. Hirota’s expertise, however, primarily originates in jazz music and cover versions of western pop music.22 Although her cover versions did fairly well in terms of record sales, Ningyô-no Ie was beyond compare. If an incomparable amount of attention and admiration is given to a song that stubbornly conforms to conventions and successfully stimulates and fulfills ejaculatory desire, we now must abandon the aesthetic postulation that music is value-free and should be evaluated solely on the basis of beauty. Now, let us consider for a moment a possibility of emergence of Other in Ningyôno Ie. Does this piece only portray and, when performed, reinforce sexism just because it complies with male-centric conventions from start to end? Is this another Burû-raito Yokohama in which Otherness is foreclosed and hindered even from emerging as an Other? That is not true. After so much tension created by the last two choruses, where the song approaches its climax, the tension is finally released and the overloaded desire fulfilled, and the strings start to play the outro. In the outro, the melody starts on g#, which is yet again quite conventional, but takes a trajectory down to lower b, then up to upper c#, and finally makes a landing on a#, creating a dissonance with the cadencing G#m. Not only evident in this dissonance between harmony and melody, it is confirmed by the selfclashing G#madd9 played by the acoustic guitar on, to our surprise, an upbeat (second beat), making itself a rare occurrence of feminine cadence in the entire genre. “Too little an appearance,” one might say. Granted, it is possible to view this lastminute emergence of Other as having little, if any, effect on the song narrative, but I would like to offer here a different reading of it. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” offers a post-colonial reading of 22 Christphine, a character in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. A rebellious native woman, Christphine, living in Dominica during the era of colonialism, leaves the narrative saying, “Read and write, I don’t know. Other things I know.” For Spivak, this is the weakness and the strength of the novel.23 When a subject discovers an “other” and understands it as such, he or she that the other is has always already been incorporated into the dominant discourse, only to serve as a convenient tool with which the subject consolidates its own identity. Christphine, on the other hand, Spivak argues, by leaving the narrative, suggests that there is always residue, an outside to discourse or a given text.24 Drawing on Spivak’s critical reading of Christphine, I would like to argue that, though consistently subscribing to conventions and showing utter indifference to Otherness including the bodies of Hirota herself and other musicians who performed the song, who only seem to function as a transparent medium of delivery of the written music to the audience, Ningyô-no Ie, in calling for a strong dissonance at the very end, finally reveals that there is so much left untouched by such conventional expressions, bringing into light a peripeteia, which mercilessly parodies everything that has been played out. Note that Ningyô-no Ie literally translates as “A Doll’s House,” the exact same title as the 1879 Henrik Ibsen play (originally entitled Et dukkehjem) in which Nora Helmer, a lawyer’s wife, tired of and disappointed by her husband who treats her only as his doll to play with, decides to leave the household in order to become a whole human being. Although the lyrical story of Hirota’s Ningyô-no Ie significantly differs from Ibsen’s screenplay, it is not impossible to interpret the last-minute dissonance in Ningyô-no Ie as indicating a decision that the protagonist/Hirota makes at last, a decision to become a whole human being. Let me ask, however; do we really think that a woman could have possibly enacted a perfect ejaculation? Would it have been culturally and socially acceptable for Hirota to musically achieve an orgasm and, by doing so, exercise ideal, textbook ejaculation, in a 23 culture where any female attempt at “having the phallus” is either punished or overlooked as if nothing happened, if there had not been a dissonance at the end of the song? Wouldn’t it have been considered female invasion into the masculine region, and so, wasn’t that exactly why there had to be a dissonance, a “feminine” incompleteness, at the end, just like a boy child is taught to wear condoms25 because he is not yet mature enough to inseminate? Butler asks in her Bodies That Matter; when Lacan repeatedly insists that the phallus is not a penis, why is it that the penis is always “the privileged referent to be negated”?26 She then argues, If the phallus must negate the penis in order to symbolize and signify in its privileged way, then the phallus is bound to the penis, not through simple identity, but through determinate negation. If the phallus only signifies to the extent that it is not the penis, and the penis is qualified as that body part that it must not be, then the phallus is fundamentally dependent upon the penis in order to symbolize at all. Indeed, the phallus would be nothing without the penis. […] The question, of course, is why it is assumed that the phallus requires that particular body part to symbolize, and why it could not operate through symbolizing other body parts. [on the same page] [emphasis preserved] There is no reason displacement of the phallus is impossible. For Butler, the privileged status of the phallus as a signifier itself is indeed performatively constituted through discourse such as Lacan’s.27 The phallus is, therefore, transferrable and thus reterritorializable, which is precisely why the phallus has to be performatively defended and kept “always just out of reach”28 for women; otherwise, the classic proposition that men are to “have the phallus” whereas women are to “be the phallus” will be subverted. Hence, a condom for Mieko Hirota was necessary. 24 Koi-no Dorei, Chiyo Okumura In 2008, thirty-nine years after Koi-no Dorei was released, Chiyo Okumura told the general public that she had hated to perform the song because of its extremely sexist lyrics.29 She also told that when she had begun performing the song on television, a few men had started to stalk her near her residence. This certainly illustrates how difficult and risky it was for a female singer to be and survive in Japanese show business during Showa 40s. As demonstrated in Section 1-1 on pages 16 and 17, positions in the Symbolic order available to women are way more limited than those available to men. Women who strive for transcendence, attempt to take forms not “appropriate” for those in feminine positions, are sanctioned. As Halberstam says that “[g]ender conformity is pressed onto all girls, not just tomboys,”30 those who confine themselves to the feminine positions within the Symbolic order are also kept frightened by the threat of sanction. By “sanction,” I mean more than just social sanction where, as Pipher says, one is labeled as a “bitch” or is scorned for unattractiveness.31 The kind of sanction that I have in mind is the risks that accompany such an escape from the Symbolic order. Judith Butler in her Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative argues that To move outside the domain of speakability is to risk one’s status as a subject. To embody the norms that govern speakability in one’s own speech is to consummate one’s status as a subject of speech.32 [emphasis removed] One needs to be symbolically specifiable in order to speak and make sense. For Shimizu, as we have seen, positions are forcefully assigned to you according to the way you look. By resisting the positions that claim to belong to you, you will bring your status as a subject of speech at the brink. By resisting the feminine positions all together, your speech 25 will become the “ramblings of the asocial, the rantings of the ‘psychotic’.” [on the same page] A “madwoman” is what you will become. Drawing on Butler’s account for the subject of speech, the following discussion will deal with the ways that Chiyo Okumura’s Koi-no Dorei was censored, and what implications it has in relation to Okumura’s agency, or a lack thereof. Just like most of the pieces that we have so far explicated, Koi-no Dorei is, in its musical structure, governed by the male-centered conventions that foreclose the Other. Just like Ningyô-no Ie by Mieko Hirota up until the very end, Koi-no Dorei follows the musical conventions from start to finish. The entire song is in E minor, never deviating from the primary key, except for one occasion where, at the very end of the chorus, the chord progression goes B7/C7/Bm/Em, creating a slight unconformity by b-flat (or, flat-ninth) on C7. This irregularity, however, is an occurrence within the context of chromatic accidentals: b on B7, b-flat on C7, b on Bm, and then b on Em. Meanwhile, all melodic phrases are limited within the region of the E minor scale, with no accidentals. The A-chorus structure of this song enacts an even easier process toward ejaculation by introducing the audience to the world of the song in Passage A, and then, immediately taking them to the higher region on the words, «dakara itsumo soba-ni oitene; jama shinaikara; warui toki-wa dôzo butte-ne; anata-gonomi-no anata-gonomi-no; on’na-ni naritai» (“so please let me be near you all the time; I won’t interrupt; just hit me whenever I am bad; the kind of girl you like, the kind of girl you like; that’s what I want to be”). As you can clearly see, the lyrics are, in fact, of an extremely sexist nature as Okumura herself explains. The music and the lyrics, combined together, successfully announce the protagonist/Okumura’s availability for easy sexual intercourse, a kind of sex that does not require foreplay or tension, in which there’s no need for holding back—— ultimately, sex so convenient for males that the only requirement is that he ejaculate and 26 achieve an orgasm. She is constituted as a masturbator, whose very existence only serves men for ejaculatory purpose. The song became a huge hit, probably to the extent that more than a few men were convinced that she would masturbate them and stalked her. But that year’s Kô-haku Utagassen, an annual music show on New Year’s Eve broadcast by Japan Broadcasting Corporation, or NHK, refused to air her performance of Koi-no Dorei on the grounds that the lyrics violated the NHK internal ethic codes. Instead, Okumura did a performance of Koi Dorobô, one of the other two songs in her koi-trilogy released in the same year. It is, of course, possible to view the prohibition as merely a matter of lyrical contents, but it is nevertheless not impossible to probe further. Koi Dorobô, unlike Koi-no Dorei, does not employ the ejaculatory A-(B-)chorus structure, and thus, there is no orgasmic part in the song. The piece consists of two different passages but it is in the first passage that Okumura reaches the highest tones, and the second passage is filled with significantly low tones. Tonality is also ambiguous and it is rather difficult to determine whether the song’s primary key is C major or A minor. Granted, Koi Dorobô does not seem to fall into either category, the refrain-excess-refrain or the A-(B-)chorus structure, and the tonal ambiguity seems to undermine the male-centric conventions in music; nevertheless, we must ask, why so “feminine”? How do we account for this sudden gender transmutation without suspicion that it was a form of degradation, or in other words, a form of castration? Despite Okumura’s status as a masturbator, she is at the same time the one to initiate the act and perform the very ejaculatory practice. She enacts and represents ejaculation, or put more fearlessly, she is ejaculation. Then, isn’t it possible to argue that female ejaculation was so threatening to certain people that it had to be censored, rather than that the prohibition was solely based upon the lyrical contents? 27 Let me clarify at the moment what exactly it is that Okumura was forcibly deprived of. The issue at stake is two-fold; (1) Okumura’s performance of female ejaculation was censored, and (2) the status of female ejaculation itself is a product of foreclosure. A distinction must be drawn between censorship and foreclosure. For Butler, censorship repressively works against a subject’s will after the constitution of the subject, while foreclosure tacitly does exactly that——constituting of the subject of speech.33 Note that, despite NHK’s decision not to broadcast the performance of Koi-no Dorei, the song sold more than one million copies, and hence Okumura’s fame. We would be hallucinating if we focused on the prohibition on her television performance and deflected our attention from Okumura’s aversion to the song. What I am trying to show is quite similar to the point I made in Section 1-1 on page 8; Okumura is alienated twice. The lyrical story of Koi-no Dorei is where Okumura is incarcerated, nonetheless it is the position offered to her as a place to speak. Incarceration was the condition for her speakability, since one always needs to be subjected to power in order to become a subject. But when her performance turned out to be uncontrollably masculine and to enact supposedly “masculine” ejaculation, it was censored. “[T]here is no other way for women to assume the phallus except,” says Butler, “in its most killing modalities.”34 What that implies is that, quite ironically, what Butler calls “the monstrous ascent into phallicism” is not as difficult to practice as conventionally expected. It probably happens everyday, and it is always unpredictable, thus always creating a fearful and obsessive incentive on the male part to by all means have women remain castrated, or apply a condom over the feminine phallus. Ai wa Kizutsuki-yasu-ku, Hide To Rosanna In Ai wa Kizutsuki-yasu-ku, Rosanna is granted access to the domain of “masculine” ejaculation, only on the condition that she is in company with Hide, her male companion. The A-chorus structure begins in a minor key, the first line of which is initiated by Rossana, 28 then repeated and closed by Hide. This to and fro lasts throughout passage A, and even continues into the chorus where Rossana sings, «yomigaeru hibi» or “those days arise again,” which is then overlapped by Hide’s phrase, «yomigaeru ai» or “the love arises again” on the same melody. In the bar preceding the chorus, a bright brass sound beautifully leads the song to the parallel major. Then the chorus, delightfully illuminated, proceeds to Hide’s and Rossana’s unisons, cadencing on tonic on the words, «soshite musubare-ta» or “and then, we united,” closing the narrative story by suggesting a sexual union between the two singers. The prohibition on female ejaculation, though forcibly applied to Hirota and Okumura, is magically annulled in the case of Rossana. But I suggest that it was the presence of Hide, a male, who is considered the “original” possessor of the phallus, that voided the Law of the Father. As long as the one who has the phallus brings resolution to what a woman has initiated, that is, as long as he concludes each and every move that she makes in their foreplay (passage A), and as long as she is not alone in achieving an orgasm, the Law of the Father seems to make it an exception. 1-3. Conclusion Just because we have been looking at the refrain-excess-refrain structure and the A-(B)chorus structure, does not mean that all kayokyoku songs performed by female singers during Showa 40s necessarily employed either of the two. For instance, as we have seen, Koi Dorobô has no refrain or ejaculatory process leading up to ejaculation. In Futari-de Osake-wo (Showa 49), on the other hand, Michiyo Azusa successfully enacts an ejaculatory orgasm without being wrenched at the end, being censored——in other words, without condoms on her part——, or being in company with a man——or, put more 29 figuratively though precisely, without condoms on that man’s part. But Michiyo Azusa was unmistakably a new phenomenon. Since the mid-70s, as the A-(B-)chorus structure began to reign over kayokyoku, aidoru(idol)-kayokyoku (“idol” was the term referring to young television personalities, mostly female, admired for their attractiveness), and J-pop, more and more female singers settled into the domain of “masculine” ejaculation to the extent that the domain became no longer masculine (contagion successful!). But that is another story, which probably needs a full investigation before I write anything about it in this paper. Putting aside Michiyo Azusa and songs like Koi Dorobô, one might still feel that there should be some comparison between female singers and their male counterparts in Showa 40s, to defend our proposition that, as we have seen, the two typical music structures in kayokyoku played a role in female identification, or “misidentification” and its prevention. Now consider it done. Kazuo Funaki, Yukio Hashi, and Teruhiko Saigô were among the most popular young male singers who performed during Showa 40s. The three of them together were fondly called Gosan-ke (“Big Three”). Interestingly, most of their songs, with only few exceptions, deployed the A-B structure: no chorus, no refrain. Even in Hoshi-no Furamenko, which was among the few organized in the refrain-excess-refrain structure, Teruhiko Saigô refuses to let the refrain close the song and aggressively takes over on the words, «hoshino furamenko», where the orchestra suddenly halts and only follows Saigô’s deeply ritardando vocals. Now, why was the same true for similarly famous, young and talented singers who just happened to be female? How do we account for countless examples in female kayokyoku which we have been explicating, and which do not seem to be the case for male kayokyoku, unless we see it as a form of sexism, at least in effect and affect, if not in intention? 30 PART II: Karaoke As Musical Practice/Resistance The two-fold alienation of woman singers is, in summary, confinement of them to the feminine positions in the Symbolic order and the status of such positions as contaminating, a threat to the purity of the phallus to which only men are granted access. As I have promised in the previous chapter, Part I, I would like to discuss the ways in which women, particularly non-singer women, in Showa 40 survived such forceful identification with the feminine positions in the Symbolic order. According to Judith Butler’s account of subjectivity and agency, foreclosure, in drawing a line between the speakable and the unspeakable, is a productive form of power. By “productive,” she means it constitutes “the domain of the sayable within which I begin to speak at all,”35 the domain to which one remains confined as long as she or he strives to hold on to the status as a subject of speech. Akiko Shimizu’s argument of visibility and subjectivity, unlike Butler’s understanding of the sensational bodily ego as playing a significant role in the formation of the bodily ego, regards the visual bodily ego as doing exactly that.36 Shimizu then moves on to her argument of mimicry: […] the visible body comes into being only as that which is seen by the gaze, or more precisely, as formed on the image/screen that mediates between the gaze and the ‘I’. Since neither the gaze itself, nor the cultural image/screen, belong to the ‘I’, this body, formed and caught in the scopic field, never ceases to stand in a somewhat alienating way for the ‘I’. It induces what I called a centrifugal identification, where the ‘I’ is driven to perceive itself as this visible body on the image/screen, and as a result, is defined by and confined within the socio-cultural meanings that form and 31 sustain the image. Though we might find the images alienating and disturbing, we cannot just put them aside and go on to live as something else: we have to survive with the body and its alterity.37 These arguments clearly illustrate the misalignment of the body onto the subject. Visual representation of the body is typically loaded with intricately fabricated socio-cultural associations of gendered and racialized images with the body. One might feel that she or he is wrongfully assigned a gender or race, but she or he can never escape the Symbolic order that produces such cultural imperatives without risking her or his life as a speakable and/or visible subject. Now, for the sake of our discussion of music, let us consider the implications of such misalignments for those who sing. For one always needs to be physically present on a stage, be it one at a concert hall, a studio, a shower stall, or a karaoke bar, in order to sing, her or his body, a corporeal materiality, is a fundamental condition for singability. This necessary presence of one’s own body seems to be both fragility and recalcitrance. It is fragile in the sense that one’s musical performance is always interpreted in relation to her or his corporeal materiality, especially that of a visual nature, which is always already gendered.38 With the aid of lyrical contents, the audience will most likely be convinced that there must be no immune response occurring in your body, and thus, what you sing and what you sing about accurately describe how you feel. On the other hand, the necessity of one’s own body in musical performance is recalcitrant in the sense that each performance is a restaging of the distance between the image represented by music and the “I” who sings, an accusation of the misalignment. Since music can never stand on its own but always needs a medium that communicates it, be it a singer, a musician, an amplifier, a compact disc, or a microphone, it is necessarily vulnerable to changes of contexts. And when contexts differ, so do singers, musicians, audiences, instruments, equipment, speaker and microphone qualities, as well 32 as meanings attached to cultural images. The notion of originality must be relinquished, for a place of origin cannot easily be detected when it comes to music performance; in fact, during Showa 40s, it was becoming increasingly difficult to demarcate the professional from the amateur.39 Yes, without a doubt, what I am trying to mean by “survival” of non-singer women in Showa 40s is exactly related to the second point that I just made: corporeal recalcitrance in music performance against the Law of the Father. But first, let us look at the ways in which sexism was represented and reinforced in music performance of non-singer women. Then, we will proceed to consider a possibility of subversion taking place precisely within their performance. Let me remind you that the title of this chapter is “Karaoke As Musical Practice/Resistance,” and that the aim of this paper is to illuminate the ways karaoke machine and its class-, gender-, and region-specific spread in Showa 40s offered nonsinger women a place of resistance and negotiation through karaoke-singing. For that reason, I must leave for future investigations questions regarding other activities of consumption such as watching music shows on television, buying records and CDs, reading about music and taking guitar lessons, although I suppose that it is unquestionably important and absolutely not impossible work to point out rebellious aspects of such activities. Before the spread of karaoke machine, no one who had no skills in musical instruments could participate in music performance except a cappella or at festivities. The most accessible social setting for those who did not have musical skills themselves yet wanted to enjoy music performance was nighttime entertainment businesses such as pubs, discos, and what is called sunakku (“snack”)40. Nagashi, or strolling guitarists/singers, 33 would come and go. Live performance by bands was one of the luxurious features of expensive bars. But ordinary people only listened and were excluded from performance. It was karaoke machine in Showa 40s that made it possible for people without musical skills to actually participate in music performance. Granted, even after the spread of karaoke, non-singer women, when they did musical performance, were not any freer than professional female singers from rules and restraints. Just like Chiyo Okumura, who had her Koi-no Dorei censored by NHK, there were songs that non-singer women could not sing at karaoke. It is not that there were explicit rules prohibiting them from singing particular songs, but women knew what songs they should sing and what songs would bring forth sanctions when performed. Among the kayokyoku pieces that we have discussed in this paper, singable ones are Kyôto-no Koi, Ai wa Kizutsuki-yasu-ku, Tegami, Burû-raito Yokohama, Komacchau-na, and Shûchaku-Eki. On the other hand, Kita-guni-yuki-de, Jetto Saishû-bin, Nijiiro-no Mizu-umi, Ningyô-no Ie, and Koi-no Dorei were unsingable.41 What these unsingable pieces have in common is powerful high-tone vocals and energetic orchestration. They also typically employed the ejaculatory A-(B-)chorus structure (though not in Nijiiro-no Mizu-umi), and some of them depicted women who get past a break-up and decide to move on (Kitaguni-yuki-de and Jetto Saishû-bin). This kind of “strong woman” image, however, never shows up in the unsingable pieces, which, instead, depicted precisely the followings: a woman who mourns her ex-partner to the extent that she wishes to die (Kyôto-no Koi); a woman who has been through a painful relationship with a man to the extent that they consider to kill themselves together (Ai wa Kizutsuki-yasu-ku); a woman who cares so much about her ex-partner and his future, but still wishes to get back together (Tegami); a woman who rejoices in her man’s arms (Burû-raito Yokohama); a woman who learns to appreciate date offers and love letters (Komacchau-na); and a woman who cannot get past a break-up and still 34 sorrows (Shûchaku-Eki). What this style of narrativization of female characters in kayokyoku tells us is that a song was singable when it served the function of pleasing the male audience, whereas it was perceived as unsingable when it threatened them with such phallic devices as magnificent vocal skills and portrayals of strong women. Now, the question is whether not only professional performances by female singers but also amateur karaoke-singing by non-singer women conformed to the Law of the Father, and thus perpetuated and reinforced sexism. That is true to some extent, as Judith Butler suggests: […] those rules that govern the intelligibility of speech […,] “decided” prior to any individual decision, are precisely the constraining conditions which make possible any given decision. […] One decides on the condition of an already decided field of language, […]42 But Butler continues: […] but this repetition does not constitute the decision of the speaking subject as a redundancy. The gap between redundancy and repetition is the space of agency. [on the same pages] Then, what is the kind of agency we can find in karaoke-singing by non-singer women? Before we rush into an easy answer,43 let us share a little bit of background information. It is not true that, as soon as karaoke machine began to be installed in nighttime entertainment establishments, everyone quickly gained access to singing. There were class, age and, most importantly, gender gaps. Customers were mostly middle- or upper-class men in their thirties, forties, or fifties. Women, on the other hand, were, for the most part, lower- or lower-middle working class “girls” in their late teens, twenties, thirties, and 35 occasionally, forties. Those women not employed by the house were either male customers’ “lovers” or employed elsewhere in the nighttime entertainment and/or sex industry, and sometimes both. This demographic figure is suggestive of the exclusion of wives, mothers, and daughters from karaoke-singing. Those who had access to karaoke machine were not housewives, full-time students, or career women.44 They were women rather marginalized and financially disadvantaged, working in the nighttime entertainment and/or sex industry and/or having extramarital relationships. They were outside of the familial union, the most highly regarded sort of relations. Unlike wives, mothers, and daughters, these women’s intimate relationships with men, mostly male customers and/or their “lovers,” were of a temporary nature. In Showa 50, Miyuki Nakajima in her Azami-jô no Rarabai (“Lullaby of Lady Thistle”) sang, «haru-wa nano-hana; aki ni-wa kikyô; soshite watashi-wa itsumo; yoru saku azami» (“Coles in spring; bellflowers in autumn; and I am always; the thistle that blossoms at night”). Also in 2004, a bijuaru-kei45 band called Shido sang, «nichiyô-bi no on’na-ni-wa; tôtê nare-nai» (“to become a woman of Sunday; is literally just a dream”) in their Doyô-bi No On’na, or “Woman of Saturday.” Those non-singer women granted access to karaoke-singing were Lady Thistle, women of Saturday. That permission itself was given on the grounds that they were not women of Sunday, ones in the familial, and thus permanent, union with a man as his wife, mother, or daughter. When it was women like this, economically, socially, and culturally marginalized, who had the privilege to sing karaoke, we can no longer view it as a privilege. It was just one of the circumstances surrounding their lives, with which they had to live and survive. My point is that in karaoke-singing, just like the last-minute dissonance in Ningyô-no Ie seems to turn the entire song into a parody of sexism, karaoke performance of female 36 kayokyoku by non-singer women in Showa 40s was, in effect, a parodic expression of sexism, to which it was supposed to contribute. The stark fact that these women, whose relationships to men were for the most part temporary, sang about women who sorrow and almost kill herself for a man, wish to reconcile, entrust herself to a man, and never move on, was a contradiction unmistakably manifest and obvious to the eyes of non-singer women themselves, as well as their male audiences. Their performance was, at least in effect, a parody of “woman of Sunday,” a carnival, or a masquerade, the mechanism of which all “guests” must have been vaguely aware of. This is what I think is a “space of agency,” where a norm gets repeated, through the process of which the norm transforms as repetitive utterances take place equivocally.46 Butler gives us hope by saying, […] to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination. It offers the possibility of a repetition of the law which is not its consolidation, but its displacement.47 And yet, masquerade was, for the non-singer women with access to karaoke-singing, a means of survival rather than a means of subversion. Sometimes one may have truly wished that she had been a woman of Sunday. Sometimes her companion at sunakku saw nothing but a sign of woman in her performance, hence mimicry unsuccessful. But if their performance had been unquestionably rebellious, and thus, unequivocally subversive, their survival would have been cruelly unsuccessful. Our culture has numerous ways to punish such women: from marriage to mental institutions, from witch hunt to rape, and as we have seen in this paper, from lyrics to censorship, then even to condoms. It is precisely because they clung to the Symbolic order yet all the while refusing to be absorbed into it that they have survived without falling into the domain of the unintelligibility. By “survival” I do not only mean representational survival in the Symbolic order but also economic survival in society. The latter was accompanied by very rational 37 exchange of money between the males and females at the carnival. Women employed by the house would sell alcohol and coquetry to their male customers, and receive money in return. Female companions to male customers would also sell them coquetry and night hours, and drink alcohol as their treat. The spread of karaoke-singing in Showa 40s was not such a thing as an expansion of the scope of sexism. Those with access to karaoke-singing were not new victims of sexism accelerated by technological development. For those women, who were socially, economically, and culturally marginalized, karaoke-singing was probably one of the means of survival, in which they would take advantage of sexism embedded in music, and ultimately, alter the sexist circumstances that would have otherwise condemned them to poverty, if not death. 38 Conclusion “Love him like a wife, obey him like a daughter, and embrace him like a mother,”—— these are the imperatives imposed on women in song narratives of female kayokyoku—— “and when you fail, you’re nothing.” And when a woman refuses to be none of the above, yet strives for something more significant, which is only significant in the sense that it never ceases to be performatively constituted as such, there comes another imperative, motivated by misogynous transphobia: “Love him like a wife, obey him like a daughter, and embrace him like a mother——but never be like him.” The strategy of non-singer women in Showa 40s, or the effect of what can be retrospectively considered their strategy of survival, was that they pretended like a wife, a daughter, and a mother. Kayokyoku sung by female singers was full of descriptions and articulations of the feminine positions in the Symbolic order, both lyrically and musically, as we have seen in Part I. That was nonetheless what the women took advantage of, in order to make their own life a little bit easier. Their performances of mimicry, on the one hand, performatively assured them of a place to be, to exist, in the Symbolic order and, on the other hand, provided economic support for them. That might sound too conservative to those who embrace subversion, especially those of you who hold extreme anger toward (hetero)sexist society. But don’t mistake me, I am one of you. It is just I place a higher priority on survival than on subversion, because for me, subversion can and should be suspended whenever one’s life is at stake, either symbolically or physically. Another thing we have discovered is that musical performance, especially singing, is probably the most accessible and of the highest success rate of mimicry among many other cultural discourses (i.e. writing, painting, sculpting, et cetera… but not dancing, apparently!) for it always needs corporeal materiality through which it communicates itself, 39 the kind of body that always lays bodily excess onstage, thus creating a crack between the “I” and the image/screen that claims to belong to it. What I have not covered in this paper, which I should and could have covered, was the discussions of female spectatorship at sunakku and the kind of voyeurism that takes place when one sings karaoke on the stage and looks into the television set, and thus being less sensible to the gaze from her audience. These issues will surely be examined by my future studies. 40 Notes Susan McClary, “Feminine Endings in Retrospect,” in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis: the University of Minnesota Press, 1991), ix. 2 Luce Irigaray, “Retour sur la théorie psychanalytique,” in Ce Sexe Qui N’en Est Pas Un (Paris: Minuit, 1977). = Tanasawa, Naoko et al. (trans.) 「精神分析理論再考」『ひと つではない女の性』(東京: 勁草書房, 1987=2002), 41-42. 3 Judith Butler, “Phatasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex,” Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: London: Routledge, 1993), 101. 4 Ibid, 103. 5 McClary, “Introduction,” in Feminine Endings, 9-10. 6 Ibid, 11. 7 Ibid, 14. 8 Irigaray, “Ce Sexe Qui N’en Est Pas Un,” in Ce Sexe Qui N’en Est Pas Un, 23-24. 9 The line from another passage, «semete koi-bito no mama-de; yasashiku kata wo daite» or “at least, just kindly put your arms around my shoulders; before you take away my lover status,” can also be said to depict bodily interactions between the two persons, but only within the context of dancing, while the sexual symbols in the middle passages suggest their past sexual relationship. 10 McClary, “Excess and Frame,” in Feminine Endings, 84. 11 Ibid, 86. 12 Judith Butler, “Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Heterosexual Matrix,” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: London: Routledge, 1990), 81. 13 Ibid, 80-81. 14 Ibid, 75. 15 Probably, “male-centered audience” is a better phrase than “male audience” for women, no matter what it means, can not necessarily be denied access to core ideologies of patriarchy through which to look, listen, taste, smell and feel. Moreover, it should be noted that from pre-school to graduate school, no matter what gender one may be, she or he is taught to identify with the male gaze, the looking “I”, through instillation of the (male) protagonist’s interpretation of the (narrative) world in the reader’s mind. For a more psychological account of female identification with the male gaze, see Lyn Mikel Brown, Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection Among Girls (New York: New York University Press, 2003). 16 Mary Pipher, “Theoretical Issues——For Your Own Good,” Reviving Ophelia, 39. 17 Judith Halberstam, “An Introduction to Female Masculinity,” Female Masculinity, 8. 18 Ibid, 9. 19 Halberstam offers a queer reading of Goldeneye in Ibid, 3. 20 Akiko Shimizu, “What You See Is What You Get,” Lying Bodies: Survival and Subversion in the Field of Vision, 2. 21 Min’yo (folk music) and Rôkyoku (narrative ballads), as well as enka in Korea and Japan which developed from traditional folk music and narrative ballads and adopted the western techniques, tonality and orchestration styles in classical music, epitomize this. Note that in these genres, one rarely encounters the same melody twice. A song usually consisted of lines (four to seven in the case of enka and min’yo) that have different melodies. This is the major characteristic of the A-(B-)chorus structure, though each of the passages (A, B and chorus) typically consists of a couple of similar melodies; not to mention, the second section is almost identical to the first one. It is debatable whether the A-(B-)chorus structure directly originates from these traditions, but their similarities, as well as the dissimilarities between the refrain-excess-refrain structure and the three aforementioned genres, should not be overlooked. 1 41 22 She covered numerous popular songs from the U.K, the U.S. and France such as Poupé de cire, Poupé de son by France Gall, Don’t Treat Me Like a Child and You Don’t Know by Helen Shapiro, Vacation and Follow the Boys by Connie Francis, and Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen by Neil Sedaka. 23 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Warhol, Robyn R. and Herndl, Diane Price, Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Criticism, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 896-912. 24 Ibid, 905. 25 The use of the term, “condom,” is not only a pun. According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition, “condom” is a “thin rubber sheath worn on a man’s penis during sexual intercourse as a contraceptive or as protection against infection.” (1) The etymological explanation of the word, “contraception,” offered in the same dictionary, is that it is a compound of contra- [against] and a shortened form of conception. Let us for the moment think of the other meaning of “conception” which is “understanding; ability to imagine.” Therefore, another possible meaning of “contraception” is “against comprehension.” So putting a condom literally means refusing to understand. (2) “Protection against infection” is also suggestive of the fearful and obsessive need on the part of men to exclude women from the domain of “masculine” ejaculation, for infection never happens when nothing is considered pure enough to be protected from contaminants. And that is precisely the way in which the phallus, in order to rightfully signify, is performatively constituted as illness that the feminine “infection” causes. 26 Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” Bodies That Matter, 84. 27 Ibid, 83. 28 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 9. 29 Urenakya Yokatta…Kin’yô-bi no Kokuhaku SP! Dai-Souzetsu-Jinsei, broadcast March 7, 2008 by Tokyo Broadcasting System Television, Inc. in Wikipedia contributors, “奥村 チヨ” (Okumura Chiyo), Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://ja.wikipedia.org/ wiki/奥村チヨ, accessed May 24, 2009. 30 Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 8. 31 Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia, 39. 32 Judith Butler, “Implicit Censorship and Discursive Agency,” Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, 133. 33 Butler, Excitable Speech, 135. 34 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 103. 35 Butler, Excitable Speech, 133. 36 Shimizu, “A Body Not of One’s Own,” Lying Bodies, 31. 37 Shimizu, “Mimicry and Lies: Manipulating the Visible Self,” Lying Bodies, 33. 38 Discussion of racial dynamics is beyond the scope of this paper and has to be left for further studies. 39 Traditionally, professional singers had to take official lessons with composers, conventionally called sensei or “teachers,” for years prior to their debut. But Showa 40s saw a historical change in that tradition, typified by singers like Linda Yamamoto, who debuted immediately following her career as a model. Trained, flawless vocals were no longer necessary and the kind of originality that professional singers had claimed lost its ground. 40 The English entry of “Host and hostess clubs” in Wikipedia explains what sunakku is, but here’s a quote: “a kind of hostess bar, an alcohol-serving bar that employs female staff that are paid to serve and flirt with male customers.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_and_hostess_clubs#Snack_bars, accessed May 26, 2009. 41 Note that people not only sang kayokyoku, though it being the most popular genre in karaoke0singing, but also old enka, which appealed to the relatively older male customers (karaoke demography is discussed later in this chapter) and enka-like 42 kayokyoku (i.e. Ikebukuro-no Yoru and Isezaki-chô Burûsu by Mina Aoe and Shinjukuno On’na by Keiko Fuji). 42 Butler, Excitable Speech, 128-29. 43 An easy answer would be a statement too general for our purpose here, such as that a female body on the stage, in fact, represents not only a result of all past sedimentations of symbolic constitution of the body, but also a residual outside to it, a bodily excess. (Butler, Excitable Speech, trans., 240.) 44 There were not many career women around in Showa 40s in the first place. 45 Bijuaru-kei, or visual-kei, refers to a music genre in which musicians typically wear “striking make-up, unusual hair styles and elaborate costumes, often, but not always, coupled with androgynous aesthetics.” (“Visual kei,” Wikipedia) 46 Akiko Shimizu, “Scandalous Equivocation: A Note on the Politics of Queer Selfnaming,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8:4, 2007, 511. 47 Butler, Gender Trouble, 40. 43 Bibliography Brown, Lyn Mikel. Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection Among Girls. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York and London: Routledge, 1993. ———. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. ———. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. (trans.) 『触発する言葉——言語・権力・行為体』東京: 岩 波書店, 2004. ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Originally published in 1990. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998. Irigaray, Luce. Ce Sexe Qui N’en Est Pas Un. Paris: Minuit, 1977. = Tanasawa, Naoko et al. (trans.) 『ひとつではない女の性』東京: 勁草書房, 2002. Originally published in 1987. McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality. Minneapolis: the University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Pipher, Mary. Reviving Ophelia. New York: Putnam Adult, 1994. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton, 1992. Originally published in 1966. Shimizu, Akiko. Lying Bodies: Survival and Subversion in the Field of Vision. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008. ———. “Scandalous Equivocation: A Note on the Politics of Queer Self-naming.” InterAsia Cultural Studies 8:4 (2007): 503-16. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Criticism. Eds., Warhol, Robyn R. and Herndl, Diane Price. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997: 896912. Reprint of “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985). Walker, Lisa. Looking Like What You Are: Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity. New York: London: New York University Press, 2001. [cited in Shimizu, Lying Bodies] 44 Acknowledgments I thank professor Natsumi Ikoma for patiently working with me toward completion of this thesis. I am a procrastinator. Maybe I was born to procrastinate. I hope I can postpone my own death saying, “well, I can do that tomorrow.” That’s just absurd but certainly illustrates how lazy I am. That put aside, I also thank her for teaching me feminist literary criticism. I had always been a sociology geek since sixteen-years-old, but when I took professor Ikoma’s literature course, it blew me away. I also thank professor Midori Kobayashi for introducing me to the world of feminist criticism of music and inviting the entire class to a dinner party at the end of semester. Taking the course with professor Kobayashi was just an amazing experience. After the semester was over, I decided to write this paper on music. This paper would not exist if there had not been for professor Kobayashi. My appreciation also goes to Akiko Shimizu, who has been a great inspiration to me both as a friend and an astonishing scholar. A lot of what I wrote in this paper actually draws on the arguments in her latest book, Lying Bodies: Survival and Subversion in the Field of Vision (2008). I thank as well Makiko Iseri and Kazuyoshi Kawasaka for being wonderful friends of mine and, at the same time, very exciting people to talk with about queer and feminist theories. This paper will be presented at the Inter-Asia Cultural Typhoon 2009 in summer, and Ryo Kawaguchi was the first one to suggest that I should make this paper public. Last but not least, I feel very grateful to my mother, Chitose Matsumoto, who shared with me a lot of her memories of doing various kinds of nighttime entertainment businesses in her late teens through her forties. She was the whole motivation for writing this paper, writing about the life of women in Showa, and writing about agency of women who grew up and lived and survived with kayokyoku. 45 和 文 抄 訳 様々な表象文化の中で、音楽もまた社会的、政治的な権力作用から自由ではな い。本論文は、昭和４０年代日本において女性歌手によって歌われた歌謡曲から いくつかを取り上げ、主にフェミニズム理論及びクィア理論（それぞれ特に、精 神分析理論の批判的読みや現代思想の潮流を汲んでいる部分）を用いて分析し、 ジェンダー・セクシュアリティの視点から歌謡曲の新たな読みを提供する。 第一部では『フェミニン・エンディング 音楽・ジェンダー・セクシュアリテ ィ』の著者、スーザン・マクレアリの理論を参考にしながら、日本の「歌謡曲」、 特に昭和４０年代に女性歌手によって歌われたものを分析する。その結果分かる ことは以下の通り。つまり、女性と主体性について、あるいは女性と他者性につ いて、この時代の女性歌手による歌謡曲は非常に雄弁であるということ。それは 曲構成上の物語装置（終結、退場など）や音楽学的な要素（和声、旋律など）に よって、女性を主人公とした物語世界がいかに女性を疎外する形で表象している かという問題に関わる。また、そのように疎外される女性の《行為体》と検閲の 関係には密接な関係があるが、ジュディス・バトラーのように検閲を「主体に対 してなされる行為」と「主体が[ ]行為遂行的に生産されるためになされる行 為」（『触発する言葉 言語・権力・行為体』）に分けると、女性の疎外は正に この二つのレベルで行われていることが分かる。つまり象徴界における《女》と いう記号へと導入される女児は、そのとき「行為遂行的に」「主体」として「生 産される」。しかし《女》とは象徴界において、ペニス中心的な考え方によって 「欠如」として、「他者」として認識されるものである。また、男児がそれを見 て去勢不安に陥るような、ファルス「である」ものとしても構築され、男児がフ ァルス「を持つ」ことを強化する役割を与えられている。しかしこういった非対 称的な配置は、言語によって行為遂行的に再確認され続けなければならないほど 46 に脆弱である。なぜなら、バトラーによれば、ファルスとペニスの関係（「ファ ルスはそれを象徴しない」と言われ続ける特権を持っているペニス、という関 係）は想像的な営みでしかなく、その関係そのものが行為遂行的に構築されてい るにすぎないからだ。であるから女性にとって象徴界における《女》という位置 を降りること、もしくは「怪物的にファルス主義にのし上がる」ことは、検閲を 受けなければならないとされる。そしてそれはまた、「主体に対してなされる行 為」としての検閲が頻繁に行われなくてはいけないほどに、「主体が[ ]行為遂 行的に生産されるためになされる行為」としての検閲が「主体」とやらを徹頭徹 尾象徴界に組み込ませられていないことを意味し、その点で、ジェンダーに関す る行為遂行的な言語の引用の隙間に《行為体》を見いだせることになる。 以上を受けて第二部では、昭和４０年代に急速に普及したカラオケマシーンが いかに一般女性（プロの歌手でない女性）に抵抗と交渉の機会を与えていたかを 検証する。そもそもカラオケマシーンへのアクセスが許されていた女性は、水商 売に職を持つ女性か、あるいは水商売の店に男性に連れ添って客としてその場に いた女性たちだけである。そして彼女らのほとんどがローワー・クラス及びロー ワー・ミドル・クラスの１０代後半から３０代、時に４０代までの女性であり、 その場にいる男性たちにとって家庭的な、持続的な関係性の中の女性（母・妻・ 娘）ではなく、あくまで一時的な関係を結ぶだけの女性たちであった。しかし彼 女たちはプロの女性歌手が受ける検閲行為よりも更に厳しい慣習的な検閲を受け ており、カラオケで彼女らが歌っても差し支えなかった曲は、正に母・妻・娘の ような（男に都合のいい）愛情を持つ女の姿を描く曲ばかりであった。しかし彼 女たちの身体が実際にステージにのぼり、彼女たちの身体から発声が行われるこ とは、カラオケ歌唱には不可欠のことであった。つまり歌われる表象自体は家族 的な男女観を反映しているのだが、それが歌われるときに必ず家族的「でない」 女性の身体が現前するのである。それをパロディーと解釈できないとしたら、い 47 ったい何だろうか。これを第一部の《行為体》の解釈と合わせることで、これら の性差別的な歌謡曲を歌うことがいかに水商売で働く女性たちあるいは水商売の 店にやってくる女性たちにとって（象徴的及び経済的な）生存可能性をかけたサ バイバルの一つの手法であったかが明らかになる。それはつまり、象徴界から完 全に脱却してしまうことで自らの生存可能性を閉ざしてしまうこともなく、だか らと言って象徴界へと取り込まれてしまうことで自らの《他》性、すなわち主体 としての「Ｉ」と、その「Ｉ」に所属するということになっているイメージ（と その文化的意味）との間の差異をなかったことにしてしまうこともなく、撹乱よ りも生存に重きを置いた生き方である。このミミクリー的な手法は、常に大げさ な撹乱を狙う戦略よりも有効だろう。 48