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ABSTRACT
In the Argentine tango music culture of Japan, to have undergone many life experiences is considered critical in order to perform the powerful emotions of tango. Narratives by Japanese tango musicians stress ‘each musician’s feelings’ as crucial in shaping a good tango performance, while empathy is considered important in cultivating such feelings. Based on the author’s field research in Japan and Argentina, and by adding a different nuance to Carolyn Pedwell’s notions of transnational ‘affective relations’, this essay examines how Japanese historical narratives, rooted in aesthetic and moral ethos, fabricate discourses of tango authenticity by Japanese musicians. Taking a closer look at the ways in which Japanese musicians discuss tango’s emotion illuminates how Argentine tango’s aesthetics of emotion are given renewed meanings through the channelling of cultural and historical symbols in Japanese contexts. This article argues that Japanese tango musicians create their discourses surrounding tango authenticity at such transnational instances when aesthetics, affect and morality intersect.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr. Henry Stobart, Dr. Frederick Moehn, Dr. David W. Hughes, Dr. James Butterworth, Dr. Jonathan Roberts, Dr. Hettie Malcomson, Dr. Lonán Ó Briain, the anonymous reviewers, and Dr. Shzr Ee Tan for their advice on this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Yuiko Asaba completed the PhD in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2017. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph, Tango in Japan: Performing and Orchestrating a Distant Music, University of Hawai’i Press, part of which is upcoming in Japanese in an edited volume with Minerva Shobo (Yusuke Wajima ed. 2019). Her current research also looks at the relationship between Japan’s migration politics and Argentine tango from 1910 to 1948. As a tango violinist, Yuiko has performed as a member of the National Orchestra of Argentine Music ‘Juán de Dios Filiberto’ in Argentina and Tango Orchestra Astrorico in Japan. She is currently Visiting Lecturer of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Notes
1 In p’ansori, undergoing ‘pain and suffering’ is also considered necessary for one to become ‘a good sorikkun [p’ansori performer]’ (Yates-Lu Citation2017: 99. See also Killick Citation2010: 151, 158−61; Willoughby Citation2000).
2 While I resist claiming that every single Japanese tango musician believes this, I argue that the aesthetics of tango’s emotion exists in Japan’s tango music culture in quasi-institutionalised forms. For more discussion see Asaba (Citation2016: 269−72).
3 This essay considers ‘feelings’ and ‘emotion’ in conversation with how, in recent scholarship, the turn to affect has ‘foregrounded the relational nature of feelings and emotions’ (Butterworth Citation2014: 20).
4 Similar aesthetics of emotions are seen in Japanese enka song genre (see below). In Argentina, its folklore music genres share close resemblance to such aesthetics of emotion.
5 In this article, I use empathy as it refers to sympathy for all-encompassing human conditions. See below.
6 This is the violinist’s stage name. Rica Asaba is my aunt. Notes on aspects of autoethnography in my research will appear below (see also Asaba Citation2016: 25−32).
7 All translations in this article, from Japanese and Spanish, are my own unless otherwise stated. For the names of instruments such as the bandoneon – which in Spanish is written as bandoneón – I have followed the English convention without the accents.
8 For its use to mean pity or mercy, Japanese word such as nasake (情け) is used. On the other hand, the word sympathy – as used in The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith – has been scholarly translated into Japanese as dōkan (同感). Dōkan literally means ‘to feel’ (感) ‘the same’ (同).
9 LaCapra has argued that the nature of empathy ‘risks an obscuring of the boundary of self and other’: that ‘for ethical empathy to occur, it requires simultaneous recognition that the experience of the other is not one’s own.’ (Citation2001: 40; see also Tucker Citation2016: 39). While I consider this claim to be valuable, I am primarily concerned here with musicians’ discourses surrounding how life experiences are understood to nurture empathy that is perceived to be crucial in a good tango performance in Japan.
10 I consider notions of ‘intimacy’ here in a broad sense, as employed to discuss a sense of closeness that transcends boundaries such as the public and private (Bigenho Citation2012; Stokes Citation2010).
11 This turn to affect is part of several epistemological ‘turns’ in a number of disciplinary fields beyond music. While the relationship between music and affect has concerned scholars since antiquity, theoretical concerns surrounding music and affect began to appear from the late nineteenth century (Hofman Citation2015: 38−9).
12 By ‘transnational,’ I refer to the condition of ‘interconnectedness and mobility across space’ that characterises ‘contemporary social life in the context of global capitalism and postcoloniality.’ (Ong Citation1999: 4, see also Pedwell Citation2014: 22).
13 Realist aesthetics as manifested in musical performance is indeed not limited to tango. See also Butterworth (Citation2014), Gray (Citation2013) and Fox (Citation1992).
14 Tango in Japan has been entangled with, and has always highlighted, disjunctions of class positions since its arrival in the late 1910s (Asaba [forthcoming]).
15 On historical narratives, I am particularly interested in Donna Haraway’s ‘narrative field’ in which cultural and historical symbols are seen to be constructed through narratives (Citation1988). On narrative discourse and the narrative imagination of history, see also White (Citation1987).
16 These include, in particular, narratives of hardships experienced by European immigrants as they settled in Argentina from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. At the same time, Archetti (Citation2007), Plesch (Citation2009) and Schwartz-Kates (Citation2002) have argued that the Argentine nostalgia for its pre modernisation era is represented in the contemporary portrayals of sadness as associated with the Gaucho and the Pampas.
17 While class politics are integral to the mugre aesthetic, my primary concern in this essay is to examine how Japanese tango musicians create their discourses surrounding Argentine-derived aesthetics of emotion in relation to mugre. See the Conclusion of this essay.
18 I situate notions of traditionality in this essay within the contexts and discourses surrounding modernity and globalisation (see Rocha Citation2006: 1–15).
19 I consider cultural assimilation in terms of how a ‘foreign’ music has been digested, disciplined, and institutionalised in another country. For more discussions on tango in Japan in relation to assimilations of other imported cultures in Japan, see Asaba [forthcoming]; Citation2016.
20 Dorinne Kondo problematises a separation of Self and Other in anthropological studies, and discusses how the first person voice ‘I’ already includes ‘the world’ in narrative conventions (Citation1990: 24−6).
21 For more discussion on this topic, including notions of fieldwork ‘at home’, see Asaba (Citation2016: 25−32).
22 Tango, throughout its history in Japan since its arrival in around 1914, has always been caught in the politics of cultural legitimisation. Especially after World War II, it was seen to elevate Japanese people’s taste through increased association with Western art music, while maintaining the imagery of the popular (Asaba [forthcoming]). Ikuo Abo’s first encounter with tango falls within this postwar era, when people of working class backgrounds sought to listen to Western art music and popular musical genres from abroad, namely jazz and tango (Nagasaki Citation2013).
23 Comment by the presenter who chaired the public tango lecture, given by Ikuo Abo at the Institute for Latin American Studies, Rikkyo university, Tokyo (7 December 2013).
24 This notion of sentiment in the voice (or sentimiento as Abo repeatedly commented, and I will discuss later in this article) resonates with flamenco’s cante jondo (deep song). This aesthetic of passion or duende in the voice, where formal musical structures or technique are transcended, is beautifully evoked by Federico García Lorca who describes the intense cante jondo singing of La Niña de la Peines as ‘a gusher of blood worthy of … her pain and sincerity’ (Kirkland Citation1999: 80).
25 Abo commented: ‘the elegance … the high class feel of tango attracted me immensely’ when he first heard tango. The connection between tango and ‘the high class feel’ may seem paradoxical given its perceived origin in low life contexts. However, from the early twentieth century tango was welcomed into the Western high social classes while the working classes continued to embrace it. Tango has been widely appreciated in the high social classes, while discourses surrounding tango has always highlighted disjunctions between class positions rather than uniting them (see Asaba Citation2016).
26 The interrelation of vocality and suffering is certainly not unique to tango (see Willoughby Citation2000 on P’ansori). However, it is crucial to note that tango’s aesthetics as depicting ‘real life suffering’ while also being associated with the idea of the ‘Western high society’ attracted the Japanese working classes as well as the middle- to upper-middle classes after World War II (Asaba Citation2016: 88–92).
27 James Butterworth also asserts that more importance is given to the words than the song melody in expressing the aesthetics of emotion in huayno song genre (Citation2014: 106−34).
28 In Argentina, Spanish words alma (soul) and corazón (heart) are used for similar purposes. Notions of the heart when used metaphorically differ depending on the contexts. For example in Japanese min’yo David Hughes notes that enthusiasts and performers call min’yo ‘the heart’s hometown’ (Citation2008: 1–3). As also seen in the footnote 24 of this essay on Spanish cante jondo, notions of the heart unite corporeal, temporal, geographical spaces of affect.
29 Porteño refers to people of Buenos Aires (Porteña for a woman, Porteño for a man) or the Rioplatense accent used in this city. The word porteña/o derives from the Spanish word puerto, or port, that refers to Buenos Aires as a port city facing the Río de la Plata.
30 See below in this essay for discussions on performing life experiences in relation to tango’s aesthetic of mugre (dirt).
31 James Butterworth also suggests, to ‘elicit empathy’, is a critical aspect in the aesthetic of huayno popular song genre (Citation2014: 106).
32 Notions of financial security as seen to endanger a genre aesthetic, is not limited to tango in Japan. See Butterworth Citation2014.
33 Both musicians have asked to maintain their anonymities.
34 While mugre discourse concerns issues of class politics, my primary objective here is to examine how notions of mugre shape the aesthetics of emotion in tango.
35 Nélida Rouchetto, an acclaimed tango critic in an interview with the author suggested that in Buenos Aires in the 1960s ‘barro’ (mud) was used instead of mugre (Nélida Rouchetto, interview, Buenos Aires 23 June 2006).
36 See the Conclusion of this essay for discussion on mugre perspectives held by Argentine and Japanese musicians since the 2000s.
37 Indeed, there are other words such as tanguerro, compadre, and canyengue that refer to certain positive masculine qualities in tango performance. However, I focus here on mugre as it appears to be a closer fit with the transcultural Japanese perspective.
38 The aesthetic of dirt as attributing authenticity and giving the performance a real life quality is found in a number of popular music genres (Hughes Citation2008: 197; Moehn Citation2005: 47−83).
39 This sense of realism as a key aesthetic in many of the popular music genres has also been described – based on Foucauldian formulation – as the process of ‘ethical subject formation’ (Butterworth Citation2014: 130).
40 I would like to note that Keiko Naitō’s reference to Sakata as the author is not reflected in his published translations, where acknowledgments of original lyricists are made appropriately under the Japanese and Argentine copyright laws.
41 While notions of intertextuality may be useful here, my central concern is to study the intersecting moments of multiple suffering subjects, and how Japanese musicians and poets have internalised these instances as emotion, empathy and morality interweave transnationally.
42 Hiroo Sakata is the father of the former Takarazuka revue ‘top star’, Mizuki Oura (1956–2009). Sakata began his Japanese translations of Argentine tango song lyrics when Oura started to perform tango after her retirement from the Takarazuka revue at the age of 35. Oura had produced and performed in numerous acclaimed theatrical tango shows in Japan and abroad.
43 The original text in Japanese was provided by Rica Asaba with Keiko Naitō’s permission.
44 ‘Jealousy’ is a Danish tango song, and it has been hugely popular in Japan since the 1960s as part of a genre in Japan called ‘continental tango’ (konchinentaru tango). There is indeed a double layer of transculturality here. Continental tango genre consists of all tango pieces composed in Europe, and it is equally as popular as Argentine tango among Japanese tango fans (Asaba Citation2016).
45 Indeed, Japanese hannya derives from Buddhism (Kanaoka Citation2001), and traditional mythical values surrounding oni and Buddhist ideology play a critical role in the lives of many Japanese people. Additionally, for more details about influences of Buddhism in Japanese performing arts, see Kanai (Citation1991).
46 Indeed this might also be seen as the result of ‘macho pride’ and of cornudo, or the cuckold (see Brandes Citation1980). However I treat suffering in love here as not mutually exclusive of such possible macho pride.
47 See Berliner (Citation1994) for jazz performance practice in the U.S.A., where musicians learn to impart a sense of lived emotion in their performance through repetition and imitation.
48 Stokes also cites works by other scholars on this topic. See Stokes (Citation2010: 190).