Sound hunting in postwar Japan: recording technology, aurality, mobility, and consumerism

ABSTRACT

Throughout the 1970s, the hobby of sound hunting boomed in Japan. A magazine and numerous guidebooks urged young people to get out and about recording the soundscape and hunting for “real sound”. The mobility inherent in the technological transformations of the previous decades fed into a media discourse which drew together theories and practices taken from the protests and sub-cultures of the 1960s that celebrated creativity, openness, and individuated lifestyles, whilst challenging notions of authority and expertise. Sound hunting and amateur recording was a mediatised pastime that sought new ways of incorporating technological change, as well as professional experimentation in music and sound recording, into everyday life. Sound as an object – to be understood, controlled, and manipulated – was incorporated into consumer society through a media discourse that emphasised the individualism, mobility, experimentation, and spending at the heart of youth lifestyles in the 1970s. Capturing sound required detailed research, an individual, creative approach and an amateur spirit. The sound hunting boom in Japan highlights the importance of technology, consumerism and the media to sound studies by shedding light on the wider social, cultural and media contexts within which portable sound-recording technology and new practices of listening became increasingly commodified.

KEYWORDS:

• Sound hunting
• Japan
• soundscape
• tape-recorder
• media
• youth
• consumerism
• mobility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In the mid-1950s, composer Toshihiro Ichiyanagi travelled to the US to study composition. He met John Cage in 1957 and began studying with him. Cage and other “New York School” composers visited Japan in 1961 and produced several compositions. This interest in western experiments with Zen philosophy in music was incorporated into the quest by Mayazumi and others to find a Japanese aesthetic for electronic music. This quest drove many of the composers working in the studio of state broadcaster NHK from the early 1950s and was central to the musical elements of the Osaka Exposition of 1970.

2. Torigoe established the Institute of Kanda Soundscape Studies in 1984, which carried out an important (probably the first) historical study of the soundscape of that area of Tokyo. Though the activities of the institute and its successor the Japan Soundscape Association appeared to be new at the time, it is clear that, although the term “soundscape” may have been new, work in radio, experimental music and sound recording in Japan had for several decades been concerned with the study and capture of environmental noise.

3. As Yoshihisa Kinameri (former editor) noted, Heibon Punch stood firmly on the side of the protesting students and the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 1960s.

4. The connection between the hobby of photography and sound hunting needs to be explored in much more detail. Photography buffs are often pictured alongside sound recordists in the literature surrounding the Namaroku boom, and most Namaroku enthusiasts probably took a camera with them on their quests. The mobility, control and individual creativity offered by the increasing portability of the camera in the post-war period was recognised in artistic circles much earlier than the sound hunting boom of the 1970s.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martyn David Smith

Martyn David Smith is a historian of modern and contemporary Japan and Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield. My research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of sound and the history of technology in Japan and Asia. I am a founding member of the Asian Sound Culture Studies and Modernity Project and am currently editing a collection of papers looking at sound culture and change across Asia since the late 19th Century. My long-standing research interests cover national identity, nationalism, gender, the mass media and consumer society in Japan and East Asia.