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Abstract
The first great wave of American influence on Japanese popular music came before the Second World War, and coincided with the rapid expansion of Japan's record industry that began in the late 1920s. Imports of American records, sheet music, and movies, together with Japanese performances and recordings of American songs, brought a wide range of American music into the complex emerging mixture of Japanese popular music. Among these American imports were numerous songs and musical elements that referred to places or cultures considered exotic from the standpoint of mainstream America. I focus on three songs and the roles they played in the development of Japanese popular music exoticism. American-made exoticisms were not simply imposed upon Japan, however. Japanese culture producers actively initiated and carried out the process by selecting American songs, adapting them to the needs of their audience and drawing selected elements from them to be recombined with material from other sources, both Japanese and foreign.
Notes
Mitsui Tōru (2004, 2005) has discussed the 1928 Japanese versions of this song in detail.
In late 2008 the present author found two sheet music versions of ‘Sing Me a Song of Araby’ in the catalog of the National Library of Australia, and obtained digital copies. One, a copy of the Paul Van Loan arrangement for small orchestra (Fisher Citation1927a), was previously owned by The Film House library in Sydney and shows the handwritten names of cinemas to which it had been loaned; the other is an arrangement for voice and piano (Fisher Citation1927b) that appears to be Fisher's original arrangement, printed in Australia under license from the American publisher. The song was also recorded for Australian Columbia, by Charles Kaley and His Orchestra in March 1928 (see Rust Citation1975: 909); this record was advertised later the same year in the Wellington, New Zealand Evening Post (13 October: 24a; and 20 October: 24b), but to my knowledge no copy of it has been found. Scott-Maxwell Citation(1997), although she does not mention this particular song, shows that numerous American popular songs about ‘Araby’ were available as song sheets in Australia during the 1920s.
‘Rumba’ properly refers to a more specific Cuban genre; I use it here in the broad sense.
Hosokawa Citation(1999) examines in detail the history of rumba in prewar Japan, including the reception of ‘The Peanut Vendor.’