Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of the history of Japanese disco, focusing on the relationship between the record industry and the dance floor: it reveals how disco music in Japan established itself on the dichotomy of ‘imported’ and ‘domestic’ records and went on to significantly transform and even eradicate that binary. The chapter examines case studies ranging from records disguised as ‘imported’ music aimed at the Japanese disco scene, Japanese disco records aimed at the international market inspired by the success of European disco in the US, and the uniquely Japanese phenomenon of Eurobeat and its associated parapara dance form derived from imported European disco records popular only in Japan.
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Notes
- 1.
Although the aforementioned romanticised foreign music discourse appears to oppose such phenomena, it is often complicit with them in inventing a distinctively Japanese foreign music culture, since critics tend to rely on idealised notions of a particular musical genre rather than on actual information and context about its real origins.
- 2.
Ever since the 1920s, Japanese young people have favoured music cafes where recorded music was played on high-quality audio equipment for a relatively inexpensive admission fee (Hosokawa and Matsuoka 2004).
- 3.
For example, the LP entitled The Classics of RCA Blues: 1927–1946, which was compiled in Japan under the supervision of famous critics, became an instant classic. On the Japanese reception of ‘rootsy’ African American music, see Higurashi (2010).
- 4.
Tsutsumi first entered the music industry in 1963 as a director in the foreign music section of Japan Gramophone. By 1967, he had become a freelance songwriter when the local popular record production system underwent a dramatic change. Within the vertical integration management structure established in the 1930s, not only singers but also lyricists, composers, and session musicians were bound by exclusive contracts to a certain record company. This, however, was all about to collapse and be replaced by a new system wherein music publishers and entertainment agencies shared copyrights and co-produced master discs, employing freelance songwriters and session musicians to create them. Tsutsumi belonged to the first generation of the new system and is arguably the most successful example of it.
- 5.
In 1974, Tsutsumi wrote the soul-disco track “Nigai Namida” (“Bitter Tears”) with Japanese lyrics, which was performed by the American female trio The Three Degrees. They had achieved considerable popularity in Japan with the song “When Will I See You Again”, which became an instant hit. This happened before their worldwide success due to their participation in the 1974 Third Tokyo Music Festival, a large international song contest aiming to be a ‘Eurovision in the East’ organised by Tokyo Broadcasting Service (TBS). Since they did not release a new single in the United States, CBS Sony, the Japanese agent of Philadelphia International Records, planned a project that would exclusively target the Japanese market. The novelty of African American women singing in Japanese on Japanese TV was probably at least partly responsible for the success (Shinozaki 2017c, 232–234).
- 6.
The blog is accessible at https://funkydisco.jimdo.com/disco-step/.
- 7.
Azami suggests that this was already the case in the late 1960s when CBS in the United States and Japanese Sony established the joint venture CBS Sony (Azami 2016, 177). The phrase ‘the world’s second largest music market’ was also used two years later in the title of the feature article in Billboard (May 26, 1979).
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Wajima, Y. (2022). Japanese Disco as Pseudo-International Music. In: Pitrolo, F., Zubak, M. (eds) Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s. Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_5
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