Hiromu Nagahara, "Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and Its Discontents" (Harvard UP, 2017)

New Books in Japanese Studies · Nov 11, 2021 · 1h 18m

Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and its Discontents (Harvard University Press, 2017) by Hiromu Nagahara is the first English-language history of the origins and impact of the Japanese pop music industry. The book connects the rise of mass entertainment, epitomized by ryūkōka (“popular songs”), with Japan’s transformation into a middle-class society in the years after World War II.

With the arrival of major international recording companies like Columbia and Victor in the 1920s, Japan’s pop music scene soon grew into a full-fledged culture industry that reached out to an avid consumer…