The Record Begins to Sing ― The Day the Popular Song Was Born

Until then, a song was something sung by someone right before your eyes. Within the circle of a festival, on the stage of a play, from the dais of a vaudeville hall. If there was no singer, the song vanished there and then ― that was a matter of course. But as the Taisho era came, a strange machine made its way into the home. A gramophone: a wooden box fitted with a large morning-glory-shaped horn. Lower a needle onto the black disc, and the voice of a singer you have never met rings through the room, any number of times, exactly the same. Song became a ‘thing,’ something you could buy, something you could play again and again ― and this very change gave birth to a new culture: the popular song.

The Black Disc Carried the Voice Home

The disc-shaped record, the so-called SP, is said to have gone on sale within Japan around 1903. Compared with the earlier cylinder type, the disc was easier to store and easy to copy from a master. The same sound could be pressed in great quantity ― this quality became the foundation for circulating music as a commodity. In time SP discs cut with sound on both sides spread, and the record drew gradually closer to something within the reach of ordinary people.

The event often told as the one that clearly showed the world the power of song to spread on records is ‘The Song of Katyusha’ of 1914. This was an insert song from the play ‘Resurrection,’ staged by the Art Theater troupe led by Shimamura Hogetsu. The composer was Nakayama Shinpei, and the singer was the leading actress Matsui Sumako. Along with the play’s reputation, the song swept the whole country, and the record on which it was cut is said to have sold roughly twenty thousand copies. Records of the day were by no means cheap, and this figure was astonishing. The line ‘Katyusha, my dear’ even became a catchphrase, and is said to have risen to the lips of people who had never seen the play.

A song that spread across the whole country through media ― in that sense, ‘The Song of Katyusha’ is often placed as the first popular song of Japan. Of course, there is a range of views on what counts as the first, and one should be cautious about tracing the origin to this single piece. Even so, the phenomenon of one song ringing throughout the land by way of multiple channels ― stage and record alike ― surely symbolized the newness of this age.

Radio and the Major Companies Accelerated the Song

Two forces gave a further push to the current by which song became the possession of the masses. One was radio, whose regular broadcasting began in 1925. Until then, to hear a song one had to make one’s way to a stage or buy a record. But radio carried music over the airwaves and delivered it to every household all at once. Far-apart people heard the same melody at the same hour ― this simultaneity raised at a stroke the very speed of what we call a trend.

The other force was the modernization of the record industry itself. As the Showa era opened, around 1927, major record companies tied to Western capital and technology were born one after another. The Nippon Phonograph Company, founded in the Meiji era, partnered with British capital and came under its umbrella, later renaming itself Nippon Columbia. Around the same time, the Japan Victor Gramophone Company was also established. These firms took in from the West a new recording technology called ‘electrical recording’ and are said to have greatly improved sound quality.

The very nature of the singer changed as well. Not stage actresses or geisha, but ‘record singers,’ who made it their profession to cut songs onto records, rose up as an occupation. A company kept singers, commissioned songs from lyricists and composers, and sent them out into the world together with publicity ― the skeleton of the music industry that continues to this day began, around this time, to show its dim outline.

‘Tokyo March’ and the Song of the City

One piece that symbolized that new age was ‘Tokyo March,’ released in 1929. The lyrics were by Saijo Yaso, the composition by Nakayama Shinpei, and the singer was Sato Chiyako. This was the theme song of a film of the same name, based on a novel by Kikuchi Kan, and as a successful example made in clear tie-up with a film, it is also called the first film theme song of Japan. Released ahead of the film’s opening, the record is said to have become an unprecedented hit, selling more than two hundred thousand copies.

The lyrics painted in vividly the manners of the Tokyo of the day. The willows of Ginza, girls dancing to jazz, the subway and the movie theater ― the glamour of a great city in the very midst of modernization, and the figures of the moba and moga who came and went there, were set to a light melody. Listeners touched, through the song, the cutting-edge air of the city, and swelled with longing for a life they had never seen. Song was no longer merely something that sang of feeling; it had become a presence that mirrored, and also created, the very trends of the age.

So, from the Taisho era into the early Showa years, song left the theater and the classroom and became a sound within daily life, flowing from the gramophone and the radio in the home. The popular song carried people’s joys and loves and longings, sang the scenery of the city, and became a vessel for sharing the mood of the age. Seen from the time when the school songs of Meiji had been ‘music to be taught,’ it was a far freer, far more familiar world. Yet even as that free resonance filled the air, the atmosphere of society slowly grew taut. In the next age, toward the voices of people singing each as they pleased, the great shadow of the state was about to creep quietly near.