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Japanese popular music : culture, authenticity, and power
Stevens, Carolyn S., 1963-London ; New York : Routledge, 2008.Japanese popular culture has been steadily increasing in visibility both in Asia and beyond in recent years. This book examines Japanese popular music, exploring its historical development, technology, business and production aspects, audiences, and language and culture. Based both on extensive textual and aural analysis, and on anthropological fieldwork, it provides a wealth of detail, finding differences as well as similarities between the Japanese and Western pop music scenes. Carolyn Stevens shows how Japanese popular music has responded over time to Japan's relationship to the West in the post-war era, gradually growing in independence from the political and cultural hegemonic presence of America. Similarly, the volume explores the ways in which the Japanese artist has grown in independence vis-a-vis his/her role in the production process, and examines in detail the increasingly important role of the "jimusho", or the entertainment management agency, where many individual artists and music industry professionals make decisions about how the product is delivered to the public. It also discusses the connections to Japanese television, film, print and internet, thereby providing through pop music a key to understanding much of Japanese popular culture more widely.
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On the margins of Japanese society : volunteers and the welfare of the urban underclass
Stevens, Carolyn S., 1963-London ; New York : Routledge, 1997.Japan is regarded as a society that provides "cradle to grave" security to those who conform to its standards. Carolyn Stevens' ethnographic study of social life in Kotobuki, (an inner city district of Yokohama), documents the lives of those on low income who have missed the Japanese economic miracle. Kotobuki is the toughest neighbourhood in Yokohama and a traditional home to day labourers. The author has spent a number of years in the district and has closely examined the lives of those who live there, mostly the unemployed, elderly and disabled. Also she has sought to understand the small number of volunteers, such as middle-class Japanese Christians and radical students, who go there in order to address issues of social justice through their charitable work. On the Margins of Japanese Society demonstrates how volunteering in Kotobuki is seen as a response to social marginality, both personal and political. There, social rules are less restrictive and more flexible, than in the rest of Japan, which allows volunteers and residents to create and re-create definitions of their identities.
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The Beatles in Japan
Stevens, Carolyn S., 1963-Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018.Following their first tour to Japan in 1966, the Beatles would become an important part of Japan's postwar cultural development and its deepening relationship with the West. By the 1960s Japan's dramatic rise in prosperity and the self-confidence of the country's `economic miracle' period were yet to come; it was not, at this stage, considered a fully-fledged partner of the West. All these potential developments were consolidating around the time of the 1966 tour. The Beatles' concerts in Tokyo contributed to the construction of a new Japanese national identity and introduced Japan as a new potential market to UK and US music producers, broadening the country's transnational cultural links. This book explores the Beatles' engagement with Japan within the larger context of the country's increased global connection and large-scale economic, social and cultural change. It describes the great impact of the Beatles' contentious 1966 tour, which took place amid public displays of both euphoric `Beatlemania' and angry protests, and discusses the lasting impression of this tour on Japanese culture and identity to the present day. The Beatles' relationship with Japan did not end after their departure; this book also examines the Beatles' subsequent contacts with Japan, including John Lennon's marriage and artistic partnership with Yoko Ono, and Paul McCartney's later Japanese tours and the warm reception the ex Beatles and their musical legacy have received over the years.
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