I've just finished reading Toya Mamoru's Shinchugun kurabu kara kayokyoku e (From Occupation Army Base Clubs to Japanese Pop Songs, published by Misuzu Shobo, 2005). Taking up a "micro" approach to the "macro" problem of what he calls the "Americanization" of postwar Japanese popular culture, Toya narrates a detailed history of the musical practice that developed during the American Occupation (1945-1952) in nightclubs and bars set up to entertain American military forces. In these spaces that were "off limits" to ordinary Japanese, thousands of Japanese musicians, managers and agents, and other workers (e.g. bartenders) developed an intimate relationship with the hitherto exotic alien culture of America.

Toya conducts interviews with a number people who lived this local--yet also global--culture, and he reconstructs the vanished moment in great archival detail: the book includes sheet music, set lists, photographs, diagrams of club layouts, etc. Although he is more concerned with recording the nuts-and-bolts history of this culture, he never loses sight of his main theoretical hypothesis: that much of postwar popular music culture in Japan was the product of this specific place. The performing and management styles that would become dominant in the Japanese music industry in the 1950s and 60s were first developed in the base clubs. Moreover, many of the singers and players who subsequently became stars in Japan got their start playing for American servicemen: Eri Chiemi, Yukimura Izumi, etc. He points out, too, that the new mass media of television got underway in Japan just as the Occupation was ending: many of the musicians, singers, arrangers and producers shifted directly from the base nightclubs to the television studio, literally without missing a beat.

The book is quite informative, and Toya largely achieves his aims: you get a feel for what it felt like, even what it smelled like, to be a Japanese musician working one of these clubs. But I also wonder if Toya doesn't stress too much the break in musical culture that took place in 1945. He traces the roots of the base club music culture largely back to wartime military bands, since that was the starting point for many of the participants, but he largely overlooks the thriving jazz scene of 1920s and 30s Japan. Those musicians were already well established by 1945 and hence weren't as likely to work pick-up gigs at base clubs, but they also played a major force in developing postwar kayokyoku.