10 Raising the ante of desire
Foreign female singers in a Japanese pop music world
Let me begin with a puzzle whose pieces interlock seamlessly, yet fit only with great irony. The time is August 1992; the place is Tottori, Japan, a coastal city on the Sea of Japan; the event is a sunset concert by Korean and Japanese pop singers broadcast throughout Japan by NHK (Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai; Japan Public Broadcasting Corporation).1 With torches blazing and trumpets blaring, the announcer narrates:
The Japan Sea. One ocean containing two countries which from times past had commingled, their emotions running even deeper than the seas. And now, from the shores of Tottori, voices go out in song, and two hearts become one. We present, The Japan–Korea Big Star Tottori Concert.
What follows is a parade of singers, singing song after song in quick succession. They are led by two singers in duet: dashing Itsuki Hiroshi and Kim Yonja in a glittery evening gown. The only difference between this and countless other performances in Japan is that half the singers are from Japan and half from Korea. Their voices, however, do not mingle on equal terms. In not-so-subtle ways, the stage is not a neutral meeting ground, but a particularly Japanese one. For one, the language of the performance is Japanese, including all the introductions, voice-overs and dialogue. As singers perform in their respective languages, the lyrics of their songs — including Korean ones — are printed in only Japanese at the bottom of the screen. There is hardly a trace of hangul (Korean syllabary), except in the titles of songs and names of singers. Korean singers in interviews use an interpreter, while none of the Japanese singers do. Although many Koreans in Japan speak Japanese as a result of the colonial period (1910–45) when Japanese, not Korean, was the official language, the singers performing on the Tottori stage are generally too young to do so. Accordingly, these Korean singers are rendered mute, except when singing. Furthermore, some Korean singers perform only one verse of their songs, while Japanese singers more typically perform two verses.
This chapter analyses this stage and others like it as negotiations of race/ethnicity, nationalism, emotionalism and gender in performances by Korean singers in Japan. Specifically, I analyse what Richard Dyer calls the ‘star image’ or what I prefer to call the ‘star text’ of one female singer, Kim Yonja.2 Following a trend in the Japanese music industry begun in the 1970s and increasing by the 1980s, Kim relocated from Korea to Japan in 1988 to build a career in the more lucrative Japanese market.3 She has done so with great success, and remains a prominent figure in the Japanese popular music scene. In analysing the Tottori stage, as well as Kim's ‘star text’ in Japan, I draw upon the following: (1) live and pre-recorded performances by Kim, 1992–3; (2) an interview with Kim and her manager in July 1993; (3) articles on Kim in fan magazines like Enka Jaanaru from 1989 to 2001 and Karaoke Fan 1992–3; (4) Kim's fan club literature; and (5) website sources, including Kim's official home page (www.senshu-kikaku.co.jp/) and other sites.
Puzzle pieces: reading the Tottori stage
One part of this puzzle is the call by politicians and business leaders in Japan in the 1990s to return to Asia’. Only a year after the Tottori concert, the Japanese government announced that its volume of trade with other Asian countries, including that of its popular culture products, surpassed that of trade with the United States. This chorus for a return to Asia’ as economic turf harks back perilously to a different kind of prewar ‘return to Asia’ (dubbed nyū-A) on blatantly political turf. It comes amidst widespread insistence on a pan-Asian unity based in homologies of Confucian values, family structures, aesthetic tastes and other elements. One piece of evidence for this current version of pan-Asianism is said to lie in the popularity of Japanese mass culture throughout the region, including youth culture products such as magazines, fashion and ‘cute’ goods, as well as television dramas and older popular music.4 This version of millennial Asianism — in, through and around Japan — becomes both a ‘re-Asianisation’ (‘return to Asia’) of Japan and a ‘Japanisation’ of Asia. What becomes implicated in both of these is a double move that first assumes Japan's separateness from Asian, then purposefully re-positions Japan in Asia's midst, as a pivotal locus of power and control.
This Japanese ‘return to Asia’ occurs as multifaceted nostalgia. In one sense, Japan's Asia models premodern, pre-industrial rusticity. In another sense, Japan's Asia marks a kind of indigenous modernity, an ascendant industrialising vigour reminiscent of Japan's own earlier modern period (Iwabuchi 2002: 15–16). Both of these place Japan at the forefront of Asia, proud of its position, yet looking longingly back. Moreover, as Leo Ching argues, Japan has historically billed itself as Asia's ‘whiter country’, creating a racial hierarchy based on degrees of ‘yellowness’.5 This complicated relationship between Japan and Asia, then, forms one puzzle piece of the Tottori stage that juxtaposes Japanese singers with Korean qua Asian ones.
Another part of this puzzle situates this concert within a history of particularly rancorous relations between Korea and Japan. Korea was an early and geographically close target of Japanese imperialism, resulting in the establishment of colonial rule from 1910 to 1945. During this period, much of Korean culture was forced to go underground, including language, customs, and music. Bitterness toward Japan continues to be felt in Korea over 50 years later, in particular by those who lived through it. Evidence of that bitterness was a governmental ban in Korea on public presentations of things Japanese, including popular songs with Japanese lyrics, only lifted in 1999.
A third part of this puzzle is the large number of Koreans resident in Japan for generations, a legacy of the colonial period. Japan's myth of homogeneity has long effaced the presence of its minority populations, which include in the 1990s and 2000s, besides Koreans, burakumin (the traditional pariah class), Ainu, Okinawans, Chinese, Filipinos, Iranians and Brazilians. Within a nation-as-family ideology, Japanese citizens are said to constitute a single group whose very homogeneity becomes the source of its strength. Japan's supposed monoethnicity, coined as tan'itsu minzoku kokka (nation-state built upon a single ethnicity), becomes an assumption in people's everyday speech. The oft-heard expression ‘wareware Nipponjin …’ (‘we Japanese’) frames many racial/cultural explanations for traits and practices presumably shared throughout the population (Murphy-Shigematsu 1993: 65). The burgeoning narratives of nihonjinron (theories of Japaneseness) from the 1970s look beyond homogeneity to include Japan's island ecology, wet rice agriculture, group model, psychology, language and ethos to sustain models of racial and cultural uniqueness and often implicit superiority (Befu 1993: 109–13). These provide the context for enka's reconfiguration as national music with the implicit assumption of homogeneous peoples and tastes.
Presently, over 670,000 resident Koreans make up the largest foreign minority population within a country which continues to espouse a myth of its own homogeneity. For the most part, these Koreans residing in Japan (zainchi) remain resident aliens without citizen's rights, even though the great majority of them were born in Japan, speak Japanese, and even assume Japanese names, in part to mask their Korean identity. In spite of changes in the law to make citizenship available to zainchi Koreans, the majority remain resident aliens, a testament to years of discrimination (see Kajimura 1998). Like minority populations elsewhere, a significant number of these zainchi Koreans have made a place for themselves in Japanese society by performing outside the mainstream work world, in particular in the realms of entertainment and sports. The Tottori stage included some of these, performing as ‘passing’ Japanese. To this day, the non-Japanese ethnicity of certain entertainers in Japan remains a hidden topic, subject to rumour and gossip. For example, when I have presented this material outside Japan, often at least one Japanese in the audience expresses privately to me their astonishment and/or disbelief that these entertainers are actually Korean. I have also met a number of Japanese in Japan who vehemently deny that these entertainers are Korean or half-Korean. This demonstrates the degree to which the subject is still a controversial issue.
A fourth part of the puzzle lies in the music sung at this concert, which is enka, a popular ballad genre said to be expressive of ‘the heart/soul of the Japanese’ (nihonjin no kokoro), dubbed ‘the song of Japan’ (nihon no uta), and even the ‘sound of Japanese tradition’ (dentō no oto). With middle-aged and older men and women as its primary audience, enka makes a claim to national culture through them. These claims must be contextualised amidst precipitously declining record sales for enka in Japan (4 per cent at the time of the concert; less than 1 per cent by the end of the 1990s; Oricon 1993, 1999). Many youth and intellectuals actively dislike enka, denouncing it as overly sentimental, old-fashioned, even feudalistic, particularly in its treatment of women. According to its detractors, enka holds little claim to national culture because it situates Japan staunchly in the past and on the periphery, not in the present or the future. In the meantime, karaoke, AM radio and state institutions such as NHK, the broadcaster of the Tottori concert, keep enka afloat.
Debates surrounding enka's origins and popularity constitute a fifth part of the puzzle. Japanese scholars and much of enka's listening public view the genre as emphatically indigenous to Japan. They point to other Japanese musico-narrative genres with which enka shares a direct lineage. They embed enka within a longstanding tradition of poetic expressions of longing, as one of several past and present naki-bushi (songs/poems of crying). At the same time, many Korean scholars look to their own tradition of popular songs of sadness known as pongchak, and interpret enka as a genre which traversed the sea by way of Japanese resident in colonial Korea. Indeed, there is a great similarity between the ‘enka’ composed in Korea and that composed in Japan, both of which share the stage in Tottori. They use similar scales, melodies, instruments, textual themes and emotions. Besides the obvious contrast in language, they differ more subtly in vocal ornamentation. In particular, one former resident of Korea, Koga Masao (1904–78), was stationed in Korea during his early post-university days and, some would say, absorbed Korean elements into his musical language. Koga subsequently became a key figure in casting the genre in the 1920s and 1930s into what is now stereotypically called ‘Koga merodii’ (Koga melody) — minor scales, slow tempo, mandolin or guitar and dark gloom.
Enka's popularity throughout East and Southeast Asia attests to the legacy of Japan's colonial period in the musical tastes of the formerly colonised peoples. In each of these former colonies, enka has been popularised as ‘people's music’. Korean singers on the Tottori stage sing their own ‘enka’, pongchak, in the Korean language, claiming the genre to be theirs as much as Japan's. The sense of indigeneity of the genre felt strongly by those on both sides of this fence lays bare one of the mismatched puzzle pieces.
The sixth and final part of the puzzle is the focus of the remainder of this chapter: the importation of singers from Korea and Taiwan to sing enka by the Japanese music industry. Although both male and female foreign singers have been recruited, females outnumbered males by 6:1 in 1993, disproportionately higher than the female-to-male ratio of established singers, which is about 2:1.6 These singers perform not as hidden Koreans or Taiwanese, but as specifically non-Japanese, ‘Asian’ singers. These include Taiwanese female singer Teresa Teng, who debuted in Taiwan in 1974, built a highly successful career in Japan in the 1980s, and whose tragic death in 1995 was greatly mourned in Japan. Teng, born in 1953, has been quoted as saying, ‘I grew up in Taiwan listening to Japanese songs, so I cannot think of Japanese songs as being foreign music. Japan's music is Asia's music.’7 This very notion of Japan's music as Asia's music is the ground upon which this chapter treads. Other established foreign enka singers include Korean male singer Chō Yonpiru (who debuted in 1982) and Korean female singer Kye Unsook (who debuted 1985).
These pieces of the puzzle form a necessary lens through which one must view the performances on the Tottori stage. Among its many performers is one whose interactions on that stage and others that I now turn to.
Kim as star text: performing Korean
Kim Yonja is emphatically not a hidden Korean in Japan, but has always been a Korean in Japan. Her hybridity, her Koreanness-out-of-place, in fact, inevitably becomes part of the spectacle of her performances, both from the stage and audience. She has a Korean name of course, but more than that she performs Koreanness as a central component of her star text. In concert, she often includes Korean songs, wears Korean dress and mentions being Korean in her stage patter. At one performance I attended in Tokyo in 1993, members of the audience seated in the front row carried small Korean flags, and theatre-goers who purchased Kim's CD were given a fan printed with the Korean flag. Articles on Kim in enka fan magazines unfailingly mention Korea or her being Korean in them. When a fan asked her how she reduces stress, she answered that she turns to things Korean by taking a Korean-style sauna and talking in Korean with friends.8 She names kimchi (Korean spicy pickles) as both her favourite food made by her mother, as well as the source of her power.9 Furthermore, she takes her fans on tours to Korea.
In interviews she herself brings up her Koreanness, her foreignness, as if it is a constant supratext. Often, this Koreanness takes the form of being unfamiliar with the Japanese language. A 1992 article comments on her singing in Japanese: ‘It is easy enough to understand her, because she takes care in her pronunciation of Japanese lyrics with which she is not yet familiar.’10 Cleverly, she comments upon her inadequacies with self-deprecating humour. At the concert I attended in 1993, she joked about one of her early linguistic mistakes when she mistook the word oshinko (Japanese pickles) for oshikko (urine). In a 1993 published interview, Kim again freely joked about her linguistic faux pas: ‘When we were recording my most recent song, I made a big blunder. In the second verse there's a phrase “mukōmim” [foolhardiness, recklessness], but I made the mistake of thinking that it meant “the water over on the other side” [literally, mukō, far side + mizu, water]’.11 In turning these linguistic difficulties into jokes, however, not only does she avert the critique possibly laid against her, she turns these mistakes into assets of charm.
The charm lies in the ways in which she positions herself as one in need of the assistance of those around her. In a performance I attended at a mid-sized venue in Tokyo, audience members called out their corrections to her linguistic mistakes. In an interview on the Tottori stage, she tripped occasionally on more complicated Japanese verb forms, slowing down as though she was still a student of the language in order to get it right. In an interview with top composer Yoshioka Osamu, Kim explained the special needs of a Korean/foreigner: ‘Being a foreigner, I don't always understand the exact meaning of songs, but somehow I feel something like the meaning. However, I think that it would improve the recording if I could sing with a better grasp of the composer's intentions.’12 She gives credit to those around her — including her staff, her producer and her composers — and in so doing exactly fulfils the model of Japanese interdependence.
I was trying hard to understand the Japanese, but when I was recording ‘Shikatte Ageru’ [Reprimanding], I ended up making another mistake. Because of the word ‘shikatti’ [reprimand, scold], I interpreted the character as becoming more and more furious, and I ended up singing the passage with great fury. But my staff said, ‘Try and sing it more gently, with a kind of maternal instinct’. Unfortunately, I laughed and said, I don't really understand this ‘maternal instinct’.13
Later in the same interview she credits producer (and then-retired enka singer) Miyako Harumi with helping her avoid similar kinds of mistakes in her most recent song. ‘After all’, she explains, ‘if you don't sing with a proper grasp of the words, it's difficult to really strike a chord in people's hearts’.14 Kim thus gives great credit to those around her, who help her understand the words to Japanese songs. These intermediaries — staff, producer, composer, audience — become buffers and interpreters for Kim, the interloper.
While I am not suggesting that Kim's mistakes are deliberate, she places herself and is placed in situations that foreground her neediness derived from her position of non-nativeness. She performs Koreanness through her linguistic stumbling. And because she must always perform Koreanness, linguistic stumbling must always be a part of her star text. Her mistakes call upon an amae (dependency) relationship between Kim as one who amaeru (displays their dependency) and her buffers/interpreters as those who amayakasu (give the dependant service) (see Doi 1971; Lebra 1976: 54–5). This relationship is gendered as well. Observers of the few foreign male singers of enka suggest that these men do not speak much Japanese in public, as a deliberate attempt to avoid displaying either their mistakes or their linguistic competence. Foreign men, in other words, have a more difficult time positioning themselves appropriately vis-à-vis Japanese. Too many mistakes emasculate them; too few mistakes threaten their position as foreigners. The best option for them, then, is to not speak at all.
Kim's position as interloper both enables and disables. In a 1993 performance I attended, Kim admitted to appearing in kimono — the most typical dress for female enka singers — on stage for the first time. However, instead of downplaying this fact, she placed it centre stage in her performance. She talked about feeling confined and trapped. She worried aloud about tripping in the floor-length, narrow garment. She stood awkwardly, looking uncomfortable. After singing her song, she joked, ‘Can I really step forward in this?’ The kimono became a centrepiece of Kim's performance, as well as emblematic of her position in Japan. The kimono is a vessel into which one gets poured, yet Kim never becomes the container; instead she always holds the container at a distance from herself. Or, as it might be said, she is always made to hold the container at a distance from herself. She at once adopts and extends the gaze of her audience in Japan. Kim and kimono do not blend, but hold one another in suspension like oil and water.
In fact Kim replicates many young Japanese people's engagement with things defined as ‘traditionally Japanese’, from kimono to keigo (Japanese honorific speech) to Yamato-damashii (the spirit of ancient Japan). The racial divide she brings to the enka stage parallels the generational divide many older people in Japan lament. Japanese youth are often decried by older generations as awkward and unfamiliar – as foreign from what has been defined as Japan, some might say, as Kim appears to be. This includes enka itself. Unlike Kim, however, who actively pursues these elements of her new home — singing enka, wearing a kimono, speaking Japanese respectfully — younger Japanese, according to this critique, neglect or reject these matters. At the same time, young Japanese may come to ‘things Japanese’ with a sense of entitlement (even as some may reject this); Kim must come to ‘things Japanese’ as a perennial student. When asked by a fan which language she writes in her diary, Korean hangul (syllabary) or Japanese, she answers that she writes in both languages, but that she tries hard to write in Japanese because it is good for her studying (‘benkyō no tame’).15 Japan for her is a constant benkyō (study).
Being a constant student of Japan, she works hard at the practices of being Japanese. She never takes these for granted; instead, each practice becomes an achievement. And in many ways she succeeds. The announcer at one of her performances that I attended in 1993 introduced her by saying, ‘She is more Japanese than the Japanese.’ The model minority, she outdoes the ‘natives’ in practising their culture. Furthermore, she is taken as not only quintessentially Japanese, but also as the embodiment of past ideals of Japanese femininity. One article states, ‘Kim Yonja epitomises the shyness and modesty of Japanese women in the past’ (Tajima 1997: 29). In these ways, Kim's star text is not only exoticised, but also feminised, by her very in betweenness.
Fan literature, promotional material and Kim herself take this position as interloper — between countries, languages, cultures — as an asset. Her 1993 fan club calendar pictures her six times in Western dress, five times in a Korean gown and twice in a Japanese kimono. Her position in between allows her to claim what Aihwa Ong has called ‘flexible citizenship’, based upon ‘the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions’ (Ong 1999: 6). She thus traverses terrain that Japanese people themselves may not broach so easily.
According to her professional profile, even before her re-debut in Japan in 1988, she had performed in the United States and Canada (1984, 1987), Brazil (1986), and Libya, England, Switzerland and France (1987). Early promotional articles mention these multinational performances: ‘Kim is one who has been actively performing in various countries of the world.’16 She is dubbed ‘Korea's goodwill ambassador of song’ (Kankoku no ‘uta no shinzentauhi’),17 and, more to the point, ‘a songstress who binds Japan and Korea’ (Nihon to Kankoku o musubu utahime).18 An article discussing Kim's 1996 performance in Cuba proclaims, ‘Yonja's voice is once again going to cross the ocean! [Yonja no kasei ga mata hitotsu umi o koeru!]’.19 In its tone of amazement, this article and others express awe (and possibly envy) at Kim's fluidity: she crosses more frequently and with greater success than island-bound Japanese.
The spearhead of her ambassadorship is song — ‘the power of song to cross national borders’ (kokkai o koeta uta no pawaa).20 The phrase, ‘crossing national borders’, has become a catch phrase of Kim's reputation. More specifically, Kim crosses by way of enka, the ‘song of Japan’. Magazine articles point out that she is the first to bring enka to the stage in these countries distant from Japan, both geographically and culturally, such as Cuba, Brazil and Vietnam. In other words, not only does she cross borders, but in doing so she extends the reach of enka, Japan's national popular music. She becomes enka's worldwide advocate.
In 1990, she performed in Sakhalin to a mixed audience of Soviets, Koreans and Japanese in two performances attended by full houses of 5,000 each. According to a magazine account, ‘the house was packed with the people of these three countries mixed together’ (mikka kuni no hitotachi ga hairi konjitte gisshin man'in) … listening from beginning to end ‘in a huge fevered pitch’ (dai fibaa to natta).21 Photos show Kim performing in Korean costume and a Western evening gown to an audience of primarily older women. Singing a combination of Korean and Japanese songs, Kim sings pointedly to the generations of Japanese and Koreans long resident in Sakhalin: ‘Kim cried and cried on stage, saying “I'm happy beyond words to see the joy that these people — Koreans who cannot return to Korea, Japanese who cannot return to Japan, and those who have never stepped foot in their mother country … find simply in hearing these songs”’.22 The article reports that in singing Japanese songs Kim incited strong feelings of longing amongst the Japanese expatriate population:
In the words of a 60-year old Japanese woman, ‘I finally got to hear Japanese songs! While I am alive, I would like to see my furusato [hometown, homeland] in Hokkaido’ … That night, Mrs M, a Japanese woman who is married to a Korean man, burst into tears, saying ‘I want to return to Japan soon!’ [hayaku Nihon ni kaeritai!], only to be comforted by Kim.23
Kim, the native Korean now with, in her own words, ‘Japan as my second furusato [homeland, hometown]’, becomes the pin-up girl for displaced Japanese (Tajima 1997: 29). In her own border crossing, Kim incites emotions that reconnect overseas Japanese to Japan. The fact that the source of this reconnection is not Japanese, but Korean, is discretely ignored. In defence of her position, some would say that it is Kim's non-Japaneseness that paves the way for her crossing national borders in the first place. As a Korean in Japan, her very career is built upon the processes of border crossings. Performing overseas, then, is but an extension of her career in Japan.
With the recording of her first album in the United States, ‘Heartful Soul in New York’,24 Kim is spoken of as one ‘who is one step closer to taking on the world’ (sekai ni mata ippō chikazuita kanojo).25 The stepping stones of her career are as follows: first Korea, then Japan, next, the world (sekai). No other singer in the enka world garners such a reputation. She alone is allowed the world as her stage.
Moreover, her performances overseas can take on overtly political significance, as was the case with her concert in Korea in 1999. This concert marked an historical moment: the first large-scale performance of Japanese popular songs following a lifting of the ban earlier that year. According to one article, ‘this concert granted Kim's wish, which was to be the very first to sing Japanese songs in Korea with the lifting of the long-standing ban’.26 In an interview, Kim calls Japanese and Koreans brothers (dōhō), saying, ‘If there are songs that we both know, then let us please sing them together’ (Oh 2000). This event gained significant prominence in fan magazines, published with a colour photo spread on the second page of Enka Jaanaru. A quote from Kim reaffirms her place as border crosser and ambassador of song: ‘I felt deeply that song knows no national borders’ (uta ni wa, kokkai wa nai to iu koto o, shimijimi omoimashita).27
Another case in point is an April 2001 concert in Pyongyang, North Korea, performing songs in Korean, Japanese and English. In a zainchi website article on this event, Kim is called a ‘bridge of rainbows which spans north–south [Korean] exchange’ [namboku kōryū no niji no kahbashi].28 Since her career has been built upon constant exchange, she is now called upon to broker the political conflicts which have divided her home country.
What allows Kim to cross these national and cultural borders so easily is, according to the magazine articles, emotion. One article describes Kim as ‘a songstress who was raised in Asia and whose voice crosses national boundaries and oceans with its emotion’.29 Another article poses the question,
How is it that even without understanding the words, one's heart can be moved [kotoba ga wakaranakute mo, mune ni jiin to kuru]? Listening to Kim Yonja's voice, this question comes to mind … Kim's voice has great strength of feeling [kokimi no yoi panchi chikara ga aru] … She sings with a voice from the depths of her heart, and transmits a white-hot heat to us all [mune no okusoku kara koe o dasu koto myotte, sono nekki ga wareware ni tsutawatte kuru no da].30
In the end, the author concludes that the answer to his question lies in kokoro (heart, spirit, soul) and the depth of emotions therein. ‘“She sings with her heart [kokoro de utau],” is the answer that comes to mind addressing the mystery of being moved even without understanding the language.’31 In an interview, Kim says, ‘I'd like to create the kind of stage where I link up with the audience, heart to heart.’32 Singing with her heart gives Kim's performances an incandescence, an intensity, described as ‘boiling over with true emotion’ (jikkan waku): ‘I think that people who have seen Kim Yonja on stage even once … cannot help but be overwhelmed by her intensity [sono hakuryoku ni atto sareru]’.33
Emotion and tears, in fact, become not only the tools of ambassadorship, but also Kim's trademark. At the Tottori concert, Kim sings ‘Danchō no Miari Koge’ [Japanese title], a well-known Korean ‘enka’ song in Korean dress. She sings the first verse in Korean and the second verse in Japanese. At the end of the song, with trumpets blaring in a crescendo of music and emotion, she calls out to her lover, dropping melodramatically to the ground, fists punching the air, tears flowing. When I have shown this video clip to Japanese and Koreans alike, they comment that this kind of performance crosses the boundaries of Japaneseness and becomes stereotypically, even exaggeratedly, Korean. The stereotype creates a racial divide around tears: whereas Japanese tears fall in a controlled, aestheticised manner, Korean tears fall uncontrollably, in profusion, in excess. As one Japanese woman in her sixties comments, ‘She sings with too much passion! She's overdoing it. But that's because she's not really Japanese.’ One zainchi Korean woman in her thirties criticises Kim for just this type of performative excess, agreeing that Kim overdoes it. She faults Kim for playing right into the stereotype by which Koreans are denigrated in Japan. This use of emotion to create a divide between self and other finds parallel in terms of race and gender elsewhere (see Lutz 1988). In other performances I have watched, Kim does not emote quite so vociferously. Yet emotion plays a part in everything she does. She performs with her heart very much on her sleeve, a thoroughly gendered and here racialised production. Tears, it seems, becomes her. I have watched her cry before, during and after songs, at times steering the timing of the performance to accommodate the control of tears. The advertisement for her 1993 Tokyo concert plays upon the theme of tears when it proclaims Kim's performance as ‘songs which flow throughout my body’ (watashi no karada ni nagareru uta).
Tears form a linkage with superstar Misora Hibari (1937–89), dubbed ‘queen of enka’ (Tansman 1996), whose Korean ethnicity has long been a subject of rumour and gossip in the entertainment world. In Korea, Kim is known as ‘Korea's Misora Hibari’ (Tajima 1997: 28). When I interviewed Kim, she referred to Hibari as her ‘dai-senpai’ (‘big’ senior, elder, superior). She refers to Hibari in performance. At a 1993 concert I attended, one half of the programme was devoted to Hibari songs. In 1996 she released two volumes of Misora Hibari songs.34 In fact, the two have much in common. Hibari, too was known for her tears, especially when singing particular songs. In Hibari's case, however, her tears fell as Japanese tears, proof of her social embeddedness, her sensitivity, her very humanity. Over ten years after her death, Hibari's tears now deify her. Kim's tears fall inevitably as Korean tears, beyond enka's bounds, out of kilter with Japanese.
Tears give Kim a vulnerability, both on stage and backstage, which counterbalances the power ascribed to her. At times, it seems, her emotions overpower her. An air of unpredictability hovers around Kim's performances. In concert I have watched as she either forgot the lyrics to a song or was overwhelmed by emotion to the point of not being able to continue singing mid-song. Her performance is full of extreme highs and gaps such as these (although some would not call these gaps). As a viewer, this unpredictability electrifies a concert with an on-the-edge-of-your-seat reality. Kim's trademark — her tears and emotion — makes a performance riveting. Compared to other polished Japanese singers, she presents a rawer image, one no less practised perhaps, but one also performing from an untouched core. Furthermore, tears connect her to her fans in a highly gendered fashion. One journalist expressed amazement at witnessing Kim, in tears, running out of a radio studio mid-programme at the news of the death of one of her biggest fans (see Tajima 1997: 28). She makes herself more accessible to fans than other enka singers, who are typically insulated by layers of managers and staff.35 Tears humanise Kim, even while they racialise and feminise her.
Kim's border crossing includes the boundaries of song genres. Far more than other enka singers in Japan, Kim sings from a wide range of genres, including American jazz and popular standards. In fact, she claims to want to sing different types of songs as a challenge (kore kara mo iroiro na taipu no sakuhin ni charenji shite ikitai desu).36 This stands in contrast to Japanese enka singers who more commonly stay within enka's bounds, even if only because the listening public demand it. The Japanese public have fewer expectations of Kim; she is free to sing any song she likes, interloping across genres as she has done across countries. Therefore she is often dubbed not an ‘enka singer’, but a ‘song stylist’.
Border crossing also extends to Kim's audience. According to her manager, women make up the majority of her fan club members, as is common with enka singers. However, one fascinating segment of fan club members consists of gay men. At the two live performances I attended, these 10–15 men in their twenties and thirties (young by enka standards) sat near the back of the audience, gesturing in unison during particular songs. According to Kim, they accompany her to different performances and form a highly responsive, performative audience wherever she goes. She considers them to be her close friends. Kim is one of a handful of female performers considered particularly appealing to gay male audiences in Japan. Although I have not interviewed any members of this sub-group of fans, Richard Dyer's comments on the gay fandom in Euro-America surrounding Judy Garland provides an interesting comparison and contrast. Dyer considers three aspects of gay (Euro-American) culture which are consonant with aspects of Garland's image: (1) ordinariness; (2) androgyny; and (3) camp (Dyer 1986: 156–86). Furthermore, he analyses Garland's star image as one suffused with emotion.
An important part of Kim's star text which is explicitly not part of fan magazine articles and promotion is her connection with the zainichi Kankokujin (resident alien Korean) community. Her husband, the band leader of the Clear Tones Orchestra, heads the Zainichi Kankokujin Bunka Geijutsu Kyokai (Zainichi Korean Cultural Arts Association).37 In fact, Kim's official website is one shared by her zainichi husband, and includes links to various zainichi Korean sites and pieces of news.38 In this backstage facet of Kim's star text, she sings directly to those not even mentioned in the frontstage text. In my perusal of enka magazines from 1999 to 2001, Kim's name never gets linked to zainichi Koreans, only to Korea itself, and this nearly unfailingly. She is always positioned as a foreign singer who performs before audiences in Japan; but that audience never gets scrutinised as one composed in large part of zainichi Koreans. zainichi Koreans, then, are erased from the Kim star text presented in enka magazines. They defy the categories of ‘Japan’ and ‘Korea’ by living in one while being of another. Theirs is not a hybrid existence, but a non-existence in terms of publicly sanctioned order. The border crossing Kim effects does not extend to their lives.
In interviews published in zainichi newspapers, Kim speaks more frankly and critically of her life in Japan as a foreigner, as a Korean, than in interviews published in enka magazines. When asked about her success in the Japanese music world, she brings up her earlier failure twenty-one years previously.
Even if I failed before when I came to Japan [in 1979], I think what helped this time is that I studied the Japanese language tirelessly and I worked hard to learn more about Japan. Furthermore, I think that the general knowledge of Korea and Koreans in Japan is now very much changed from previously.
(Oh 2000)
It is a fact, however, that Kim herself has played a large part in the Japanese public's increased awareness of Korea. And it is said that Kim alone will appear on Japanese television wearing Korean costume and promoting Korea by telling people that it is a fine place and people should come visit. Kim also talks about the difficulties of being a foreigner in Japan:
It seems that even if one starts out at the same point, overcoming the handicap of being a foreigner in Japan is difficult … When people see you just once as a foreigner, forever after they will always think of you as a foreigner. They will not write your name in kanji [Chinese ideographs], but always spell it out in katakana [elementary syllabary used for foreign words].39
Kim's critique derives from the special place of katakana within Japan's writing systems. In general, katakana is used to separate and isolate, for example, words of foreign origin, as well as words given emphasis (e.g., in advertising). Kim interprets Japanese people's writing of her name in katakana as a cultural slight, both in their ignoring of the Chinese ideographs, as well as in the special, separate status given her. In fact, what she says is borne out by a quick survey of magazine articles on Kim: before 1989 her name was written with Chinese ideographs (with furigana, explanatory pronunciation); however, by 1990, her name was written almost exclusively in katakana. The switch from Chinese ideographs to katakana reflects the intertwined practices of familiarisation and colonisation: the Japanese public has become increasingly familiar with Kim on their terms, in a writing system they do not have to translate, ignoring the ideographs that may give her name as much semantic meaning as theirs. This is not to indicate that Kim and her manager had no part in this, or that it does not work to their advantage. This only describes the structures by which Kim has become a more marketable, and thus profitable, commodity in Japan.
Kim is not zaimchi, of course, and never will be. In contrast with most zaimchi, she at least retains a Korean name, speaks freely of being Korean, and travels easily back and forth to Korea. On the other hand, by becoming a touchstone for zaimchi, she affords them a means to be frankly Korean in Japan. Attending a Kim concert, being a Kim fan, even travelling with Kim's fan club to Korea, does not necessarily proclaim that one is Korean. One does not need to be Korean to participate in these activities. But at the very least Kim creates a Korean enclave within Japan by insisting upon performing the star text of Korea, even while singing Japanese enka, even while being introduced as ‘more Japanese than Japanese’. She plays to the zaimchi audience as a family matter. Kim's performances offer fans a space of intimacy within which one may sit side by side in a darkened concert hall watching tears fall from — better yet, crying with — an overtly Korean singer. For two hours and 15 minutes, one may sidle up to this bejewelled and bedecked version of Korea.
Return to the Tottori stage
Let us return, in the end, to the Tottori stage to reiterate the ways in which the puzzle pieces fit and do not fit. The Tottori concert closed with these words: ‘We are so pleased to present tonight's concert which binds together the hearts of Japan and Korea. This is indeed a first step in building a bridge to Asia’. All the performers returned to the stage to sing in unison a song created just for this concert, ‘Tabibito’ (Traveller), lyrics written by a Japanese, music written by a Korean. As a finale, Japanese and Korean performers alike sang this song, ostensibly a cooperative effort, but one sung only in Japanese on a Japanese stage broadcast to Japanese audiences. The ‘bridge’, then, which reputedly connects Japan to Asia is one built by and for Japan.
The pieces of the Tottori stage fit neatly as an official presentation of shared bonds between Japan and Korea, voices of one mingling with the other. This stage shows Japan to be a good neighbour, meeting on the apolitical ground of song. However, these pieces clash as soon as they are juxtaposed with one another. The inequities of the stage hierarchise the neighbours back into colonial positions expressed in language and song. The apolitical ground of song quickly gives way to a performance of contested positions. Nowhere is this more clearly embodied than in one of the evening's central stars, Kim Yonja. She opened the show, performing in duet with one of enka 's celebrated but hidden zainichi Koreans. She performed solos in both languages. She changed from Western dress to Korean costume and back again. She performed her own transnationality repeatedly and in several layers at once. Kim's performance on this stage and others may be taken as simultaneously Korean, Korean in Japan (singing to, but not as zainichi), Japanese (that is, particular to the context of Japan), and/or Asian (that is, the ‘Asia’ configured by Japan). The polysemy of her star text matches the puzzle pieces of this stage.
As Ong notes, ‘transnational mobility and maneuvers mean that there is a new mode of constructing identity, as well as new modes of subjectification that cut across political borders’ (Ong 1999: 18). In Kim's case, she uses those political borders to her advantage, building a career based upon crossing them. She becomes part of past and present circulations of popular culture in, through and around Asia. This concert brings together not simply one historical moment, but a panoply of such moments in this most recently configured ‘return to Asia’. I argue that these meanings come into play through performances that encompass these histories, tensions and politics — in other words, the various puzzle pieces — of intra-Asian popular culture flows. It is performances such as these that ignite this Japanese stage, lighting up ironies amidst the incandescence of tears.
Notes
This chapter has previously been published in Hybridity: Journal of Cultures, Texts and Identities. I thank the editors for permission to reprint this slightly revised version.
1 The show was recorded on 1 August 1992, and broadcast 29 August 1992, 4:20–5:45 p.m.
2 Dyer includes within this image not only performances, but also promotion, fan response and critique, suggesting that these ‘are always extensive, multimedia, intertextual’ (1986: 3).
3 Kim's move to Japan in 1988 was actually her second attempt to establish a career there. Her first attempt came 9 years earlier in 1979. In spite of performances at the prestigious NHK Hall in Tokyo in 1983 and 1984, Kim's career in Japan floundered at that time. Her performance of the song ‘Asa no Kuni kara’ (From the Land of the Morning; Japanese translation of title) at the final ceremony of the Seoul Olympics in 1988 became the launching pad to her subsequent career in Japan. Subsequent concerts and recitals by Kim in Japan invariably include performance of her Olympic song.
4 Pan-Asianism is not uniformly accepted. Chua Beng Huat (2000), for example, questions the pervasiveness of the influence of Japanese pop culture in Asia.
5 Ching (1998: 65, 67–8) argues that the ‘globalized imperialist structure’ of hierarchy based upon epidermal distinctiveness — primarily black vs. white, but also yellow and brown — informed Japan's self-positioning as ‘not white, not quite, yet alike’, that is, not white, but more white than other Asians, yet linked as a ‘whiter Asian’ among Asians.
6 Oricon (1992).
7 Kokiku (1995: 13).
8 www.senshu-kikaku.co.jp/ (date accessed 24 May 2001).
9 Ibid.
10 Karaoke Fan (1992: 10–11).
11 enka Jaanaru (1993: 22).
12 enka Jaanaru (1990: 22).
13 enka Jaanaru (1993: 23).
14 enka Jaanaru (1993: 23).
15 http://www.senshu-kikaku.co.jp (accessed 24 May 2001).
16 enka Jaanaru (1989: 34).
17 enka Jaanaru (1990: 16).
18 enka Jaanaru (1993: 20).
19 enka Jaanaru (1996: 35).
20 enka Jaanaru (1990: 16).
21 enka Jaanaru (1990: 16).
22 enka Jaanaru (1990: 16).
23 enka Jaanaru (1990: 16).
24 Crown Records CRCP-20245, released 21 June 2000.
25 enka Jaanaru (2000: 8).
26 enka Jaanaru (1999b: 2).
27 enka Jaanaru (2000: 8).
28 enka News 2000. Http://enka-dayo.tvst.com/korea.html (accessed 24 May 2001).
29 enka Jaanaru (1997: 37).
30 Karaoke Fan (1992: 10).
31 Karaoke Fan (1992: 11).
32 enka Jaanaru (1992: 20).
33 Karaoke Fan (1993: 68).
34 ‘Misora Hibari o Utau, Vol. I and II’, Crown Records CRCN-20126, CRCN-20128. Kim is not the only singer to release albums of Hibari songs. Others include Tagawa Toshimi, Tendō Yoshimi, Nakamura Mitsuko and Matsubara Nobue.
35 During the period of my fieldwork in Japan from 1991 to 1993, Kim was the only enka singer to grant me an interview of longer than a few minutes. In fact her interview lasted three hours.
36 enka Jaanaru (1993: 23).
37 This organization was founded in 1982.
39 Korea shares Chinese ideographs with China and Japan. Therefore, Kim's name can easily and correctly be written out with the proper ideographs. However, the Japanese have also developed phonetic syllabaries considered to be more elementary forms of writing and of lower status.