A R T I C L ECopyright © 2008SAGE Publications(Los Ang.docx

A R T I C L E
Copyright © 2008
SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi and Singapore)
www.sagepublications.com
Vol 16(2): 111–29
10.1177/110330880801600201
J-Pop and performances of
young female identity
Music, gender and urban space in Tokyo
CSABA TOTH
Carlow University, USA
Abstract
This article examines the staging of sexuality and femininity in
Japan Pop (J-Pop)
and its related club-cultural scenes. While historical research on
many aspects
of gender in Japan has been extensive, the relationship between
popular music
culture, gender, and urban space has been given little
recognition. Based on ex-
tensive fi eld research in Japan, the article provides an analysis
of not only how
present-day female stars, Ayumi Hamasaki, Shina Ringo and
Misia reproduce and
enact prescribed gender and sexual roles, but also reveals how,
in many in-

stances, they transgress those. These female performers
managed to carve out a
representational space by highlighting girl themes that
energized girl solidarity,
and held up the possibility for rearticulating young femininity.
They represent
different angles of Tokyo’s current music and style scenes, and
cultural geography.
These are scenes and geographies shaped by and inseparable
from urban markers
that female fans follow night after night in Tokyo in order to
reach clubs playing the
music of their favorite stars. Girls’ active engagement in clubs
with commercialized
media texts that J-Pop performers produce assists them with the
development
of their identity and formation of relationships with other young
females. The
study argues that from trans-ethnic ‘white’-style scenes, ‘black’
soul, and rhythm
and blues (R&B)-oriented clubs in Shibuya to Shinjuku’s
‘seedy’ disco bars, young
women explore possibilities for new ethnic (trans-Asian, ‘Asian
black’), gender
and sexual, and generational identities. The essay hopes to
contribute to applied,
transnational gender and cultural studies as well as music
criticism.
Keywords
cultural geography, ethnicity, gender, girl studies, J-Pop, Japan,
popular music
Nordic Journal of Youth Research
Young

112 Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
It’s so nice to be a beautiful girl
(It’s so nice to be... beautiful)
Party like a wild thing
(ba ba ba ba ba ba)
In parties that go on and on
Shake it at a nightclub
(la la la la la la)
Disco till the crack of dawn.
Kahimie Karie, ‘Good Morning World’ (1998)1
Pop star Kahimie Karie’s words adequately express the feelings
of young Tokyo women dedicated to spending their days in the
chic boutiques of
Shibuya and Daikanyama, and their nights dancing in one or
rather more of the
myriads of discothèques of the Japanese capital.2 Present-day
Tokyo’s ‘clubland’
incorporates Shibuya’s ‘white’ goddess Ayumi Hamasaki,
‘black’ music divas
such as Misia, and tough-girl Shina Ringo, who is the voice of
the shot bars and
edgy discos of Shinjuku where prostitute and female performers
are often indis-
tinguishable. Here I would take issue with cultural geographers
John Connell’s
and Chris Gibson’s assertion that Tokyo is one of those centers

that ‘have not
been attributed a “sound” in international mediascapes’
(Connell and Gibson,
2003: 102). What Connell and Gibson set as criteria of
appropriations of urban
spaces for subcultural use — infrastructure of clubs, mobile
populations, and
‘a vibrant culture of music consumption’ — are all present in
Tokyo (p. 103).
Indeed, what makes Tokyo different from New York, Berlin and
London is the
incredible density of clubs in relatively small areas, in which
four- or fi ve-storey-
high buildings may accommodate four or fi ve venues, each of
which plays a
different kind of music for markedly different audiences, a
difference that shapes
the age and gender mix on the dance fl oor. The author of this
article has visited
a dozen or more clubs within less than a mile radius in Shibuya
a night (only to
come by as yet-uncharted ones the following night), a good
number of which
cater to almost exclusively young female audiences.
In Tokyo’s vast urban sprawl, female clubbers follow specifi c
urban markers.
They travel a succession of stops along specifi c transit lines,
and navigate specifi c
urban markers (Krims, 2007) on any given night in an effort to
reach their
favorite clubs — in the plural. Arguably, Shibuya is the starting
point for nightly
endeavors. The options are multifold. Groups of girls may want
to explore some
of the fashionable districts surrounding Shibuya. The clubs of

Omotesando,
Aoyama, Daykanyama and Roppongi are all within easy reach.
However, most
young women of the ‘in crowd’ stay in, navigate or, at some
point of the night,
return to Shibuya’s discothèques.
While major record labels often tend to sell their female stars
by highlighting
their sexual desirability, some female performers managed to
carve out a repre-
sentational space by highlighting girl themes that energized girl
solidarity and
held up the possibility for a re-articulation of young femininity.
Girlhood emerges
Toth Music, gender and urban space in Tokyo 113
Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
from this space not as a universal, biologically-grounded
condition of female
experience; instead, it implies a relation to agency, visibility
and history (Wald,
2002: 207). Clubbing in contemporary Japan is a crucial site in
which young
women can construct their own representations of girlhood —
either as a chal-
lenge to or in conformity with hegemonic gender narratives.
Clubs function
as important sources of emotional sanctuary for girls, and act as
outlets for the
expression of anger, pleasure and hope (Wald, 2002: 209).

JAPAN: FUTURE IN THE PAST?
Japan is a country that even today remains unique, not only for
its distinctive
culture but for the fact that, until recently, it has been the only
non-Western society
to have successfully industrialized its economy. It seemed that
Japanese society,
with its well-oiled government bureaucracy and corporate
management, single-
party politics (Liberal Democratic Party), and high
technological innovations ex-
isted as a ‘utopian alternative’, as the Eastern ‘Other’ to ‘what
many perceived as
the corrupt and decadent societies of the West’, as fi lm studies
scholar Susan J.
Napier writes (Napier, 1998: 27–8).
By the mid-1990s, the situation changed dramatically. Japan
found itself in the
midst of an ‘imploding national economic system, a
disintegrating social order,
and the virtual absence of ethical and competent leadership’
(Yoda, 2000a: 635).
This real or perceived state of affairs led to an increasing
disenchantment with
the values and goals that post-war Japan was built on. The
disillusionment is
particularly obvious in Japanese youth culture. As girl studies
scholar Catherine
Driscoll stresses that young women are highly visible and
central to the ‘iconog-
raphy of Japanese life and culture’, still, they are often
represented as insignifi cant
in dominant discourses (Driscoll, 2002: 292). Therefore, it is
greatly paradoxical

that moral panics over youth behavior, the outbreak of which
has been closely
interwoven with the nation’s economic troubles, suggest that it
is girl cultures
that refl ect the brand-crazy consumerist obsession and the
‘anything goes’ atti-
tude of the recent period (Yoda, 2000a: 635).
Media studies scholar Mary Celeste Kearney has demonstrated
that girl-made
and girl-consumed cultural texts, including commercial media
texts, reveal nego-
tiations of ideologies of race, class, generation and sexuality
(Kearney, 2006).
Girls’ participation in public activities such as clubbing assists
them with the
development of their identity and formation of relationships
with other young
females (Kearney, 2006: 15). In the different forms of girls’
culture emerging
in music and club cultures in Japan, young women have
performed invented
ethnicities from a trans-ethnic ‘white’ to black American to
pseudo-historical
Japanese. The ensuing massive moral panic has described these
girls as ‘pack
animals’ (guntai doubutsu), part-time prostitutes, and creatures
who exist only
as images, appearances and body adornments (Kinsella, 2005:
150). In a socio-
cultural context where race/racial purity ( yamato minzoku) and,
by association
114 Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29

of sexuality, bloodline (kettou) are still regarded highly
important, such semi-
osis has generated, at the very least, contradiction and
confusion (Kinsella, 2005:
147, 152).
I have selected three performers — Ayumi Hamasaki, Shina
Ringo and Misia —
all extremely infl uential as both club-scene makers and
commercially successful
artists, and their fans since they exemplify three different faces
of Tokyo’s club,
music and girl cultures. It is remarkable how little these mega-
selling performers
are known to western audiences favoring Japanese
‘underground’ artists iden-
tifi ed by avant-gardist associations. The most obvious barrier
to their success is
language; it is not accidental that Japanese noise music, which
drives language
itself to its limits, and stages its dismantling and voidance in a
wall of noise, has
been enormously infl uential in the West (Toth, 1999, 2003)
while possessing
only a small fan base at home. The contradiction, of course, is
that performers
who cross over into, say, the United States markets and gain
popularity — most
recently, girl bands such as Afrirampo and Tsu Shi Ma Mi Re —
remain rela-
tively obscure in Japan. It appears that female artists, who
succeed in the United
States, have, in cultural studies scholar Gayle Wald’s
assessment, a postmodern
way of simultaneously acquiescencing to orientalist stereotypes

and resisting
them, evoking the more pedestrian aspects of American
commodity culture in
text/image and performing high-end rock, punk or metal (Wald,
2002: 202–3).
Neither being Anglophone nor easily fi tting generic markers of
western music
markets, J-Pop, at best, occupies a marginal position in these
sites. And the fact
that some J-Pop artists play out seemingly conventional images
of girlhood, makes
them less attractive to alternative or ‘indy’ audiences (and
critics) thinking in un-
complicated ‘categorical hierarchies of conformity and
resistance’ and missing
out on, what postcolonial fi lm studies scholar Rey Chow calls,
the ‘structural am-
bivalence’ of these songs (Driscoll, 2002: 208–9; Chow cited on
p. 209).
THE ‘TRANS-ETHNIC’ PRINCESS OF SHIBUYA POP:
AYUMI HAMASAKI
Tokyo’s Shibuya district, a pivotal youth hangout, contains a
stunning array of
giant, multi-storey TV screens showcasing J-Pop’s latest stars,
huge billboards
(one of which featured singer Ayumi Hamasaki semi-nude),
department stores,
specialized record shops, fashion boutiques and lately even a
mall (McClure,
1998: 62–71). Coming from Shibuya Japan Rail (JR) Station, to
the right of the dis-
trict’s main thoroughfare, Dogenzaka, there is an extraordinary
enclave crowded
with dance clubs and performance halls. Musician Mikami

Chisako from the
group fra foa describes Shibuya as ‘a convenient place’ where
‘[y]ou can have
pretty much everything in the area, and almost everybody is
allowed to be here’
(interview, in PPP @ Shibuya, Spring 2003, 14–5). She cites her
pregnancy as
a case in point. Girl band Love Psychedelico’s Kumi claims that
San Francisco,
New York and Tokyo’s Shibuya radiate a similar kind of
positive power; to Kumi
Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
the area is a ‘power spot’ (Kumi, 2002). In brief, Shibuya is
perhaps the most
vital center of Japanese youth culture, fashion and music trends.
Ayumi Hamasaki as J-Pop’s biggest current star has enormous
infl uence over
Shibuya trends or Shibuya kei (Toth, 2004). Shibuya kei is a
very self-conscious
culture which changes monthly and changes dramatically, is
expensive and dif-
fi cult to catch up with; the exact same fashion design as what
is displayed on
the runways in Paris, Milan and London. It is clean and very
elaborate, ‘French-y’
style which is casual but not too casual (shibukaji), sexual but
not too sexual.
It is heavily dominated by the color white with both clothes and
make-up em-

phasizing a certain measure of whiteness that is perceived as
trans-ethnic chic.3
A key to Hamasaki’s growing success in South-East Asian
countries, historically
antagonistic towards cultural products coming from Japan, is
her indeterminate
ethnic look (it was not accidental that she was the fi rst
recipient of the Miss
Barbie Award in 2001). Ironically, this fact led to a temporary
drop in her popu-
larity in Japan, and she had to be ‘repackaged’ in the image of a
geisha whose
spectacular dress combined classic Japanese styles with strokes
of cutting-edge
western fashion.
Ayumi, or simply Ayu as her fans call her, has her own clothes’
line brand-named
‘Material Girl’ in homage to Madonna. There is no concealment
about the materi-
alistic approach of promoting her. Ayu sells images, and is sold
as a bundle
of images. Fans capture Ayu as a mascot, a body on a giant
poster wall, and
a model for Bulgari, yet no one knows what kind of a girl she
really is — the
star herself acknowledges this much as she sings in ‘Real me’
(title in English),
‘What I get?/What you get?/It may be an illusion’.4 This
inscrutability enables
her close relation to merchandizing. When she wore Channel
sunglasses, they
sold out, while Yves Saint Laurent’s lacey fashion was
introduced by the diva.
A couple of years ago, tight jeans and knee-high black boots
became fashion

because of Hamasaki. As one of her admirers has put it, ‘Ayu is
the me I wish
I was. She just … gets it’ (Takeuchi Cullen, 2002: 51). Highly
ironic that in a
hyper-consumption society, the practice of ‘extreme shopping’
by her fans, and
young women in general, is widely viewed as irresponsible
overindulgence. On
the other hand, some popular feminists in Japan celebrate
excess shopping as
‘a legitimate protest against constraints forced upon women’ in
a paternalist
society (Bardsley and Hirakawa, 2005: 113; Yoda, 2000b).
Hamasaki’s early success came through electronic dance music
(EDM) re-
mixes of her songs (a hardcore/trance sound) that were allowed
to be played
in clubs — a crucial form of expanding a performer’s appeal.
While different
genres within EDM have had a wide appeal across gender,
sexual and class
cleavages (Huq, 2006: 105), there has been very little generic
crossover. In other
words, audiences tend to be bound up in their favorite styles
while rejecting
others. Thus Ayu girls dance at their club nights to the mix spun
by their favorite
DJs. While they exist, super clubs are relatively rare in Tokyo,
smaller-scale clubs
with lower levels of volume and more intimate spatial
arrangements abound;
they are compatible with holding conversations or simply
passing the time. Here,
one needs to consider the scarcity of private (home) space in
Tokyo’s crammed

116 Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
living quarters; thus experimenting with make-up, reading
magazines and sizing
up boys is carried out in the public space of the club.
Clubbing for these young women constitutes an aesthetic and
political chal-
lenge to dominant representations of female sexuality produced
by Japan’s
patriarcho-corporate sector. I would argue that clubbing is a
strategy to realize
young women’s agency by the production of a representational
space (dress,
music, language) that is, in effect, off-limits to patriarchal
authority. While the
clubs Ayu fans frequent do not exclude male patrons, men
present mostly serve
as ‘attendants’ and ‘body guards’. The girls’ wild carousing
inspired by their idol
preempts the sexually objectifying gaze of the rest of male
clubbers. Ayu and
her fans’ revelry in ‘girliness’ has an air of transgression in a
profoundly mas-
culine society (as Japan still is) while at the same time, can be
interpreted as
merely playful performance lacking the markers of
transgression. Gayle Wald’s
comment on western ‘girl power’ practices holds true for
Tokyo’s young female
clubbers, ‘The instability of strategic reappropriation of
girlhood is mirrored and
reproduced… in the very instability of “meanings” that

consumers construe from
performers who play the “girl”’ (Wald, 2002: 197).
Shibuya girls successfully challenge male ownership of the club
as a public
space and, while heteronormativity is not explicitly questioned,
heterosexuality
is subtly subverted by their obsession with themselves. This
latter point is clearly
exemplifi ed by one of Ayu’s major hits ‘Boys and Girls’, a
song for which the
visuals show Ayu only; the ‘boy’ appears in the text only, and
even there he is
dismissed. The song starts out with fl ashes of a conventional
romance — ‘It’s on
my lips/It’s in my dreams/It’s a story told by two’ — however,
happiness — ‘You
say you want to be happy/You’ve already been so many times’
— which she
simultaneously expects and doubts, does not materialize. She
quickly equates her
romantic feelings with a little confusion that dissolves in the
light of the day:
I was really expecting it.
I really doubted it.
What was it? Who was it?
They say he’s a good person.
He seems like a person I don’t care about.
The morning glow is dazzling.
It pierces my eyes.
My breast hurts.
I was a little confused.5
Music video is the key to Hamasaki’s and other female

performers’ success. Beyond
serving as marketing tools, they produce gender discourses that,
rather than
reiterate gender norms, complicate them. Visual representation
of their songs
as fi lmic narratives has been important to young women’s
identifi cation with
the performer (Vernallis, 2004). Encounter with these clips is
unavoidable, for
they penetrate public space: Shibuya and Shinjuku’s giant
electronic billboards
constantly play them at full volume.
Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
Some of what is going on in Hamasaki’s ‘Appears’ (sic) helps
us understand
why a high school student said in a documentary that what
prevented her from
dropping out of school were the sad but positive lyrics of
Hamasaki. In ‘Appears’,
Ayumi sings about a girl who is obsessed with images of
happiness such as coup-
les holding hands, walking together, kissing in the car, etc.
Everything is going
well, everyone is happy, seemingly there are no problems but
who knows the
truth. Only two people, only the couples know the truth but
even their ‘truth’
may not be ‘true.’ They cannot know what the truth is,
Hamasaki suggests, be-
cause we look at our own happiness through other people’s

eyes. Happiness is
constructed — ‘It looks like everything is going perfectly, but
no one knows the
truth’ — everything is open to interpretation:
At the fi rst phone call, the hand
with which I held the receiver trembled.
At the second call a message
was left on my machine.
At the seventh call we decided to meet.
It all began on that ordinary day.
…
At the 10th call we
went far away together.
As we held hands and walked,
I felt a little shy.
And the nights fl ew by.
On the way home, in the car, we kissed.
I love the white, shining snow.
Nevertheless, we were separated last year.
This winter, we’ll try together.
Will we make it? Can I say?
The Merry Christmas I couldn’t say before.6
There is an inherent tension between Ayu in the club context
and Ayu singing
on Shibuya’s huge television screens. As opposed to the
participatory, commu-
nal relations which her music incites on the dance fl oor
amongst girls, many of
her songs such as ‘Appears’ seem to encourage privatized
discourses of hetero-
femininity.

Hit songs like ‘Kanariya’ (Canary) and ‘Fly High’ (title in
English) are self-
referential; in them, Hamasaki addresses what it means to be a
young female
working in the music business. In ‘Kanariya’, ‘surface image
people’ — presum-
ably, record business people — expect canaries to sing but the
birds do not
necessarily follow their expectations. The studio for Hamasaki
is the cage, just as
canaries are kept in a cage. Now, the canaries have stopped
singing:
It’s not that the canaries whose voices were crushed to death
couldn’t sing. Maybe
they just chose not to.7
118 Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
In ‘Fly high’, Hamasaki sings about pretending, and about how
the real (that is,
the ‘girl’) Ayu has become the shadow of the fake (that is, the
‘superstar’) Ayu.
Ayu the ‘girl’ is watching Ayu the ‘star’ on the screen in a
disco: everything looks
so small because, as the song tells us, the sky is so big. The
‘real’ Ayu is unable
to handle this ‘big’ vision of her; in stardom, everything is a
fake. Out of this
confrontation between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’, Ayu springs her
desire to reclaim
agency,
It’s all in this hand for sure.

I mustn’t leave my dreams here.
It’s all in this hand for sure.
I don’t need a predetermined future.8
The singer feels so blinded and trapped in the fl ashlights of the
media that
nothing is or might be true. She feels like a ‘mascot’; ‘I am a
product [of the
industry]’, she confessed in an interview (Takeuchi Cullen,
2002: 53). One must
note though that Hamasaki is in total control of her production,
therefore this
‘confession’ must be taken with a grain of salt.
Girls who worship Ayu know that they are not the same as she,
and will
not be, yet they are responding to statements that Ayu is just
like them. Does
Ayu offer some expression of these girls’ desires while, in the
end, encouraging
conformity? One could argue that girls’ embracing popular
rather than avant-
garde cultural production generates further emancipatory
possibilities (Aapola
et al., 2005: 31). Does Ayu then push young women to identify
girl-positive feel-
ings with a non-political discourse? Do her fans think about
girlhood in cultural
ways rather than a space for social and political action? While
probably most
of these considerations are in part valid, I would argue that
Hamasaki’s work
fi nalized a shift in the dominant paradigm of club cultural
production directed
toward girls.

Girls’ infl uence on Tokyo’s club culture came to sight fi rst at
the legendary and
now-defunct mega club, Juliana’s, in the early 1990s. Women
who wore body-
hugging micro-skirts (bodikon, or body conscious), Good Up
bras allowing a
spectacular cleavage, and gogo shoes, created a sensational
sight as they walked
the distance from the nearby JR station to this club on the
waterfront (Shibaura).
Once inside, young women were dancing on tiered platforms,
showing off their
bodies clad, as the night progressed, in barely more than G-
strings and bras,
and holding a feather-trimmed fan (Juli[ana]-sen[su]) in one
hand while moving
to the beat. Signifi cantly, men were ‘condemned’ to only
watch, and meandered
around in confusion. Tokyo police put an end to Juliana’s
culture of ‘bodikon
and deviance’. However, the sheer existence of the super-club
led to a new
understanding of the nexus between feminine spatial practice,
club culture and
mainstream music trends, which was quickly taken up by Avex,
now Japan’s
biggest record company that, in 1994, bought one of Tokyo’s
most infl uential
dance clubs, velfarre (sic), as a ‘de facto replacement’ for
Juliana’s (Braun, 2003).
velfarre became the testing ground for Avex’s increasing efforts
to fuse electronic

Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
dance music with the more orthodox J-Pop sound, which
eventually translated
into the success of stars such as Ayumi Hamasaki. (velfarre
closed in 2007.) A
proliferation of girl-centered smaller clubs ensued as the girls-
only para para
dance craze began to dominate, a style that smoothly meshed
with techno (tech
para) and trance (tra para). No accident that, on a club level,
Hamasaki taught
her fans to do para para to some of her hits.
SHINA, SHINJUKU AND ‘OLD’ JAPAN
Shinjuku occupies a particular position within the cartography
of Tokyo’s ‘club-
land’. If anyone, it is Shina Ringo who represents Shinjuku-kei,
pure and simple.
Direct sexual imagery and vocabulary bring Shina and Shinjuku
together. To the
singer, Shinjuku stands for Kabuki-cho: the rough and sleazy
culture of the East
Exit (higashi deguchi) of JR Shinjuku station. In other words,
her work rests on
a negation of the culture of department stores, and pricey hotels
concentrated
around JR’s affl uent West Exit. Until recently, she has had that
‘amateur’ (read
‘uninhibited’) attitude so wholly different from the delicate
sophistication of the
Ayu girls. A girl asserts about Ringo fans, ‘They have self
assertion, and they are
sensual.’9 Explaining ‘sensual’, she adds, ‘Fans show their

sexual[ity by] taking
control of the man they want. … Most important thing for them
is control of
love.’10
Ringo was discovered via the radio program Japan Music Quest,
which is a
weekly showcase for amateur performers. Hopefuls send in
demos, listeners vote,
and in the end whoever has received the most votes can debut
on a major label
every two months. She is not a bona fi de solo artist, has
performed with the
band Tokyo Jihen since 2004; nonetheless she works on her
music and songs
by herself. She has created the word Shinjuku-kei because
before that, so runs
the mythology, no fashion and no music of consequence existed
in this entertain-
ment district for the salaried men.
Ringo’s ‘Kabukicho no joou’ (Queen of Kabukicho) opens with
a dream se-
quence: everyone has this dream of going to Kabukicho. The
female protagonist’s
mother was Queen of Kabukicho, that is, the most sought-after
prostitute:
Mommy was the Queen of this place
And she’s my spitting image
Everyone stretched me their hands
And even though I was just a child, they showed me around the
pleasure quarters
When I turned fi fteen,
The Queen left me and disappeared

Maybe she’s living
With the man who came along every Friday
‘All that rises must eventually fall’
I barely started to understand what this phrase meant
when I stepped inside the pleasure quarters
Even though I hate the woman who abandoned me, now it’s
Summer
120 Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
And I revere with pride
The name of the Queen
Now I am a woman, and what I’m selling
Is only myself
I will lose everything
When I need sympathy.11
The mother might have vanished with the man who used to
come to their house
to have sex with her. Did she fl ee aging? The listener-viewer is
reminded of an
Edo era saying, ‘All that rises must eventually fall’, as he/she is
confronted in the
video with grim, black-and-white images of aging prostitutes.
The daughter, who
happens to be a musician, starts out on a spiritual journey in
order to fi nd her
mother. This is the time the daughter needs to take over. Her
living the same
life as her mother is her destiny. Every utterance by Ringo
references ‘instinct’,
‘gene’, and ‘sex’ as predicaments that cannot be avoided, ‘From
tonight on, in

this city; I was once the daughter and now I am the Queen’.12
Kabukicho stands for secret life, taboo life; sex-Queen mother
and daughter
are predisposed to follow the exact same life path. The daughter
names the East
Exit of Shinjuku JR station as the site where her world lies. At
the end, she too
dresses up as a prostitute — the Queen of Kabukicho. In a
typical Shina-esque
move, she selects a word ( joou) of murky origin that, in written
Chinese, fi rst
appeared in the late third century and referred to Japan as a
country ruled by a
joou or Queen.13
The song, however, is larger than a ‘simple’ daughter–mother
nexus. It posits
the feminine as staging ground for national history by evoking
at least one
distinct stage in recent Japanese history — the Occupation years
of 1945–1953
(Dower, 1999). Shina is reminiscing about her mother while
wearing a G.I.’s cap,
suggesting that her mother’s customers were US soldiers, and so
was possibly the
man with whom she ran away. The potential is there in Ringo’s
work to create a
narrative of the ‘travel of sexualities that would, once again,
fracture disciplinary
practices’ of post-war reconstruction in the Pacifi c (Inderpal
Grewal quoted by
Parks, 2002: 228). The sexual history of the ‘forgotten’
Occupation period is
a ‘taboo’ topic since miscegenation would complicate not only
American and

Japanese gender and sexual norms but also symbolic
investments in national
identity. Both the song and the video depend on an unstable
exchange between
memories of Showa-era Japan (1926–1989) and the social costs
of the economic
turmoil of the present — homeless people, a boy urinating in
the street, and
sickly, stray animals. They are fused together by the theme of
gender identity
formation, the feminine disrupting the constraints the nation
(state) imposes at
the site of the body.
Ringo admits to enka infl uences upon her songcraft. The
Shinjuku link is
made more emphatic by her persistent references to social class
(urban, work-
ing class with rural roots). This is a characteristic of enka but
unheard of in
Japanese pop. Shina has picked up these references while
hanging out at mar-
kets for the poor where (amateur) enka performers equipped
with cheap PA
Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
systems sing about miseries of life as a form of release. Enka’s
history dates back
to the Meiji era (1867–1912), when it was a political street song
contesting in
the name of popular representation the government’s top-down

introduction
of western market capitalism in the country. In its role today, it
functions as a
cultural technology for creating ‘national and cultural memory’
and ‘archive of
the [Japanese] nation’s collective past’ (Yano, 2002: 17).
However, while con-
temporary enka, facing the uncertainties of the present and
unable or unwill-
ing to account for Japan’s past, is about withdrawal, Shina
Ringo’s songs directly
address a complex web of historical issues (Yano, 2002: 179).
In Shina’s ‘Honnou’ (Instinct), boundaries between femininity
and masculinity
are transgressed rather than reinforced (Butler, 2004; Jagose,
1994: 4–5). The
protagonist, a nurse, does not need promises because they are
never kept; she
just wants to have a physical connection until morning; she
wants her partner
to put her ‘instinct into motion’. Don’t be bored, do something
to turn me on,
she demands of her lover, whose gender is not immediately or
not obviously
identifi ed:
Forgive my whims
don’t think it’s too late, just rush me
enter me deep
put my instincts into motion.14
She responds angrily to her lover’s indifference by smashing
glass windows. She
is breaking everything that is taboo by behaving as a sexually
overcharged nurse,

and having a same-sex encounter with a patient. The hospital
sign says: honnou
or instinct. Instincts in motion make her blood literally boil as
shown by the
intravenous tube in the video. Ringo is wearing a nurse’s
uniform, heavy make-
up and high heels — the metal heels of which she uses to kick
in the windows of
the hospital door. The latter are of signifi cance because they
represent not only
‘fashion with vengeance’ and ‘a defi ant gesture… of rebellion’,
but are coded as
ambisexual. It is a fetish that is unmistakably feminine yet
carries the weapon
(Kaite, 1995: 95–7).
Shina has a committed club cultural fan base that embraces her
outbursts of
rage on stage, ruthless domination of male musicians around
her, and the violent
content of many of her songs and video clips. One of her CDs’
jacket design
(Gipusu or Plaster Cast) shows Shina slicing her hand with a
kitchen knife,
which have led devotees to wonder about her ‘sanity’. However,
one female fan
has touched upon a potential intersection between cultural
creativity and micro-
politicization (Marchart, 2003) in Shina’s world, ‘Violent
images = destruction =
get rid of regulations. Violent images used for innovation… ’.15
Shina has fashioned an ‘Old’ Japanese ethnicity, one that she
constructs in
linguistic (rare Chinese characters, invented ‘old’ words),
generic (enka allusions),

and sartorial ways (the singer’s donning a kimono fi ts with this
process unlike
Hamasaki’s in whose case it has been a purely commercial
move). Her sexually
overt style, both textual and visual, not only intentionally
evokes the pleasure
122 Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
quarters of Edo, as Tokyo was once called (till 1868), but by
referencing the
sexually polymorphous world immortalized in shunga — erotic
scrolls or wood-
blocks documenting brothel life — fosters a greater sense of
awareness and ac-
ceptance of the Other (Leupp, 1995: 78–80). Signifi cantly, this
includes the queer
Other understood to include a broad variety of ‘non-
heterosexual and gender-
variant identities, practices and communities’ (McLelland,
2005: 2). Using Shinjuku,
this ‘veritable epicenter’ of sexual and gender Otherness in
contemporary Tokyo
(Pfl ugfelder, 1999: 330), as the backdrop to most of her work,
is signifi cant. Shina
Ringo, on occasions at least, gives representations of kono sekai
or ‘this world’
as queer cultures have been commonly referred to in Japan
(McLelland, 2005: 1).
She positions herself as a pop genealogist tracking down what
Foucault calls
‘buried and disqualifi ed’ knowledge (Foucault quoted in
McLelland, 2005: 8).
Signifi cantly, the unparalleled forcefulness Shina displays in

her music videos,
screened in heavy rotation on television and billboards, speaks
to an audience,
and may complicate often condescending western views positing
sexual minor-
ities in Japan as ‘the hapless victims of a repressive regime’
(2005: 6). Nonethe-
less, in order to avoid triumphalist generalizations concerning
Ringo’s cultural
work, we must remember queer theorist Yukiko Hanawa’s
caution that ‘it [is]
necessary for one to always consider the singularity of practice
informing sub-
jectivity, sexual as well as gender’ (Chalmers, 2002: 1–17;
Hanawa, 1996: 476;
Robertson, 1998).
Ringo’s performance does imply loss, grief and absence in a
gendered way.
Tension builds in her work as her ‘old’ way of saying or doing
things feels cynical
in light of the contemporary mood. New and retro sounds blend
in her tunes as,
textually, and less obviously sonically, they hark back to a
long-lost, yet never
idealized Japan:
Though her old Japanese is not exact, I think it’s (a good) match
and beautiful. I’m
Japanese so I have such a feeling’ (Female high school
student).16
Ringo’s historical detours are considered new wave-y because
they fi t the retro
rage of the moment in Japan and elsewhere.

‘BLACK’ DIVA CULTURE: MISIA
It is Misia who embodies diva culture in Japan. Diva would
‘translate’ as the
aggregate of female soul and R&B music, braids, dreads,
cornrows and fashion
wear such as Tommy girl and Baby phat. In March 1998 Misia
made her live debut
at Tokyo’s premier R&B and hip hop club Harlem, packing the
600-capacity
venue with 1200 fans.
It was her African–American vocal coach in Fukuoka17 who
exposed Misia
to soul and R&B at a music school (McClure, 2007). In 1997,
Misia was signed
by Arista Japan, moved from Fukuoka to Tokyo, and released
her debut single,
‘Tsutsumi Komuyouni’ (Embracing, 1997). An analog version
of the single was
released before the CD and became a hit on the Tokyo club
scene, thanks to
Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
remixes by DJ Watarai and rap versions by Muro. ‘Embracing’
eventually sold
some 700,000 copies, catapulted Misia into superstardom, and
was followed by
the Recording Industry Association of Japan naming her New
Artist of the Year
for 1998. Her success paved the way for other R&B-infl uenced

‘divas’ who, as
McClure points out, changed the ‘J-pop template with
technically accomplished
soul- and R&B-infl uenced music’ (McClure, 2007).
One can ask basically the same questions about Japanese soul
music that
historian E. Taylor Atkins poses about Japanese jazz. Does a
Japanese soul diva
surrender her identity when she performs black R&B? Is it
possible to express that
identity through an African–American art of music? Is this, in
the last instance,
‘authentic’ soul (Atkins, 2001: chapter 1)?
In partial response to these questions, one may suggest that
Japanese soul
and R&B is about no boundaries, and that Misia’s performance
is more about
reinvention of ethnicity or creation of post-ethnicity. Her music
is what is
currently being referred to as m.o.b.o., or ‘music of black
origin’. The concept
of m.o.b.o., originating from the United Kingdom,18 lends
credibility to the
existence of Japanese soul, R&B and hip hop: the music is black
or m.o.b.o.,
therefore the performer does not need to be black. R&B is
captured as a neo-
Japanese sign in the sense that the singer’s message is that we
(in Japan) are
in possession of ‘blackness’; it is not an import, it is part of our
own culture.
Rejecting racial essentialism, one of Misia’s admirers has
expressed this idea as,
‘ … what makes us Japanese is getting more and more complex

and diverse,
and African American music is part of it. I guess Tokyo
becomes much more
internationalized and culturally chaotic.’19
This search by Misia for a parallel ‘emotive vocabulary’
(Atkins, 2001: 249) as
historically indigenous and rich in depth of feeling, does not
come at the price
of expunging soul’s roots in African–American music. The
‘discursive loophole’
that Atkins takes note of regarding the history of Japanese jazz,
is quite possibly
valid for Misia’s R&B performance as well. This ‘emotive
vocabulary’ rests on the
assumption that there exists a ‘natural affi nity’ between black
soul music and
Japanese soul music, both expressive of the shared and painful
history of peoples
of color (Atkins, 2001: 251–2). Misia familiarizes her audience
with this — to
her listener’s as yet unfamiliar — sign; in her videos, for
instance, we see a
dreadlocked Misia leading her African–American dancers across
the narrow
alleys of Hong Kong. In her Japanese fans’ imaginary, black
culture equals ‘hip’
culture, that is, Misia gives her followers the ultimate ‘cool’ —
and one that is
experienced as homegrown. ‘Cool’ is realized through cultural
consumption;
youth consume (and produce) commodities such as music that
show both
their desire for these cultural products and their investments —
affective and
material (Maira, 2002: 197). Obviously, boundaries do exist in

Tokyo’s R&B
scene; yet, challenging some of the assumptions of subcultural
theory, ‘cool’
is in this instance constructed by virtue of its (racial)
inclusivity rather than
exclusivity (Jensen, 2006; Muggleton and Weinzierl, 2003: 9–
10; Thornton,
1995). This inclusiveness goes beyond the appreciation of music
‘only’, Misia’s
fans do include African–American, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-
Asian clubbers as
124 Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
any night in any Tokyo R&B club will reveal. As cultural
anthropologist Daniel
Miller notes, ‘consumption is a “moral” project, built on the
possibilities that
commodities offer to reimagine cultural ideologies, such as
those of “self” and
“other”…’ (Miller quoted in Maira, 2002: 197).
Paul Gilroy suggests that Afro-diasporic cultures in western
modernity cross
‘different national paradigms for thinking about history’ and
that black identity is
‘unstable’ that challenges notions of authenticity and cultural
uniqueness (Gilroy
cited in Huq, 2006: 121; Condry, 2006). Misia’s work might
retain ‘residual con-
tradictions’ of colonialism and exoticism, yet it also speaks to
new cultural and
political currents that have emerged from ‘fundamentally new
geopolitical and

economic realities’ (Lipsitz, 1997: 5). Considering ‘refl exive
uses’ of the black
Other in the context of Japanese popular culture, anthropologist
John Russell
raises the possibility for the rejection of a racial status-quo
mirroring a Eurocentric
world view, and assertion of solidarity by Japanese youth with
other non-whites
(Russell quoted in Maira, 2002: 66).20 Misia and her fans’
embrace of black music
does the cultural work of ‘discursive transcoding’ (Douglas
Kellner and Michael
Ryan): indirectly expresses youth disenchantment with not only
a Eurocentric
universe but the new rage of topdown ethno-centrism in
contemporary Japan
(Kellner and Ryan cited in Lipsitz, 1997: 55).
Misia’s fans who fl ock to dance clubs with such telling names
as Harlem, Asia
(both in Shibuya) and Yellow (in Nishi-Azabu) view blackness
as a means of
iden-tity negotiation. They incorporate black skin in their
stylistic vocabulary as
a key signifi er of R&B and hip hop styles. As historian of
Japanese literature Nina
Cornyetz has noted, in J-Pop fandom, like in white suburban
appropriations of
African–American youth culture, the origins of these genres are
erased but with
a crucial difference: in Japan, they are not ‘whitened’
(Cornyetz, 1994: 114).
Black culture therefore might be understood as a space to
comprehend the self,
and experience Otherness. Fans talk about the incorporation into
their selves

of the black Other, ‘Through the music of African American
origin, I acquire a
totally positive image of otherness — cool, soulful, and
powerful.’21
Unlike Hamasaki, who rarely sings in English, Misia cannot
avoid singing in
English. In order to refl ect the ‘proper’ atmosphere, she feels
compelled to mix
Japanese with English to engender the feeling of soul music.
Misia’s performance
represents the fundamental pleasure of music: the listener does
not take her as
commodity; it is a music-centered performance. Her respect for
African–American
music is refl ected in her adoration for Chicago soul diva
Minnie Riperton, whose
1975 hit single ‘Lovin’ You’ Misia has covered (the Japanese
diva like Riperton
possesses a rare fi ve-octave vocal range). In New York, she
sought out Erykah Badu
whose Afro-centric soul, hip hop and jazz has been an infl
uence on her music,
in order to record with her the duet ‘Akai Inochi’ (Red
Destiny). Admiration is
manifested in the other direction as well; legendary house music
DJs — Junior
Vasquez and Frankie Knuckles — who work with Misia,
consider her a top talent
in the R&B fi eld.
Misia always talks about the boyfriend she wants to have. Her
yearning
exemplifi es girls’ sentimental dreams and appeals to young
women with her

Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
evocation of passionate longing. In ‘Key of Love’, Misia asks
her boyfriend to
teach her a ‘little bit of love’, and asks him to open the
‘wounded door’ of her
heart and hold her:
Abandoning hesitation,
The time is now
I will start to run. The time is now [repeat]
Alone I was looking up at that sky, now I extend my arm
My love for you that was once unable to grow has gone beyond
my dreams
…
Key of my love
My heart, like a thin spring ice,
Melts little by little, I realize
You’re the key of my love.22
In ‘Hi no ataru basho’ (The Place that Gets Sunshine) she asks
existential ques-
tions: What is the meaning of her life? Why does she sing?
I can sing a song for you and me forever (English in the
original)
Finding a place where the sun shines
I can sing a song for you and me forever
Let’s change sadness to a smile
Although I sing DADDA RATTATTARARA

Although I fool with PAPPA RATTATTARARA
Incompatible with my feelings that fl ow and fl ow
If I was not here, oh
If I had the time to think
It would be good when I look up at the clear sky
Because I am so small, I am not alone, unable to live alone
If I lose the words, I can still sing, oh.23
I would argue that embrace of ‘blackness’ by Misia’s fans and
their R&B culture
recast America as constructed white as well as defi es the
equally constructed
Japanese national, racial identity. As Cornyetz points out,
Tokyo’s ‘black cultural’
fans search for an alternative, yet communal identity, and by
incorporating Black
and other non-white cultures, Japanese R&B and hip hop
‘generates interactive
dialogue rather than unilateral plundering of image’ (1994:
132).
CONCLUSION: FEMALE JISAKU-JIEN-YA AND THEIR
FANS
Club scene is one of metropolitan Japan’s most fertile sources
of new musical
trends. What all Tokyo clubs have in common is a degree of
subtle sophistication.
It has been an elitist and very masculine scene. This is the
culture which Ayumi
Hamasaki, Shina Ringo and Misia have broken into, begun to
interrogate and, on
occasion, managed to reformulate its masculinist codes. ‘She is
jisaku-jien-ya’,

126 Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
a fan characterizes Ringo; that is, a maker and enactor of her
own style, a charac-
terization that holds equally true for Hamasaki and Misia.24
However, what made the creation of these openings in Tokyo’s
club culture
possible were the activities of young female fans. Their
collective sense of iden-
tity — acknowledged even by their most vociferous critics (see
‘pack animals’) —
has been built around a particular type of music and particular
performer.
I would concur with Mary Kearney that young women’s
collective participation
in commercialized public activities, such as clubbing, helps
‘female youth to ex-
press themselves assertively and to form relationships with
other girls’ (2006: 4).
And while these girls might be seemingly politically disengaged
and involved
in semiotic ‘warfare’ only — although as I have hinted earlier,
contours of an
emerging micro-politics can be sighted — their nightly
endeavors speak directly
and unambiguously to mounting social and economic insecurity
under neo-
liberal regimes (as the Koizumi and Abe governments have
been), and refl ect a
desire to counter encroachment by a patriarcho-corporate
culture.
Notes

1 Text was accessed on 17 March 2007 at
http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/k/kahimikarie
4821/goodmorningworld212097.html. No translator was named.
All lyrics are pro-
vided for educational purposes only. Intermittently, I have made
slight changes for
the sake of greater clarity.
2 An earlier version of this essay was presented at the School
of Culture and Commu-
nication, Södertörn University, on 13 March 2007, and the
Center for Gender Studies
at Stockholm University on 14 March 2007. I want to thank my
audience for their
valuable comments. I also wish to express my gratitude to
Atsuko Miyawaki (Tokyo)
who was instrumental in honing my approach to J-Pop. The
romanization system in
this article follows the Hepburn system.
3 See, for instance, the Ayumi Hamasaki cover story in Girlpop
(Japan), January, Vol. 77,
2006, pp. 10–21. The article and photo-shoot evoke a white,
dreamlike vision of Ayu
dressed in a wedding dress, however, signifi cantly, with no
male in sight.
4 Text was accessed on 22 May 2007 at http://www.ayumi-
hamasaki.org/music/lyrics/.
The text has been translated by Masa, Wataru and Ustuff (sic).
http://www.primanova.com/lyrics.php and
was translated by Wataru.

http://www.primanova.com/lyrics/appears.
htm and was translated by Wataru.
http://www.primanova.com/lyrics/kanariya.
htm and was translated by Wataru.
8 Text was accessed on 17 March 2007 at http://www.ayumi-
hamasaki.org/music/
lyrics/ and was translated by Masa, Wataru and Ustuff (sic).
9 T.R. email on 21 May 2007.
http://www.centigrade-j.com and was trans-
lated by Brian Stuart and Takako Sakuma.
12 Ibid.
Young 16:2 (2008): 111–29
13 The word is a relative latecomer in Japanese, making its
appearance most likely in
the mid-eighteenth century. I want to thank Professor Junzo
Oshimo at East Asian
Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh, for this
information. For historical
detail on Wei chih (the Chinese chronicle, c. AD 297) about the
Japanese ‘queen’, see
Hall (1991: 25–6).

14 http://www.centigrade-j.com
16 High school student’s (anonymous) email on 24 May 2007.
17 Coincidentally, Misia, Ayumi Hamasaki and Shina Ringo are
all from Fukuoka, the
largest city on the southern island of Japan, Kyushu.
18 The acronym has been popularized by the Mobo awards —
one of a number of music
awards in the United Kingdom that can infl uence record sales
and boost an artist’s
profi le. ‘Music of black origin’ awardees account for more than
half of all singles sold
in Britain. Nominations are not restricted only to Black artists.
Nominees can be of
any race or nationality, so long as their performance draws on
music that traces its
roots back to Africa.
19 S.I. email on 14 March 2007.
20 John Russell observes ‘the tendency to employ the Black
Other as a refl exive sym-
bol through which the Japanese attempt to deal with their own
ambiguous racial
status in a Eurocentric world, where such hierarchies have been
largely (and lit-
erally) conceived in terms of polarization between black and
white, and in which
Japanese as Asians have traditionally occupied a liminal space.’
(Russell quoted in
Maira, 2002: 299.)
21 S.I. email on 14 March 2007.

22 Translation by Yoko Motoyama. Commissioned by the
author.
23 Translation by Yoko Motoyama. Commissioned by the
author.
24 High school student’s (anonymous) email on 24 May 2007.
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social movements,
production of gender, girl cultures, politics of sound, urban
history, and peda-
gogy. His writings have been published by The M.I.T. Press, St.
Martin’s Press,
and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He was a guest
professor

of American Studies in Japan (1998–2000), lectured in
Australia, Lithuania,
Ukraine, Georgia, and Sweden, and has been the recipient of
several major
grants and awards (Fulbright Senior Lecturer, NEH, Newberry,
George Soros
Foundation, DAAD, Wise-Susman Prize). Toth co-teaches with
Katie Hogan
the seminar ‘Girl Cultures’. Address: History Department,
Carlow University,
3333 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. [email:
[email protected]
com]
<<
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>>
>> setdistillerparams
<<
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>> setpagedevice

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