Ricerc@Sapienza

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between popular songs (ryūkōka) and war imagery in Japan from the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War to the end of the Pacific War. Thanks to the development of the recording industry and the introduction of the radio, Japanese popular songs developed rapidly in the early years of the Shōwa period (1926-1989) and thus constitute a valuable source for the identification of recurrent themes and the sentiments behind them.
Through an analysis of a corpus of 944 war-themed songs, I trace the evolution of the representation of war, which at first was romanticized and sugar-coated but came to be described with greater seriousness and even grimness in the 1940s, at which time the image of self-immolation appeared. I further identify and discuss songs with exotic themes, which peaked in popularity between 1939 and 1940 and nearly disappeared after 1943.