Sound Recording, consumerism and national identity 1952-1997: towards a contemporary Japanese Soundscape.

This project traces the history of the concept of the 'Japanese soundscape' as it emerged within a local media ecology that pressed the increasing commodification of portable sound recording technology, new practices of listening to the everyday, increasing individual mobility, and the changing sonic experience of the natural and man-made environments made possible by postwar consumerism and rapid economic growth. I outline how the sonic possibilities for an imagined community developed around greater opportunities for personal consumption, domestic and international travel, and changing notions of the environment brought about by rapid change. Transnational understandings of modern sound and technological transformation, were filtered through local understandings of the relationship between sound and space and the domestic development of a market for sound recording technology shaped by increasing consumerism and the growth of the mass media. Because of this, by 1997, the Japanese Environment Agency could create the '100 soundscapes of Japan' project. Available as a CD and accompanied by a map of the archipelago with the local and regional sounds listed, the project relied on people, both amateur and professional, to record sounds they felt were symbolic of their region and wanted to preserve for the future. But, beyond the aim to preserve the sonic environment in the face of rapid change, the project also sought sounds that had 'meaning or significance' and, in selecting 100 sounds from the over 700 submitted, aimed to create a repository of 'natural sounds' that were being lost thanks to 'modernisation and urbanisation'-sounds which became the 'Japanese' soundscapes of the title.
Global interest in recording and mapping the soundscape has most often been seen as an outgrowth of the World Soundscape Project developed by R Murray Schafer in the 1970s and/or Michael Southworth's sound walks in the late 1960s. In Japan, concern for the soundscape is seen as emerging form the work of Keiko Torigoe, a former student of Schafer's, who, in the 1980s, translated his book Soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world, and created the Institute for Kanda Soundscape Studies-the precursor to the Soundscape Association of Japan which formed in the 1990s. My research challenges the established narrative that the origins of and concern with the notion of a 'soundscape' in postwar Japan lie within western academic institutions and trends. Already by the late 1950s, interest in the latest sound recording technology and techniques for recording the sounds of nature or of everyday life, as well as discussion of the nature and meaning of 'real sound', was becoming widespread. Sound recording, both indoors and out, boomed by the 1970s and this project will examine the numerous magazines, guidebooks, newspaper articles, manufacturers publications and recording competitions to show how sound recording became a mediatised pastime that created new ways of incorporating technological change, and understanding of sound, into everyday life.
Scholars have recently noted the need to move beyond the reliance on western genealogies, manifestations, and theorisations of key (canonical) terms in Sound Studies. Historicising the notion of a Japanese soundscape within the rise of consumerism and the growth of the mass media, the project fills a gap in the literature by questioning the shared, transnational experience of concern with the soundscape. It also foregrounds the role of sound and technology in expanding our understanding of the social and cultural transformations of Japan between 1945 and the 1990s asking:
How and to whom were sound recording products marketed in Postwar Japan?
How did the growth of sound recording as a popular pastime, and its appeal to young Japanese, promote the sonic mapping of the nation?
How can historians use sound as a source to better understand Japan's postwar history?