Imported others: American influences and exoticism in Japanese interwar popular music

The first great wave of American influence on Japanese popular music came before the Second World War, and coincided with the rapid expansion of Japan's record industry that began in the late 1920s. Imports of American records, sheet music, and movies, together with Japanese performances and recordings of American songs, brought a wide range of American music into the complex emerging mixture of Japanese popular music. Among these American imports were numerous songs and musical elements that referred to places or cultures considered exotic from the standpoint of mainstream America. I focus on three songs and the roles they played in the development of Japanese popular music exoticism. American-made exoticisms were not simply imposed upon Japan, however. Japanese culture producers actively initiated and carried out the process by selecting American songs, adapting them to the needs of their audience and drawing selected elements from them to be recombined with material from other sources, both Japanese and foreign.