Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. xv, 277 pp. (Tables, figures, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-231-18713-8.
Many of us have a mental image of what a particular period in history may have looked like. Selective as they may be, contemporaneous depictions—photographs, paintings, and illustrations, for example—offer clues about the way people dressed, designed their houses, cooked their foods, travelled, etc. By and large our historical imagination privileges the visual. But what about sound? What did different historical periods sound like? In recent decades scholars have increasingly attended to historical soundscapes and to aurality as a dimension of historical analysis.
In Electrified Voices, Kerim Yasar joins this recent scholarship by exploring the changing soundscapes of Japan during a crucial period when new technologies of recording and transmitting sound rapidly transformed the sonic experience of everyday life. “Sound is central to social and ritual life,” Yasar writes, “and the ability to reproduce and transmit sound has radically altered human beings’ relationship to sound and thus to social life” (5). Focusing on the arrival of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and radio to Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, Yasar argues that while these devices were integrated into longstanding communication practices, they nevertheless provoked changes that reverberated through the Japanese cultural landscape. Thus, on the one hand, the use of these foreign devices in Japan was inflected by existing oral traditions. On the other hand, the very materiality of sound technologies allowed the development of new practices, and encouraged new ways of thinking about the social and legal significance of human voices.
One of the key concepts Yasar introduces in Electrified Voices is “residual orality.” When the telegraph, telephone, and phonograph arrived in Japan, they entered an existing soundscape, rich with diverse oral traditions. Rather than revolutionizing this soundscape, the new technologies were integrated into it. For example, early demonstrations of the phonograph utilized Kabuki performances, and early recordings captured existing oral genres of performance, such as naniwabushi stories or rakugo comedy.
But these technologies did not merely provide a new medium for the same content. As Yasar shows us, by becoming an essential part of existing social matrices, new sound-transmitting technologies also provoked a series of practical and conceptual transformations. One striking example of such an emergent practice is yobidashi denwa, whereby a person was summoned to answer a phone call made to a nearby telephone device (perhaps the only telephone in the vicinity). Changes to copyright law, on the other hand, represent an example of conceptual transformation. Previously, copyright in Japan had been conceived of in terms of visual media—as a license to print. But the advent of phonograph recording destabilized ideas about art and intellectual property and forced people to confront the idea that a performer’s voice and oral performance could be licensed.
As we see in Electrified Voices, the very materiality of the new sonic medium mattered. The speed of news about foreign policy via the telegraph and the telephone, the groundbreaking recording of the voice of the Japanese ambassador to the US, updates on the emperor’s health via daily radio news, the establishment of a national broadcasting organization (NHK)—all these were new manifestations of state power. Furthermore, as Yasar shows, the new practice of mass, synchronous radio exercise formed a unifying national habit, and created a collective bodily experience that facilitated widespread acceptance of militaristic ideology.
Electrified Voices tells us not only about new sounds prevalent in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, but also about the sentiments people had towards sounds, the associations that sounds evoked, and the affects they induced. The ring of the telephone and the noise of the tuning radio were the sounds of modernity, as was Western classical music and military marches. Phonograph recordings and radio broadcasting created a new kind of sonic intimacy, which allowed the illusion of a direct witnessing of a baseball match, a feeling of proximity to a famous Kabuki actor, and an emotional closeness to the emperor announcing a national defeat. The appeal of the radio drama and of the early sound films, the so-called “talkies,” was a newly acquired sense of realism, produced by sound effects, by the recognizable and unique voices of actors, and by peculiarities of regional accents, described by filmmaker Mizoguchi Kenji as the “smell of the soil” (214). The feelings incited by sound technologies—of intimacy, of witnessing, of proximity—all created a unique sense of belonging to a particular community at a particular moment in modern Japanese history.
Electrified Voices is a delightful and insightful narrative that weaves vivid human examples into a theoretical discussion of the meanings of media and sound. Although describing sound in a written form, Yasar manages to convey to the reader the awe, the tension, and the intimacy experienced by early twentieth-century Japanese listeners. Even those who know the history of modern Japan quite well will find that the inclusion of the sonic dimension makes this history richer, more vivid, and even more human. As Yasar masterfully shows us, understanding historical sound, the ways sound functioned in a society, and the affects sounds produced should be an essential part of any historical analysis. If our histories so far are more analogous to silent films, it is time that we move to historical “talkies.”
Yulia Frumer
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore