Between 1920 and 1945, many Japanese tango musicians migrated to work at the Shanghai and Manchurian dance halls in Japan-occupied China. The cosmopolitan cities of Shanghai and Manchuria were considered by Japanese musicians as a musically ‘authentic’ place to work and to polish skills as musicians. This was seen as a great contrast to Japan at this time, where much of the ‘foreign’ popular musical knowledge was acquired through imitating recordings. Many Japanese musicians migrated to Shanghai and Manchuria to ‘learn through working at the dance halls’, some of them with entire families: they called these places ‘the cities where one could make a fortune at a single stroke.’ Influenced by Japanese colonial imaginaries of China, Japan’s fascination for Shanghai and Manchuria has been discussed not only as an economically and artistically driven admiration, but as a form of Orientalism. This project, however, clarifies that the Japanese fascination for Shanghai and Manchuria at this time had much wider historical meanings. Key contexts here are Japan’s fascination for the ‘continents’, South America and China, and the mass Japanese immigration to South America that peaked between 1920 and 1945, promoted by the Japanese government’s pro-emigration campaigns. Though Japanese immigration to South America began in the late nineteenth century, this was in much smaller numbers compared 1920-1945. By examining Japanese tango musicians’ migration to Shanghai and Manchuria through this lens, this project examines the China-returnee Japanese tango musicians’ roles in creating Japanese people’s imaginations about ‘South America’, promoting further Japanese immigration to South America. In so doing, this project reveals music’s central function in the political creation of the maritime continent/island dichotomy, and their idealised images that orchestrated the Japanese immigration to South America, 1920-1945. This project shows that historically, migration has not only enabled dissemination and mixing of musical genres, but that music has also been the very cause of migration. Tango is widely known as the music of immigrants, and my research activities also demonstrate this narrative’s relevance in the twentieth century Japanese migration history. Through public dissemination, I also address how issues of sexual and racial discrimination intersect with migration, cultivating wider public’s awareness of stereotypes in order to work toward abolishing racial and gender discrimination. Furthermore, through publications and public engagements for audiences outside academe, I shed new lights on the twentieth century Japan-China historical relations. Japanese popular musicologists, migration and gender studies specialists, Japanese and Latin American studies scholars have studied the political organisation of the Japanese fascination for South America, as well as China, using historical analyses and under the lens of modernity. In this project, I have used these methods in innovative ways to study the role of music in the orchestration of Japanese immigration to South America, 1920-1945.
