Amano’s paper analyzes how the affective archetypal symbol of Osaka in Japanese enka songs intertwines the contradictory emotions of a cosmopolitan ambition with a sad sense of yearning for the bygone past of traditional Japan. In Japanese love songs, the use of particular locations as literary topoi has been a popular practice, and those places in lyrics have intersubjectively cemented socio-cultural images of each city. In particular, industrial or commercial cities like Tokyo, Osaka, and Yokohama have inspired creative imaginations for love songs and played a role as the topoi of not only romance but also unrequited love or failed relationship. Broadly classified as a genre of kayō kyoku and enka (popular song, and song of dramatic performance), these songs are oftentimes composed in the vernacular language of Osaka dialect. In so doing the lyrics defy the city’s economic development and globalization, while obstinately provoking the images of local quarter, street, aquascape, and indigenous mentality. Intertwined with such motifs of locality, this array of love songs commodifies, as Christine Yano famously describes, “tears of longing.” This paper argues that such an emotive rendition of longing constantly resists internationalized realities of the city, replacing them with a sense of yearning for the bygone past of the city in transit.
Yao develops Amano’s analysis by arguing that the transposition of this music from Japan to Hong Kong was enabled by a common experience of economic and political development coupled with a nostalgic sense of loss. After the 1984 signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration that set the transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997, Hong Kong could look back at its quick rise as an economic center in the 1970s and 1980s yet also look forward toward the 1997 handover and the end of its city-state existence. This double view of its situation created the conditions for Hong Kong’s reception of Japanese love songs filled with loss and longing. As women singers in modern times, Anita Mui and Priscilla Chan, born in Hong Kong, both lament love in a heavily nostalgic way to cast their eyes upon the local rise and decline of Hong Kong. The two different expressions of nostalgia in their two respective love songs of 1989, adapted from the same Japanese enka song, demonstrate a collective fragmented consciousness of Chineseness and simultaneously private longings for an impossible utopia. The craze in Hong Kong popular songs derived from the nostalgia structured by Japanese music as well as Hong Kong’s own lyrical expressions of nostalgia.
Huang argues that Teresa Teng’s love songs entered China surreptitiously to challenge Maoist collectivism. Initially distributed through pirated cassettes and underground radio broadcasts when revolutionary anthems still dominated public soundscapes, Teng’s songs were denounced as decadent by party propaganda organs. Nonetheless, they rapidly gained popularity among youth and rural listeners to catalyze a broader opening and receptivity to new soundscapes and genres in the mid-1980s. They laid the foundation for a lasting emotional repertoire exemplified by the 1996 film Tian Mi Mi and the 2007 television drama of the same name, both of which feature diegetic soundtracks of Teng’s love songs. Drawing on both official sources—such as party documents and propaganda manuals—and grassroots materials including oral histories and local gazetteers, alongside lyrical analysis and media discourse, this paper maps how Teng’s repertoire functioned as a cultural and affective force across shifting ideological terrains and generational memory.
This session investigates the ways in which love songs from diverse areas of East Asia influenced, resonated with, and transformed not only dominant cultures but also those of other areas to ultimately create an emancipatory form of cultural acknowledgement and understanding.