Emily Lu: Ambition and Illusion in Imperial Japanese Military Music

November 11th, 2024 — ONLINE @ 19:00 JST
Meeting ID: 880 6249 5885
Passcode: Please see banner at the top of the page at https://sites.google.com/site/modernjapanhistoryworkshop.

Toward an East Asian Utopia: Ambition and Illusion in Imperial Japanese Military Music
Emily Lu (Florida State University)

Gunka, or Japanese military music, provided crucial assistance to propaganda-building in imperial Japan. Introduced through British military bands during the Meiji period, Japan’s own military music had taken off since the Russo-Japanese War and only gained popularity through the decades as Japanese imperialism intensified. Although gunka faded out of everyday life in postwar Japan, its wartime ubiquity should not be overlooked. In this dissertation, I posit that music-making and -consumption in imperial Japan was a valuable propaganda tool for the Japanese authority and served as a ubiquitous and effective media for conveying the falsehood of a united East Asia utopia under Japanese tutelage. In this workshop, I seek to demonstrate through contents of specific songs, their wartime propagation, and wartime writings, the intellectual notion that music was crucial to the making of imperial Japanese character and new-age leader of East Asia. In addition, I examine the lively wartime German-Japan musical alliance that substantially propelled the propaganda music movement.