At the height of Japan’s interwar era of mass sound media, the human voice became a highly charged site of theorization at the crossroads of literature, science, and the performing arts. This talk explores this ferment with a focus on the work of Kanetsune Kiyosuke (1885-1957), an eccentric musicologist who spent the 1930s attempting to elaborate the musical, linguistic, and acoustical properties of what he termed the “Japanese voice” (nippon no koe). To this end, Kanetsune produced dozens of phonetic spectrograms using early sound-on-film technology in order to visualize what he proposed as hitherto-unheard continuities in Japanese between song and language, language and labor, and labor and social life. While such a project resonates on its surface with strains of ethnolinguistic nationalism ascendant during the interwar period, this talk proposes that Kanetsune’s eclectic methods serve more crucially to model a materialist poetics through which to envision something other than the “Japanese voice” it invokes.

Please note that this is an in-person only event.

Reischauer Institute Japan Forum