Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

Michael K. Bourdaghs is associate professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism and a translation editor of Natsume Soseki's Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings and Kamei Hideo's Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature.

• Acknowledgments A Note on Names and the Translation Introduction 1. The Music Will Set You Free: Kurosawa Akira, Kasagi Shizuko, and the Road to Freedom in Occupied Japan 2. Mapping Misora Hibari: Where Have All the Asians Gone? 3. Mystery Plane: Sakamoto Kyu and the Translations of Rockabilly 4. Working Within the System: Group Sounds and the Commercial and Revolutionary Potential of Noise 5. New Music and the Negation of the Negation: Happy End, Arai Yumi, and Yellow Magic Orchestra' 6. The Japan That Can "Say Yes": Bubblegum Music in a Postbubble Economy Coda Notes Index

Michael K. Bourdaghs's compellingly readable Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon imaginatively conceives an original account of how Japan, in the postwar and Cold War years, broke with a historical narrative centered on the United States military occupation and Japan's subsequent confinement within the American imperium to enter the actual world. Bourdaghs persuasively shows how Japan, through the production of diverse forms of popular music and the formation of its audiences, engaged a genuinely global geopolitical aesthetics, shaping it and being shaped by it, that successfully left behind the narrow precinct of America's Japan for the new world announced by J-Pop. -- Harry Harootunian, Duke University, author of Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan For music, history, or cultural fans of contemporary Japan, this book is a chart-topper. -- Kris Kosaka Japan Times It is truly encouraging to see this Asian specialist presenting an excellent study of a subject so often mishandled in poorly researched journal articles. Bravo! Highly recommended. Choice A well-researched account of the rise of Japanese popular music in the post-war period and is recommended for anyone who has an interest in music as a form of cultural production. -- Eric Abbey Popular Music and Society