Michael Bourdaghs's Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon is titled after a 1973 song of the same name by the Japanese rock band Happy End. The members of Happy End, like many postwar musicians, negotiated a complex relationship of admiration and resistance to American cultural hegemony. If rock had to be sung in English to be authentic, then Happy End's decision to sing in Japanese suggests their attempt to create a new authenticity that was not defined in terms of history or tradition (i.e., enka). As Bourdaghs argues, it was a negation of the negated that sought to define a new space outside of the dilemma of the colonialist self or the colonized other. Future rock musicians in Japan would benefit from the creation of this new space for popular music sung in Japanese. Today, we call this space J-Pop.
Bourdaghs subtitles his book a “prehistory of J-Pop” in order to...
