Longing for the past when the streets in Ginza were lined with willow trees
A young beauty becomes a nobody with age
Dance to the jazz music and down liquor into the night
And the rain that is the tears of the dancers will sprinkle at the break of dawn.
Tokyo March (1929) Lyrics taken from the English subtitles in Tokyo March (1929), directed by Mizoguchi Kenji, in Talking Silents 1, DVD (Tokyo: Digital Meme, 2007)
Movie Poster for Tokyo March from 完全版朝日クロニクル 20世紀 : 日本と世界の100年 v.2
Shinpei Nakayama(中山晋平) was a Japanese composer known as “the father of popular music” who was active during the early 1900’s. Nakayama rose to fame when his composition “Tokyo March” (Tokyo Koshinkyoku) was used as the theme song for the 1929 movie by the same title directed by Mizoguchi Kenji. Upon the song’s release, “Tokyo March” came to be considered one of the first Japanese “pop” songs, selling an unprecedented 400,000 copies according to The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema. The resounding success sparked the careers of Nakayama, the song’s lyricist, and the song’s performer Chiyako Sato (佐藤千夜子), which subsequently caused a surge in the country’s overall record production. Japan’s professional music industry was set into motion.
However, the sudden fame of Nakayama’s work was not without controversy. “Tokyo March” (both the song and film) focused on a common theme of social inequality, which was a byproduct of the clumsy transition between Japan’s feudal past and the Meiji Restoration beginning in 1868. Both the content and the mass popularity of the work were seen as threats to the higher class citizenry, to which the capitalistic nature of the record industry posed the risk of upheaving the established social order.
For its critics, “Tokyo March” carried the risk of social dislocation, but the song was beloved by the general population for its nostalgic imagery of pre-restoration Tokyo. And for the generations that may not ever see Ginza’s streets “lined with willow trees,” the “Tokyo March” is an eternal reminder of Japan’s complex past and the effects of rapid urbanization
- Rekion access in OSUL – Rekion Identifier for the 1929 recording is “info:ndljp/pid/2915564”
More about Tokyo March (Tokyo Koshinkyoku 東京行進曲):
- Tokyo koshinkyoku (Videorecording) in OSUL
- Unpopular Music: The Politics of Mass Culture in Modern Japan – Dissertation by Hiromu Nagahara (OSU account verification needed)
NOTE: This is one of a series of posts highlighting content available in Rekion (れきおん), the Historical recordings collection of the National Diet Library (Japan), which is available at a dedicated computer in the Music and Dance Library at Ohio State. See the Introductory post in this series for more information about the database.
