Conference Agenda

Centering its geographical locus on the Japanese mainland and its discursive relation to the Axis, this first paper examines how Japanese music magazines navigated the tangled relationship between ultranationalism and the transimperial fascist streamlining of modernist music discourse. In 1935, Japan formally entered the global contemporary music community by joining the International Society for Contemporary Music. Yet its ambition to rival European musical thought had already surfaced a few years earlier, when several newly launched music magazines began publishing articles about modern music creation in Europe. Germany frequently stood at the centre of these discussions, which ranged from factual reporting to critical commentary. At times, these magazines introduced readers to musical life under the Nazi regime, including concert scenes that had already taken a sharply antisemitic turn. Until the late 1930s, these articles adopted various stances on Germany—sometimes dismissing its antisemitic cultural policies outright, while at other times praising its efforts to “unite the nation through singing.”

This mixed discourse, which emerged from an imperialist and militaristic call to elevate Japan on the global stage through music, changed markedly in 1941, when a new national system brought all music-related activities under strict imperial government control. All music magazines joined the state’s call to support Japanese military offensive, often citing Germany’s musical life—structured under the directives of the Reichsmusikkammer—as a model and drawing on their perception of Nazi Germany’s concept of Kultur as intrinsically connected to the idea of “nation.” Yet against this backdrop, the 1942 debate on culture titled “Overcoming Modernity,” published one year after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, complicated the pro-fascist rhetoric that had come to dominate musical discourse. This paper argues that several prominent figures, including Yamada Kōsaku, understood this “cultural war” as a struggle not only to assert the superiority of imperial Japan over other Asian nations, but also to advocate a form of modernism that would transcend the globally shared model initiated by the West. The magazines, as both vehicles for state ideology and sites of intellectual debate, reveal how this aspiration simultaneously depended on and sought to negate Western musical modernity.

The second paper moves southward to follow the imperial Japanese southern advance. During the short but aggressive Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia (1941–45), music was mobilised as a tool for the Empire’s southern advance. Yet the scholarship on music and the Japanese Empire has primarily focused on either mainland Japan or the Empire's East Asian colonies and occupied territories. To fully understand Japanese ambitions to reshape and control aurality in the western Pacific sphere, this paper interrogates the hitherto little-examined role music played in Japanese exercises of power in the region by centring the canonical Japanese composer-conductor Yamada Kōsaku and his weeks-long musical missions to the Philippines and Thailand in 1943. Methodologically, it draws on both Japanese- and English-language newspapers for reporting, interviews with Yamada, and information on radio programming as its archival basis. Theorisation in infrastructure studies and critical biography studies in music inform my analysis.

Focusing on the singular figure of Yamada, who dominated the Japanese musical world and was tightly entangled in the political one, enables a nuanced consideration of the question the late Filipino political scientist Lydia Yu-Jose (1992) asked: “Who did it?” Analysing Yamada’s musical missions helps complicate the notion of “Japan” by clarifying the potentiality of it referring to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to particular individuals within it, or perhaps a confluence of timing, personalities, and contextual forces. The paper argues that Yamada’s missions reveal how cultural diplomacy under fascism operated not through seamless state coordination but through improvised alignments between institutional agendas, individual ambition, and wartime contingency. It thus contributes to comparative studies of music and fascism, demonstrating that the Japanese case, like its European counterparts, relied on prominent cultural figures whose prestige could be leveraged to project soft power.

Yamada’s entourage further enriches the analysis. Most notably, Aiko Saita, a second-generation Japanese Canadian mezzo-soprano who traversed the Pacific sphere with imperial Japanese support, was among them. Her participation foregrounds the diasporic and gendered dimensions of wartime musical labor, while also casting light on music and fascism’s transimperial history and the Japanese Empire’s positioning in the wider world.

The final paper also centres gender while broadening the panel’s geographical reach beyond Pacific Asia.

The 1930s offered a window for fascist musical cooperation well before the formalisation of the “Axis” between Germany, Italy, and Japan. Examining the Japanese tour of Austro-Swiss conductor Felix Weingartner and his wife Carmen in 1937, this paper reinterprets fascist music diplomacy through globalising interwar musical mobility. Notably, the Weingartners’ tour meant that the first major European conductor to perform in Japan came not from Nazi Germany but fascist Austria. This required a high level of commitment from political and cultural institutions on both the Japanese and Austrian sides. This Austrian tour—deeply rooted in a distinctly “Austrian” repertoire—effectively sidelined the German Reich, catalysing both Austrian and German large-scale follow-up projects for the musical programme of the 1940 Olympic Games and World Fair in Tokyo. Carmen Studer-Weingartner’s role as the first woman conductor in Japan, together with the presence of Jewish expatriate or émigré musicians from Germany and Austria, further illuminates the opportunities Japanese music life offered to European musicians facing discrimination and exclusion. The authoritarian conditions of Japanese musical life—linked to the German-speaking musical canon and its institutions—offered global professional alternatives.

In Japan, the Weingartners’ visit profited from Japan’s media infrastructure of newspapers, radio, and record companies and became a matter of prestige for the country’s cultural and political elites. As part of a broader globalisation in music, organising and promoting such intercontinental mobility ultimately became a testing ground for the postwar wave of international orchestral touring to Japan under radically changed political auspices. After Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany and the outbreak of the Pacific War, Weingartner’s transatlantic experience and East Asian engagements helped him reorient his career on an international scale. As the globally most active conductor of his time, he went on to perform in Palestine and Egypt, arguably demonstrating the political and geographical flexibility of musical careers under fascism. Such global trajectories, with East Asia as a central node, challenge dominant narratives of the interwar period as an era of “deglobalization.”