Singer Misora Hibari (1937-1989) is undisputedly one of Japan’s central figures of postwar music culture. As a child star, she excelled on the movie screen and in live performance settings, ending her career with 1,500 recorded songs in genres ranging from jazz to boogie-woogie, French chanson and Latin pops. Today, she is often lauded as ‘the queen of enka’, a genre linked to Japaneseness (Yano, 2002). Given Misora’s status, broad skill-set, long career and connection to nation, she has been the subject of a number of scholarly and popular texts, concerning her deification (Wajima 2010, Takenaka 2005, Yamaori 2001), status as ‘diva’ (Yano 2018), and star image (Shamoon 2009). This paper brings a new perspective to the literature, by examining how technology assists in sustaining Misora’s star image and national status in the decades following her death, via video montages and posthumous duets. We do this through an examination of lyrics, costumes and staging in the televised Japanese year-end song contest Kōhaku utagassen, where Misora made song performances during her lifetime (from 1954-1979) and has been repeatedly ‘resurrected’ after her death. We also present a case study of the “AI Misora Hibari” hologram which was created using Vocaloid technology and performed at the 70th anniversary Kōhaku (2019). Informed by ethnographic fieldwork at Kōhaku rehearsals, we show how AI Hibari’s rendition of the custom-composed song “Arekara” (Ever Since Then) serves to perpetuate a sense of her immortality.

Dementia, a syndrome involving memory loss and physical decline, results from underlying medical conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. A dementia diagnosis affects more than the brain, including personal identity, relationships, and status in local communities. Yet, even as speaking skills deteriorate, musical knowledge remains relatively preserved. As a result, both scientists and community-based programs have become interested in the use of personalized music playlists to improve well-being for people living with dementia. Corresponding resource toolkits describe how to build personalized playlists. But how personal are these playlists? Playlist curation aims to identify preferred music, yet many people living with dementia lack the capacity to easily describe their favorite, or most meaningful, moments in music engagement. This paper draws on 6+ years of ethnographic data from community and nursing home settings to argue that the contents of a personalized playlist hinge on the music knowledge of family members, friends and above all, the person compiling the playlist. With limited training, playlists can be inadvertently limited to popular songs of a certain decade, rather than the music that is most important to the playlist recipient. In this presentation, we discuss how ethnomusicologists are well-positioned with the tools needed to co-curate, and to help train others to co-curate, deeply meaningful playlists, reflecting not only important moments across the life span but also the multifaceted elements that comprise personal, relational and social identity. By reframing playlist making as a co-creative process, we also address how this practice can model relationship-based approaches to dementia caregiving.

2023 marked the 70th anniversary of the ceasefire of the Korean War. Chinese anti-American songs from the 1950s were performed and broadcast through state-run media and social media in China to commemorate such event. Known in China as the “War to Resist the US and Assist Korea” (hereafter WRUAK), the Korean War was the very first international conflict involving the newly founded People’s Republic of China (PRC). Therefore, Chinese songs associated with the Korean War are a crucial part of the PRC’s special musical memories of the past. Drawing upon my ethnographic research concerning the Chinese audience and singers (including several Chinese veterans of the WRUAK) of anti-American songs, this paper analyzes the new appropriation of anti-American songs from China’s protean mobilization for the WRUAK in the present day. After constructing the historical context of Maoist attitudes toward music and exploring various models for Chinese revolutionary songs, the paper arrives at the Korean War via an analysis of song tunes and texts from the Chinese home front during the 1950s, emphasizing the role of devil imagery in anti-American song propaganda. From student amateurs to conservatory-trained cultural workers, song composers and contemporary music arrangers used music and lyrics to satirize China’s American enemies, suggesting that Chinese songs from the Korean War extend beyond buoyant patriotism, evoking past trauma and pride of “hard-won victory”.