Joel Littler publishes 'A Song of Fallen Flowers: Miyazaki Tōten and the making of naniwabushi as a mode of popular dissent in transwar Japan, 1902–1909' on Modern Asian Studies (Cambridge University Press).
The popular genre of sung and spoken performance—naniwabushi—was the biggest ‘craze’ during the first decade of the twentieth century in Japan. The article uncovers how Miyazaki Tōten (1870–1922), a revolutionary and thinker who became a naniwabushi balladeer, was instrumental in the rise of naniwabushi as a popular art form during the Russo-Japanese transwar period (1902–1909) and used it to engage in a practice of nihilist democracy.
In using a transwar frame to examine the content, audiences, and contemporary reports of his performances, the article concludes that Miyazaki Tōten created ‘new’ naniwabushi to deliberately link the techniques and rhetoric of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement from the 1880s to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905).
The article is available here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/song-of-fallen-flowers-miyazaki-toten-and-the-making-of-naniwabushi-as-a-mode-of-popular-dissent-in-transwar-japan-19021909/28CA11F431CFBFDA0DD4C98B7F8D4569
