“I’ve been watching over you”: Resurrecting Misora Hibari via a Japanese Song Contest

Part of the 'Louise Hanson-Dyer Colloquia Series' at The University of Melbourne.

About The MIRC Speaker: Associate Professor Shelley Brunt is the Program Manager of the BA (Music Industry) degree at RMIT University. As a popular music ethnomusicologist, Shelley focuses on ethnographic approaches to understanding music cultures in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. She publishes regularly on Japan’s annual NHK Kōhaku Utagassen (Red and White Song Contest), including a forthcoming monograph with Bloomsbury for the 33 1/3 series.

Abstract: Singer Misora Hibari (1937–1989) is undisputedly one of Japan’s central figures of post-war 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 publications concerning her deification (Wajima 2010, Takenaka 2005, Yamaori 2001), her status as ‘diva’ (Yano 2018), and her star image (Shamoon 2009).

My paper brings a new perspective to the literature by examining how technology assists in sustaining Misora’s star image and national status after her death. I do this through the lens of the Japanese TV programme Kōhaku utagasen (Red and White Song Contest): a long-running New Year’s Eve extravaganza that was created during the post-war era with the purpose of uniting a defeated nation through song. Misora appeared repeatedly on Kōhaku during her lifetime, from 1954–1979, and in the decades following her death she has been ‘resurrected’ via video montages and posthumous duets. I present a case study of the “AI Misora Hibari” hologram which was created using Vocaloid technology and subsequently performed live at the 70th anniversary edition of Kōhaku (2019). Informed by my ethnographic fieldwork at the Kōhaku rehearsals in Tokyo, I show how AI Hibari’s rendition of the custom-composed song “Arekara” (Ever Since Then)—which includes the unnerving lyrics “I’ve been watching over you—serves to perpetuate a sense of her immortality.

This research was funded by The Japan Foundation via the 2019-2020 Japanese Studies Fellowship.