In this presentation, I discuss postwar Japanese diva Misora Hibari (1937–89) and her voice and image as public positioning, addressing issues of modernity framed within that mediated space. I ask, what did this version of modernity sound like? What did it represent? How did Hibari help define the era for which she was mourned? How did the very transgressiveness of the era— embodied and sounded through Hibari—characterize the modernity of which it was a part?  Indeed, Hibari was not only the Queen of Enka, but also, I argue, the Queen of Tears, setting her divahood in motion directly through the range of emotions spectacularized on stage.

Christine Yano is on the faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa, and is currently a visiting professor of anthropology at Harvard University. Her recent book is Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty and Its Trek Across the Pacific (Duke University Press, 2013). In particular, Yano focuses on Hello Kitty as a consumer item and a cultural icon, sold to children and young adult females throughout Japan as well as in other industrial nations. Hello Kitty packages cuteness as an aesthetic, a set of morals, and a prescription for action (or passive inaction). Yano curated an exhibit on Hello Kitty at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles entitled “Hello! Exploring the Supercute World of Hello Kitty” open from October, 2014, to May of 2015.

Yano has done extensive research on the Japanese popular music genre, enka, which incorporates constructions of emotion, gender, and the nation. In 2002 she published a book on that subject: Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song (Harvard University Asia Center/ Harvard University Press).

Free, non-ticketed (a Valente Lecture)

Made possible by the William E. Valente endowment, the Department of East Asian Studies, and also with generous funding by the AAS Northeast Asian Council’s Distinguished Speakers Bureau and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission.