7 - Singing the Contentions of Place: Korean Singers of the Heart and Soul of Japan

Summary

Performing emotions holds a particular niche in the field of intimate cultural production. Inasmuch as emotions occupy both private encounters and public disclosure, their performance on the commercial stage mixes these encounters and disclosures within processes of imaging and commodification. Performing emotions in particular ways can be a form of branding—and thus selling—a singer or a genre in East Asia, as elsewhere. Whole swaths of song may be noted for their sentimentality; within particular popular music genres in East Asia individual singers may be noted for their tears. Linking tears to women follows gendered expectations in East Asia of sentimentality and excess. Performing hyperemotions then takes on added meaning when the singer is a foreign woman. These conditions add issues of race, nation, and place to the already gendered performing stage.

In this chapter I examine performing emotions as part of branding the career and fandom in Japan of Korean female singer Kim Yonja. Kim sings a variety of songs, but specializes in enka, a sentimental genre appealing primarily to older audiences and known in Japan as expressive of the heart and soul of the nation. To understand the ironies embedded within the context of a Korean female singer performing enka more fully, one needs to further unpack the iconicity of this type of song. Enka comprises a genre of popular ballad known as naki-bushi (crying song), evoking tears through tropes of longing: departed lovers, rural hometowns, and memories of mothers.