earticle

영어

On August 13, 1999, the Japanese government enacted a law to designate the country's de facto national flag and anthem, known respectively as Hinomaru and Kimigayo, as its official national symbols. Regardless of their legal status or lack thereof, the Japanese have tacitly approved Hinomaru and Kimigayo as representations of their nation-state in both official and unofficial capacities for over a century. Nevertheless, there were considerable misgivings over the official endorsement of Hinomaru and Kimigayo and what they signify as national symbols at the end of the twentieth century. The legislation opened up heated debates on anachronism and outdated imperial references of these historically charged signs and their appropriateness as national symbols for today’s democratic Japan. Although most of the discussion concerning Kimigayo focused on the anthem’s lyrics, its semantic meanings and connotations, this essay examines the anthem as a musical composition and what its “official” arrangement based on the 1888 score acoustically embodies. Three different renditions of recent Kimigayo performance that attempted to deviate the composition from the standardized military band rendition—the unisonous collective singing (seishô) in Japanese school ceremonies; the rare gagaku (Japanese court music ensemble) rendition in the 1998 Nagano Olympics’ opening ceremony; and a variety of solo performances (dokushô) by celebrity singers and musicians in widely broadcast athletic event—will be analyzed in their respective contexts. I shall discuss how these examples “undid” Kimigayo and the collective voice it embodied in its sonority, and the implications of such procedures.