Creating Enka: The “Soul of Japan” in the Postwar Era is the landmark study that changed how scholars and listeners understand one of Japan’s most dominant forms of postwar popular music. Written by Yusuke Wajima, a musicologist specializing in Japanese popular music, popular culture and Afro-Brazilian music, the book confronts a belief so widespread that it can seem beyond question: that enka is the ancient, uninterrupted musical expression of Japanese feeling. Wajima’s achievement is to show that this “soul of Japan” was not simply inherited. It was made - through musicians, critics, record companies, broadcasters, audiences, politics and the changing cultural desires of the postwar decades.

Love it or hate it, enka is indispensable for anyone seeking to understand modern Japanese music. Its dramatic vocal inflections, wide vibrato, stylized longing, themes of separation and loss, and mixture of Japanese and Western musical elements have made it a persistent presence in broadcasting, recording and collective memory. Yet Wajima argues that the category itself is far newer, stranger and more contested than common sense suggests. The word enka originally referred to “speech through song,” associated with the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement of the Meiji period, before largely fading from use in the early twentieth century. It returned in a new cultural context in the late 1960s and 1970s, gradually becoming attached to a body of sentimental postwar song that was then presented as authentically, naturally and essentially Japanese.

This book is not a simple chronological survey of singers and hits. It is a forensic account of cultural construction. Wajima traces how earlier styles of kayōkyoku, popular balladry and hybrid song became retrospectively arranged under the banner of enka. He examines the role of prominent artists such as Hibari Misora, whose later canonization as an emblem of Japanese tradition sharply contrasts with the often dismissive or ambivalent reception her music received in earlier decades. In Wajima’s telling, tradition is not exposed as a fraud in order to dismiss it. Rather, it is shown as an active cultural process - a set of choices, institutions, memories and arguments through which music comes to stand for a people.

The social stakes of that process are central. Enka emerged as a powerful alternative to the increasingly Westernized currents of folk, rock and youth pop, but it was not merely conservative or nostalgic. Wajima reveals how the genre was also embraced by sections of the rising left, who rejected elite preferences for Western classical music and the automatic scorn directed at commercial entertainment. Enka could be understood as music of the people, an expression of popular feeling positioned against cultural hierarchy. Its supposed “Japaneseness” was therefore never politically neutral. It was shaped by debates over class, nation, modernity, authenticity, commercialism and who had the authority to define a shared culture.

The English edition makes this foundational research available to readers beyond Japan with a new introduction by the author, an index and full-color printing unavailable in the Japanese original. It also provides a vital point of entry into an area of music history too often simplified for international audiences. Wajima writes with the clarity of a scholar who understands that sound carries social history: vocal gestures, melodic turns, media framing, fan devotion and critical disdain all become evidence in a larger story about the manufacture of cultural meaning.

Originally published in Japanese in 2010, the work received the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities and the IASPM Book Prize, recognition of its importance for both Japanese studies and popular-music scholarship. This edition confirms why. Creating Enka does not ask readers merely to appreciate a genre. It asks them to listen more carefully to the stories cultures tell about their music - especially the stories that sound oldest, purest and most natural. In doing so, Wajima turns enka from a fixed symbol of national essence into what it has always been: a vivid, hybrid and continuously contested creation of postwar life.