During Japan's imperial expansion of the 1930s and early 1940s, evocations of continental East Asia, and in particular a genre of songs known as tairiku merodei (continental melodies), emerged as a major trend in Japanese popular music. This trend was encouraged and enabled by Japanese imperialism, and many tairiku songs, as I will call them, contain clear propaganda messages. They were not, however, simply a body of deliberate propaganda; rather, they were the products of a music industry that was subject both to the profit motive and to government pressures to support official ideology. As such they present a range of combinations of ideological and exotic views of the Asian continent, reflecting the various goals and constraints to which songwriters were responding. Tairiku songs were also products of Japan's modern history, including its rapid assimilation of Western technology and culture and its changing relationships with China and the West. Analyses of these songs show how songwriters drew upon Western-derived genres, Japanese genres whose meanings had shifted in response to Westernization, and musical exoticism from both domestic and foreign sources; and how they combined verbal and musical signifiers so as to satisfy ideological goals, the demands of the record-buying public, and their own aesthetic ideals.
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