Popular Song Studies, No. 1: Shanghai-gaeri no Lil

English translation of the prose

AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Popular Song Studies, No. 1: Shanghai-gaeri no Lil

Seishu Hamano

Read the original ten-page Japanese paper (PDF). The recording accompanying the original article remains available in the media section.

Translation scope: all the paper's prose is translated below. Song lyrics are not newly translated or reproduced in full; links at their original positions lead to the relevant pages of the Japanese PDF. Historical dates, interpretations and generalizations are those of the original author.

1

The opening four lines of verse 1 appear on PDF page 1.

“Shanghai-gaeri no Lil,” which begins with these lines, is one of the representative popular songs that became a hit in Japan after the defeat. The melody is the real thing, in a mood full of the pathos of defeat. Its opening is stylish.

First, listen to it carefully three times on YouTube. What do you notice?

On the first and second hearings, you will notice that, in terms of its lyrics, this is a poignant “harbor song.” What you notice next is probably that it is a song of its times. A further observation is that techniques of modulation are incorporated throughout: subtle changes of pitch let us glimpse the protagonist's emotional agitation. It is, of course, often sung at karaoke even today, but few amateurs can sing it properly through one modulation after another.

Lil is probably the professional name of a woman working in a cabaret. She must have had a particularly deep melancholy that she could not shake off. Men who had returned to Japan from the Manchurian front or the battlefields of the south would have recognized something of themselves in the man who, infatuated with her, wanders about possessed by his love. The lyricist has a sharp eye.

“Hama” means Yokohama. Has she come back this far and taken a job at a cabaret catering to sailors? Or, since Shanghai is also a port city, does it refer to a high-class cabaret near the Garden Bridge? The possibility of different readings draws us in.

With those seemingly casual first four lines, the scene shifts from a shot of the harbor to decadent Shanghai.

At the time of the Shanghai Incident, which could be called a prelude to the Sino-Japanese War, many women crossed from Japan to China. Perhaps she encountered a wealthy officer or a civilian employee of the military there. Or was he a Manchurian adventurer taking his share of the military's spoils? For a man who loved a woman who entertained intelligence agents, the postwar period is not over yet.

In only four opening lines, this song stirs the hearts of men whose dreams have been shattered. The dramatic situation is properly established. It is skillful.

The depiction is unpretentious and unobtrusive, but there is a lonely man who cannot forget a drifting “woman with a past.”

The war is over and everyone is doing all they can merely to find enough to eat. Yet the song conjures up the dashing military policeman of earlier days, attached to the Imperial Navy's landing-force brigade stationed in Shanghai. Even without having experienced it personally, a well-informed older person—or, indeed, a young person today who loves history and sings the song—can imagine that much. That is why it was a song that caused such a sensation throughout Japan at the time.

It was popular on NHK's Nodo Jiman singing contest too, with several people attempting it each time. Most, however, could not negotiate the melody's modulations, and the amateur singers fell by the wayside. The pleasures of the lyrics continue through verses 2 and 3, yet they would beat an early retreat.

The latter part of verse 1 paints the scene in this way. The lyrics continue gently, skillfully weaving in the painful memories.

The latter part of verse 1 is quoted on PDF pages 3–4.

The lyricist does not call the man's sweet, painful memories “lingering attachment.” Instead, he describes the man gathering them to his breast and walking in search of her, as though this were a scene in a film. In other words, rather than using that abstract expression, he writes in visual images. The singer calls Lil's name in a high register, almost a cry. Of course there is no answer. In disappointment, he lowers his voice and begins talking to himself about where she might be. The listener shares his disappointment, and the song moves on to verse 2.

2

Now, in the second verse, fragments of this woman-with-a-past's circumstances begin to flicker into view. This too is skillful.

The first part of verse 2 is quoted on PDF pages 4–5.

If she is crying in a black dress, she has lost someone she loved. Was it her father, away at the front? Or her mother, whom she had left behind at home? Was her younger brother, who had joined the army, killed in action? Or was there another man, unknown to the protagonist, who died in a gun battle somewhere near Shanghai Station? The protagonist must imagine such things, but the lyrics do not go that far.

They say only that there was a bereavement in Lil's family, and that someone saw her crying in mourning clothes. The protagonist wants somehow to comfort her, but this too is no more than a rumor. Since Lil has returned from Shanghai, perhaps some misfortune occurred in Japan. That is uncertain as well.

Leaving the situation indistinct, the song moves into the latter part of verse 2. There we find a depiction of a setting that could hardly be more characteristic of Shanghai.

The latter part of verse 2 is quoted on PDF pages 5–6.

Sima Road was a street in Shanghai that had originally been a carriage road. The surrounding area was Shanghai's foremost entertainment district, lined with opium dens and establishments keeping prostitutes. The Japanese army was still winning its battles, and the naval landing force's headquarters building was nearby. So was the Japanese quarter. At night, therefore, it became an entertainment district where Japanese and Chinese mingled.

There is also an interpretation that Lil is a high-class prostitute who takes such officers as her clients. Ordinary Japanese listeners who love the song, however, do not think that far into it. In Japan at the time, since the Great Depression of the 1930s, one bankruptcy had followed another. Among the families of company presidents brought low in this way, children with the sad fate of leaving girls' school and crossing to the continent were not unusual. With lyrics, it is enough if one can get listeners to imagine things in all sorts of ways.

The description of falling fog also fits Shanghai perfectly; the lyricist has not inserted it merely as a rhetorical ornament. Shanghai is a city of fog. The night fog in Dick Mine's celebrated “Yogiri no Blues” is Shanghai's night fog too. That is why it is the Shanghai of dreams, the Shanghai of men.

Here the two part, with few words. They look only into one another's eyes—the eyes at parting. They cannot make any promise about when or where they will meet next. On the Chinese front, reports continued until the very end to announce one Japanese victory after another. In reality, however, the Japanese forces had fallen completely into the Chinese army's strategy, moving from Shanghai to Nanjing, then south from Nanjing to Wuhan's three cities. Exhausted on the central front, they finally pushed into Chongqing. Even transoceanic attacks from the Japanese home islands could not overcome the Chinese army. Caught in its diversions across the vast continent, the Kwantung Army and the expeditionary forces were drawn ever further into a protracted war, ran out of supplies, and ultimately retreated in full. That was the real situation.

Rumors circulated constantly that both the Kwantung Army and the expeditionary forces would apparently have to withdraw for lack of supplies. Anyone back from Shanghai would have countless memories of this succession of exhausting campaigns, and of losing themselves in fleeting romances with Chinese girls whom they met along the way. The situation was complicated; this was not a world that could be understood through relations between men and women alone.

That is why everyone had no choice but simply to look at one another and part. The urgency of the wartime situation is incomprehensible unless one has experienced it.

From the same era—or rather, a little earlier—comes “Soshu Yakyoku.” Here too, the happiness of love is repeatedly described as disappearing like foam. That makes it all the more poignant and sad. The tone of the song is a splendid match.

3

The lyrics of the third verse are exceptionally good. Their past circumstances are a dark destiny. To live in the new Japan, the two should encourage one another… How brave and touching.

Verse 3 is quoted on PDF pages 8–9.

Do you notice? The passage that moves everyone's heart is the appeal to share this dark destiny and live together as they did before. Men, at any rate, are the more romantic ones; women do not think in this way. The past is the past, and now is now.

Since the days of Edo kouta, that is said to be the way women draw a line under things. “Shanghai-gaeri no Lil,” however, captures precisely this clinging sentiment in a man's heart.

Now, at this point, return to YouTube once more and listen from the beginning.

Quite apart from the protagonist's poignant hope that they might share their dark destiny and live as they used to, Japan by now is a burned-out wasteland. American occupation troops ride about in jeeps: “Hello! Are you hungry?”

“Give me chocolate,” the street children say, holding out their dirty hands.

Showa 25, when this song appeared, was still two years before the conclusion of the Japan–US peace treaty in San Francisco. Japan remained a country under American occupation, so beneath the surface there was a wish to return to the powerful country it had been before its destruction.

Meanwhile, returnees from detention in Siberia had been indoctrinated with communism, and Japan was a mixture of ideologies. Just then North Korea broke through the 38th parallel and the Korean War began. In Japan, the “Gunkan March” was revived once more, and there were debates over rearmament…

This song, which captured everyone's hearts at the time, could not help but revive the battlefields of their compatriots, who had until recently been Asia's mighty conquerors. “Shanghai-gaeri no Lil” is a song of lost love, but it catches the Zeitgeist with skill. Joined to a lonely man's wish to revive the good old days, and intertwined with the sense of defeat, it inevitably drew people's hearts toward it.

The lyricist's feelings connected directly with the hearts of everyone.

Young people who hope to become lyricists: do not forget to capture people's hearts in seemingly casual words. Instead of bellowing, write a song that gradually winds itself around the heart.

Seishu Hamano