ABSTRACT
The highly gendered expressions of Japanese popular song and its staged performances give ready access to constructions of what it means to be a man or a woman, masculine or feminine. In enka, a popular ballad genre considered the most ‘traditional’ in its forms and cultural values, men and women take the stage not only as gendered beings, but as particularly Japanese ones. This chapter examines one half of the constructions, that of masculinity, through texts, music, movement and images of its stars. At the same time, I acknowledge that masculinity and femininity are relational concepts, which cannot be understood without reference to each other (Kimmel 1987: 12; see also Gutmann 1996) as well as to articulations of multiple masculinities within one socio-cultural setting (Connell 1987; Ortner 1996).
