ABSTRACT
Nikusei, lit. ‘corporeal voice’, is a Japanese-made sinographic neologism that was widely used in print across the territories of the Japanese empire during the early twentieth century. Closely associated with the idea of nikudan, lit. the ‘corporeal bullet’, it was most effectively used for advertising recordings, posthumously in particular, of the voices of gunshin or ‘gods of war’. This chapter first demonstrates how such recordings were designed and sanctified in the 1930s. It then examines sound recordings waxed by Japanese military officers during their tenures as Governor-Generals of Taiwan and Korea, with a focus on political speeches made for the policies of so-called ‘imperial subjectification’ (kōminka) and wartime mobilisation since the late 1930s. The questions explored include how these recordings were planned, how these top-rank officers performed in studios, what textual and performative dimensions of their speeches were like, how the Japanese and vernacular press dealt with their records, how colonised peoples turned their attention—or a deaf ear—to the recorded voices, and how all these processes of voicing and listening were played out against the phonographic silence of the very centre of the empire, the Emperor.
