“Kimigayo”: Japan’s National Anthem from a Global Historical Perspective

The idea of national anthem was peculiarly modern Western. When it was first introduced to Asia in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was merely understood as a diplomatic necessity by government elites, who hastily prepared a makeshift tune to use it as a façade of an independent country. This chapter focuses on “Kimigayo”, the surviving national anthem of Japan, and discusses how and why it was transformed into a genuine symbol of the first successfully Westernized Asian country and of the vast Japanese empire towards its final catastrophe at the Second World War. This story constitutes not just part of the national history of Japan but also dramatic, (semi-)colonial experience of other Asian nations, namely Korea, China and Thailand, which were only (albeit sometimes nominally) independent nations in Asia until 1945 and were all strongly influenced by the globalizing Western politico-musical culture. It will be argued that the globalization of modern Western-style nationalism can be clearly observable in the government-sponsored advent of the national anthems and their ensuing surprising popularization in the region.