Reviewed by:

• Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945 by Kerim Yasar
• Daqing Yang (bio)

Beginning with the little-known fact that Japanese was the second language transmitted across telephone lines (after English), Kerim Yasar laments that the study of modernity has long favored the visual and overlooked the auditory. Indeed, sound, one of the ubiquitous key elements of social life, is usually absent in historians' reconstructions of the past. How to bring this muted subject back into historical inquiry?

More than two decades ago, Japanese media scholar Yoshimi Shunya attempted just that with his pioneering study in Japanese, Capitalism of the "Voice": A Social History of the Telephone, Radio, and Phonograph (1995). Although Electrified Voices seems to bear certain resemblances, it is a very different book. Whereas Yoshimi emphasized auditory technologies breaking down the centuries-old dominance of print media, Yasar sees their advent in Japan not only as a technological rupture but also as a reformulation of past practices. As Yasar argues, "modern technologies, which have often been thought to go hand-in-hand with modern forms, became vectors for traditional arts and even for traditional lifeways and reactionary ideologies" (p. 7).

If Yoshimi wrestled with introducing the study of voice and sound to his Japanese readers, Yasar makes the experience of modern Japan relevant to non-area specialists, in part through a critical dialogue with an impressive array of theories on sound and voice in recent decades. Trained in cultural history and media studies with a background in music, Yasar demonstrates in rich detail how Japan's cultural elites crafted specific types of orality conditioned by the different electronic media at different moments in their technological development and reception in modern Japan.

The book begins with a discussion of voice and orality in the Japanese context, followed by a succinct assessment of the impact of the first electric technologies—the telegraph and the telephone (chapter 1). Both are shown to have shaped a language being standardized and a sense of national community [End Page 1233] at a critical time of nation-building in Meiji Japan. Next, Yasar examines in-depth Japan's traditional and modern soundscape—defined as sounds that comprise the auditory environment (chapter 2). While Westerners visiting Japan often described Japanese music as an alien acoustic experience, even rejecting it as barbaric, Japanese elites quickly embraced Western music, initially through military bands and music education in schools. This reflects the obvious power asymmetries rather than acoustic qualities.

With the stage set, the rest of the book covers major auditory technologies. Yasar then examines the early use of the phonograph, introduced to Japan in 1877 (chapter 3). The recording and commercial duplication of popular entertainment in Japan such as naniwabushi and rakugo vividly illustrate the author's point that "Japan's oral performance traditions were not vanquished by modernity—on the contrary, they experience the renaissance while concurrently metamorphosing into new genres across new media and distribution platforms" (p. 7). Disputes over whether recorded voice constituted real art also shaped Japan's early copyright law.

The electric medium that receives most attention is radio broadcasting, started in the mid-1920s and popularized as Japan embarked on new continental expansion in the 1930s. The book analyzes two of radio's public deployments: exercise and sport reporting, which created obedient subjects as well as an imagined community of listeners (chapter 4). Yasar then shows how the relatively short-lived but immensely popular radio drama offered democratic potential, opening the door for amateurs to create content, albeit with elites exercising gatekeeping (chapter 5). The final chapter is devoted to uses of voice (and sound) in Japan's nascent film industry, above all highlighting both the spatial and temporal importance of spoken Japanese.

Electrified Voices is situated between studies of technological developments that emphasize social negotiation and technological determinism and universalism. Its main protagonists are writers, actors, directors, and occasionally private entrepreneurs, rather than engineers or industrialists. Addressing specific local demands and conditions, these acoustic pioneers in Japan also tuned...

审核人：

• 电气化的声音：电话，留声机和收音机如何塑造现代日本，1868年至1945年，作者Kerim Yasar
• 杨大庆（生物）

从鲜为人知的事实开始，日语是通过电话线传输的第二语言（仅次于英语），Kerim Yasar感叹现代性研究长期以来一直偏爱视觉，却忽视了听觉。实际上，声音是社会生活中无处不在的关键要素之一，通常在历史学家对过去的重建中是缺失的。如何使这个沉默寡言的话题回到历史探究中？

二十多年前，日本媒体学者Yoshimi Shunya用他的日语开创性研究即“电话的资本主义：电话，广播和留声机的社会历史”（1995年）尝试了这一点。尽管《电声》似乎具有某些相似之处，但这是一本非常不同的书。Yoshimi强调听觉技术打破了印刷媒体百年的统治地位，而Yasar认为它们在日本的出现不仅是技术的破裂，而且是对过去做法的重新表述。正如Yasar所说，“通常被认为与现代形式并驾齐驱的现代技术已成为传统艺术甚至传统生活方式和反动意识形态的载体”（第7页）。

如果Yoshimi竭力向他的日本读者介绍语音和声音的研究，那么Yasar会将近代日本的经验与非区域专家联系起来，部分是通过与近几十年来令人印象深刻的声音和语音理论进行批判性对话。Yasar受过具有音乐背景的文化历史和媒体研究的培训，详细展示了日本的文化精英如何在现代日本的技术发展和接受的不同时刻，以不同的电子媒体为背景，制作出特定类型的口述。

该书首先讨论了在日本语境中的语音和口述，然后简要评估了第一批电子技术（电报和电话）的影响（第1章）。两者都显示出塑造了一种标准化的语言和一种民族共同感[End Page 1233]在明治日本国家建设的关键时刻。接下来，Yasar深入研究了日本的传统和现代音景-定义为构成听觉环境的声音（第2章）。虽然西方人经常将日本音乐描述为一种陌生的听觉体验，甚至拒绝日本音乐是野蛮的，但日本精英人士很快开始接受西方音乐，最初是通过军乐队和学校的音乐教育来进行的。这反映了明显的功率不对称而不是声学质量。

在准备好阶段之后，本书的其余部分将介绍主要的听觉技术。Yasar然后研究了1877年引入日本的留声机的早期使用情况（第3章）。日本流行娱乐节目如naniwabushi和rakugo的录制和商业复制生动地说明了作者的观点，即“日本的口头表演传统并没有被现代性所取代，相反，它们经历了复兴，同时又在新媒体和新媒体上变成了新的流派。分销平台”（第7页）。关于录制的声音是否构成真实艺术的争议也影响了日本早期的版权法。

最受关注的电介质是无线电广播，始于1920年代中期，随着日本在1930年代开始新的大陆扩张而普及。该书分析了广播的两个公共部署：运动和体育报道，创造了听话的主题以及想象中的听众社区（第4章）。然后，雅萨尔（Yarar）展示了相对短暂但广受欢迎的广播剧如何提供民主潜力，尽管有精英们在守门，但也为业余爱好者创造内容打开了大门（第5章）。最后一章专门介绍了日本新生电影行业中语音（和声音）的使用，其中最重要的是突出了日语口语的时空重要性。

电气之声介于强调社会谈判和技术决定论与普遍主义的技术发展研究之间。它的主要角色是作家，演员，导演，偶尔还有私人企业家，而不是工程师或实业家。为了满足当地的特定需求和条件，这些在日本的声学先驱也对...进行了调整。