Civil Voices: Everyday Vocality in the Production of Japanese Social Order

Japanese everyday life is characterized by the mundane and ubiquitous presence of voice types specific to particular genders, vocations, and social situations.

This presentation overviews my third book project, about the role that these voices play in the moral education of contemporary Japan. I focus on four categories of voices: voices to children, service voices, professional announcers, and voices of law, which together constitute an unending chorus of pedagogical voices that propel people through everyday life and teach obedience to social order and to the law.

The purpose of this project is to demonstrate that the pedagogical power of the voice arises not only from what these voices say, but from the prosodic features of the voice-uses of timbre, pitch, dynamics, textures and rhythm, features which arise from a confluence of voice production and its complex technological and spatial mediation.

About the speaker:
Joshua D. Pilzer is an associate professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the anthropology of sound and music in modern Korea and Japan, voice studies, gender, trauma and everyday life studies. He is particularly interested in the ethnography of the "everyday," in the thresholds which link music to other forms of social expression, and in the vistas of ethnomusicology beyond music.

His first book, "Hearts of Pine," about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of the Japanese "comfort women" system, was published in 2012. His second book, "Quietude," was published in 2022 and is an ethnography of the arts of survival among Korean survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and their children.

He is currently conducting fieldwork for an ethnography of the voice in everyday life in contemporary Japan, focused on the uses of speaking and singing voices in pedagogies of propriety and authority.