Promoting Moral Sound: The Japanese Ministry of Education’s ‘Gramophone Record Recommendation and Authorization Project’ in the 1920s

This article aims to re-evaluate the importance of the gramophone as a mass medium for dispersing state-controlled political and moral views in the 1920s. It takes the Japanese ‘Gramophone Record Recommendation and Authorization Project’ by the Social Education Department of the Japanese Ministry of Education as a case study. Between 1923 and 1940, this project aimed at guiding children and adolescents towards forms of sound that were deemed morally and socially acceptable through the recommendation of carefully selected records. Bureaucrats cooperated with non-state actors such as academics and record companies to achieve this goal. Amid competing visions about morally ‘correct’ sound and the spread of ‘degenerate’ popular music, the encroaching Western corporate influence in Japan’s recording industry added another complexity. Taking this hitherto overlooked facet into account, this case study adds a novel perspective to gramophone records’ political and ideological sonic functions in the 1920s.