Speaker: Noriko Manabe, Boyer College of Music & Dance, Temple University

The Fukushima nuclear disaster following the tsunami of March 11, 2011, exposed deep collusions among the nuclear industry, the government, and media that effectively silence or minimize opposition to nuclear power. In response, antinuclear activism swelled into one of the most popular and passionate movements seen in postwar Japan, leading to a powerful wave of protest music that has continued into movements against Japan’s remilitarization. Musicians have given voice to residents' concerns, educated them on the issues, and mobilized them into action through their activities in cyberspace, demonstrations, festivals, and recordings.

Noriko Manabe is Associate Professor of Music Studies in the Boyer School of Music and Dance at Temple University, with interests in music and social movements, global popular music, and the music business. She is the author of the monograph, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima (Oxford University Press, 2015) and the monograph, Revolution Remixed: Intertextuality in Protest Songs (Oxford, under contract). Professor Manabe has long conducted fieldwork on Japanese rappers, DJs, and popular music and knows over 100 recording artists. She has published articles on Japanese rap and language, hip-hop DJs, ringtones, online radio, Japanese wartime children’s songs, and Cuban music, which appear in Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, Asian Music, Latin American Music Review, Oxford Handbook of Children’s Musical Cultures, Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, the Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, and other publications. She is co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Protest Music (with Eric Drott) and Sonic Contestations of Nuclear Power (with Jessica Schwartz), about responses to nuclear bombs and waste around the world.