Misora Hibari (born Katō Kazue) was literally a child of war and occupation. She also became an embodiment of postwar reconstruction, not entirely on the victor’s terms. In 1937, her birth year, Japan’s ongoing border clashes with China turned into total war. In December 1941, the war in Asia merged with the war in Europe when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and several additional targets in East and Southeast Asia. By August and September of 1945, when Japan surrendered and World War II officially ended, Hibari (Japanese always referred to her by her personal name) was 8 years old and already known locally as a child singer. The remaining years of her girlhood and youth were spent under foreign occupation. She was only fifteen when Japan regained sovereignty in 1952. By then, she was one of Japan’s pre-eminent entertainers as a child actress and recording star. Although she sang in various styles, including jazz classics, French chanson, and occasionally boogie, she became especially revered as Japan’s foremost singer of enka, a form of Japanese popular music which has today fallen from favor and been overtaken by European and American styles. In her lifetime, Hibari made hundreds of records, starred in numerous films, made frequent appearances on radio and television, and performed in live concerts.

Enka, the genre for which Hibari was best known, is a song or ballad composed in minor pentatonic scale and is considered a sub-form of Japanese popular music called kayôkyoku. The lyrics tend to be sad or melancholy, such as mourning a lost love, and are sung with pulsating vibrato or quavering of the voice. Such songs were immensely popular in the late 1940s to 1960s, even though the Occupation re-introduced many Western styles of classical and popular music. The primary audience today is older people who tend to identify enka with tradition, even Japaneseness, although in fact it traces back to the 1870s as a form of protest. Anthropologist Christine Yano views enka as “a cultural form which incorporates constructions of emotion, gender, and the nation.” Those who love enka ignore critics who demean the genre as schmaltzy or overly sentimental.

Hibari came from a lower middle class background. Her parents ran a fish shop in Yokohama, and at a very young age she began singing with her father’s amateur band. After the war, when performing in Tokyo, age eleven, she took the performance name of Misora (beautiful skies) Hibari (skylark). Possessing an adult-sounding voice of great power and range and obviously precocious, possibly a genius, she worked constantly and apparently received little formal education. She sang both in natural voice and enka style. Hibari made her film debut in March 1949, when she was almost twelve. Later that year, she starred in her fifth film, Sad Whistle or Sad Whistling (Kanashiki kuchibue), also the title of the theme song. She was catapulted into stardom and sold huge numbers of tickets and records. In her previous films, she had played boys. In this one, she was an orphan, a tomboyish street child, who was looking for her missing older brother, a repatriated soldier—all references to postwar social issues. She was a lovable and honest orphan, who happened to enchant people with her singing. Her lower register was remarkable. A kind middle-aged man and his daughter give her a home. At one point, she sings the theme song while peeling onions, and her crying turns into mournful tears.

Later, her brother, who had composed the song, hears her, realizes she is nearby, and they are reunited for a happy ending as her benefactors become her new family. In another scene, set in a cabaret, she becomes a flirtatious child. Attired in a tuxedo and top hat, and holding a cane, she sings, taps, twists, and teases. Though often compared to Shirley Temple, the famous child star in American films of the Depression years, Hibari projects far less innocence. She is eroticized by the filmmakers, with gestures and movements more like Marlene Dietrich in the film Morroco. Others have mentioned Judy Garland and Edith Piaf to convey a sense of her power and charisma, if not her style.

By the time the Occupation ended, Hibari had appeared in twenty-five films and toured in Hawaii. Tokyo Kid, 1950, was another big hit for her. In Dearest Dad, 1951, she sang to great effect, “I Am a Child of the City.” Margaret O’Brien, a child star of Hollywood, came to Tokyo in 1952 to perform with her in a film about a Japanese war orphan. Also in 1952, she first performed her best known song, The Apple Melody (Ringo oiwake) in the film, The Maiden of the Apple Farm, not to be confused with The Apple Song (Ringo no uta), a huge hit by another singer in the first months of the Occupation. Once again, her recording hit big figures for the day—70,000—and became a classic.

She followed this up this success with a live performance at the Kabuki Theater, Tokyo. Her many films in this period, though ignored in a basic English language work, The Japanese Film (1st ed. 1959) by Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie, were nevertheless important, stress her fans, in re-creating the Japanese as a community and holding them together in the aftermath of defeat, devastation, and poverty. She knew instinctively how to connect with her audience. She became the people’s singer. Intellectuals slighted her, but working class audiences loved her. Moreover, her films are more complicated than at first glance, dealing with cross-dressing, gender, and erotica, as well as celebrating freedom to choose one’s marriage partner.

Hibari’s post-occupation career was successful but also stormy. Should enka, the form which she mastered, be seen as a way for Japanese to resist “artistic colonization” by the West, as suggested by literary scholar Alan Tansman? Enka was Japanese song, said to express the Japanese soul. It was sung wearing a kimono and to the accompaniment of light strings, rarely a piano. Hibari acted in film until early thirties and became one of Japan’s highest tax-payers. But in 1957, ten people were killed or hurt while trying to get into a hall to see and hear her. A crazed fan threw acid on her face but with little damage. Among her loyal fans in those years were young women barely out of junior high school who came to Tokyo for jobs. She was briefly married to actor and singer Kobayashi Akira, 1962-1964. Later, she adopted the son of her brother. His drug abuse and alleged connections with the yakuza or criminal world landed him in jail and temporarily set back her reputation. She transcended all obstacles as the “Queen of the Showa Era” and “Queen of Japanese Singers.” She managed to endure, to “Flow on Like a River,” the theme song with which she is most identified. In the 1960s and after, Hibari continued to sing the same hit songs from her early career in Occupied Japan but also became famous for new ones, especially “Mournful Sake,” composed in 1966, sung with full throttle emotion. In later years, she was adorned in elaborate flowing gowns of Western design and wore flamboyant headdresses.

Hibari never became well-known outside of Japan—few Japanese singers have, except perhaps in nearby Asia. But to the Japanese she was an icon—to many but not all, since tastes have changed and memories of occupation and struggle have faded. This greatest of postwar singers came to embody, say some critics, cultural conservatism, an ache to preserve the authentic past. Her songs are suffused with suffering, and she died a painful death in 1989, age 52. In a special review conducted by East magazine in late 1999, she emerged as one of the century’s ten most influential Japanese personalities. In a TV New Year’s special, January 3, 2000, Hibari was proclaimed Japanese artist of the century. A museum in Kyoto commemorates her life and art.