Enka

Enka is the Japanese popular ballad tradition that took shape in the postwar decades, sung in a sentimental, highly ornamented manner over orchestral arrangements of strings, brass and touches of shamisen color. Its singers — performing in kimono, with restrained stage gestures — deliver narratives of lost love, endurance, sake, harbors and distant hometowns, using the kobushi vibrato and melismatic turns inherited from min'yō folk song and rōkyoku narrative singing. Enka codified a vision of old Japan for the mass audience of the LP and television era, and its stars, above all *Hibari Misora*, became defining voices of twentieth-century Japanese popular culture.