Enka is a contraction of enzetsu no uta, "speech songs" — songs that carried a political argument. It dates to the Meiji period, around the 1880s and 1890s, and referred to a specific kind of street performer: political activists who could not legally hold rallies under the new Meiji government, so they set their speeches to popular melodies and sold the printed lyrics on the corner. The first enka were protest songs. They were tied to the Freedom and People's Rights Movement, sung outdoors, and aimed squarely at a government that was trying to suppress them.

If you stop a Japanese person on the street today and ask what enka sounds like, none of that will come up. They will describe a slow ballad, sung by a woman in a kimono or a man in a tuxedo, with a heavy vocal vibrato called kobushi, lyrics about lost love and northern winters, performed on television variety shows during the New Year season. That is a different genre with the same name. The break between the two is so sharp that some scholars argue we should treat them as unrelated.

The Japan of 1960 was rebuilding from the war. Television sets were spreading into the new middle-class homes. The record industry, run mostly out of Tokyo, was trying to figure out what to sell to the millions of people who had just moved from the countryside into urban housing and were homesick. Two streams of older music got fused into a new commercial product: the prewar ryūkōka popular song, and trot, a sentimental genre that took shape in colonial-era Korea in constant exchange with Japanese song (and is still loved in Korea today). Producers gave it a vocabulary: the pentatonic yonanuki scale, built by dropping the fourth and seventh notes for a sound that registers as nostalgic; the heavy kobushi vibrato; lyrics centered on snow country, harbors, sake, separation. And they gave it a name: enka (演歌), borrowing the old word and silently changing what it referred to.

The poster faces were Hibari Misora, a child prodigy who had been performing professionally since the late 1940s, and Saburō Kitajima, the booming baritone from Hokkaido. By the late 1960s — before Ishikawa Sayuri and Tendō Yoshimi even joined the lineup in the 1970s — enka already had a recognizable canon. The marketing claim that came with it — that this was Japan's oldest popular form, the music of the national soul — was made up. It was not a lie exactly. It was a positioning strategy.

Invented traditions usually fail. People sense the artifice and reject it. Enka did not fail. It became, for two generations, the genre most Japanese people thought of when they thought of being Japanese. To understand why, you have to look at what the new urban listener actually needed in 1965. They had left a village they were unlikely to see again. They worked in factories or offices that did not exist in their parents' lifetimes. The country itself had been remade so completely that the past felt unreachable.

Enka offered them a version of that past they could carry on a single record. The snow country in the lyrics was not the snow country anyone had actually lived in. It was a more concentrated, more cinematic snow country, in which loss was shaped into something beautiful and longing had a melody. Hibari Misora's Kawa no Nagare no You ni ("Like the Flow of the River") — 川の流れのように — recorded in late 1988 and released as a single in January 1989, months before her death from interstitial pneumonia, is the genre's late masterpiece in this mode: it likens a life to a river, and was written as something affirming — a song of encouragement, not a lament. It became elegiac only after her death. By acclamation, it became the most beloved Japanese song of the postwar century. It is also not yet forty years old.

Most national traditions, it turns out, were invented within the last two centuries to do specific political work — the Scottish tartan, British royal ceremonial (coronations, jubilees and the like) among them. The historian Eric Hobsbawm argued as much in The Invention of Tradition, the volume he co-edited with Terence Ranger. One of the book's own examples is the Bastille Day national holiday, established in 1880 to give the new republic the weight of ritual. None of this makes them fake. Tartan still makes Scots cry. The Marseillaise still raises pulses. Enka is the Japanese case study. It was assembled in postwar Tokyo for postwar reasons, and it is also, completely, Japanese.

What changes if you know this? Mostly, what changes is who gets credit. The romantic story makes enka the unbroken voice of the Japanese soul, supposedly reaching back a thousand years. The accurate story credits a generation of producers, lyricists, and singers who, between roughly 1960 and 1975, assembled it from the parts they had and convinced a country to recognize itself in it. Saburō Kitajima's Matsuri ("Festival") — まつり — is a 1984 single. It sounds like the festival music of an ancient village. It is manufactured, and it sounds like it has been sounding forever. Both things are true at once.