SONGS OF RAIN AND LOCOMOTION. Text mining of Japanese lyrics of pop and enka

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to compare the differences in the vocabulary used in lyrics of the two music genres Japanese pop and enka. Text mining or lexical analysis as described by Hanks (2013) and previous studies on Japanese lyrics such as Kobayashi et al (2017), Hosoya et al (2010) and Ōde et al (2014). The bestselling singles of each genre have been compared using text mining. For singer-songwriters, the highest ranked songs from each time period have also been compared. Song lyrics were selected from two time periods, the 80’s and the 00’s. There are clear differences between the two genres in terms of vocabulary usage and themes. In some respects, the genre female singer-songwriters has changed from one time period to the other.