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ENLIT 12 Section V
20/10/19
Mr. Vincenz Serrano
Bonus Paper 2
The Ideological Work of Music on Radio in the Philippines

Radio in the Philippines has had a huge influence towards the masses. Certain radio

stations are rapidly gaining a huge amount of followers and it has given a lot of people

opportunity to showcase their talent, be it behind the mic or behind the scenes. In the talk,

Elizabeth Enriquez talks about the effects and impact of the Japanese by manipulating the

radio during the mid-1900s and how the process of entertainment through radio has changed.

The Japanese used the radio to erase any American influence in the Philippines during

their arrival in the 1940s. Using the radio to spread political agenda and to further establish

their arrival. The usage of the radio was due to the Filipino’s preference of listening to the

radio and watching movies and that “Filipinos were musical.” This made the radio an

effective tool for the Japanese to spread their political agenda towards the people. Besides

having phased out western songs on air, the Japanese also heavily filtered out movies in the

cinemas to limit Filipinos on what they wanted them to see. Radio stations would only play

Japanese and Filipino songs on air which included Japanese folk songs, kundimans and the

occasional European classical music. By this time, Western music was rarely heard on the

radio due to the filtering out of content. Usual airing time averaged at 15 hours and 8 hours of

which are recorded music while the rest were played live. Stations made sure that something

was playing every minute because dead air was considered a sin in radio production. Playing

live music on-air was also common back then due to the lack of technology and recording

materials to produce recorded material. This made radio a hungry medium because it

demanded a lot of work and it would cost a lot to play live music for hours every day of the
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week. By 1943, the Japanese required the registration of radios to ensure that only Japanese

signals were only heard on-air. However, this was not so successful as only a handful of

radios were registered during that time and Filipinos still continued to listen to broadcast

from abroad. Filipinos still also got to listen to American music, like jazz, due to the short

signals sent from San Francisco. Jazz then became a symbol and reflected the carefree pre-

war ere and it made people forget that war was raging. The emergence of Jazz music and

growing popularity of Western music was something the Japanese did not anticipate.

Despite the Japanese’s best effort, they were unsuccessful to control Filipino through

radio. They simply lacked material culture and physical artifacts to further control Filipinos.

A lot of other factors also came into play which the Japanese failed to consider. However,

despite failing in manipulating the country, this event has greatly influenced how the

Philippines utilize the radio at present time. Live performances are applauded and the

diversity of content on-air is something we should be proud of.