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Fence, flavor, and phantasm: Japanese

musicians and the meanings of
‘Japaneseness’
Gordon Mathews
a
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Published online: 23 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Gordon Mathews (2004) Fence, flavor, and phantasm: Japanese
musicians and the meanings of ‘Japaneseness’, Japanese Studies, 24:3, 335-350, DOI:
10.1080/10371390412331331582

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 Japanese Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3, December 2004

Fence, Flavor, and Phantasm: Japanese Musicians

and the Meanings of ‘Japaneseness’1

GORDON MATHEWS, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

This paper explores senses of ‘Japaneseness’ among Japanese musicians today by considering the
words of 32 musicians—from koto and shakuhachi masters to jazz saxophonists, rock guitar-
ists, and classical and electronic composers—in a provincial Japanese city. Their diverse senses of
cultural identity are analyzed through three metaphors through which they express themselves:
Japaneseness as a fence, walling off Japanese from change and foreignness, Japaneseness as a
flavor to be enjoyed by anyone in the world who so chooses, and Japaneseness as a phantasm:
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Japaneseness obliterated, to be created anew if enough people can be convinced of the validity
of such a recreation. This paper suggests that these metaphors may be useful in explicating cul-
tural identity across a broad range of settings beyond music.

In the 1980s I came across a ramshackle ‘blues coffee house’ in Sapporo where I was
living at the time, and, while listening to John Lee Hooker, got into a conversation
with the proprietor, a man who had been eking out a living for decades as a blues guitar-
ist. After an hour I got up to leave but he bade me sit down, to voice a question that had
clearly been on his mind for our entire conversation: ‘Do you think that yellows can play
the blues?’ He himself was doubtful: ‘After all, I’m Japanese!’ At the same time I was
studying shakuhachi. One evening after several glasses of beer, a fellow student said to
me: ‘You might be able to learn the techniques of shakuhachi, but you’ll never be able
to really understand this music, because you’re not Japanese’. These stories illustrate
the question I explore in this paper: what are the meanings of ‘Japaneseness’ for Japanese
musicians, and what can this tell us about Japanese cultural identity today?
When non-Japanese think of Japanese music, they even now may imagine the koto or
shakuhachi on the soundtrack of many a foreign documentary about Japan. Japanese
may wince at the depiction of Japan as a land of quaint tradition, but Japanese contrib-
ute to this view, with the idea, often expressed in popular writings, that what is truly
Japanese is an unchanging cultural bedrock. In music this bedrock is hard to find.
Most Japanese do not play or listen to instruments such as koto and shakuhachi; what
they have grown up hearing and playing is piano and guitar and this has been the
case at least for the past 60 years.2 Conservative critics maintain that this represents

1
An earlier version of this paper was given at the International Convention of Asian Studies, Berlin,
Germany, 11 August 2001. I thank Robert J. Smith and E. Taylor Atkins for valuable suggestions con-
cerning this paper. I also thank the four anonymous referees of Japanese Studies for their useful comments,
as well as its editor, Judith Snodgrass, for her encouragement.
2
De Ferranti notes in Japanese Musical Instruments, 20, that although Japanese music was neglected in the
school curriculum implemented in the 1880s, with schoolchildren learning Western music instead, until
the 1940s Japanese music continued to be learned or heard by many Japanese outside of school. Only
since the end of World War II has traditional Japanese music become largely removed from Japanese
everyday life.
ISSN 1037-1397 print=ISSN 1469-9338 online=04=000335-16 # 2004 Japanese Studies Association of Australia
DOI: 10.1080=10371390412331331582
 336 Gordon Mathews

Japan’s ‘Westernization’: ‘Japan has become a musical colony of the West’, stormed
Kikkawa Eishi in 1979, a statement arguably as true now as it was then.3 However,
this does not mean that Japaneseness in music is vanishing; rather, the meanings of Japa-
neseness are ever changing. Throughout Japanese history, foreign music, such as the pre-
cursors of koto and shakuhachi, have been taken in and rendered ‘Japanese’, so that after
many centuries their foreign origin is forgotten.4 Today this process has become fantas-
tically accelerated because of the global spread of mass media, audio recordings, and now
the internet, rendering the ongoing creation of cultural identity through music proble-
matic in Japan and throughout the world.5
Japanese cultural identity is being debated on many fronts, from ethnicity to business
practices to Nihonjinron discussions of the meanings of Japaneseness.6 Musicians are par-
ticularly interesting to consider in the context of cultural identity for three reasons. First,
musicians may see themselves not simply as consumers of Japanese cultural identity, but
as creators: whether playing the koto or chanting hip-hop odes, they are, at least
indirectly, depicting, describing, or defining Japaneseness. The musicians I spoke with
were often remarkably articulate about how they felt their music related to their sense
of Japaneseness. Second, more than most other people in Japan today, musicians
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reveal the changes that have taken place in the meanings of Japaneseness. When a 70-
year-old koto teacher in kimono says, ‘My music is Japanese’, does she mean the same
thing that an 18-year-old rock musician with platinum-blond Mohawked hair means
when he exclaims, ‘My music is Japanese’? Or are they talking about something funda-
mentally different?
Third, there is the nature of music as a medium. Cultural identity may be expressed
through a variety of mediums, from food to language. The comprehension and playing
of a foreign music, whether koto or panpipes or sitar, may be neither as easy to acquire
as a taste for a foreign cuisine nor as difficult to acquire as full comprehension of a
foreign poetry in its own language. Music is in the middle: imitable yet not easily pos-
sessed as one’s own. This elusive character of music makes it particularly contestable
terrain in arguments over cultural identity. It is widely held that Japanese can excel in
at least some forms of foreign music, as the array of world-famous Japanese violinists

3
Kikkawa, Nihon ongaku no seikaku, 13. In this paper my position is that the terms ‘Western’ and ‘Japa-
nese’, applied to music, have little objective meaning. ‘Westernness’ and ‘Japaneseness’ do not reside in
music, but in the claims of cultural identity that are made about music. I do on occasion refer to
‘Western music’ and ‘Japanese music’ as a form of shorthand, since these are the terms my informants
used.
4
The origins of koto and shakuhachi are complex, as Malm delineates in his Traditional Japanese Music and
Musical Instruments. Prototypes of these instruments were probably brought to Japan from China in the
Nara period but after a thousand years of change and dormancy came fully into their own in the Edo
period as transfigured Japanese instruments.
5
Cook has described how recent technological transformations in the dissemination of music have decon-
structed musical boundaries globally; see his Music: A Very Short Introduction, 40–45.
6
To take just a few of countless examples, see Minami, Nihonjin no shinri to seikatsu, as opposed to Oguma,
Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, for differences over whether there is a common Japaneseness as opposed
to merely a myth of Japanese ethnic homogeneity; Arai, Shūshin koyōsei to Nihon bunka, as opposed to
Ohmae, The Borderless World, for differences as to whether Japanese corporate practices are the essence
of Japanese identity or are simply outmoded and disposable in a globalizing world; Befu, Hegemony of
Homogeneity and Funabiki, ‘Nihonjinron’ saiko for different recent interpretations of ‘discourses on Japa-
neseness’. These contrasting arguments broadly parallel in their breadth the range of voices set forth in
this paper.
 Japanese Musicians and ‘Japaneseness’ 337

and pianists attest;7 but at the same time, many Japanese, like the aforementioned
shakuhachi player, hold that non-Japanese cannot truly comprehend Japanese music.
This attitude is rooted in inequalities of global cultural power. Japan has taken in so
much Western music that it has come to seem a natural part of Japanese life, readily play-
able by Japanese. Japanese traditional musicians may see themselves as guardians of
beleaguered Japaneseness. ‘Western music has stolen away most Japanese from Japanese
traditional music, and if foreigners can take even Japanese music from Japanese people’s
possession, then Japaneseness itself will die’, these musicians may feel. But some contem-
porary musicians fundamentally disagree. ‘Music is for anyone in the world who wants to
play it’, they may say: ‘who can claim its exclusive possession?’ This argument, based in
music’s especially contestable cultural character, makes musicians and their music a
fascinating arena for the study of Japanese cultural identity.
This paper is by no means the first to explore such a topic. The historian Atkins has
considered whether Japanese jazz musicians can most truly be ‘authentic’ by exactly
replicating the jazz of African Americans, or by attempting to create a uniquely Japanese
jazz. He explores how these different views have competed at points throughout the
history of Japanese jazz, and remain unresolved today.8 Among anthropologists, Yano
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has analyzed Japanese popular song (enka) as representing Japan through the invocation
of hometown and of mother,9 and Condry has discussed how Japanese rap is seen by
some as ‘only imitation’ of American black urban culture, but by others as having its
own Japanese authenticity.10 Among musicologists, Mitsui has considered the rise in
popularity of Okinawan bands in Japan in terms of ‘domestic exoticism’,11 Hosokawa
has examined the rock musician Hosono Haruomi’s ‘soy sauce music’ series in its
efforts to transcend Japanese self-orientalism,12 and Yasuda has analyzed how Japanese
DJs are differentiated as ‘Japanese’ within the global arena.13 These writings are all highly
insightful, but confine themselves to particular genres of music and particular types of
musicians. In this paper, I seek to add to the contributions of these scholars by setting
forth a broad framework that enables the examination of Japanese musicians as a
whole in their senses of cultural identity.14
In the summers of 1995, 1997, and 2000, I interviewed in Sapporo 32 musicians, 11 of
whom practice traditional Japanese music (playing koto, shakuhachi, and shamisen, among
other instruments) and 21 contemporary music (playing jazz, rock, and classical, among
other forms). I chose these musicians because of their diversity as well as personal circum-
stances (often the introduction of a mutual friend made interviews possible). In a rough
sense, my informants represent the spectrum of Japanese musicians, although it is for

7
Nonetheless, Japanese classical performers express a spectrum of positions similar to those of the
musicians discussed in this paper. To cite just one example of a classical performer expressing doubt as
to Japanese people’s ability to play classical music, the acclaimed pianist Uchida Mitsuko has said: ‘[Japa-
nese] children are taught Western music, but the cultural background, the cultural necessity for Western
music is not there . . . Since there is no tradition, [playing] becomes very technical, very mechanical’
(Waleson, ‘A pianist who just does as she likes’).
8
Atkins, Blue Nippon; Atkins, ‘Can Japanese sing the blues?’.
9
Yano, Tears of Longing.
10
Condry, ‘The social production of difference’.
11
Mitsui, ‘Domestic exoticism’.
12
Hosokawa, ‘Soy sauce music’.
13
Yasuda, ‘Whose united future?’.
14
See Taylor’s Global Pop: World Music, World Markets, among a number of other recent works, for a
discussion of the cultural identities of musicians worldwide that parallel this paper’s discussion.
 338 Gordon Mathews

the reader to decide how much their views ultimately ring true beyond themselves.15 I
interviewed each musician about how senses of being Japanese related to senses of
music; I also attended numerous concerts and went to many clubs. Interviews were
conducted in Japanese, generally in informants’ homes or at clubs or coffee shops where
they played or listened to music. Interviews were taped and transcribed. In half-a-dozen
cases, I interviewed musicians two or three times over the course of five years. I played
flute and saxophone in several Japanese jazz bands in Sapporo in the 1980s and faced
many of the ambiguities of musical identity described in this paper. A few of the musicians
whose words appear here are friends I have known for two decades; many others I have met
only once.16
Sapporo is the fifth-largest city in Japan, but for many of the musicians I interviewed it
represents the periphery as opposed to the Tokyo center, where musicians go to seek
national and international success. There was little in the character of Sapporo or of
northern Japan that influenced these musicians’ sense of musical identity. One had
made recordings of Ainu music and two were interested in Hokkaido folk music tra-
ditions, but most indicated no regional influence in their music. The dominant regional
distinction these musicians made was simply that they had chosen not to go to Tokyo to
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pursue their musical careers.

These musicians were mostly semi-professional, deriving only some of their income from
music. They held a range of jobs from rock-club manager to school teacher to temporary
worker (furiitaa). Interviews with Tokyo musicians in music magazines often show
considerable polish, with musicians shaping their words to fit their professional images,
but in my interviews, informants sometimes spoke with remarkable bluntness about
Japaneseness and their music. As unknown amateurs they had nothing to lose and this
paper benefits from their candor. The musicians I interviewed parallel the amateur musi-
cians discussed by Cohen and Finnegan in Great Britain.17 Like Finnegan’s subjects, the
musicians in this paper ranged in a continuum between amateur and professional, and
played a vital if unrecognized role in society through their communal practice of music.
Like the aspiring rock musicians discussed by Cohen, some of the musicians in this
paper dream of ‘making it big’ while more or less realistically assessing their actual
chances. However, while the musicians I interviewed resembled these English amateurs
in their everyday musical lives, in their expressions of cultural identity—the focus of this
paper—they largely shared the discursive world of the Tokyo elite, to which they were
exposed through mass media. Thus in my analysis I quote at points from mass media
and scholarly accounts of well-known Japanese musicians when this enables a broader com-
prehension of my informants’ senses of Japanese cultural identity through music. Let me
now describe what I have found, in terms of the three metaphors that form the title of
this paper: Japaneseness as fence, Japaneseness as flavor, and Japaneseness as phantasm.18

15
I have sometimes disguised the particular instrument an informant played, as well as other information,
in order to protect informants’ identities.
16
Much changed in Japan between 1995 and 2000, the years of my interviews, but I find that my inter-
views do not reflect these changes. Informants in 2000 said similar things to those in 1995. Therefore I
omit the exact dates of interviews.
17
Cohen, Rock Culture in Liverpool; Finnegan, Music-Making in an English Town.
18
These metaphors may be contrasted with those in Mathews, ‘What in the world is Japanese?’ in Global
Culture/Individual Identity, 30– 75. This paper’s data to some extent overlap that chapter, but this paper
sets forth a more fully developed analytical frame. The paper’s metaphors, it must be emphasized, specify
not individuals but discourses; the same individual sometimes spoke using two or even all three of these
metaphors in the course of our interviews.
 Japanese Musicians and ‘Japaneseness’ 339

Japaneseness as Fence
A number of the musicians I interviewed spoke of Japaneseness in music as some-
thing that Japanese possess as their birthright, from which other people are excluded.
Metaphorically, their view was of Japaneseness as a fence separating Japanese and
non-Japanese; some characterized this as a matter of ‘blood’ and others as a matter of
‘culture’.
A practitioner of shigin—the singing of poems—said, ‘I think foreigners could under-
stand shigin if they tried hard, understand 90% of it, anyway. The deepest 10% only Japa-
nese can understand. This is from the blood [chi] . . . that only Japanese have’. A teacher
of the biwa concurred: ‘Japanese can . . . feel Japanese music because of their race . . . It’s a
matter of blood’.19 Assertions such as these were not easy for their adherents to defend,
since the vast majority of ethnic Japanese today have little interest in traditional Japanese
music and may hardly have heard it, and many ethnically non-Japanese have considerable
interest, as shown by the large number of foreigners now practicing such music.20 When I
pointed out to the biwa teacher that some Japanese, despite their ‘blood’, are inter-
national soloists of Western classical music, she commented that ‘those people must
have European DNA in their blood’—just as, by her logic, non-ethnic Japanese who
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can excel at Japanese traditional music must have ‘Japanese DNA’.

Most musicians I interviewed scoffed at ‘blood’ as an explanation for the ‘Japanese-
ness’ of Japanese music; but ‘culture’ was more convincing to many. A shamisen
teacher said, ‘I play this music because I’m Japanese . . . Foreigners can play this
music—I had a foreign student last year—but because they don’t have the cultural back-
ground, they can never play this music as Japanese can’. A koto teacher said: ‘This music
was created in the Japanese climate and land, and in Japanese daily life over hundreds of
years; that’s why it’s Japanese’.
These explications seem plausible; there may indeed be aspects of Japanese culture
that remain over history, shaping Japanese differently from non-Japanese, causing the
music that Japanese make to be different from music that non-Japanese make. But is
the Japanese cultural environment today really so distinct that those who grow up in it
make music differently from those who do not? Perhaps—the Japanese language is suffi-
ciently distinct in its rhythms to make claims for a distinct enduring Japanese musicality
seem reasonable. Still, looking at the potpourri of cultural influences that make up Japan
today, in music and in life as a whole, one may wonder if there really can be such a distinct
Japanese cultural essence, separating all those who are Japanese from those who are not.
A few of the traditional musicians I interviewed recognized this in questioning, at least
implicitly, the existence of enduring Japaneseness. The koto teacher said: ‘Koto compo-
sitions written long ago are played with today’s sensibilities; we can’t know how they
were conceived of by their composers. We can’t listen to how a piece sounded back
then; we can only play with our contemporary sensibilities’. Given all the massive
changes that have taken place in Japan in recent generations, musicians like this one
could only suspect that Japaneseness based in the past is Japaneseness based in the
present’s dream of the past. The fact that this teacher expressed this to me was revealing:
she could commiserate with a foreigner about the foreignness of the Japanese past.

19
Yoshino in Cultural Nationalism, 115–121, argues that terms such as ‘blood’ in Japan tend to be used
metaphorically, but the musicians I spoke with seemed to use the term literally.
20
Takeuchi and Kisaragi, Hōgaku, hōbu, 80–81.
 340 Gordon Mathews

In contrast to this view, many musicians I interviewed saw Japaneseness as a cultural

essence that transcended past and present. Some who believed in this Japanese essence
were traditional musicians, arguing that Japanese had lost their culture, but could reawa-
ken to it. Another koto teacher said, ‘Many young people have never really heard koto
music: if they could hear it, they’d like it’. She was convinced that if Japanese today
could only be exposed to traditional Japanese music—an exposure until recently
lacking in Japanese public schools—then they would come to appreciate it.21
Contemporary musicians, on the other hand, longed to destroy the fence of Japanese-
ness but felt this was impossible. A jazz saxophonist said, ‘I don’t think that Japanese can
fully understand American jazz . . . When you listen to John Coltrane—Japanese can
imitate him, and maybe come close, but finally it’s just imitation’. His own playing, he
felt, was nothing but imitation.22 The blues guitarist mentioned at the start of this
paper gave a doubtful answer to his question, ‘Can yellows play the blues?’ ‘No, you
can’t really sing the blues in Japanese . . . Blues is black Americans’ tradition. We sing
while imagining America in our minds, but it’s difficult—“riding in a Cadillac with
your girlfriend” is very different from Japanese life’.
These contemporary musicians are saying, in parallel with the traditional musicians,
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that each culture has its own musical tradition that only its members can fully
understand. Their attempt to express themselves in foreign musical forms are
doomed, they say, because they are of the wrong cultural and ethnic background: they
can’t climb the fence that separates them from these foreign forms, but can only peer
over the fence from within their ineradicable Japaneseness. These musicians, often
older, and thus not experiencing the Western musical forms they follow as their birthright
as might younger Japanese musicians, are longing for a musical home that they feel is
forever denied them.
These contemporary musicians fear that they are stuck within the walls of their Japane-
seness. For some traditional musicians, their fear is the opposite: that the walls will come
tumbling down. As the shamisen teacher said, ‘There’s a danger that in the future, people
all over the world will become alike. Wherever you went, you couldn’t tell the difference
. . . We’ve got to . . . get Japanese people to appreciate their culture, so that that won’t
happen!’.
For all their differences, these musicians seem to assume that there is a cultural essence
in Japanese music that defines Japanese as to who they are. This belief is apparent among
some of the most well-known of Japanese musicians. Takemitsu Tōru, probably Japan’s
most famous postwar composer, has commented on the differences between how Japa-
nese and foreigners hear music, an idea implicitly based on theories of ‘the Japanese
brain’ in all its uniqueness. As Nuss has argued, this way of thinking involves the erection
of ‘impermeable “Japanese” walls’.23 This view is widespread beyond music. Books
within the genre of Nihonjinron, ‘theories of Japaneseness’, are more or less based on
the idea of Japan as fence. As Befu writes, ‘The whole genre can be regarded as one

21
As noted earlier, since the Meiji era, music instruction in Japanese schools has been Western. However,
a newly revised musical curriculum now requires junior high school students to learn a Japanese musical
instrument. See Blasdel, ‘Education—in whose music?’.
22
Imitation has long been a standard method of teaching Japanese traditional music, an attitude that has
filtered into Japanese jazz, as Yui (Ikite iru jazu shi, 277–280) and Atkins (‘Can Japanese sing the blues?’,
51–53) discuss. The musician quoted above sees imitation negatively, as did most of the contemporary
musicians I interviewed.
23
Nuss, ‘Hearing “Japanese”, Hearing Takemitsu’, 38. He notes, however, that Takemitsu is complex in
his views, also espousing musical universalism.
 Japanese Musicians and ‘Japaneseness’ 341

dealing with Japan’s identity, attempting to establish Japan’s uniqueness and to differen-
tiate Japan from other cultures’, through such clichés as ‘cultural homogeneity,
groupism, harmony, unspoken or nonverbal communication [and] love of nature’;24
the fence, in these books, is depicted as being made from blood, culture, or innate
psychological difference. The musicians we have discussed in this section are engaged
in a musical version of Nihonjinron, making ‘Japanese tradition’ in music, arising from
blood or culture, the marker of innate Japaneseness. There are both ‘positive’ and ‘nega-
tive’ versions of Nihonjinron, with the former written to foster Japanese senses of pride,
and the latter to foster self-criticism.25 In this section we have seen both views: the tra-
ditional musicians seeking to foster pride in Japanese traditional music, and contempor-
ary musicians lamenting that they are trapped in Japaneseness. But like the Nihonjinron
that forms a cultural backdrop to their views, these musicians in common see Japanese-
ness as ineradicably separating those who are Japanese from those who are not.

Japaneseness as Flavor
Japaneseness as a flavor connotes an understanding of Japanese music that is not con-
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fined to those who are ethnically Japanese. The majority of musicians I interviewed
believed that Japaneseness is not a fence, but a flavor that can be enjoyed by people of
all cultures.26 As a shakuhachi teacher said:
The way of thinking up to now—‘only Japanese can play shakuhachi’—is no
longer true . . . A Japanese person who has never heard shakuhachi, as compared
to a [foreigner] . . . who studies Japanese history and customs, and understands
Japanese music on that basis—it’s the latter person who’s more Japanese.
This applies beyond Japan as well. Just as a foreigner who truly works at it can become
Japanese, so too a Japanese musician can transcend Japaneseness. Figures such as Ozawa
Seiji, the conductor, and Akiyoshi Toshiko, the jazz pianist, have long been renowned in
Japan for having excelled at foreign music. A player of New Orleans jazz commented to
me on how strange it was that ‘in any field, jazz, flamenco, chanson, you can find a Japa-
nese doing it and accepted as being as good as a native’. A jazz pianist told me that ‘a
really good Japanese jazz musician could play jazz with musicians anywhere . . . If you
only listened to the recording, you couldn’t tell he was Japanese’. Japanese musicians
playing Latin music, such as Orquestra De La Luz and Grupo Chevarde, have evoked
admiring comments. It has been said of the latter that ‘if you close your eyes, you’d
think they were straight out of the Caribbean’.27
However, if anyone in the world can conceivably excel at any of the world’s music, then
what does one’s particular culture mean? A rock bassist tried to explain this through the
analogy of food: ‘In Japan or America, you can eat steak or sushi, whatever food you like.
But Japanese still usually prefer Japanese food, and Americans prefer American food.
The same is true for music’. In fact, the same may not be true for music, given the
even greater cultural imperialism apparent in worldwide musical tastes than in food

24
Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity, 2, 64.
25
For example, Kawai’s ‘Nihonjin’: to iu yamai (The Sickness which is ‘Japanese’).
26
This also is the position held by ethnomusicologists such as de Ferranti in ‘“Japanese music” can be
popular’ and, implicitly, by Cook in Music, Imagination and Culture, maintaining that there is a
common habitus or imagination that renders Japanese music ‘Japanese’ as opposed to other musics in
other musical cultures, but that by no means precludes understanding by those who are not Japanese.
27
Tracey, ‘Cuban music made in Japan takes on the world’.
 342 Gordon Mathews

tastes.28 This man is, after all, a rock bassist, playing music that is, at least in its recent
origin, foreign. But his metaphor is apt, connoting a global cultural smorgasbord. Within
this smorgasbord, Japanese musicians may nonetheless choose Japanese music because
they are Japanese, he maintained. As the shakuhachi teacher put it:

Now we’ve become borderless; all over Japan we hear about internationaliza-
tion. But ‘who am I?’ . . . I became a player of shakuhachi, not a rock musician,
because rock isn’t part of Japanese culture; as a Japanese, I wanted to do some-
thing Japanese, built up by Japanese over hundreds of years.

But in a global smorgasbord, where no music belongs to any particular cultural group
and all is free for the choosing, why should people of Japanese cultural background
choose Japanese music over any other music?29 A thoughtful rock guitarist said: ‘I
think Japanese should become like the French, and become cultural purists! We
shouldn’t abandon our culture! . . . But looking at the way we live, how can we not
[abandon our culture]?’30 This musician, a composer of computer-generated rock, won-
dered if he himself was helping to destroy his culture through his ‘unJapanese’ music.
I asked these musicians what they felt ‘Japaneseness’ in contemporary music might
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mean. Several answered that if they wanted to claim the Japaneseness of their music,
they would have to add a flavoring distinctively recognizable as ‘Japanese’. An orchestral
composer inserted the scales of traditional music in his compositions, which his audience
instantly recognized as bearing ‘Japaneseness’, he told me. I have also heard of efforts to
place koto or shakuhachi within rock, although the rock musicians I interviewed dismissed
such efforts. Atkins notes how mixing Japanese traditional music with jazz may be seen as
‘gimmicky’.31 A jazz saxophonist I interviewed claimed that the nature of the saxophone
as an instrument and jazz as a medium made the idea of inserting Japanese traditional
music into his jazz absurd.
This is not always the case. The shakuhachi master Yamamoto Hōzan, to take one
example, has made jazz albums such as Silver World (Ginkai) that have been praised by
critics and by several of my informants for combining the textures of traditional shaku-
hachi with the rhythms of contemporary jazz. It seems that traditional musicians who
play contemporary-sounding music are generally better regarded than contemporary
musicians who bring in traditional elements. Certain types of traditional music—the
tsugaru shamisen of the Yoshida Kyōdai and the contemporized gagaku of the hichiriki
player Tōgi Hideki32—have recently become popular in Japan because they sound con-
temporary. In the words of a rock keyboardist I interviewed, ‘When jazz or rock musi-
cians try to make their music “Japanese” by playing traditional music, it sounds

28
As Burnett (The Global Jukebox, 99) notes, ‘The output of the popular music industry in North America
constitutes the majority input of those radio and television formats around the world that rely on popular
music for program content’.
29
As Cook notes, in Music: AVery Short Introduction, 41–42: ‘The immediate availability of music from all
over the world means that it has become as easy and unproblematic to talk about different “musics” as
about different “cuisines” . . . Deciding whether to listen to Beethoven, or Bowie, or Balinese music
becomes the same kind of choice as deciding whether to eat Italian, Thai, or Cajun tonight’. By impli-
cation, then, one is no more bound to one’s own culture’s music than to its food: all is free for the choosing
in a ‘global cultural supermarket’.
30
This musician overestimates French ‘cultural purity’. As a young French African actor from France’s
multiethnic housing projects put it, ‘French culture used to be a baguette, a beret, and a Camembert . . .
Now it’s us’ (Leland and Mabry, ‘Street culture’, 39).
31
Atkins, ‘Can Japanese sing the blues?’, 41.
32
See Lancashire, ‘World music or Japanese’.
 Japanese Musicians and ‘Japaneseness’ 343

phony. But when traditional Japanese musicians play avant garde music, they’re making
their music modern’.
Can contemporary Japanese musicians, thus cut off from ‘Japanese tradition’ in music,
do anything but imitate musical forms they see as Western? Throughout most of the Japa-
nese postwar period, the unequivocal answer was no; today, with the emergence of world
music, the answer is more equivocal. Despite this, there remains a widespread inferiority
complex felt by many (particularly older) Japanese musicians about their own relation to
jazz and rock they may still see as being from ‘the West’. The brilliant pianist Yamashita
Yōsuke entitles one of his albums Asian Games, as if to say self-mockingly, ‘these are the
games I am playing on the fringes of “real” jazz’.33 A popular rock band call themselves
‘The Yellow Monkey’,34 just as another call themselves ‘Jap Bastard’. These names mock
Western racism but also imply that this sneering Western gaze circumscribes these bands’
identities. The musicians I interviewed did not so overtly indicate their subordination to
the West, but every rock musician belonged to a band with a Western name; the jazz
musicians acknowledged a pantheon of Western influences, but almost none mentioned
any Japanese influences on their music.
This reflects the paradox of many of the Japanese musicians I interviewed. Between a
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tradition far from these contemporary musicians’ lives, and a Westernness that has domi-
nated their musical lives, what can Japaneseness consist of other than self-exoticism?
Mitsui has discussed the popularity in Japan of the Rinken Band, emerging within an
Okinawan context in which ‘folk music still remains intertwined with the daily life of
the people’;35 but he notes that for most Japanese, their own folk traditions are ‘domes-
tically exotic’—removed from the culture in which they actually live. My informants who
played contemporary music had all heard traditional folk music as well as koto and sha-
kuhachi, but this was not part of their day-to-day lives, which was the ‘Western’ jazz and
rock or classical music that they played. This was the taken-for-granted musical culture
in which they had grown up: for them too, Japanese traditional music was ‘domestically
exotic’. De Ferranti has argued that there is a Japanese musical habitus linking contem-
porary popular music and traditional music within a common cultural frame.36 In a
purely musicological sense, this may well be the case, but for most of the contemporary
musicians I interviewed, this argument would be seen as nonsensical. They maintained
that the music they play has absolutely no relation to traditional Japanese music.
This question of where Japaneseness is to be found in a cultural world suffused with
Western forms is hardly confined to musicians. At points throughout the past century,
intellectuals such as Takeuchi Yoshimi have written of ‘overcoming the modern’: of creat-
ing a modernity that is not simply a copy of the West, but is distinctly Japanese.37 Applied
to music, this means that Japanese musicians can create a music neither ‘traditional’ nor
‘Western’ but ‘modern Japanese’. A rock promoter and guitarist I interviewed said,
‘Is Japan a cultural colony of the West? Yes; until now, Western ways of thinking,
living, have penetrated Japan; but maybe we really can make our own Japanese music
that will penetrate the West’. He told me he searched the aspiring bands that played
on his club’s stage for some sign of that new Japanese music. The orchestral composer

33
It is unclear whether this title was the product of Yamashita himself or of Bill Laswell, the album’s
producer.
34
B Pass, ‘The Yellow Monkey’.
35
Mitsui, ‘Domestic exoticism’, 5.
36
De Ferranti, ‘“Japanese music” can be popular’.
37
Harootunian, ‘Visible Discourses/Invisible Ideologies’.
 344 Gordon Mathews

said, ‘I hope people playing Western music will begin to confront the West, putting an
end to merely learning from the West. We need creativity; we need to rethink our core
attitude as Japanese’.
But how? Can this consist of something other than self-orientalizing ‘exotic Japanese-
ness’? The rock musician Hosono Haruomi has been as conscious as anyone of the folly
of this conception, and yet even he, in his ‘soy sauce music’ series, seems self-consciously
swallowed up within it.38 Yasuda has written that ‘Japanese musicians and DJs have
to present their identities as distinctively Japanese in foreign markets in order to be
differentiated’,39 however irrelevant this distinction may be to how they themselves
understand their musical identities. DJ Krush has spoken in English-language publi-
cations of ma, the sense of space and emptiness long key in Japanese aesthetics, as a
part of his music: ‘I see my music as a rock garden. Each sound, even the space
between beats, makes that garden’.40 One may wonder how much he himself believes
this, as opposed to speaking within a self-stereotyping discourse that foreign fans
might readily understand as ‘Japanese’. My own informants, having neither foreign
markets to cultivate nor reputations to internationally polish, did not tend to identify
any such Japanese flavor to their music. but they nonetheless puzzled over what such a
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Japanese flavor might consist of. They too did not know how to conceive of a Japanese
flavor apart from a fake exoticism, invoking cultural practices far from their own
musical lives. This leads us to our next metaphor, Japananeseness as phantasm.

Japaneseness as Phantasm
Japaneseness as phantasm connotes that Japaneseness is a myth in music, an irrelevancy
for contemporary musicians, who are working in a global forum.41 A punk-rock musician
commented:
I’ve never thought about putting Japaneseness in our music. If someone were to
say, ‘you should play Japanese music’, I’d tell them that music has no bound-
aries: you should just do what you want, shakuhachi or rock or whatever . . .
I asked him about global inequalities of power: ‘Why does American and English rock
dominate world music, while few in the West have heard of Japanese rock?’ But he
refused to rise to the bait: ‘I like what I like, hate what I hate; whether it’s Japanese or
foreign, I don’t care’. A jazz pianist took these ideas further, by bringing in the idea of
music in a worldwide market:
Jazz is a universal music . . . Now, we invite American jazz players to Japan to
supplement jazz here . . . If I’m invited to play in New York by American
players, it would mean that . . . I’m good enough to play anywhere in the world.
This musician denied that there was any such thing as ‘Japanese jazz’; if people used that
label, it simply signified an inferior form of jazz, he felt. Just as sports like football and
sumo have one set of rules that everyone must follow regardless of cultural background,

38
See Hosokawa, ‘Soy sauce music’. This is my interpretation more than Hosokawa’s.
39
Yasuda, ‘Whose united future?’, 53–54.
40
As quoted in Beals, ‘Kings of cool’, 30. Atkins discusses invocations of ma among Japanese jazz and
classical musicians in Blue Nippon, 40, 245 –246, 258.
41
My use of the term ‘phantasm’ is different from Ivy’s use of the term in Discourses of the Vanishing. She
refers to the construction of a vanished Japan through contemporary cultural practices. I use phantasm to
represent the belief held by many of my informants that Japan is irrelevant as a category: the very idea of
Japan as a distinct musical culture is an illusion.
 Japanese Musicians and ‘Japaneseness’ 345

so too jazz, he held. Invocations of culture serve as an excuse for mediocrity on the world
stage. However, Japaneseness cannot be so easily dismissed in at least one sense. All these
musicians live within a Japanese social world that conditions their music. The punk-rock
musician quoted above subsequently sang a different tune:
The original English punks were anti-establishment. In Japan today there aren’t
many punk-rockers like that. We’ve grown up in an age of affluence that has
made ours a uniquely Japanese kind of punk . . . My music isn’t angry like
Western punk music was . . . American rock is straight, emotionally; Japanese
rock is more . . . subtle.
The manager of the club where this punk-rocker’s band played said:

The bands here—their appearance may be frightening, but they’re nice kids. In
American or European punk, it’s kids critical of society, bad kids—but not
in Japan, at least not in my club! It’s imitation of the West in technique; but
in Japan, it’s difficult to lead an extreme life, or maybe you just don’t need to.

Patterns of Japanese social interaction emphasizing avoidance of confrontation thus

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shape the music this punk-rocker makes, despite his earlier claim that his cultural back-
ground doesn’t matter in his music. This aversion to raw anger and aggressiveness may
indeed represent the Japaneseness of Japanese rock, Japaneseness not tied to vanishing
tradition but to contemporary patterns of emotional expression. However, for the musi-
cians I interviewed, this was not enough to make them feel their music was Japanese.
They sought a clearer marker. As the orchestral composer put it:

Any ethnic group must have something different from other groups. Even pop
music has to be varied. But actually, rock music is just rock music, tango just
tango. So, the problem is that contemporary music in Japan must have a
status to be called Japanese music.

How, this composer is asking, from within the apparent homogeneity of contemporary
worldwide musical forms (or more exactly, a heterogeneity of genres that transcends
national cultures), can a contemporary Japaneseness emerge?
Some musicians I interviewed were doubtful about any such emergence. ‘No, Japanese
rock doesn’t exist’, said a jazz pianist: ‘Except for the language, it’s the same as anywhere
else’. A rock guitarist disagreed:

Rock isn’t the same everywhere: each country plays rock differently . . . All over
the world now there’s Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but this doesn’t mean that
all the world’s become nothing but Coca-Cola and McDonald’s; the consu-
mers’ ways of eating all are different in different places. The same is true
with rock . . . The world won’t all become the same.

These musicians are all broadly saying that the world is becoming smaller: rock is rock
and tango is tango, just as McDonald’s is McDonald’s, and variations on these forms,
indicating cultural difference, are bound to be within the frames of these forms. Yet vari-
ation, even if a matter of minor differences, will continue. There may indeed be some
basis for claiming a Japanese rock or jazz, but this is complicated by the fact that what
musical forms belong to whom is not at all clear. A thoughtful rock musician said this:

No, I don’t think that there’s any real Japanese rock . . . The rock that Japanese
musicians come up with is written on the basis of their having listened to foreign
 346 Gordon Mathews

music: there’s a lot of stealing. Of course, blues and soul were once black, stolen
by white musicians, so, yes, it’s just second-level stealing. Maybe, since every-
thing is stolen anyway, we really can say that there is Japanese rock!

Indeed, as we have seen throughout this paper, the idea of musical culture as a particu-
lar culture’s possession seems no longer tenable: ‘Japan is like a convenience store . . . You
can get any music you want’, explains a Japanese DJ,42 and you can also perform any
music you want. A rock guitarist I interviewed had taken to playing his didgeridoo (‘a
present from my Australian aboriginal friend’) at the intermission of dance parties to
lend ‘spirituality’ to the proceedings. When I asked him about the propriety of this, he
said, ‘if you want to play any of the world’s music, go ahead—it’s no one’s possession’.
The culture of origin of music, by this view, is irrelevant; all the world’s music belongs
to all the world.
This view is not confined to music. It echoes Japanese globalization advocates such as
Kenichi Ohmae, who in his book The Borderless World argues that companies must learn
to shed all national attachments. A Japanese CEO has no business going to the funeral of
his Japanese dealer if he is not equally willing to go to the funeral of his dealer in
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Europe.43 Globalization, by this view, is creating a world in which we no longer must

belong irrevocably to our culture of origin, but can belong to a culture of our choice.
Many musicians in this section matter-of-factly stated that in music they did not need
Japaneseness. They acknowledged that they were Japanese in their ethnicity and in the
language they spoke—but in music they lived in a cosmopolitan world of global forms,
they felt: the borderless world of which Ohmae writes.
Others, however, clearly felt a need for ‘Japaneseness’ in music, despite their sense of
the lack of any such musical ‘Japaneseness’ at present. We have seen in the previous
section how some I interviewed longed for the emergence of a Japanese band, but
were unable to give any hint of what they felt such Japaneseness might consist of,
other than stale tradition. This section gives such a hint: a new Japaneseness must
consist of something created from contemporary musical forms, from the rock or
jazz of today. Such a process is clearly happening in Japanese arts such as animation,
recognizable the world over as ‘Japanese’.44 It has happened as well in music, at
least for a few years; the band Yellow Magic Orchestra succeeded in creating a new
‘Japaneseness’ in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in a ‘music that was neither “white”
nor “black”, but “yellow”’, while ‘undermin[ing] stereotypes of what such a “yellow”
music should sound like’.45 ‘The YMO became a symbol of the internationalisation of
Japan’s incomparable techno-culture’,46 a new Japaneseness based on a distinctly con-
temporary aspect of Japan—although the group’s demise limited their global persuasive
power in signifying this new Japaneseness. Since then, there have been individuals and
groups creating remarkable new music—including United Future Organization,
Mondo Grosso, and the Silent Poets, as well as YMO’s former members Hosono and
Sakamoto—that might be claimed as the bearers of new Japaneseness.
As noted earlier, many of my informants were skeptical about ‘a new Japaneseness’
emerging from Japanese jazz and rock, trance and techno. In one computer musician’s
words, ‘the music coming out these days is really good, but it’s not a new

42
Tartan, ‘DJ Tsuchie finds creative means of expression in the hip-hop mix’.
43
Ohmae, The Borderless World, 17–18.
44
Asahi Evening News, ‘Japanimation’.
45
Schilling, ‘YMO’, 300.
46
Hosokawa, ‘Soy sauce music’, 140.
 Japanese Musicians and ‘Japaneseness’ 347

Japaneseness . . . It has nothing to do with Japaneseness’. (My informants were incre-

dulous when I suggested that they themselves might create such Japaneseness. Their
self-acknowledged position as ‘minor-leaguers’ compared to Tokyo musicians made
such an aim seem ridiculous to them.) The reason for this skepticism seems clear.
This new Japaneseness in music cannot be only a matter of music itself, but more,
of popular perception. These potential bearers of a new Japaneseness have not yet
caught the imaginations of Japanese at large, enabling them to say, ‘Oh, so this is
what Japaneseness is . . .’ When a particular musical group or genre emerges that
can convince a broad range of people in Japan and throughout the world that it is
‘Japanese’, this will be the new Japaneseness.

Conclusion
In this paper, I have examined three formulations of Japaneseness among Japanese
musicians: Japaneseness as fence, walling off Japanese from the inroads of foreignness,
Japaneseness as flavor to be enjoyed by anyone in the world who chooses, and Japanese-
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ness as phantasm: an illusion obliterated by globalism, perhaps to be recreated anew.

Musicians in the first group think of Japaneseness in terms of either ‘blood’ or
‘culture’, separating Japanese from others in the world. However, is there really a singular
Japaneseness unifying Japanese in their understanding and expression in music as
opposed to other people? Musicians in the second group formulate Japaneseness as a
flavor in a world of flavors; but what is this particular Japanese flavor? Musicians may
seek it in tradition, but find that musical tradition can only fit in a stilted way within
the contemporary music they play. But if they ignore tradition, where can they locate
themselves as Japanese within a musical world that they feel is overwhelmingly
Western? Musicians in the third group reject Japaneseness, and seek to pursue their
music within a global forum, irrespective of nationality. But although many were
skeptical, some expressed the hope that a wholly new Japaneseness might emerge from
Japanese contemporary music.
These musicians’ words are significant in that they offer a snapshot of starkly different
versions of Japaneseness in music at one historical moment, a moment at which an earlier
version of Japaneseness has become unlinked from most people’s lives, and a new version
of Japaneseness has yet to take root. The social construction of musical identity—the rise
and clash and fall of versions of Japaneseness in music—took place in earlier periods of
history as well, but it is particularly apparent now, due to globalization and the calling
into question of all roots. When musical cultures belong to everyone in the world,
what does it mean to claim one’s own musical culture? In Japan, an economic superpower
still partly under the West’s domination in its cultural products, this question seems all
the more excruciating.
What, then, will happen in the ongoing struggle to recreate Japaneseness through
music? One possibility is that the situation will continue as it has in recent decades,
with Japanese musicians struggling and failing to find a musical cultural identity under
the shadow of the West: fence, flavor, and phantasm will continue to coexist.
However, the fence is becoming easier to climb over, and thus its existence may
become progressively harder to believe in. A second possibility involves the gradual
eclipse of senses of national identity among musicians: just as fences will crumble, so
too will flavor seem less and less convincing as an expression of Japaneseness; as Japan
merges into a ‘borderless world’, music may become less and less linked to national
 348 Gordon Mathews

culture. But, as commentators have pointed out,47 human beings often have difficulty
living without a cultural home; lacking such a home they may create one, in Japan just
as elsewhere. This leads to a third possibility: the creation of a new Japanese identity
within the competing arenas of identity formation in music that people will indeed
come to believe in. Some musical form may emerge so convincingly that a range of
Japanese and non-Japanese will be able to say, ‘This is what Japanese music is’. My
view is that the third of these possibilities is most likely to come to pass, although this
may take many decades.
Let me, in closing, discuss the potential applicability of these three metaphors of iden-
tity to realms beyond music. Music is a particular medium for the performance of iden-
tity, but it parallels other areas of Japanese life in the range of cultural identities it offers,
as portrayed through these three metaphors. ‘Fence’ connotes cultural identity based on
ascribed belonging, a belonging based on birth that gives abilities to belongers that non-
belongers cannot possess. ‘Flavor’ connotes cultural identity based on achieved belong-
ing; it is a matter not of the given but of the chosen. That which is chosen nonetheless
retains its own cultural character: a distinct culture remains, although its membership
becomes fluid. ‘Phantasm’ connotes the inability to believe in and belong to any particu-
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lar cultural identity. The fence has fallen and the flavor tastes phony; there is no cultural
home left to return to—unless that culture can be self-consciously created and then
believed in, phantasm becoming reality.
Consider, for example, philosophy. Are the writings of philosophers such as Nishida
ever fully comprehensible to non-Japanese (Japan as fence)? Are they potentially compre-
hensible to anyone who studies Japanese Zen and aesthetics, as well as Heidegger (Japan
as flavor)? Or is the Japaneseness of any given author simply beside the philosophical
point (Japan as phantasm)? Or consider the Japanese economy. Should Japan strive,
during this era of economic stagnation, to preserve the particular characteristics of the
postwar Japanese economy by keeping foreign investment and products out (Japan as
fence)? Should Japan allow some foreign investment and business practices to enter
Japan, but work to preserve ‘the Japanese way’ in its economic structures (Japan as
flavor)? Or should Japan abandon its postwar economic structures in all their impli-
cations for Japaneseness,48 to adopt what may be seen as more flexible practices from
elsewhere (Japan as phantasm)? These metaphors do not perfectly fit these areas, but
may be useful to think with, both within and beyond Japan, in connoting the culturally
frozen, the culturally fluid, and the culturally irrelevant—the culturally given, the cultu-
rally chosen, and the culturally vanished—in a globalizing world in which culture and its
possession are increasingly contested.
It may thus be that the few dozen musicians whose words we have heard in this paper
portray in microcosm a clash of identities extending far beyond themselves. This isn’t
because these musicians are extraordinarily insightful—they are not, nor is their
analyst—but because cultural identity everywhere today may fall into a few basic
logical categories that these metaphors broadly specify, and that may apply to a
diverse array of groups and institutions in Japan and in the world. But such speculation
goes beyond the bounds of this paper.

47
See Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, and Mathews, Global Culture/Individual Identity.
48
See Arai, Shūshin koyōsei to Nihon bunka, for an argument about how ‘lifetime employment’ is intrinsi-
cally linked to the cultural character of Japanese.
 Japanese Musicians and ‘Japaneseness’ 349

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