The Ashgate Research Companion to Japanese Music

David W. Hughes, Alison McQueen Tokita

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754656999
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351697606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Music is a frequently neglected aspect of Japanese culture. It is in fact a highly problematic area, as the Japanese actively introduced Western music into their modern education system in the Meiji period (1868-1911), creating westernized melodies and instrumental instruction for Japanese children from kindergarten upwards. As a result, most Japanese now have a far greater familiarity with Western (or westernized) music than with traditional Japanese music. Traditional or classical Japanese music has become somewhat ghettoized, often known and practised only by small groups of people in social structures which have survived since the pre-modern era. Such marginalization of Japanese music is one of the less recognized costs of Japan's modernization. On the other hand, music in its westernized and modernized forms has an extremely important place in Japanese culture and society, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, being so widely known and performed that it is arguably part of contemporary Japanese popular and mass culture. Japan has become a world leader in the mass production of Western musical instruments and in innovative methodologies of music education (Yamaha and Suzuki). More recently, the Japanese craze of karaoke as a musical entertainment and as musical hardware has made an impact on the leisure and popular culture of many countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas. This is the first book to cover in detail all genres including court music, Buddhist chant, theatre music, chamber ensemble music and folk music, as well as contemporary music and the connections between music and society in various periods. The book is a collaborative effort, involving both Japanese and English speaking authors, and was conceived by the editors to form a balanced approach that comprehensively treats the full range of Japanese musical culture.

1

Context and change in Japanese music

Alison McQueen Tokita and David W. Hughes

1. What is ‘Japanese music’?

Increasingly, the common view of Japan as a mono-cultural, mono-ethnic society, whether in modern or ancient times, is being challenged (denoon et al. 1996). The category ‘Japan’ itself has been questioned by many (for example Amino 1992; Morris-Suzuki 1998). Amino insists that when discussing the past we should talk not about Japan or the Japanese people, but about people who lived in the Japanese archipelago. If Japan itself is not a solid entity, neither can its musical culture be reduced to a monolithic entity. If the apparently simple label ‘music of Japan’ might refer to any music to be found in Japan, then the phrase ‘music of the Japanese’ would cover any music played or enjoyed by the Japanese, assuming we can talk with confidence about ‘the Japanese’. The phrase ‘Japanese music’ might include any music that originated in Japan. This book would ideally cover all such possibilities, but must be ruthlessly selective. It takes as its main focus the musical culture of the past, and the current practices of those traditions as transmitted to the present day. A subsidiary aim is to assess the state of research in Japanese music and of research directions. The two closing chapters cover Western-influenced popular and classical musics respectively.

At least, rather than ‘Japanese music’, we might do better to talk about ‘Japanese musics’, which becomes one justification for the multi-author approach of this volume. There are so many different types and genres of music in Japan, past and present, and practised by people in Japan and by the Japanese diaspora, that the plural is necessary. It is difficult to define ‘traditional’ (or classical, pre-modern, indigenous) music, ‘pop’ music and ‘Western’ music in the Japanese context because of cultural hybridity. To say ‘Japanese music’ is to essentialize what is a fuzzy category, in whatever period. For example, when did what is now called gagaku, an imported court genre, come to be seen as Japanese? When did its instruments and their derivatives come to be seen as Japanese? virtually all Japanese instruments were introduced from China in the historical period.

We must further question cultural homogeneity by considering the musical culture of groups which form a significant part of the contemporary Japanese nation, but are culturally not considered mainstream Japanese – Okinawans, the Ainu, Koreans in Japan. Popular postwar ideas about Japanese uniqueness (nihonjinron) and national identity suggest some essential quality of Japaneseness that is timeless and unchanging (Ivy 1995; Vlastos 1998). However, such a quality is difficult to substantiate in the case of musical culture, which has been continually evolving, adapting to diverse contexts, involves various minority groups, and creates an ambivalent attitude towards the ‘traditional’ in the early twenty-first century.

Given the diversity of today’s Japanese culture and the size of the population, it should not be surprising that, even as an individual Westerner may be totally uninterested in and ignorant of a particular genre (opera, Morris dancing, barbershop quartet singing) that nonetheless has huge numbers of adherents, so many Japanese manage to ignore most of their traditional musics (Hughes 1997). Statistics show that large absolute numbers of the population are involved in studying and performing ‘Japanese (traditional) music’. This fact, as well as the relevance of these musics to Japanese concepts of self-identity, shows that they remain relevant to an understanding of Japan today.

Appadurai (1996) speaks of cultural flows between local and global contexts. Styles of biwa narrative music that were local traditions within Kyushu until the late nineteenth century became part of a metropolitan traditional music, like many other Japanese genres. Okinawan music has not only claimed a significant place in Japanese popular music but is even impacting the ‘world music’ and worldwide ‘club’ scenes (for example, the title track of england-bred South Asian Talvin Singh’s album OK is built around a performance by four Okinawan singers). Contemporary Japanese (Western-style) composition is situated in an international rather than a local context. And taiko drumming groups are springing up all around the globe (see for example de Ferranti 2006) – still recognized as Japanese in origin, but increasingly developing local flavours. In terms of both import and export of culture, Japan is now solidly embedded in a global context.¹

In the eighteenth century, it is hard to imagine that a book might have been written about ‘Japanese music’, although there were writings about particular genres. In the twentieth century, especially postwar, the concept of Japanese music was defined in contradistinction to Western music. The master narrative of Japanese music history usually defines the subject matter as hōgaku (national music), in contradistinction to yōgaku (Western music). This excludes any other musics in the world, which are relegated to the category minzoku ongaku (folk or folkloric music). The term hōgaku as used by scholars has until recently almost always excluded folk music, thus originally positioning it outside the pale of ‘serious’ musicological research, although folk performing arts (minzoku geinō) have been the object of deep academic research by ethnologists. In recent decades the term hōgaku has also been used in record shops to mark the shelves containing Western-style popular music by Japanese performers, as opposed to the yōgaku section housing foreign recordings, but this usage is quite separate from its sense of ‘Japanese traditional music’.

Both folk and popular musics have gained increasing legitimacy as subjects for musicological research in recent decades. Further, as economic growth after the tragedy of the Second World War brought a restoration of Japan’s confidence, there was a shift in perspective that could relativize hōgaku not only against Western music, but also against the music of other cultures. This trend is reflected in the work of ethnomusicologist Koizumi Fumio, followed by Tokumaru Yoshihiko and Yamaguchi [Yamaguti] Osamu (see for example Koizumi et al. 1977), and anthropologists such as Kawada Junzō. Prominent researcher of Japanese folk music Kojima Tomiko was also important in widening the perspective.

2. Historical overview of music in Japanese culture and its geopolitical context

The concept of ‘national culture’ is largely a modern one, a feature of the modern nation-state. Since the discrediting of the militarist and imperialist state, as postwar Japan developed into an economic superpower, it has actively cultivated cultural nationalism (Yoshino 1992) as a substitute, based on ideas of cultural uniqueness. Supported by the Japanese government, performance genres such as nō and kabuki have served to represent Japan culturally overseas in the postwar period. However, the weakening of economic confidence and the push towards internationalization (and the pull of globalization) in the 1990s have de-emphasized unique identity and recognized the hybridity of culture.

Ever since the intensive importation of Chinese culture in the sixth to ninth centuries, Japan has striven to differentiate the indigenous, the native Japanese, from the imported, the Chinese. The binary structure and different evaluation of all areas of culture – music, literature, visual arts – is striking. China is powerful, rational, masculine, literate; Japan is soft, emotional, feminine, oral (Pollack 1986). This binary structure is particularly noticeable in elite cultural forms, such as gagaku (court music) and shōmyō (Buddhist chant). In the modern period, the oppositional Other against which Japanese cultural identity is defined is no longer China, but ‘The West’. In order to catch up with the West, Japan adopted (among other things) Western music, and lodged it securely in the new modern education system. A slogan of the modernizing Japanese leaders, ‘Leave Asia, enter europe’ (datsua nyūō), epitomized the process. Western music was thus imposed on the whole population who attended primary school since the 1890s, in contrast to the earlier embracing of gagaku and shōmyō, which were (for many centuries at least) enjoyed only by social elites. In the modern period, the integration or fusion of ‘native’ and Western musical elements has taken many forms, some perhaps more successful or lasting than others. Native music has of course changed in the process of modernization. Western music has been adopted and adapted to the Japanese context very successfully, and has often in the process become Japanized (domesticated) and different from its model. Furthermore, hybrid music has resulted, such as enka, J-pop and ‘contemporary Japanese music’ (gendai hōgaku) or ‘new Japanese music’ (shin-hōgaku).

Nelson’s chapters (2 and 3) on gagaku (court music) and shōmyō (Buddhist vocal music) introduce the two major genres of continental musical culture imported by the ruling elites from the seventh to ninth centuries and the ways they were gradually naturalized. In each, Japanese sub-genres were created in contradistinction to the imported groups of pieces. In gagaku, for example, there was tōgaku music from the Tang court, komagaku from Korea, and saibara and other Japanese local songs with sparser instrumental accompaniment. In shōmyō, categories were based on Sanskrit, Chinese and later on vernacular Japanese texts, with resultant musical implications.

Although, like almost all Japanese instruments, the biwa (pear-shaped lute) was introduced from the continent as part of the gagaku ensemble, Komoda, in Chapter 4, shows how, in the genre of heike narrative (heikyoku), the instrument came to accompany stories drawing on indigenous cults and war tales, albeit with a strong Buddhist overlay. De Ferranti, in Chapter 5, gives an account of other types of biwa-accompanied liturgies and narratives – those practiced by the blind zatō in Kyushu, and their modern derivatives, satsuma- and chikuzen-biwa, which became popular in the modern period and gave musical expression to nationalistic patriotism in the educated classes.

There has been active interaction between Japan and other musical cultures from prehistoric times. Japanese music might at first blush seem unique and the polar opposite of Western music since the Baroque. If however it is seen in its east Asian context and compared with other musical cultures than the Western, commonalities become visible. Prehistoric cultural formative influences came from northern Asia (shamanic ritual and long narratives). Another input was from Southeast Asia, as can be seen in cultural affinities with Island east Asia through to Polynesia, including musical scales and textures. These two general directions were the sources of the major inputs to what is called Jōmon culture (everything up to c. 300 BCe). Wet-field rice agriculture gradually entered the archipelago during what is now called the Yayoi period (c. 300 BCe to 300 Ce) from the developed Chinese regions with large movements of people from the continent. These peoples entered from the southwest and pushed the Jōmon inhabitants to the east and north. Musical instruments known to have been used in the archipelago in these times include sto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of musical examples
• List of tables
• Stylistic conventions
• Foreword and acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Context and change in Japanese music
• 2 Court and religious music (1): history of gagaku and shōmyō
• 3 Court and religious music (2): music of gagaku and shōmyō
• 4 The musical narrative of The Tale of the Heike
• 5 The Kyushu biwa traditions
• 6 Nō and kyōgen: music from the medieval theatre
• 7 The shakuhachi and its music
• 8 Sōkyoku-jiuta: edo-period chamber music
• 9 Gidayū-bushi: music of the bunraku puppet theatre
• 10 Music in kabuki: more than meets the eye
• 11 Popular music before the Meiji period
• 12 Folk music: from local to national to global
• 13 The music of Ryukyu
• 14 The music of the Ainu
• 15 Popular music in modern Japan
• 16 Western-influenced ‘classical’ music in Japan
• Bibliography
• Audio/Videography
• Contents of accompanying compact disc
• Index