Fence, flavor, and phantasm: Japanese musicians and the meanings of ‘Japaneseness’

Abstract

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 guitarists, 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: 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 cultural identity across a broad range of settings beyond music.

Notes

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 concerning 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.

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.

Kikkawa, Nihon ongaku no seikaku, 13. In this paper my position is that the terms ‘Western’ and ‘Japanese’, 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.

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.

 Cook has described how recent technological transformations in the dissemination of music have deconstructed musical boundaries globally; see his Music: A Very Short Introduction, 40–45.

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 Japaneseness’. These contrasting arguments broadly parallel in their breadth the range of voices set forth in this paper.

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: ‘[Japanese] 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’).

Atkins, Blue Nippon; Atkins, ‘Can Japanese sing the blues?’.

Yano, Tears of Longing.

Condry, ‘The social production of difference’.

Mitsui, ‘Domestic exoticism’.

Hosokawa, ‘Soy sauce music’.

Yasuda, ‘Whose united future?’.

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.

I have sometimes disguised the particular instrument an informant played, as well as other information, in order to protect informants' identities.

Much changed in Japan between 1995 and 2000, the years of my interviews, but I find that my interviews do not reflect these changes. Informants in 2000 said similar things to those in 1995. Therefore I omit the exact dates of interviews.

Cohen, Rock Culture in Liverpool; Finnegan, Music-Making in an English Town.

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.

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.

Takeuchi and Kisaragi, Hōgaku, hōbu, 80–81.

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?’.

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.

Nuss, ‘Hearing “Japanese”, Hearing Takemitsu’, 38. He notes, however, that Takemitsu is complex in his views, also espousing musical universalism.

Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity, 2, 64.

For example, Kawai's ‘Nihonjin’: to iu yamai (The Sickness which is ‘Japanese’).

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.

Tracey, ‘Cuban music made in Japan takes on the world’.

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’.

As Cook notes, in Music: A Very 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 implication, 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’.

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).

 Atkins, ‘Can Japanese sing the blues?’, 41.

See Lancashire, ‘World music or Japanese’.

It is unclear whether this title was the product of Yamashita himself or of Bill Laswell, the album's producer.

B Pass, ‘The Yellow Monkey’.

Mitsui, ‘Domestic exoticism’, 5.

De Ferranti, ‘“Japanese music” can be popular’.

 Harootunian, ‘Visible Discourses/Invisible Ideologies’.

See Hosokawa, ‘Soy sauce music’. This is my interpretation more than Hosokawa's.

Yasuda, ‘Whose united future?’, 53–54.

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.

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.

Tartan, ‘DJ Tsuchie finds creative means of expression in the hip-hop mix’.

Ohmae, The Borderless World, 17–18.

Asahi Evening News, ‘Japanimation’.

Schilling, ‘YMO’, 300.

Hosokawa, ‘Soy sauce music’, 140.

See Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, and Mathews, Global Culture/Individual Identity.

See Arai, Shūshin koyōsei to Nihon bunka, for an argument about how ‘lifetime employment’ is intrinsically linked to the cultural character of Japanese.