Music in the Making of Modern Japan

“This innovative volume [...] brings together highly diverse genres, texts, and issues, including music education, gender, and traditional, classical, and popular genres. The chapters speak to each other through the unifying concept of affective media, and successfully provide a rich palette of a wide variety of the vibrant and multifaceted state of music in Japan today.”

-    Professor Alison Tokita, Monash University, Australia


​This volume explores the notion of “affective media” within and across different arts in Japan, with a primary focus on music, whether as standalone product or connected to other genres such as theatre and photography. The volume explores the Japanese reception of this “affective media”, its transformation and subsequent cultural flow. Moving from a discussion of early encounters with the West through Jesuits and others, the contributors primarily consider the role of music in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. With ten original chapters, the volume covers a wealth of themes, from education, koto music, guitar making, avant-garde recorder works, musicals and rock photography, to interviews with contemporary performers in jazz, modern rock and J-pop. Innovative and fascinating, the book provides rich new insights and material to all those interested in Japanese musical culture.