3. The Case of Japan

After all, never has there been a country more unskilled in [cultivated] music than ours.¹

Few things were more astonishing than the growth during the past forty years of a taste for ‘foreign’ music. In no other respect did the civilization of Japan differ from that of Europe so much as in its music which, through centuries of assiduous cultivation, has become a highly developed and complete system, oriental in its general character, yet distinctly national. [...] Their own still holds first place in the hearts of all the music loving people and some of them who are capable of thoroughly understanding and enjoying both systems, sturdily maintain that it possesses certain qualities and characteristics of such excellence that it will have a large contributory influence in the evolution of the ‘music of the future’ and must be reckoned with accordingly.2

That European music should play a leading role in the United States’ quest for an American music is not surprising, given that the dominant class of immigrants came from European countries. Japan, however, had a highly developed musical culture and, although threatened by the European powers, was never colonized. Relatively few Europeans settled in Japan and fewer still as immigrants. Japan nevertheless represents an ‘extreme case’ of musical Westernization.³ Nowhere was Western music adopted and assimilated as rapidly and thoroughly as in Japan; and in no other nation was a highly developed, diverse, and flourishing native musical culture marginalized to quite the same extent. ⁴ Less than fifty years after the Meiji Restoration, foreign observers were beginning to express astonishment at the rising standards of musical performance. In 1940, moreover, Japan celebrated the 2,600^th anniversary of the founding of its empire by commissioning large symphonic works from acclaimed Western composers.5 More than anything else, the use at the height of military nationalism of European-style symphonic music to celebrate the ascension of the (legendary) first emperor demonstrates that the formerly alien music had become an integral part of the culture of modern Japan.

What processes resulted in the dominance of Western music to the extent that traditional Japanese music was marginalized? We can rule out an inherent superiority of European art music (even if contemporaries did not), or direct pressure from the Western powers. No-one forced the Japanese to found a Western-style conservatoire, or symphony orchestras.

There were several reasons why Meiji leaders nevertheless saw the introduction of Western music as a necessity, although sidelining Japanese music was not what they had in mind. Their ultimate goal was the creation of a new national music, and Western models were to provide the means and inspiration for reform, as with so many other areas of politics, society, and culture. This ideal of a national music created by blending Western and Japanese elements never became a reality. Cross-fertilization and hybridization did occur, but not in the way political and intellectual leaders intended. These developments were the result of several circumstances.

One is the incompatibility of the two musical worlds at the time. Thomas Mendenhall (1841–1924), who taught physics at the University of Tokyo from 1878 to 1881, remarked on a ‘chasm that yawned between Japanese and European music, the difference being everywhere so great as to make them mutually exclusive’.6 Decades later, Eta Harich-Schneider, the author of the first comprehensive history of music in Japan in English, observed that Japan’s encounter with Western art music in the nineteenth century ‘took place at a moment when the contrast [with its own music] was at its strongest’.7 The nineteenth-century Western idea of ‘absolute music’, she asserted, had no equivalent in Japan.⁸ Meanwhile, Western music, including European art music, was changing: fundamental ideas that had shaped its traditions were being challenged.⁹

Western Music and Musical Reform

The decision-makers in government, however, were not in a position to appreciate the difficulties. They had minimal musical training or expertise and were motivated by pragmatic rather than aesthetic considerations. For them, Western music was not superior per se, but possessed qualities Japanese music lacked and that were perceived as indispensable for their overall reform agenda. One, frequently mentioned, was harmony. Others had less to do with the music itself than with the way it was discussed and practised: Western music came to Japan with a universal (as opposed to instrument-specific) system of notation and teaching methods suitable for large groups in the classroom; a theoretical framework and vocabulary that facilitated intellectual discussions about music (in the abstract), and―thanks to modern instrument technology and suitable compositions―a potential for large-scale and high-volume displays of power and unity in public performances. In short, it appeared highly suitable to the needs of the modern state they were in the process of building.

Western music was, moreover, perceived as being based on scientific principles and as representing an essential element of modern civilization. In the ideology of universal progress that the Meiji leaders adopted from the West, the state of a nation’s music corresponded to its state of civilization. The music of Japan, with the possible exception of court music (gagaku), which lacked popular appeal, was perceived as backward by the elites, who were brought up to regard the common people with contempt. For most men of the samurai class, the Confucian ideal of ‘rites and music’ (reigaku) as two essential means of government contrasted with the reality of their lives, where music-making was not regarded as an appropriate occupation. On the other hand, common music (zokugaku), enjoyed by the lower classes was far too prevalent and popular to be suppressed, and ‘reform’ proved easier to discuss than to accomplish.

In order to understand the process better, it is instructive to compare and contrast the advance of Western music in Japan with the fate of another musical import, known as Ming-Qing music (Ming and Qing dynasty music, minshingaku).10 Transmitted in the 1820s and 1830s by Chinese merchants in Nagasaki, Ming-Qing music was a genre of popular music that until mid-Meiji was far more widely enjoyed among the people than Western music.11 Fashionable among men of letters since the Tokugawa era (1603–1868), it reached the height of its popularity in the period from the 1860s. The instruments of Ming-Qing music included several types of Chinese fiddles and the Chinese version of the biwa, but the most popular instrument was the gekkin, a plucked lute with a round, flattish body and frets. From the 1880s, a veritable craze for the gekkin swept Japan; easier to learn than the fretless shamisen, it became popular among geisha in Kyoto and in ordinary families. During the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95, Ming-Qing music lost its popularity and never really recovered, although it continued to enjoy a limited measure of popularity and was taught (privately) as a separate genre in Osaka until 1940.12 Changing geopolitics, however, were not the only or even the main reason for its decline.

An examination of the general circumstances of their introduction and of performance spaces, actors, and social structures reveals essential differences between Ming-Qing music and Western music. Introduced through informal channels during the last decades of the Tokugawa shogunate, Ming-Qing music was not supported through regular contact with China after the initial transmission. Western music, on the other hand, was systematically adopted by the new government after 1868 and maintained and developed with continuous input from Western countries (foreign teachers, imported instruments, tutors, sheet music, and Japanese studying abroad). Official promotion by the Meiji government meant that spaces, both physical and in terms of occasions for performance, were created, starting with performance at state ceremonies. Western music was thus accorded special status from the outset and performed in entirely new, modern spaces. The early actors, moreover, included musical professionals, and systematic training was established within government structures. Ming-Qing music, on the other hand, was largely the domain of amateurs, with only a small number of specialized musicians to teach them. Unlike the government structures that supported Western music, Ming-Qing music was entirely dependent on private enterprise, and popular demand.

The decisive difference was that the adoption of Western music was part of the overall Westernization package; that is, it was tightly bound up with political relations and diplomatic protocol, activities and considerations outside the realm of music. Ming-Qing music, meanwhile, was not an inseparable part of any significant non-musical context. Finally, although this might at first glance seem counter-intuitive, the relative similarities in musical practice of Ming-Qing music and traditional Japanese music since the Edo period, especially the similar ways in which they were transmitted and performed, ultimately worked against Ming-Qing music, allowing it to melt into the latter and thus lose its independent status.13

Japanese music, meanwhile, although it suffered official neglect and was increasingly marginalized, nevertheless had a significant role to play in the making of modern Japan. Arguably, its very neglect and marginalization meant that the music itself and some of the associated practices changed less than they would have done with systematic government interference. As it was, the major genres flourished in the hands of private practitioners and sponsors, ready to be recast, when the time came, as representative of unadulterated Japanese cultural traditions in order to balance the universalizing forces of Western-style modernity by emphasizing the distinctiveness of the Japanese nation and its culture.

At the beginning of the Meiji period, however, the very concept of ‘Japanese music’ had yet to become fully formed; this came gradually in the course of the Meiji period, as a result of the encounter with Western music.¹⁴ A short characterization of Japanese music will be sufficient in the present context.¹⁵ The different musical genres were highly context-bound, played by different social groups in different settings. With the possible exceptions of the theatre, the gagaku orchestra, and music played at festivals, most settings were small and intimate. Large-scale public performances comparable to the symphony concert or the military parade, modern phenomena even in the West, were almost unknown. The only exceptions were some of the larger festivals, which were, however, restricted to certain days of the year and clearly separated from everyday life.

Scales and modes vary among the different genres. Vertical harmony is rarely used; instruments playing together tend to play in a kind of loose unison, or with a melody and counter-melody. Apart from dance music the rhythm is often quite free, while the timing or the space between sounds (ma) holds particular significance. Significant differences lie in what is considered a beautiful sound: unlike the Western bel canto tradition with its ideal of pure notes, the unstable pitch of a twanging string, or the sound of blowing mixed with the note of a shakuhachi are essential ingredients of the music; the skilled musician creates variety by subtly changing timbres. Moreover, in contrast to the passionate expression of the Classical and particularly Romantic music of Europe, most Japanese music lacks overt emotional expression; sober refinement or decorum characterized the performance of the most highly regarded music.

Transmission was by ear, from teacher to pupil. It was commonly organized in the so-called iemoto system of fictive family ties, with a hereditary master as the ‘head of house’ (iemoto) ensuring the continuation of the lineage or school (Japanese ryūha). Licensed members of the school assumed a professional name (natori), part of which was the name of the school. The iemoto system was particularly marked in the elite genres that today are described as ‘Japanese classical music’ (Nihon koten ongaku), including several of the recital and instrumental genres as well as noh and kabuki theatre. It is characteristic of other traditional arts as well as the martial arts and continues to this day.

Traditional Musical Genres and the Meiji Reforms

Western observers in the nineteenth century were quick to point out that Japan’s music owed much to outside influence from the continent, particularly China. By the nineteenth century, however, these imports had long been assimilated and were not perceived as foreign.16 One of the oldest imports is gagaku, the orchestral music of the imperial court and certain shrines. It came to Japan between the seventh and ninth centuries, and while it has changed over time it can still claim to be one of the world’s oldest continuous orchestral traditions.¹⁷ Other genres likewise have roots on the Asian continent, even if they originated in Japan.

In the course of the early modern period, the different kinds of music crystallized into the separate genres identified today.¹⁸ They included shōmyō (Buddhist chant), kagura (music performed at Shintō shrines), the accompanying music of the noh, kabuki, and bunraku theatres, as well as various styles of recitation and song to the accompaniment of the biwa (plucked lute), shamisen (three-stringed plucked lute) and koto (plucked zither), and as purely instrumental genres. Like Tokugawa society itself, music was highly stratified and its practice affected by class, gender, and geographical divides.19 The biwa, koto, kokyū (bowed lute) and shamisen were often (though not exclusively) played by blind musicians organized in special guilds with official support. Playing the shakuhachi was, at least in theory, restricted to members of the Zen Buddhist Fuke sect. Several genres were associated with the pleasure quarters. The common people enjoyed folk songs (min’yō) and various genres now described as folk performing arts (minzoku geinō). The Ainu in the north of Japan and the Okinawans in the south also each had their own musical traditions.

The Meiji Restoration and the resulting political, social, and economic transformations brought changes to the world of Japanese music even before the privileging of Western music made itself felt. Some of these changes had already begun in the Tokugawa period, such as the general blurring of social boundaries, which was reflected in musical practice. Government policies merely sanctioned them; for example, the shakuhachi was already being played by amateurs as a leisure pursuit when the Meiji government abolished the Fuke sect in 1871 and with it the right of the komusō (mendicant monks) to solicit donations as itinerant players. Guilds were abolished, while genres previously sponsored by the shogunate lost their support.20

Gagaku, closely associated with the imperial court, was the one music that had a place in the government’s reforms. As a result, it was transformed by the typical government measures of the time: centralization, standardization, regulation. As early as 1870 the government began to reorganize the gagaku musicians in the imperial household’s gagaku department.²¹ The different orchestras and their traditions were brought together in Tokyo; the musicians were ordered to submit information about the music and the training, including pieces and methods of playing that had always been transmitted secretly from teacher to disciple. They had to copy and edit their repertoire according to general principles and their status was newly defined. The system of secret transmission was abolished; in 1873 the government permitted the study of gagaku by anyone who wished to do so, provided they applied for permission. Gagaku musicians, just like the samurai, were no longer privileged by virtue of their birth, and they had to share the function of performing music at important ceremonies with the new army and navy bands. Their salaries decreased, causing some to leave and make a living elsewhere.²² At the same time, the government took measures to preserve gagaku.²³ The heads of the traditional gagaku families received government stipends to ensure that they continued to practise and teach their art. Gagaku was thus not completely displaced by Western music. It continues to play a limited but significant role to this day. Gagaku musicians played at modern ceremonies, sharing this function with the military bands. One such occasion was the official opening of the first railway line.24

The officials in the Department of Court Ceremonies, which included the gagaku department, nevertheless read the signs of the times: soon several of the musicians began to study Western music in addition to gagaku, and thus in effect attained bi-musicality.25 A rehearsal schedule published in English by the gagaku department in December 1878―the rehearsals were open to the public, which in itself was an innovation―stated that Western music was rehearsed on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the other days being devoted to ‘Kagura or music belonging to the oldest Japanese song’ and ‘Gaku or several kind [sic] of classical music’.26

Other types of music were affected by national and local government policies to various degrees. Music associated with Shintō and Buddhism was affected by the government’s policies relating to religion. Buddhism suffered suppression and persecution in the early years of Meiji. In response, Buddhist reformers reconfigured Buddhism to ensure its place in the modern world.27 Some even looked to Protestant hymns in their efforts to reform religious music. In 1907, one of the Buddhist denominations published a collection of Buddhist hymns, half of which used melodies of Protestant hymns.28

The fate of genres associated with the theatre was in part linked to that of the theatre itself, but some of them flourished independently. The noh theatre lost the support of the shogunate, but from the late 1870s, members of the government and the nobility initiated measures to protect and revive noh. A new theatre, the Nōgakudō was opened in 1881 in Shiba Park in Tokyo, and from the late Meiji period noh, like court music, enjoyed protection as a cultural asset.²⁹ Yōkyoku (noh singing) was (and is) practised by amateurs.

Kabuki, jōruri and related genres, including the vocal genres with shamisen accompaniment (nagauta, tokiwabushi, kiyomotobushi, gidayūbushi), were less influenced by the reforms. Widely enjoyed in the Tokugawa period, they continued to be popular, and some artists and performers became highly successful.30 The kabuki theatre itself became a focus for efforts to reform the theatre (engeki kairyō) in the 1880s. The aims were similar to those of music reform: to cleanse it of its supposed decadence, its erotic innuendos, and its vulgarity and turn it into an art that could be shown to Western dignitaries to convince them that Japan was a civilized country. The politicians involved were motivated by a sense of urgency following the opening of a ‘Japanese village’ in London in January 1885, and the premiere on 14 March 1885 of Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera The Mikado at the Savoy theatre. With an opening run of 672 performances, it became the most successful Savoy Opera ever and went on to thrill audiences in the United States, Germany, Austria, and Denmark. In the eyes of the Japanese, however, both events perpetuated exactly the quaint and exotic image they were making every effort to discard.31 The reform efforts had little permanent effect on kabuki; instead, a new theatre movement that aimed to break with tradition gained ground after the Sino-Japanese war.

For practitioners of the instrumental genres, the abolition of the specially protected guilds, while depriving them of a monopoly, offered opportunities to profit from the increasing commercialization. The shakuhachi became widely popular as a solo as well as a chamber music instrument in the three-part ensemble (sankyoku) together with the koto and the shamisen. New schools emerged and the repertoires were standardized. The enterprising shakuhachi player and teacher Nakao Tozan (1876–1956) introduced a new school with its own teacher-licensing system.

The koto survived as a popular instrument of domestic music-making, albeit with increasing competition from the piano in the twentieth century. Performance came to be dominated by women. In this role it persisted well into the post-war period, until it was displaced by the piano in the 1970s.32 The repertoire of koto music (sōkyoku) was developed and extended further through new compositions (shinkyoku).33 From the late 1880s, the Ikuta style of playing spread from the Kansai region, where it originated, to other parts of the country.34 One characteristic of the school was the performance of jiuta (originally a term describing shamisen music in the Kyoto style), usually in an ensemble with koto, sangen (as the shamisen was referred to in such an ensemble), and kokyū or shakuhachi.

The shamisen, played in a variety of vocal genres as well as in instrumental music such as jiuta, continued to be popular, although its strong association with the pleasure quarters gave it a dubious reputation. Several vocal genres experienced something of a heyday in the Meiji period, both spoken storytelling (such as rakugo) and singing or chanting accompanied by a musical instrument. Naniwabushi, sung ballads accompanied by the shamisen and performed by street performers in Tokugawa Japan, became one of the most popular genres of the Meiji period. It moved from the streets into the variety theatre (yose), where it was performed along with other narrative genres. In the twentieth century, recordings and radio broadcasts helped maintain and increase the popularity of these vocal genres.35

Music performed on the biwa consisted of several styles, each with its own tradition and played on a slightly different instrument. Heikebiwa performance, formerly a monopoly of the blind, suffered a temporary decline after the abolition of that monopoly in 1871. Meanwhile satsumabiwa and chikuzenbiwa, both originating in Kyushu, represent good examples of a style of musical performance that was originally a local speciality developing into genres enjoyed nationwide.36 Chikuzenbiwa was a newly developed, eclectic style, while satsumabiwa had a history of several centuries. After the Meiji Restoration, biwa players from Satsuma domain (present-day Kagoshima prefecture) moved to the capital at the same time as the new political leaders from the region. Yoshimizu Tsunekazu (Kin’ō, 1844–1910), who moved from Kagoshima to Tokyo in the late 1870s, was particularly successful; he toured regional cities, including Sendai, and founded his own school, attracting many students.37 Associated with the samurai class in Satsuma domain (Yoshimizu was sent to Tokyo as a student from the domain school³⁸), in the capital satsumabiwa initially became popular with the social elite, but from around the turn of the century it was taken up by commoners and enjoyed as an amateur pursuit. Numerous collections of biwa songs were published, many of them new compositions, narrating events from the recent wars.39 From the beginning of the twentieth century Yoshimizu began to call the style of playing he taught teikoku biwa (‘imperial’ biwa), an indication that he saw his art as a national one rather than a local speciality;40 the satsumabiwa had first attracted attention in Tokyo after Yoshimizu had performed for the emperor in May 1882.

New practices helped bring the different musical worlds together and thus contributed to the formation of ‘Japanese music’ as a concept. Public concerts, a modern institution, often featured performances of both Western and different genres of Japanese music. In April 1893 the Association for Native Japanese Music (Kokufū Ongaku Kai), whose goal was to ‘promote the characteristic music of this country (honpō tokuyū no ongaku)’, held a concert. Organized by Takano Shigeru (1847-1929), a koto teacher of the Ikuta school, it reportedly brought together musicians of different genres and from different parts of the country.41 Takano, moreover, intended to open a school for the study of all music (ongyoku), whether refined or common, and regardless of school (ryūha), as well as create a truly Japanese music (kokufū ongaku) that could be performed abroad without shame. People with disabilities would be taught for free.42 The following month, two more concerts were held on consecutive days, each ending with an outline of the new school’s aims.⁴³ By September 1893 an auditorium for the school was being constructed opposite the Peers’ School for Girls, thanks to the initiative of individuals who cared for the preservation of the country’s music (kokugaku hozon).44 Whether ‘preservation’ was the association’s main aim is not entirely clear, given that performances at the meeting in June 1894 featured both new works in the traditional idiom (kokufū shinka) and ‘reformed’ works (kairyō shinka), as well as including the well-known piece Rokudan played by an ensemble of koto, violin, and clarinet.45

Indigenous musical culture was thus affected at least as much by economic and social changes as by the introduction of Western music, and innovation and modernization within traditional genres were not always a direct effect of Westernization.⁴⁶ Ultimately, however, the Meiji government’s wholesale embrace of Western music undeniably had a far-reaching and lasting impact on musical culture. It changed the soundscape, the way music was thought about, and even the people’s musical sensibilities, within a few decades. No indigenous genre could remain unaffected by the introduction of Western music, even if direct influence was limited.

The Meiji Reforms and the Introduction of Western Music

Music was an essential part of the Meiji reform package. The main channels for the official introduction of Western music by the Meiji government were the military and the public education system. Christian missionaries played an important role in private education.47 Military bands formed an integral part of a modern army and navy and represented the nation state in both to the outside world, in diplomatic ceremonies, and to its citizens. The introduction of military music began already in the 1850s, following Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853, when the shoguns and several lords created what are usually described as drum and fife bands. Initially, these bands may not have been perceived as musical ensembles at all, but merely as a tool for military drill.48

In 1871 the national army and navy were established by dissolving the armies of the domains and forming a core out of the troops from the domains loyal to the new government (conscription was introduced in 1873). From April 1872, the army and the navy were under the jurisdiction of two separate ministries, each with their own military bands. The army employed French instructors: from 1871 to 1883 Gustave Charles Dagron (1845–88?), and from 1884 to 1889 Charles Leroux (1851–1926). The navy employed the British bandmaster John William Fenton (1828–90), previously employed by the Ministry for Military Affairs.49 When he left Japan in 1877, he was succeeded in 1879 by the German military musician Franz Eckert (1852–1916). Eckert probably contributed more to the development of Western music in the early years than any other foreign musician. During his twenty years in Japan he taught not only the musicians of the navy (from 1879 to 1889 and 1895 to 1899), but also of the army (from 1890 to 1894) and the musicians in the gagaku department, where he held official appointments from 1887 to 1899, having first taught some of the musicians privately. Between 1883 and 1886 he also taught for the Music Investigation Committee (Ongaku Torishirabe Gakari; predecessor of the Tokyo Academy of Music) established in 1879. Besides teaching, he harmonized and arranged numerous pieces of music, most famously the national anthem Kimi ga yo. Eckert left Japan in 1899. He briefly returned to Germany before moving to Korea in 1901.50

By the time Eckert began to teach the court musicians, they had already begun to study Western music, having secured official permission as well as practical support from the Navy Ministry. In 1875, about half of the court musicians, thirty-five men, were receiving instruction, and the following year Fenton was employed by both the navy and the Department of Court Ceremonies, while two court musicians were appointed conductors. The court musicians gave their first performance of Western music on 3 November 1876, at the celebrations for the emperor’s birthday. In 1879, four of them applied for permission to learn the piano from Clara Matsuno (née Zitelmann, 1853–1941), who taught at the kindergarten department of the government-run Tokyo Normal School for Women (Tōkyō Joshi Shihan Gakkō Fuzoku Yōchien). She was an accomplished pianist. Members of the gagaku department were thus among the first civilians to be trained in Western music, and some soon began to teach it themselves.

Both gagaku and military musicians actively disseminated Western music among the wider population. The gagaku department established the Society for Western Music (Yōgaku Kyōkai) in November 1879, renamed the Society for Music (Ongaku Kyōkai) in 1882: it gave regular performances of Western music. The court musicians played on an increasing variety of occasions and did much to bring Western music to an audience beyond the confines of the imperial court. Military musicians who left the army and navy in the late 1880s likewise contributed to the dissemination of Western music among the wider population by teaching or establishing their own bands.51 By that time the number of functions that called for Western music, including balls, had risen sufficiently to provide opportunities for civilian bands. In 1883 the Rokumeikan (Deer Cry Pavilion) was opened, an impressive building designed by the Englishman Josiah Conder. Its purpose was to provide a space where Japanese political leaders and their wives could mingle with foreign dignitaries and demonstrate that Japan was well on the way to measuring up to Western standards of civilization. Social events included concerts of Western music and grand balls with bands providing the music.52

Most important of all for disseminating Western music was the education system, but music education in schools was slow to develop. Nominally it started with the Education Law (Gakusei) of 1872, which stipulated universal compulsory schooling and laid the foundations for a centralized modern education system and named music among the subjects to be taught.53 Until the 1880s, however, lessons in singing and sometimes playing the organ or violin were largely limited to missionary schools, since the government lacked the necessary resources. Mission schools played a particularly significant role in education for girls, which the Meiji government neglected in the early years. Even when music was not an independent subject in the curriculum, pupils were taught to sing hymns. At the first of these schools, the private academy of James Hepburn in Yokohama, and the Ferris Seminary established as part of Hepburn’s school in 1870, hymns were taught from its establishment, while music was formally introduced into the curriculum only in 1887.54 The influence of Protestant hymns was particularly significant, because many of them were translated and published in song collections from 1874 onwards. Some, such as Joy to the World, became regular hits.55

The systematic introduction of Western music into the public education system began with the establishment of the Music Investigation Committee56 in 1879. The Committee, headed by Isawa Shūji (1851–1917), had two main tasks: research into Japanese and Western music with the aim of creating a national music (kokugaku), and the implementation of music teaching in schools by producing suitable teaching materials and training teachers. From March 1880, Luther Whiting Mason was appointed as advisor and teacher.57 Teacher training at the Music Institute began in 1880 and the first song book for use in schools was published in 1881. Of the first twenty-two students, which included several court musicians and thirteen women, only three completed the entire course and graduated in 1885. The court musicians, with their previous experience in Western music, were soon promoted to assistant teachers. In order to disseminate singing in schools as rapidly as possible, students from teacher training schools in several prefectures were enrolled for short courses in 1883 and 1884. When they graduated, they returned to the prefectures that had sent them and several became local pioneers in the dissemination of Western music.

Mason was dismissed in 1882 and was succeeded by Franz Eckert and Guillaume Sauvlet (1843–after 1898; in Japan 1885–89), both of whom had other commitments and taught part-time. Sauvlet earned his living as a travelling performer, conductor, and teacher, and first came to Japan in 1885 as a conductor and pianist for the British Mascotte Opera Company.58 The appointment of Rudolf Dittrich (1861–1919) as artistic director and the upgrading of the Music Investigation Committee to the Tokyo Academy of Music (Tōkyō Ongaku Gakkō) represent the first indication that the government’s ambitions extended beyond teacher training and towards a conservatoire, rivalling those that were founded in Europe and the United States in the course of the nineteenth century for training composers and performers—that is, artists as well as pedagogues.59 Unlike his predecessors, Dittrich was an outstanding, conservatoire-trained professional, having trained at the Vienna Conservatoire. During his time at the Tokyo Academy of Music, from 1888 to 1894, he not only taught, but performed in fifty concerts, including solo performances and chamber music with pupils, colleagues, and foreign amateurs, and conducted choral concerts.

A few months after Dittrich’s arrival, the school was reorganized into a preparatory department and a core department; the latter included a two-year teacher training course and a three-year specialist course. That same year, 1889, Kōda Nobu (1870–1946), one of only three students to graduate in 1885, became the first music student to be sent abroad by the Meiji government. This pioneering role fell to a woman, because music was still regarded by the former samurai families as a frivolous pastime, inappropriate for men. Consequently, women represented a substantial proportion of the student body and were even among the staff. Kōda Nobu returned to teach in 1895, having studied violin and piano in Boston and Vienna. Gradually, foreign teachers and the school’s graduates, often after studying abroad, raised the standards at the Tokyo Academy of Music.

Although the Tokyo Academy of Music came to teach almost exclusively Western music, in the early years the reform of Japanese music and the creation of a national music were still on the agenda. Early concerts at the Music Research Institute and the Academy included both Japanese and Western music, although, in the course of the 1890s, concerts increasingly featured only Western music.60

Like Eckert, Dittrich harmonized Japanese songs, presumably in response to the expectations of their employers.61 Dittrich published harmonizations of shōka (Western-style songs taught in schools) as well as Japanese songs from the collection of koto pieces compiled by the Music Research Committee and published by the Ministry of Education in 1888.62 In a lecture about Japanese music given in German he expressed doubts about attempting to harmonize according to Western principles the songs from another age and culture.⁶³ But apart from pleasing his employers, Dittrich (presumably) realized that music with an exotic flavour appealed to audiences in Europe. The title pages of German editions carried lavish illustrations in full colour and with an English as well as a German title.64

By the mid-Meiji period, Western music was thus well established in government institutions.⁶⁵ The army, the navy, the imperial court and the public education system each had a group of active specialists who were recruited and trained through formal channels. Equally importantly, occasions for the performance of Western music had been created as part of the process of reform: imperial tours, diplomatic events such as welcoming foreign representatives and state visitors, court ceremonies, and various new ceremonies in schools and businesses. This systematic importation by the government is one of the main reasons why Western music could take such a strong hold in Japan within a short time. Nevertheless, it took some further time for these developments to reach beyond the capital and the larger cities; the dissemination throughout the country’s schools had only begun. Most people still had few opportunities to hear Western music. For example, Kate Hansen, the American missionary who began to teach music in Sendai in 1907, observed that the provincial town had a less developed Western music scene than Tokyo, and that the smaller towns and villages she toured were even more backward in this respect (see Chapter 10).

Dedicated concert halls, like that of the Academy, were rare, even in the larger cities. Concerts took place in school auditoriums and other multi-purpose halls, theatres, and restaurants. They tended to offer mixed fare, sometimes including other kinds of entertainment. Bands parading in the streets or performing in public parks were a common feature in the cities. Their repertoire included arrangements of popular Japanese tunes (including nagauta and other vocal genres with shamisen, or well-known songs).

Informal channels played a significant role in the dissemination of Western music, although evidence of amateur music-making in private homes is limited and often anecdotal. The German engineer Gottfried Wagener, a keen violinist, reportedly gave private lessons in Tokyo.66 Christian missionaries and other foreign teachers, many of them amateur musicians, associated informally with the Japanese around them, offering opportunities for music-making at social gatherings. An example is the family of Clara Whitney, who came to Japan in 1875. Clara mentions several musical events in her diary.67 The participation of missionaries and other foreign amateurs in public concerts in Sendai is well attested (see Chapters 9 and 11). In the Kobe area, the German merchant Hans Ramsegger (1867–1933) conducted, performed, composed, and taught for several years.68

Associations, semi-official or private, both in and outside Tokyo, promoted Western music by staging concerts. In 1887, high-ranking aristocrats, government officials, and leading industrialists, together with members of the Imperial University and the Tokyo Academy of Music, founded the Japan Music Society (Nihon Ongaku Kai).⁶⁹ Its president was Marquis Nabeshima Naohiro (1846–1921); Isawa Shūji acted as vice-president. Their aim was to disseminate Western music by sponsoring regular concerts. The foreign music teachers, including Eckert and Sauvlet, participated as a matter of course and took part in the concerts organized by the society. Sixteen concerts were held between the society’s establishment and 1894; the society disbanded in 1897 and was replaced in 1898 by the Meiji Music Society (Meiji Ongaku Kai), which had similar aims and organized fifty-four concerts in Tokyo and in the Kansai area between 1898 and 1910. The Tokyo Municipal Music Society (Tōkyō Shichū Ongaku Kai) was founded in 1886 by a former navy band member as a joint stock company with financial support from Shibusawa Eiichi (1840–1931), a prominent businessman. Its band recruited twenty young men, bought musical instruments, and hired an Italian director. As the first commercial ensemble for Western music, the band played at private functions and public ceremonies; it even managed to secure a regular engagement at the weekly ball at Yokohama Grand Hotel. The band did much to introduce Western light music to the public.70

Youth bands began to proliferate and contributed to musical training, as well as increasing opportunities to hear music. One of the first was founded in Tokyo in 1895 by Shikama Totsuji (see Chapter 7). A few years later, the major department stores began to establish and employ their own youth bands. Led by former members of the navy, the bands recruited and trained young people, who had to commit themselves for a fixed number of years. The Mitsukoshi store recruited twelve youths between the ages of eleven and fifteen in 1909. They were not expected to have previous experience with instruments or written music. Rehearsing after school, they gave their first performance after two months. Membership lasted four years, after which several members turned professional. The Osaka Mitsukoshi Band followed in 1914. In 1911, the Itō clothing store in Nagoya (predecessor of the Matsuzakaya department store) recruited twenty young musicians for a band. In 1914 it performed together with the Mitsukoshi band in Ueno Park; at this time string players were added, several of whom later became professionals.71 The Mitsukoshi Band ceased performing in May 1925, but new youth bands formed in the 1920s. Many of the young men trained in these bands became members of the first professional symphony orchestras founded in the 1920s.

The Expansion of the Musical Infrastructure

In the early twentieth century, opportunities for professional training increased with the opening of several new schools. The Tokyo Academy of Music remained the most important institution of professional music education, but from the turn of the century, private music colleges were founded. One of the first was the Music College of the East (Tōyō Ongaku Gakkō), founded in 1907 by Suzuki Yonejirō, an early graduate of the Tokyo Academy of Music. Suzuki’s connections with the business world enabled him to help his graduates find employment as performers. The expansion of higher education in general in the 1920s included several music colleges.72

Magazines did much to spread knowledge of music beyond the major cities.⁷³ The earliest articles about music appeared in general scholarly and literary journals. The first magazine devoted to music, Ongaku zasshi (The musical magazine), began publication in September 1890. It ceased publication in 1897 and a series of short-lived publications followed until the appearance of Ongakukai (Music world). Published from 1908 to 1923, it attained the largest readership of all the music magazines. The Tokyo Academy of Music’s alumni association began publishing a magazine named Ongaku, perhaps the most scholarly of the magazines, in 1910. From 1907 to 1916 the musical instruments division of the Jūjiya store in Kyoto published Ongaku sekai (The world of music; Latin subtitle Mundus Musicae). Yamano Gakki, a company based in Tokyo, published Gekkan gakufu (Monthly scores) from 1912 to 1941. As the title suggests, the magazine included music scores, as did some of the other magazines.

From the 1890s, sheet music of Japanese music began to be published, much of it for the increasing number of people attempting to play the accordion, violin, or (if they could afford it) the reed organ. While earlier sheet music collections of Japanese genres were motivated by the idea of reforming Japanese music, the newer publications catered to the fashion for playing Japanese tunes on Western instruments. This fashion persisted well into the twentieth century, and led to increased familiarity with the sounds of Western music as well as with the repertoire of Japanese music (see Chapter 8). Domestic publication of foreign music began in 1915, when Koyo Senow (1891–1961) founded his music publishing company Senow Gakufu.74

Western musical instruments, like sheet music, initially had to be imported until they could be produced in Japan. Of particular importance were the production and sale of instruments used in music education. Already in the 1880s, Suzuki Masakichi and Yamaha Torakusu, the founders of companies that still exist today, began by producing violins and reed organs (and, later, pianos) respectively for the new domestic market created by music education in schools. Just before the First World War, Yamaha’s company, Nihon Gakki, began to produce harmonicas, until then almost exclusively the domain of German manufacturers such as Hohner. When Germany went to war in 1914, Yamaha and Suzuki took over German markets in Europe and America. While this first success was short-lived, it anticipated the post-1945 export boom in mass-produced Japanese instruments, particularly keyboards. A single instrument newly invented by a Japanese also gained a measure of popularity outside Japan: the taishōgoto, a type of koto with keys resembling those of a typewriter, invented in Nagoya by Morita Gorō in 1912, is still played in a few parts of Indonesia and India, where it has been adapted to local musical culture.75

By the early twentieth century, opportunities for listening to and practising Western music were increasing throughout the country. Japanese children growing up from the late 1880s onwards received some measure of singing education in schools. Shōka were increasingly composed by Japanese. The Meiji wars against China in 1894–95 and Russia in 1904–05 created a surge in patriotic feelings, which found their expression in military songs with rousing rhythms (gunka). Numerous collections of different types of shōka were published by private individuals, including themed songs such as the popular ‘railway songs’ (tetsudō shōka). They celebrated the railway, that powerful symbol of modern times, and, by describing landmarks along the main lines, they presented geography and history lessons as well as entertainment. Besides military bands, civic bands could be heard in public spaces. Particularly in cities, public concerts offered a greater range of music. For those who progressed beyond elementary education, girls’ schools often provided instrumental teaching (violin and organ or piano), while at boys’ schools extracurricular activities included Western music. Meanwhile, traditional Japanese music still represented a major element in the musical soundscape and was preferred at least by the older generations.76

Several trends are discernible around this time that continued well into the twentieth century: the accelerating dissemination of different genres of Western music, including European art music; the continued quest for a national music; and the construction of traditional Japanese music as a cultural asset to be preserved. One indication of the latter was the establishment in 1907 of the Committee for Research into Traditional Japanese Music (Hōgaku Kenkyū Kakari) at the Tokyo Academy of Music. The term hōgaku for (traditional) Japanese music came into common use from around this time. At the leading national institution, almost exclusively devoted to the cultivation of European art music, Japanese music now became an object of research and preservation. The measure was in part a response to a petition submitted by the heikebiwa player Tateyama Zennōshin (1845–1916), calling for the preservation of Japan’s traditional music. Tateyama subsequently became a member of the committee. Preservation took the form of creating scores in staff notation and recordings. Regular concerts of traditional music were held, which from 1913 onwards were open to the public. The work continued until the early 1940s.77

Nor was the Committee the only project related to traditional Japanese music. In 1903 Tanaka Shōhei (1862–1945) established a private research institute for Japanese music in his home. Four years earlier, he had returned from fifteen years of research in Germany, where he studied with Helmut Helmholtz and made a name for himself as the inventor of the enharmonium, a harmonium-like instrument that divided the octave into twenty-two pitches and had a transposing mechanism, making it possible to play with just intonation. Tanaka had learnt the violin while studying physics at Tokyo University, but although he perceived European music to be superior, he asserted that he did not feel moved by it as he did by Japanese music.78 He also founded the Bion Kai (Association for Beautiful Sound), in order to promote traditional Japanese music. The association organized public concerts with leading artists of different genres. Like the committee at the Tokyo Academy of Music, where Tanaka was at times engaged as an advisor, work at his institute included creating scores of Japanese pieces in staff notation.79 Tanaka’s object was not just preservation: he advocated reforming Japanese music with reference to Western music, as had Isawa Shūji, only in ‘a more nuanced and sophisticated’ version.⁸⁰ Among those who regularly worked with Tanaka was a young physics graduate, Tanabe Hisao (1883–1984), the future founder of Japanese ethnomusicology, who in 1910 and 1911 also worked for the Academy’s research committee.81

New forms of Western-style musical entertainment emerged in the cities. One of them was musical theatre. Japan’s first attempt to establish a permanent repertoire company for opera, at the Imperial Theatre (which, despite its name, was a private venture), failed. The director employed for the purpose in 1912, G.V. Rossi, was dismissed in 1916 and left Japan in 1918 after a failed attempt to establish his own company. But the singers trained by Rossi enjoyed successful careers, most famously Fujiwara Yoshie (1898–76), who even enjoyed success abroad. Having studied in Italy, he performed in several European countries as well as America between 1920 and 1934. In Japan, he became a star of the ‘Asakusa Opera’. Named after Tokyo’s major entertainment district, Asakusa Opera mixed all kinds of musical performance, from opera proper to light musical theatre and chorus line revues. It flourished from the late 1910s and reached a wide audience. The Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923 completely destroyed the Asakusa district, however, and Asakusa Opera never really recovered. Musicians and other performers in general had to seek work outside Tokyo at least temporarily, which benefited musical culture in other parts of the country.82

Meanwhile, another operatic venture, in the Kansai area, had lasting success, although not as the ‘opera’ envisaged by its founder. In 1914 the Takarazuka Girls’ Opera (Shōjo Kageki), known in English as the Takarazuka Revue, gave its first performance. Established in a popular tourist spot at the Hankyū Railway’s terminus by the railway company’s president Kobayashi Ichizō (1873–1957), it was intended to offer high-quality musical theatre for the masses. True to the spirit of the times, it aimed to combine the best of Japanese and Western performance art, including kabuki and opera (Kobayashi regarded both as too elitist in their pure forms). Kobayashi favoured Western music for its sophisticated image, and for the first performance Japanese women played the violin in kimono. A few years later the Takarazuka Symphony Orchestra was formed. The theatre’s programme included musicals based on Western and Japanese stage works. In 1938, Takarazuka toured Europe, North America, and China.83

Globalization, Sound Technology, and the Quest for a Japanese Sound

The 1920s and 1930s saw rapidly rising standards in the performance of European art music. They resulted from several developments. Increasing wealth brought a growing demand for both entertainment and cultural pursuits, among them learning to play Western instruments, buying gramophone records, and attending concerts and other events where Western music was played. International stars included Japan on their tour circuit, thanks to the enterprising spirit of Avray Strok, a Russian-Jewish businessman and musical impresario based in Shanghai, and his Japanese co-organizer Yamamoto Kyūzaburō, the manager of the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo.84 Japanese who had developed a taste for European art music thus had the chance to hear the world’s leading performers. Several top-class musicians, moreover, stayed longer: European refugees, including Jews fleeing from persecution, first from Russia, then from Nazi Germany.85

Compared to the influx of foreign performers, Japanese musicians performing European art music abroad were a rarity, but a few nevertheless enjoyed success in Europe and America. They included the singers Fujiwara Yoshie, mentioned earlier, and Miura Tamaki, who gained fame performing in the title role of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly (see Chapter 2). Others were Yamada Kōsaku (1886–1965), commonly regarded as the first Japanese composer of note, as well as one of the pioneers of the symphony orchestra, together with Konoe Hidemaro (1898–1973). Yamada gave two concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York to considerable acclaim. The first, in October 1918, consisted entirely of his own compositions, the second, in January 1919, in part. His experience abroad caused him to reflect on his ideas about a Japanese national music in a Western idiom, and in his works from 1919 he self-consciously employed Japanese elements.86 Konoe conducted in Germany in the 1930s and, during the Second World War, in the countries occupied by Germany. He impressed his audiences not only with his own achievements, but also with his reports about Western music’s triumph in Japan.87 In 1934, the violinist, composer and conductor Kishi Kōichi (1909–37) had his works performed at a widely reviewed ‘Japanese Evening’ in Berlin and conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, only the second Japanese after Konoe (in 1924 and 1933) to do so.88 Other Japanese composers in the 1930s were taking part in festivals of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), and a number of them won prizes at international competitions.

Foreign artists contributed significantly to the rise of symphonic music, which until then could hardly be heard in Japan at all. When Yamada and Konoe founded the New Symphony Orchestra (Shin Kōkyō Gakudan), the predecessor of the present-day NHK Symphony Orchestra, in 1926, they relied heavily on the support of foreign musicians as conductors and concert masters. Although commonly described as Japan’s first professional symphony orchestra, the New Symphony Orchestra was in fact predated by the Takarazuka Symphony Orchestra, which gave its first Concert in 1924 under the Austrian musician Josef Laska (1886–1964). Laska conducted the orchestra in 150 subscription concerts from 1926 until he left Japan in 1935.89 The New Symphony Orchestra’s affiliation with national broadcasting, introduced in 1925, nevertheless assured it a pioneering role, and the radio represented a decisive impulse for the rise of professional orchestras.

Amateur orchestras also began to form in the l910s and 1920s. The Suwa Symphony Orchestra in Nagano Prefecture, founded in 1925, prides itself upon being Japan’s oldest amateur orchestra.90 Others formed at universities, where music societies began to flourish around the turn of the century. Among the earliest were those of Tokyo Imperial University, whose members often took part in concerts at the Tokyo Academy of Music; the private Keiō and Waseda Universities; Kyoto Imperial University, and the private Dōshisha University.91 The orchestra at Kyushu Imperial University played its first symphonic concert in 1919.

New settings for music included Western-style hotels, cafés, dance halls, and cinemas. The large international hotels employed both Japanese and foreign ensembles to play for concerts and balls or in their cafes and restaurants. The repertoire required in these settings was not limited to art music. Globalization was bringing new kinds of music to Japan, including Latin American, Tango and Hawaiian, and, most notably, jazz.92 Jazz became popular in Asian port towns, starting with Manila, from where several Philippine jazz bands and musicians came to Japan, and to Shanghai, which became an Asian jazz mecca, attracting many Japanese musicians. Other Japanese musicians played on the ocean liners and, while on leave in San Francisco, they had the chance to hear American jazz musicians and to buy instruments, scores, and other equipment. Jazz was also played in the dance halls, which enjoyed great popularity until government or local authorities increasingly suppressed them as morally dubious. The first public ballroom, the Kagetsuen in Yokohama, opened in March 1920. In Osaka, restaurants and cafés began adding dance halls to their businesses until police laws forbade the practice. From 1925 an increasing number of commercial dance halls opened. At the peak of the ‘golden era of dance halls’ in 1936 there were eight major halls in Tokyo and a total of thirty-nine halls in the rest of the country, the majority of them in the areas around Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe. Others opened in the colonies and on the Chinese mainland.93

Cinemas too offered musical entertainment. As in the West, the silent films were accompanied with live music; the Japanese ones with kabuki style music, often played by small ensembles of Japanese and Western instruments that played Western-style music for the Western films. Gradually, permanent cinemas were established, and with the advent of long films from around 1914, the bigger ones employed their own orchestras, who also played during intervals. Similar ensembles played in Kobe and Ōsaka. The new ‘talkies’ (the first was shown in Tokyo in 1929) put the live ensembles out of business, but provided new opportunities through the creation of soundtracks. Film music, especially the theme songs of films, was also sold on records.

Sound technology was, in fact, one of the most important developments in Japan’s music history from around the 1920s, when gramophone records became widely available, and radio broadcasting was introduced (in 1925). Recordings enabled listeners to experience a wide variety of musical styles, as well as European art music performed to the highest standard. Japan soon became the biggest market for recordings of Western music. In 1924 a set by Deutsche Grammophon of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (the first complete recording of a major work) sold 300 subscriptions in Japan. In 1933 the set of Beethoven’s piano sonatas from Victor attracted 2,000 subscriptions from Japan, the same number as the sum of all European subscriptions. The set of Toscanini’s recording of Beethoven’s Fifth with the NBC Orchestra released by Victor in 1939 sold 50,000 copies in Japan.94

Thanks to gramophone recordings, major symphonic works and difficult chamber music and solo repertoire could be heard in Japan for the first time. In the nineteenth century, intellectuals had often discussed composers such as Beethoven and Wagner without having heard their works performed in the way the composers intended.95 Unless they had travelled abroad, they knew Beethoven from the literary work of Romain Rolland (1866–1944) rather than from his own music. His ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ was familiar from Tolstoy’s story rather than from hearing Beethoven’s composition performed. Gramophone records enabled music enthusiasts not only to hear famous works, but also, by imitating the recordings of stars such as Elman, Kreisler, and Heifetz, to play them (or at least attempt to). One violinist who did so was Suzuki Shin’ichi, whose ‘Suzuki Method’ to this day makes good use of model recordings.96

The impact of sound recording on traditional Japanese music and contemporary popular music was equally significant. Local recording companies produced gramophone records of traditional music, as well as blended styles, often played with Western instruments. Before the large international record companies (Victor, Columbia, Polydor) took over the market, many domestic companies were founded, several of them located in the Kansai region. Nittō, for example, established in Osaka in 1920, boasted an impressive list of locally recorded Western music. But the company mainly produced gramophone records of genres such as gidayū (a popular narrative shamisen genre), kouta (a short shamisen song), and riyō (a rustic popular song), as well as styles characteristic of Osaka musical culture, which were disseminated nationwide as a result. Performers were often geisha.97 The catalogues of Nittō and other companies reflected the listening preferences of most Japanese: Western music, although increasingly popular, was far from dominant: most Japanese preferred traditional genres. Radio broadcasting likewise prioritized traditional genres, and a poll of radio listening preferences in 1925 revealed that most listeners preferred these.98

From the late 1920s, companies such as Nittō began to lose ground to the big international companies, and Tokyo displaced Osaka as a centre of the recording industry. Rather than disseminating existing musical culture, these companies produced and promoted hits. The new category of popular song, which came to be known as ryūkōka or kayōkyoku, was eclectic, encompassing a broad range of styles, broadly ‘Western’, but most often with musical characteristics that strongly appealed to Japanese sentiments.99 Popular songs, sharply criticized by the elites, were far from the ‘national music’ envisaged by Isawa and others, but they did combine Western and Japanese elements in a way that appealed to the wider population.

Popular song as a product of the recording industry is a global phenomenon and so it should not surprise us that one pioneer of popular song in Japan even enjoyed a measure of success abroad: the composer and performer Koga Masao (1904–78). His songs mixed elements from the Meiji shōka songs and American dance rhythms (as well as, possibly, Korean folk songs). He toured North and South America in 1938 and 1939, and a selection of his compositions, sung in English by the Mullen sisters, was broadcast worldwide by NBC on 31 August 1939; Koga would have continued to Europe had not the outbreak of the Second World War prevented it.100

Japanese composers of art music such as Yamada and Kishi, who performed their own compositions in America or Europe, mainly attracted interest on the strength of their ‘Japaneseness’. They were, however, expressing Japanese sentiment in a musical style perceived as Western by their audiences and which they had fully mastered. The supposedly ‘Japanese elements’ in their works conformed to a common musical idiom perceived as ‘Oriental’.101 Once back in Japan, Kishi joined in the ongoing debate among composers and musicians about how to achieve a specifically Japanese music that was not just an imitation of European models. Many performers and composers of traditional music likewise sought musical renewal. By the twentieth century, they could not avoid being exposed to and influenced by Western music, and many did not even wish to. They experimented with new forms and with new versions of Japanese instruments, typically larger ones with a wider range of pitch. The most famous representative of ‘New Japanese Music’ composed in the traditional idiom but influenced by Western music is Miyagi Michio (1894–1956). Today, his music is widely perceived as traditional, but it is a tradition transformed by the composer’s encounter with Debussy and other European composers.102

So deeply rooted was Western music by the 1930s that increasing jingoism and government suppression could not reverse the process. The debates about a national music intensified, with several composers’ associations being formed, as composers sought to free themselves from the dominance of inherited Western (especially German) traditions of composition. This was the musical version of the efforts by intellectuals to ‘overcome’ (Western-style) modernity in the same period, but it was simultaneously a continuation of the quest for a national music that began with the introduction of Western music by the Meiji government.¹⁰³

Such official opposition to Western music as there was in the late 1930s and the 1940s was mainly directed against the newer forms of popular music. Some traditional genres, such as naniwabushi, gidayū, and biwa, benefited from government support, and musicians were mobilized for the war effort. But hostility towards Western music, as the music critic Nomura Kōichi recalled, came from members of the public rather than government officials.104 Western classical music sometimes took the form of bombastic performances with large symphony orchestras, part of the official efforts to use music for propaganda purposes. The biggest musical spectacle during the war were the celebrations to commemorate in 1940 the 2,600th anniversary of the ascension of the first (legendary) Emperor Jimmu. In an effort to make this an international event, the government commissioned large symphonic works from several acclaimed European composers.105 Suppression of Western music, then, was selective, and resulted from government-enforced war austerities and the economic and social effects of the worsening military situation rather than ideology.

In sum, by the 1920s, Western music was firmly established; so were the seeds of what one author has described as the dual structure (nijū kōzō) of music in Japan.106 Western and Japanese music, the latter having begun to be known as hōgaku in order to distinguish it from Western music (yōgaku), were not yet entirely separate, as they would become, but the recasting of hōgaku as part of Japanese culture writ large had begun.

The Postwar ‘Musical Miracle’ and Its Critics

After 1945, the Japanese could build on the pre-war foundations, and the narrative of music being resurrected from the ruins is similar to that perpetuated in Germany.107 Efforts to revive culture and entertainment, including Western classical music, did indeed start almost as soon as the war was over: conservatoires reopened, orchestras performed again, new orchestras were formed, and the production of musical instruments resumed. From the 1950s, foreign artists began to tour Japan again. They performed for increasingly large audiences as prosperity increased and audience associations provided affordable tickets for their members and made it worthwhile for artists and ensembles to tour the provinces.

The post-war ‘economic miracle’ was accompanied by a rising presence of Japanese musicians on the global stage: from the late 1950s, Japanese musicians began to attract attention abroad. One of the first was Ozawa Seiji, who won the International Competition of Orchestra Conductors in Besançon in 1959 and the Koussevitsky Prize at the Tanglewood Music centre in Massachusetts in 1960. Embarking on an international career, he became a household name on the global stage. In what has been called the ‘reverse flow’,108 Japan became an exporter of classical music in other ways. Yamaha and Suzuki had already exported musical instruments earlier in the century and especially during the First World War. Once the Suzuki Method became popular abroad in the 1960s, Suzuki Violins led the supply of fractional violins. Mass-produced pianos from Japan took over foreign markets in what has been described as ‘the most significant development in modern piano history’.109 Aided by the availability of cheap instruments, the number of people in Japan learning to play Western instruments themselves also increased: the piano, previously reserved for the elites, became affordable for middle-class families and represented the chief object of middle-class aspirations.¹¹⁰

Although traditional musical genres were popular immediately after the war, as early as 1952, a Western observer remarked: ‘Thus, when one speaks about music in Japan, this means only Western music; indeed, the process of assimilation has reached the extent where the younger generation virtually denies the cultivation of its country’s indigenous music.’¹¹¹ This may well have been an overstatement, but the audience for traditional indigenous music did indeed shrink. Music education in schools still excluded indigenous music, and this did not change until this side of the millennium.

For most of the twentieth century, the growth of Western classical music looked like an unqualified success story. At the time of the ‘Bubble’ economy of the 1980s, however, Japanese observers began to express unease with the state of musical culture. Increased spending power coupled with the very high prestige accorded to Western classical music resulted in excessive commercialization, to the point where a foreign observer described Japan as ‘the world’s most profitable and least critical market for classical music’.112 In fact, many Japanese felt that Japan still somehow lagged behind the West. The weaknesses of classical music in Japan, real or imagined, were the subject of many comments and discussions in the wake of the so-called Geidai or Kanda Affair in 1981.113 Together with the privileging of Western classical music over all other forms, including Japan’s traditional music, this sense of inferiority and under-achievement has led critical observers to speak of a ‘classical music complex’.114 Some commentators have even claimed that this ambivalence towards a music imposed from outside and above combined with a sense of inferiority have resulted in a secret dislike of classical music.115

As mentioned, the increasing dominance of Western music, and indeed Western-style modernity, gave rise to criticism even before 1945. Such criticism, however, never implied an outright rejection of Western music. On the contrary, wartime debaters highlighted the ability to absorb cultural influences from abroad as a strength of Japanese culture and advocated renewing national music with inspiration from the West.¹¹⁶ It was not until the post-war era that the sharp distinction between ‘Japanese’ and ‘Western’ culture, including music, was firmly established. Western music and Japanese music (yōgaku and hōgaku), at least in their classical forms, were each placed on their separate pedestal. While the trend began earlier in the twentieth century, the hardening of the boundaries between the two musical worlds is a post-war phenomenon and resulted partly from the complete rejection of anything that was perceived as part of the wartime ideology. This meant that any discussions about renewing Japanese music was associated with the ultranationalism of the war years, although (as the following chapters will show) it had in fact been on the agenda of political and intellectual leaders as well as musicians since the 1870s.

Another reason for the separation was the internalization of Western notions of authenticity that required the music of the Other to remain pure and unsullied by outside influences, a reflection of the fact that notions of cultural and national identity are inseparable from relations with other cultures and nations. Many nations in the twentieth century strove to construct a non-Western musical identity based on Western musical style.117 Japan was, arguably, a pioneer in what became a global trend. From the start, Japanese who sought to introduce Western music and to reform Japan’s music were aware that they were actors on a global stage.