The Music Culture after the Great Kantō Earthquake (1923)

This essay intends to overview the destruction and reconstruction of music life, discussing the topical songs and musicals, the special concerts, the widely-acclaimed notion of Heavenly Punishment (tenken 天譴), and the official ceremony of reconstruction organised by the Tokyo City and the State in 1930. The paper will be concerned with questions such as how the street singers reacted to the metropolitan misfortune, what kind of concerts were offered and what kind of music was played, how the people interpreted natural and human-made disaster and sang it, how the reconstruction was musically celebrated and what kind of political message was implied.

Exhibiting the Return to terroir

In his seminal work on landscape David Cosgrove observed that ‘nature’ as a socio-cultural construct has always functioned as one of the favorite focuses of cultures when humanity is in crisis. Taking this thesis as a theoretical point of departure, this study explores a contemporary art exhibition Sensing Nature: Yoshioka Tokujin, Shinoda Tarō, Kuribayashi Takashi. Rethinking the Japanese Perception of Nature, staged in 2010 at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. The study investigates the strategies used in contemporary exhibiting practices to establish alternative sources of collective identification, and the role of the notion of ‘nature’ in these processes. It explores the recent shift from the perception of the world as the globe into the national terroir as discussed by Bruno Latour and exposed in the conceptual design of Sensing Nature, which returns to the nation-specific notion of “the Japanese perception of nature”. This maneuver demonstrates both the role of art in building social and ecological resilience; and the ambivalent potential of culture in the politics of nature.

‘Nature’ in Japanese Traditional ‘Music’

In this essay, I want to address the question of whether there exists a relationship between ‘nature’ and today’s Japanese traditional ‘music’, hōgaku. A further point is what ‘nature’ means within the discourses of the hōgaku music-making world. In relation to the issue of nature-music, I will concentrate on two questions among the many possible ones: is ‘nature’ a central element in the material culture of hōgaku, and, is ‘nature’ expressed somehow in hōgaku languages? Holding the position that interviewing traditional music-makers is the most adequate way in which to deal with such questions, as ideas are not separable from the practice of music, my intent is to provide some tentative answers.

Masumura Yasuzō

A few fundamental events contributed to create a revolution in the world of Japanese cinema during the 1950s, drastically cutting its links with the past and stimulating a completely different way to make movies. One of the main authors to stress the need for a complete change was MasumuraYasuzo. He had been studying for two years (1952-54) in Rome, an experience which enabled him to introduce a new kind of approach to human beings into Japan. Masumura’s refusal for the classical atmosphere of Japanese cinema, often referring to nature as a metaphor of the existence, together with what he had learnt in Italy, gave birth to some of his masterpieces, where the fictional universe works as a frame for depicting a dialectic mixing of freedom and individuality.

Vibrations of 11 March 2011 in Japan’s Performance Scene

This article discusses the strong resonance provoked by the 2011 triple disaster in the Japanese performance and visual arts by focusing on multimedia artist Yamakawa Fuyuki and the antinuclear activist network’s intersection with the underground music scene. Directly plugging into the disaster, Yamakawa re-elaborated his artistic practice in relation to the nuclear crisis by addressing internal and external exposure to radiation. Illustrated are connections between polluted environment, corporeality, politics and performance art, and how his performative experimentations offer novel insights into the interaction between art and disaster enhancing alternative modes of interpretation in technoscience and aesthetic theory.

A Critical History of Japanese Housing from the Perspective of the Human-Nature Relationship

The history of elite housing from ancient times onwards was based on a concept of space in which man was an integral part of his natural surroundings. This conception of space derives from the symbiosis between ‘architecture’ and ‘garden’ and is inherent to the long and rich tradition of Japanese and Sino-Japanese thought fed by myths, legends and sacred beliefs, from primitive Shinto cults to the influence of Indian thought through Buddhism imported via China, not to mention the major influence of Taoist concepts of the universe from the Heian period on. These successive influences never put into question the fundamental relationship between man and nature but, on the contrary, gave it new substance, and left their mark on all forms of social expression including architecture, art, the sacred, and mythology. Japanese architecture has always reflected the fundamental relationship between man and nature, which is why the various archetypes of Japanese dwellings from ancient to pre-modern times rely on the intrinsic relationship between architecture and garden.

Steps to an Ecology of Gagaku

This paper is an attempt to develop a theoretically-concerned basis for what could become an ‘ecology of Japanese court music’. It starts by reviewing recent developments in kindred disciplines such as music studies and ethnomusicology, stressing their tendency to employ an ‘ecological paradigm’, linking music and the environment, without reflecting on what exactly it means to perceive the world. To overcome similar weaknesses, the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold and philosopher Augustin Berque is examined, showing that there is much to gain in widening the field of music research to include more critical reflections on the notion of ‘the environment’. Finally, this paper suggests a few ways in which the theoretical debate could be transported in the realm of Japanese court music and argues that taking these tentative steps may lead to a new path in its exploration, enjoyment and understanding.