"New Music and the Politics of Japaneseness in Yano Akiko’s 'Tsugaru Tour'"

Abstract: In the early 1970s, a generation of young musicians such as Happy End and Arai Yumi gave rise to a genre of Japanese popular music called New Music. While stylistically diverse, New Music borrowed heavily from sounds of U.S. and U.K. pop/rock and depicted quotidian scenes of everyday urban life in Japan. New Music represented a depoliticization of popular music, a shift that scholars have attributed to increasing material wealth in Japanese society and waning support for the New Left. At the same time, a number of jazz musicians were pursuing an ethno-nationalist vision of “Japanese Jazz” in which Japanese cultural elements were presumed to represent an essen]alized source of originality and authenticity.

This talk explores how these two artistic movements came together in the early work of pianist, composer, and vocalist Yano Akiko (b. 1955). I focus specifically on her debut album JAPANESE GIRL (1976) and subsequent live album Nagatsuki Kannazuki (1976), which feature quotations of min’yō (folk songs) from her home region of Aomori, children’s songs, Japanese instruments, improvisation, blues, and pop/rock. While her explicit reference to Japanese cultural elements mirrors contemporaneous jazz musicians’ appropriation of traditional instruments and aesthetics, Yano contests—rather than reinforces—essentialist ties between her racial and ethnic identity and her musical expression.

Through an analysis of meter and textural layers in her performances of “Tsugaru Tour,” I demonstrate how Yano’s use of min’yō and Japanese instruments subverts their conventional function as signifiers of exoticized Japaneseness. While Yano’s playful appropriation of Japanese musical elements could be interpreted as New Music’s depoliticized response to the ethno-nationalist discourses of Japanese Jazz, I argue that her reconfiguration of Japanese cultural elements as aesthetic sources of creativity is emblematic of Japan’s broader historical amnesia regarding its legacies of imperialism. I conclude by suggesting that Yano’s musical aesthetic in “Tsugaru Tour” prefigures the Orientalist satire of techno-pop band Yellow Magic Orchestra, with whom she performed regularly from 1978 to 1980.

Bio: Toru Momii (he/him) is Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University. His research explores topics of musical interculturality, the racial and colonial politics of U.S./Canadian music theory, Asian/American performance, popular music of Japan and the Japanese diaspora, and gagaku. His current book project, Performing Against the Grain: Musical Interculturality and the Politics of Japaneseness, explores how a series of Japanese and diasporic Japanese musicians from the late 1970s to the present have navigated, responded to, and at times refused racialized and gendered narratives of Japaneseness through performances of interculturality. His article “A Transformational Approach to Gesture in Shō Performance” (2020) was awarded the Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory. Toru is a co-founder of the Engaged Music Theory Working Group, which develops resources on the intersections between music theory and issues of cultural politics.