Jazz & Coffee Masako, in Shimokitazawa, one of Tokyo’s many “jazu kissa”
The United States may be the birthplace of jazz, with roots in New Orleans and perfected on New York stages, but Tokyo now has more than 100 live jazz clubs, more than New York, and Japanese fans buy more jazz recordings than anyone else in the world.
How did a risk-averse, norm-governed society come to embrace a musical genre that values improvisation and celebrates the unpredictable?
The history of Japanese jazz is about music, about a movement, but also about the state of mind of a nation – a bold vision of a better future after the Second World War, expressed in piano, drums and brass, wrote in 2022.
Jazz first came to Japan through Filipino musicians and North Americans, in the 1920sdriven by the waves of westernization that crossed the country during the Meiji and Taisho eras, and became popular in the 1920s and 30s, when American musicians toured the clubs of Tokyo, Kobe and Osaka.
However, Japan was historically an island nation, its policy sakokuwhich for more than two centuries severely limited contact with the outside world, only ended in the 1850s.
Before World War II, an increasingly nationalist government began to repress it, feeling that jazz, a distinctively American art form, perhaps America’s greatest cultural achievement along with hip-hop, diluted Japanese culture.
In 1941, it was Abruptly banned as “enemy music”when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor turned the USA into a enemy from one day to the nextaccount Roland Keltswriter and journalist specializing in Japanese and Western culture based in Tokyo, .
Four years later, At the end of the war, jazz resurfaced with new vigor. The generation of baby boom post-war Japanese, urban and cosmopolitan, embraced defeat, to paraphrase historian John Dowe, and everything it implied, including a musical genre that transcended traditional ideologies and knew freedom.
But, true to itself, Japan did not just “embrace” o jazz americano — transformed him profoundly.
Os yazu the cat Japanese — the world-celebrated cafes and listening bars dedicated to jazz recordings — are not mere replicas from Parisian or North American clubs. These are rigorous laboratories.
Customers remain silent, musicians are treated like deities and the spaces have something sacred and meticulously thought out. Many dedicate themselves to specific subgenres, such as bebop or the cool jazz of the West Coast, and do not tolerate occasional amateurs or circumstantial enthusiasm.
In short, jazz appeals in Japan, in part, because it has been “Japanized,” defined by fans and performers alike through excellence, obsession, and discipline.
To Michael PronkoTokyo-based author and music teacher, whose inevitable “A Guide to Jazz in Japan” was published last year, the reason for the success of jazz lies in the sophistication of Japanese listeners.
The Japanese tend to appreciate rather than resistmusical complexity and value a largely wordless genre, capable of overcoming linguistic barriers. It also helps that they are less conditioned by a typically American obsession: race.
“In Japan, jazz means ‘America’whereas in the US, jazz means ‘black music’“, says Pronko. “In Japan, it’s just cool; in the United States, it comes wrapped up in this whole disastrous racial history.”
Haruki Murakami is the contemporary Japanese novelist most emblematic of the country’s love of jazz, but Don’t just write about this song nor to sow it in his works. Lived it.
In the 1960s, when post-war Japanese counterculture flocked to jazz giants like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, Murakami went further: borrowed money from the woman’s family to open a club jazz musician called Peter Cat.
“Most of my colleagues wore suits and went to work for companies,” the writer, now 77, told Kelts one day. “I opened a jazz club”.
Murakami states that This decision shaped his life. He learned to save money and tune his instinct, and realized thatand making art is an arduous and time-consuming process.
He wrote his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, in 1979, while managing Peter Cat, and I could barely save enough to pay my rent. monthly and working into the night.
Pronko says that while many writers see jazz as a metaphor for creative energy, Murakami also treats it as a process. “There is a sense of improvisation in some of his passages, a flow reminiscent of a great jazz solo. He seems understand irony that the more you can master language, whether musical or verbal, more freedom you have”.
Perhaps therein lies the essence of jazz’s enduring appeal in Japan: the more controlled and stable the culture, the freer art becomes — and the emotion it provokes.
