How Japan Came To Love Jazz

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe celebrates with saxophonist Sadao Watanabe after performing with high-school students from Fukushima in northern Japan in 2013.

Kimimasa Mayama/AFP/Getty Images

by PATRICK JARENWATTANANON
April 30, 2014 1:43 PM ET
If you've witnessed a headlining performance from pianists Toshiko Akiyoshi or Hiromi, visited a "jazu kissa" cafe where records are spun and coffee poured, or read nearly any work by author Haruki Murakami, then you probably have a sense that Japan has taken well to jazz music.

Incidentally, the centerpiece Global Concert of this year's International Jazz Day — the annual musical diplomacy initiative from UNESCO and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz — was held today in Osaka, one of Japan's historical jazz capitals. (As of publication, the concert video archive should be available shortly.)

So how did this music get to Japan in the first place? How did the island nation which fought the U.S. in WWII come to embrace an art form that originated in black America? And does the history of jazz in Japan actually support the peace-brokering role that UNESCO claims?

For a few answers, and a primer on Japanese jazz history, I gave professor E. Taylor Atkins a call. An East Asian historian at Northern Illinois University and an amateur musician, he's the author of Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan and the editor of Jazz Planet, a collection of essays about jazz outside the U.S. Here's an edited version of our conversation:

We often think of jazz as this very American thing — at least for us Americans — but it's been a very international music from the very start. How did it get to Japan in the very beginning?

Yeah, a couple of different ways. In the 1910s, there was a growth in luxury liners going across the Pacific — Americans and Japanese going across from the West Coast and Japan, and Shanghai and Manila, and places like that. And they usually had orchestras on them. And pretty much it seems like when they arrived in places like San Francisco or Seattle, a lot of the time those musicians would get off and go to music stores and buy sheet music. And they learned a lot of the foxtrot repertoire and other kinds of popular music that was coming out at that time. They were also buying records, and when they would go back, these ocean-liner musicians also worked in hotel lobby orchestras. And so it seems that the first musicians who were playing something that we would recognize as ragtime or foxtrot or jazz were those people. There was precious little improvisation, but that wasn't as big a deal, as you know, in American jazz of the 1910s or '20s.

Another thing — and there's a book waiting to be written about this — is that Filipino musicians were learning jazz, and they played in hotel and ocean-liner orchestras, in Kobe and Osaka and Shanghai and places like that. Because the Philippines were an American colony, supposedly that's the reason they became so adept at it. Some of the Japanese musicians say the first time they ever heard anybody "faking" or ad-libbing, it was Filipinos.

Read more: http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2014/04/30/308275726/how-japan-came-to-love-jazz?ft=1&f=1039