M. Yesipova. Japanese Music: Eras and Contacts

Contemporary Japanese musical culture is an unprecedented phenomenon. I discern the following basic reasons for its unique nature.
First. Though within the orbit of Far Eastern musical civilization , Japan has retained the oldest kinds of music for historical and geographic reasons. Though formerly available and progressing in the continent, they have not survived to this day there, with negligible exceptions. Meanwhile, that music allows to reconstruct many aspects of the oldest systems of musical thinking, which had taken shape in that particular part of the world.
Second. Traditional music of contemporary Japan has an unique characteristic as part of its musical culture—that music is able, in a way, to demonstrate the historical and chronological developmental process of Japanese music proper, what with kinds and genres which emerged in many eras now coexisting. That allows to see the specifics of Japanese musical thinking and trace down its evolution and reflection in musical theory, aesthetics and philosophy (1).
Third. Dynamic development of European-type musical culture (composition and rendition, commercial and entertaining music, the various music institutions, etc.) put Japan, roughly since the 1960s, on a par with the world’s foremost countries. That is the most evident as we regard that kind of culture among other European-type cultures.
It is, however, hardly possible to take stock of, and substantiate the specifics of pure Japanese school of composition in that context, if we proceed from the analytical experience of European musicology because—despite its Westernised sound—the ancient Far Eastern music concept, as accepted and developed on by mediaeval Japan, has survived to this day and retained a determinant significance in creativity . Quite naturally, the bearers of Japanese culture themselves long stayed unaware of that. Once in a new semantic context, the traditions of Far Eastern musical thinking (on which we shall dwell in detail, later on) bore ample fruit in Japanese and European composition alike. The American John Cage, for one, owed many of his works to assimilation of Far Eastern philosophy, musical and other, and of a way of thinking that corresponded to it. Germany’s Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote certain profoundly original works under the impression of traditional Japanese music.
So it is possible to explain the “Japanese phenomenon” in modern music, on the one hand, by the specifics of ethnic musical thinking and, on the other hand, by specifics of perception—in particular, perception of the new. Japan is intrinsically characterised by its ability to absorb and sometimes adapt elements of other cultures and civilizations. Side-by-side with it goes another ability—not merely to nationalise the borrowings but create something entirely original on their basis. That is why analyses of the system of selection are among the scholar’s tasks—precisely what elements of alien musical cultures were borrowed, how long and in what manner they were absorbed, how they acquired a Japanese nature and in what it found expression, and what were the potential opportunities of the borrowings for progress.
We shall now dwell on certain stages of the process in which continental culture was penetrating Japan. In that, we shall proceed from the assumption that ancient Japanese music was determined by the penetration of that culture—mainly Chinese and Korean.
The start of musical borrowings can be dated most precisely by the 4th or 5th century. We come across one of the earliest references to them in the Nihongi (Annals of Japan—a written monument of 720). It mentions an orchestra of eighty, who arrived in Japan from Silla, a Korean state known in Japan as Shiragi, for the funeral of Emperor Inkyo in 453. Four musicians came to Japan from Paekche (Kudara, in Japanese) in 554 to stay for a long time and teach the Japanese their music (2). The Japanese knew Korean bards as utabito. One Mimashi, a Korean of Kudara, came to Japan in 612 to teach gigaku music and dancing to a class of young performers . The gigaku, musical stage performance, acquired an official footing thanks to Prince Regent Shotoku Taishi, who was working for a Buddhist state. The gigaku found its way to Buddhist temples in his time. Many foreign musicians—Koreans, for the most part, immigrated to Japan in the 7th century to be naturalised. Court musicians of foreign extraction were granted the status of a privileged guild in 685 (4).
The 5th into 7th century saw massive penetration of Korean and Chinese music—the latter of the Sui (581-618) and Tang (618-907) dynasties. Japan, in its turn, started a regular dispatch of embassies to China. As we know, there were 240 on an embassy of 653, and 594 of 716 (5). Scholars know the 5th-9th centuries in China as time of international music—a highly indicative fact (6). It culminated under the Tang dynasty. Chinese music of the time integrated the music and musical theatre of India and Persia, which came through East Turkestan (what is now Xingjiang and a part of Central Asia) to be enriched by the Central Asian traditions of Sogdiana, Kucha and Hotan. It was the music notable for an amazing variety of genres and instruments. The Imperial administration promoted and monitored the progress of music. No other Oriental country of that time possessed larger music schools and institutions. Chinese music was under a strong foreign impact, which was deliberately overcome in court music. Foreign music was squeezed into the limits of the highly sophisticated and cosmologised Chinese music theory to take a precise place in the elaborate hierarchy of court art genres and types.
The 3rd century B.C., of the Qin and Han dynasties, brought a division of court music in two basic categories—the yayue and the suyue. The former, “correct, graceful, sublime music”, incorporated the Confucian ritual music and dancing in adoration of Heaven, Earth and Ancestry; the latter included the many genres of court entertaining music. Characteristically, the music of the commoners was outside it. The latter category was largely differentiated, later on. Promoting that differentiation was the penetration of Western lands’ (i.e., Central Asian) music into the court rites of the early Han (206 B.C.-24 A.D.). In fact, that penetration concerned not only Central Asian proper but Indian and Persian music, points out Shigeo Kishibe (7). That was how the huyue, “foreign music”, became a category on its own. Starting with the Northern Wei and Northern Qi dynasties (550-577), it was dominated by the music of Kucha, or Chinese Turkestan — principal Central Asian music centre. The Sui dynasty (581-618) introduced an organisation of the court repertoire in “seven kinds of music”. That was when foreign music was “cut as a precious stone” on the Emperor’s order. The repertoire eventually extended to nine and, later on, ten “kinds of music”. The music of Korea, India, Kashgar, Turfan, Samarkand and Bokhara were incorporated as particular “kinds”.
Japanese court music of the Nara and Heian periods (8th-12th centuries) was, on the whole, a branch of the mighty Tang culture. As musicological studies have shown, the court music of those periods—brought together under the term gagaku, “graceful music”—though it took the name of China’s Confucian ritual music of the yayue category (in fact, gagaku is the Japanese pronunciation of the respective Chinese hieroglyphs), really ascended to the suyue, or “banquet music” . That music was not so strictly regulated as the elaborate yayue, and included a great variety of genres and sub-genres, some of them of foreign extraction. British musicologist Laurence Picken makes a conclusion on the Central Asian origin of the Etenraku, one of the most popular gagaku compositions (8). His conclusion appears quite logical in that light. As for the yayuye allegedly misinterpreted as gagaku, we ought to explain it as follows: a conceptual idea was borrowed and eventually interpreted, with the simplification trend visible in the musical organisation of the gagaku as compared to the yayue.
As for the yayue proper, that symbol of old China did not take firm root in Japan, though it was certainly known there, according to historical references. As Japanese musicologist Eishi Kikkawa explains it, the reason was in Confucianism introduced in Japan as a philosophy and ethical doctrine, rather than religion with its rites and music (9). Even despite that, the Confucian philosophy of music, with its determinant role in Chinese theory of music, had a tremendous impact on the progress and theory of Japanese music .
Japan knows the basic idea of the Chinese philosophy of music as reigaku shiso (rei, rite/order, and gaku, music/harmony). Incorporated in the Japanese musical self-awareness in the Nara and Heian periods, it found reflection in the ceremonial and ritual character of court music and some of its later varieties.
Prominent in the conglomeration of borrowings was the tradition of Buddhist worship, which came with its religion to China from India, again through Central Asia. Japan fairly soon stratified it in several relatively independent music traditions of the principal Japanese Buddhist sects. There are also references to direct Indian Buddhist influences on the Japanese Buddhist culture—historical records of the work of Indian missionaries in teachers in Japan and of Japanese Buddhists sent to China to learn from Indian priests. Gido Kataoka (13) and other historians of Japanese Buddhist music have every reason to find ancient Vedic traces, which they date to the 4th century B.C., in the Old Buddhist bombai, or bai chants (14). Indian influences could also come through secular genres, for instance the rinnyugaku of the gagaku repertoire, which first appeared in 736 from Champa, an ancient South east Asian state which the Chinese knew as Linyi and Japanese as Rinnyu.
Just as Sanskrit and Pali left an indelible trace in the vocabulary of the Japanese vernacular (15), the Japanese music idiom assimilated sound elements of the ancient Indian Buddhist tradition.
As for the tunes of Ancient Japanese court music, the Korean substratum appears to be fairly strong here. It is discernible in contemporary komagaku compositions—a genre variety of the gagaku, which came down to this day. As Eta Harich-Schneider assumes, it was brought not so much by Korean court music as by folk, which penetrated Japan spontaneously, with no official encouragement, and much before the togaku, court music of the Tang dynasty (16).
When we speak of Far Eastern music penetration in Japan, we ought to emphasise that it was an impact of a cultural complex as a whole, music being only its part. Naturally, Japan accepted everything that accompanied it—instruments, notation, performing style and manner, aesthetics, philosophy, theory, symbolism, and the nature of social functioning and institutionalisation. Characteristically, many researchers compare that time to the Meiji period (1868-1912), which opened Japan’s doors to West European culture.
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Musical instruments are graphic material illustrations of Japan joining the sphere of Far Eastern civilisation and the far greater world of ancient Asian music. We find of interest the following words by Russian scholar R. Sadokov: “As comparative analyses show, an entire nation quickly accepts an ‘outlandish’ musical instrument only on rare occasions, and ones that certainly have good grounds.” (17). In our instance, not one but a wide range of foreign musical instruments were accepted. At first, their use was limited to the court culture—the wagon psaltery, also known as yamatogoto, and the flute yamatobue are alone considered purely Japanese of the entire range of instruments played in ancient times. Later on, other social strata acquired court orchestra instruments, and those which were not discarded received the status of national.
More than fifty samples of the oldest extant Nara and Heian musical instruments are preserved to this day at the Shosoin imperial repository in Nara . Spectacular among them are a lavishly ornamented kin (qin in Chinese), made in China, presumably, in 735; a five-string gogenbiwa lute of Indian origin; a Paekche harp—the kudaragoto or kugo, kungho in Chinese ; the shiragigoto, a Silla psaltery (kayagum, in Korean); the genkan—round-bodied Chinese lute; many kinds of flutes—a many-reed one, resembling a panpipe (21), among them, and an arrangement of drums, some of them resembling Ancient Indian. A majority of instruments preserved at the Shosoin have gone out of use for some reason. Only two are in use now—the koto, a kind of old Chinese psaltery, and the biwa, pear-shaped lute.
The principal variety of Far Eastern psalteries, the kin-no koto, directly derived from the Chinese qin, went out of extensive use with the descent of aristocratic culture. One variety, the so-no koto, known as gakuso in a gagaku orchestra, on the contrary, developed into the principal instrument in a court orchestra to become a traditional Japanese instrument. Its origin is telling. The koto descends not to the famous qin, ritual instrument of the Chinese court orchestra, so popular with Confucian scholars, though preserving its symbolism and ideological attributes, but to another kind of the Chinese psalteries, the zheng, popular in entertaining music.
The biwa, Chinese pipa, second most important of traditional Japanese instruments, is a lute with a pear-shaped body, and a short neck bent backward at a right angle in its upper portion. Experts trace its genealogy to the Persian barbat lute, which travelled to China via Gandhara and Hotan, and on to Japan . The biwa was from the start not mare part of the gagaku orchestra but accompanied the Buddhist chant, mainly in the Tendai school . Characteristically, Japanese performers retain to this day almost the entire range of ancient Buddhist ritual instruments which are described in detail in many treatises—shell bugles, bronze bells big and small, cymbals, gongs, wooden idiophones, etc. Unlike them Japan turned down the basic instruments of the Confucian orchestra which carry a greater part of ritual symbolism — such as the bianzhong and bianqing carillons and stone chimes tuned on the twelve lui (standard pichs) — though those instruments are mentioned in special treatises, and there are Japanese terms for them, e.g., hensho, the Japanese for bianzhong.
Early literary sources occasionally refer to musical instruments (Ochikubo monogatari) and music in general (Genji monogatari). Those references mainly concern court life and culture. There is however oblique testimony to borrowings in other fields of music, for instance, a reference of 799 to an Indian performer who came to Mikawa, northeast of what is now the Aichi prefecture: “He sang melancholy songs and played a one-string zither.” (24). That type of monochord was, most probably, predecessor of the contemporary Indian vina, and first cousin of the Khmer ksae diev, which appears on Indian templar reliefs starting with the 7th century. The azusayumi, a slightly modified monochord, was used in shamanic practices and survived in Japan to this day.
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The genre characteristics of music, its tunes and instrumental pitching are more of outward features of something more substantial, the arrangement of sound in space and time, which has a direct bearing on the fundamentals of musical thinking. Let us see what continental borrowings brought at the level of musical systems .
Ceremonial orchestra music borrowed from the continent gave a respective orientation to the Japanese musical mentality. The musical form and the idea of it in that oldest of all the arts took shape not on the basis of regularities intrinsic to music itself, as an art on its own, but proceeding from universal laws to regulate whatever kind of creativity. The simplest, proper musical characteristics—as, for instance, two-beat rhythms or the pentatonic scale, which were typical of many nations’ ancient music—might have come as auxiliary materials to draw those universal laws. Characteristic of the Chinese tradition was the utmost cosmologisation of the musical system and all its parts. That tradition made it a point to give a theoretical footing to spontaneous performance and put it on an exquisite cultural level. Perhaps, all that robbed music of delightful spontaneity as it proceeded from centuries-old canons, which had taken firm root in musical practice. Thus, the pentatonic scale was made part of the wuxing classification of the five primal elements (see Table 1). Figures multiple of two and the preponderance of four and eight beats in the rhythmic arrangement corresponded to the dual principle of yin and yang and the ba-kua system of the eight trigrammes (see Table 2). Perhaps, there was only one purely intellectual, speculative act in all that—the establishment of the lui-lui dodecatonic scale within measure and standard setting to coordinate it with the twelve months of the lunar calendar. Once subordinated to those universal laws, music could be regarded as “correct”. It became eternal and was robbed of the chance of evolution. That concept of music helped its oldest kind to come down to our day as the Japanese gagaku court music. It, however, took the Japanese longer than two centuries to adapt continental orchestra music. The process was all the more complicated as another music was being introduced parallel to it—Buddhist ritual chant. Though it came from China, it was no less alien to Japan as ascending to another ancient musical culture, of the Vedic India. As he was interpreting those complicated developments of the hoary past, Japanese composer Maki Ishii (b. 1936) gave them the following formula: “imitation—Japonisation—stagnation” (25). As I see it, the initial phase, imitation, was to include inevitable Sinofication of the available Japanese music forms. That certainly brought considerable losses. Thus, to quote Japanese drama student Masakatsu Gunji, the ancient ethnic forms “lost their unique colouring to turn into an empty shell robbed of content” under the impact of “outlandish stage art” as early as the 7th century (26).
The first stage of Japanese cultural isolation started with embassies no longer dispatched to China, from 894 on. Shigeo Kishibe and some other Japanese scholars define that time as “first stage of national music” (27), the time when the purely Japanese musical culture of Heian emerged. In the field of the theory of music, it was marked for an interaction of musical systems seemingly incompatible with each other. The theoretical reappraisal and interpretation of Buddhist ritual music in the Chinese terms of the gagaku theoretical system started in the 9th century. A purely Japanese music theory of gagaku began independent development, too, and the purely Japanese ryo-ritsu mode and tone system emerged within it. The theory of Buddhist chant, known in Japan under the general name of shomyo, and the gagaku theory had been practically unified by the start of the 12th century—not through integration or diffusion of organisation principles. The shomyo music came into precise rhythmo-metric structures of the gagaku, while the modal pattern of the chant received a somewhat strained interpretation in the terms of the gagaku mode and tone system. So there were two entirely different music systems. One of them, the Chinese, found theoretical preference in the Nara and Heian period. The other, ancient Buddhist, had an impact on music outside the Imperial court. Their paradoxical interaction was extremely fruitful. As I see it, the nogaku appeared thanks to that interaction. The No music, an unique synthesis of past achievements, advanced Japan to get on a par with the world’s best music cultures. Formalised by Zeami’s genius , the No music system is profoundly original and deserves close attention—all the closest as it did not come as a substitute for the older systems, though succeeding to them, but coexisted with them. Shigeo Kishibe defines the nogaku emergence period, since the 14th century, as a second stage of national music (30).
Gagaku and nogaku correlate as Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry—forgive me the trite simile. The nogaku gave up the tempered pitch. That was its principal and most spectacular innovation (as European music theory views it, on the contrary, the shift to temperament is a stride forward in musical mentality). China made a logically justified step from the lui-lui to equal temperament—what Europe did approximately 150 years later. Unlike them, Japan stayed true to that mode, the juniritsu, which remained property of the gagaku. There was nothing nihilistic and sensational in the nogaku as it broke with temperament—unlike the case with new European music of the 20th century. On the contrary, it was a natural transition. Nogaku even preserved traits of succession to the gagaku theoretical system, as Zeami was emphasising in his treatises.
Akira Tamba, Japanese composer and musicologist, expert on No music, introduces the terms “determinate” and “non-determinate” music to tell between the gagaku and nogaku systems (30). As we ought to point out here, the nogaku music, while retaining stringent canonisation of all musical components of a composition, based in its temporal unfolding on the principle of intuition, which makes every particular piece inimitable and unpredictable. That is why the No music is regarded as the fullest expression of the Zen spirit in Japanese music. Et also ought to say, by way of comparison, that the European world came close to music, which could be described as non-determinate as late as the mid-20th century, and that under the influence of Oriental cultures—and often under the Zen Buddhist influence. The three-phase temporal progression jo-ha-kyu which lies at the basis of the nogaku, comes out as an universal law and an arrangement of particular laws which are simultaneously valid at all structural levels of a composition, which gives it certain aspects which defy analytical forecast, and so are immune to reason. The smallest construction unit of the nogaku, arranged on the law of jo-ha-kyu, is a kind of super-short impulse, which reflects a higher unit, and so on ad infinitum. Perhaps, it takes dual perception—in time, horizontal, and extratemporal, instantaneous, vertical—to adequately perceive the structure. As Zeami, a Zen adept, was convinced, to perceive the No drama, one is to “liken his soul to the vessel of the Universe” (31), that is, to become similar to the Universe by opening all channels of perception. As the theoretician sees it that offers new opportunities of communication with the Universe (typologically, such opportunities can be compared to those offered by the primitive mythological mentality).
The nogaku system has no analogue either in the continent or in global musical practice. As compared to gagaku, it is the Zennist’s proverbial “step above the ground”, in which the heart of Zen is. Grafted from the tree of China’s Tang culture, Japanese music had a thoroughly different developmental logic.
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The impact of Zen on music was not limited to the No drama. Chinese musical culture retained its mental influence even after Japan locked its frontiers. Besides, the country was not absolutekly isolated in the Middle Ages. There is a semi-legendary reference to music links with China under the Sung dynasty (960-1279). It concerns the introduction of the shakuhachi, long bamboo flute and one of principal Japanese instruments. As the treatise Kyotaku denki (Kokujitai), 1765-70s, has it, the flute was brought from China by Muhon Kakushin, or Gakushin, or again, Hatto (1207-1298) , Zen priest of the Fuke sect, in 1254. Other sources have the date as 1255. The origin of the instrument is vague . There are references to a long flute, counterpart of the Chinese dongxiao, known as gagaku shakuhachi, used in the gagaku orchestra from the end of the 7th century into the 9th. That flute, however, was much different from the shakuhachi that was introduced in the Middle Ages and widespread in the Edo period. The hitoyogiri flute, predecessor of shakuhachi, remained popular up to the end of the 17th century.
Playing the shakuhachi was the first and only Japanese instrumental solo tradition, not connected to the recital. The legend of the Kyotaku denki tells this of its appearance: “There lived one Puko (Puhua) in Zhengzhou in the Tang China. An adept of Ch’an, he founded the sect which is known as Fuke in Japan. He was among the wisest men of his time. Feigning madness, as people thought, he would run along the streets ringing a little bell. Zhang Po, his disciple, felt the essence of its sweet sound, which words could not express, and conveyed it in a piece for the flute, named Kyotaku, The Bell of the Void. Zennist suggestion passed the tune on from generation to generation. Kakushin received it in the 13th century” (34).
The shakuhachi music of the old style was generally known as honkyoku. It does not know strict regulation of the pitch, rhythm and structure. They depend on the musician’s mood during performance. The honkyoku is the music of Zennist meditation, and playing the shakuhachi is, in fact, an independent spiritual exercise. On the whole, the tradition may be regarded as developing on an impetus of China’s Chan culture, which Japan perceived at the necessary suggestive level. Such indirect borrowings were characteristic of the mediaeval Japanese culture of Zen.
Another period of continental musical influence started in the mid-16th century. Musician Zheng Zhating came to Japan in 1546 from China, which was then under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). According to extant sources, he taught Kenjun (1547-1636), young monk of the Zendoji temple in Kurume (north of Kyushu), to play the qin and so zithers (35). Kenjun stood at the cradle of Japanese professional koto solo, the tsukushigoto, from Tsukushi in Kyushu . Kenjun, in his turn, had a pupil—Yatsuhashi Kengyo, eminent musician and founder of the yatsuhashiryu school of koto performance. The tsukushigoto came back to strct, “determinate” musical organisation, which ascended to the gagaku and Chinese standards. More than that, it made direct borrowings of the best-known gagaku tunes . The gagaku melodic archetypes thus became a kind of theme for variations in time. In that respect, Japanese music echoes the ancient Chinese literary philosophical tradition, which is defined as culture of commentary. The development of male professional koto playing tradition was naturally connected with a Confucian revival in Japan.
Japan received a next foreign cultural impetus with the penetration of Christian music and European instruments with Roman Catholic missionaries (Here, I refer my reader to one of my articles (37), which offers necessary facts). I only say here that, as Japanese scholars see it, the spread of Christian music was stopped before it could have any pronounced influence on Japanese music. Nevertheless, experts tracked back Japanese children’s songs and even the Rokudan-no shirabe , classical koto composition, to Christian hymns.
A new instrument of South Chine provenance, the shamisen, appeared in the mid-16th century to become widespread. It was first brought from the Ryukyu islands in 1562. This long-necked lute added a new and striking timbre to the Japanese instrumental palette and soon became an unrivalled folk instrument to accompany singing. It ousted into the background even the biwa, whose repertoire and technique it borrowed. The kokyu, a kind of violin, found its way to Japan at about the same time, also via the Ryukyu islands, after a centuries-long travel from India to China. It is used in ensembles and has no solo tradition. Unlike it, the samisen became leader in stage music of the 17th century—the Joruri (Bunraku) puppet theatre, the Kabuki, and the widespread chamber lyrical music of the geishas. It is not for nothing that, in the 20th century, the shamisen was rivalling the koto for the title of Japanese musical symbol.
There is another noteworthy fact: Chinese music proper was well-known in Japan of the Edo period (1603-1867). Thus, Wei Zhiyan, Chinese musician, was teaching Ming ensemble and chamber music in Nagasaki in 1692. The monk Xinyue was invited to the feudal house of Miyu in 1777 as qin teacher. As we know, Chinese music was played there side-by-side with Japanese—the waka poems laid to music in specific Japonisation o f the Ming qin music (39). Such instances were few, however. The elite custom did not cross the threshold of feudal households and had no influence to speak of on Japanese music of that time.
Later on, in the 19th century, Chinese ensemble music of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) penetrated Japan thanks to the activities of Chinese musician Jin Qinzhang in Nagasaki and later Kyoto. A Chinese performer and music teacher known under the Japonised name of Kinko Kin founded a Chinese music school in Edo (now Tokyo) in the Bunsei period (1818-1830). The school made an emphasis on singing to the orchestral accompaniment of Chinese instruments. The entertaining music soon became extremely popular (40). Even collections of Chinese-notation music pieces were published (41). However, different the Ming and Qing music might be, both were known in Japan under the common name of minshingaku. The Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 put an end to that music. One minshingaku piece, the Kyurenkan, however, survived as Japonised koto piece . The folk tradition of Qing music was preserved by the hokaya, itinerant performers on the smaller metal-stringed koto . Korean music of the later Yi dynasty (1593-1910) penetrated Japan at about the same time, alongside Ryukyu music, which was akin to South Chinese. Those influences were primarily reflected in the music if traditional Japanese festivals. Thus, music life of the Edo period incorporated a complex of continental traditions, which were popular with the various social groups but no longer brought major changes to the stabilised structure of national music culture.
From the viewpoint that interests us, Edo music was the most noteworthy for demonstrating parallel development of two traditions directly opposite to each other in the sense of musical organisation. One of them, the koto performing tradition, ascends to the principles of “determinate” music, while the other, the shakuhachi, evidently slants toward “non-determinate” music. That was a timer of coexistence and interaction of what might seem to be mutually exclusive types of musical mentality.
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The Meiji period, after 1868, threw the Japanese gates open to European musical culture. That was the time for Japan to join the Western world; the time which ushered in a new era, the “period of world music” in Japanese culture, to quote Shigeo Kishibe. A mere century and a half gave Japan an independent treasury of Western-type music, which was spurting forth . The spread of European music was regarded as a political step: Japan was to “Europeanise in order to survive” (43). To the Japanese ear of the Meiji period, European music might appear even more outlandish than continental orchestral music in the times of old, yet it was incorporated much more dynamically. The process took less than a hundred years. At any rate, the 1960s found Tokyo one of the world’s foremost music centres with a sophisticated infrastructure of the European-American type—symphony orchestras, solo performances, etc., etc., and a ramified system of guest performances, Russian musicians being no exception.
Music was always essential in the traditional Japanese world. Acquaintance with European music was to it a culture shock, if there ever was any. The Japanese were amazed to hear the musical idiom of Europe and the Americas, and developed a national inferiority complex, which resulted in Western music implanted dynamically and artificially. Guest performances gradually made the Japanese accustomed to the new music and renditions. Topmost Western virtuosos visited Japan in the early 20th century. School curricula by daring reformer Shuji Izawa thoroughly changed the tastes of the younger generation to make it perceive the European music system with its equal temperament, metric rhythm and functional harmony. Starting in the 1890s, the mass choir movement opened the doors of that system to the older generations. The media and sound recordings brought the campaign to final success. The dynamism with which Japanese music was Europeanised could bring disastrous fruit to the entire national culture, in which the youngest would suffer the worst—but Japan withstood it, though a squall of commercial pops, one of the results of Westernisation, even now threatens its culture, just as in many other countries.
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Contemporary Japanese music has the following basic strata: centuries-old traditional music and pops on the extreme ends of it, with the interacting shinhogaku, or “new traditional music”, and Western-type composition in between them. The shinhogaku trend emerged in purely Japanese music under the impact of the European system on traditional forms and mentality . We can single out two basic channels of that impact. The first brought new timbres to the traditional sound as experimenters were combining European and Japanese instruments, starting with the 1930s, to produce updated Japanese varieties—suffice it to mention Michio Miyagi’s invention, the 17-string koto, known as the jushichigenkin, and hybrid instruments, as Hisao Tanabe’s reikin, combination of the kokyu and the cello. The second channel is stylistic influence of European harmonies. They were, perhaps, the greatest surprise to traditional Japanese musicians. Harmony was the aspect which discovered a new music world to the Japanese ear . Michio Miyagi (1894-1955) and Kin’ichi Nakanoshima (b. 1904)—koto players and composers, and the shakuhachi players Seifu Yoshida and Nagayo Motoori became foremost figures of the shinhogaku. That trend now keeps entire Japanese traditional music afloat, is the opinion of authoritative Shigeo Kishibe. Western classics received an official status in Japan with the foundation, in 1887, of the Tokyo Academy of Music (now, the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music). Topmost European composers, conductors, pianists, violinists and cellists—mostly Germans—were invited there as professors. Japan’s first composer graduates of the Academy went to the Higher Music School of Berlin and the Paris Conservatoire for postgraduate studies. So, conventionally speaking, the French and German trends were basic in the Japanese school of composition at its initial stage. Further progress of composition also went on, as a rule, on the basis of a choice of a particular Western model (Russian classics are included in that category). At various times, particular features of Skriabin, Debussy, Stravinsky and other composers became such models. Entire stylistic systems took their place later on—for instance, of Webern, Messiaen, Xenakis, Cage or Stockhausen.
Sensitive to the basic trends of professional Western composition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japanese composers were choosing what was most akin to them—impressionist treatment of musical expressive means with its priority of phonism. Folklore collection, study and interpretation, one of the leading trends in prewar European music, became another prominent trend.
The national penchant for selection found partial expression in postwar Japanese composers’ liking for European avant-garde techniques. As I see it, they owed it to those techniques being easily accessible to the Japanese mentality , as many of their organisation principles were akin to Japanese traditional and, if we generalise it, non-European. A trend became visible in the 1960s for avant–garde composers to integrate directly opposite musical spheres—Japanese traditional and pan-European. Works by Toru Takemitsu, Joji Yuasa and Yoshiro Irino became first steps to an international synthesis .
The process of assimilating Western art approximately repeated the pattern of assimilating continental music twelve centuries before — imitation (and parallel Europeanisation of Japanese forms), Japonisation of European forms through citing national material, work based on national material and, last but not least, a turn to traditional principles of music organisation and traditional aesthetic and philosophical concepts of music. That last stage brought an exit to the next stage. As it went through several developmental stages to achieve national self-expression within the European music system, the Japanese school of composition came close to creating an original Japanese music phenomenon—setting free the subconscious mechanisms of specifically national musical mentality. It arouses great interests of musicians throughout the world. Japan has had an impact on Western music culture within the recent decades. It is gradually modifying European forms. The Japanese past is even a stronger influence on contemporary music than present-day Japan, what with great global interest in traditional Japanese music. Japanese music encourages development of new musical expressive means. Contemporary composers of many countries are enthusiastic not so much about the elements of Japanese musical idiom as about the ways those elements are connected in the musical texture to give a new dimension to the musical space. Those ways are unique and sometimes inexplicable, from the European viewpoint. The shared desire to integrate the different types of musical mentality—occidental and oriental, in the broader sense—is a fruitful desire, which leads to ever new discoveries. Music cultures of the West and Japan as part of the East appear to be ready to join their trajectories in a circle. Possibly, they will never merge, and the progress will go on a spiral. “All that came from China and India became our own, and all that comes from the West will be ours, too.” Those words of a kami god, hero of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s novella, “A Smile of Gods” (46) may be prophetic.

Table 1
Seasons - Autumn Spring Summer Winter
Elements Earth Metal Wood Fire Water
Colours Yellow White Blue/green Red Black
Cardinal points Centre Earth East South North
Planets Saturn Venus Jupiter Mars Mercury
Social hierarchy Emperor Ministers Subjects State affairs Product
(guildsmen)
Tone names
Chinese Kung Shang Chue Chi Yui
Japanese Kyu Sho Kaku Chi U

Table 2.
No. Kua (symbol) Material Instruments Cardinal points Seasons Images Features
1. Jian (creativity) Stone Lithophones Northwest Autumn/winter Sky Firmness
2. Dui (permission) Metal Bells West Autumn Pond Joy
3. Li (cohesion) Silk Zithers South Summer Fire Lucidity
4. Zhen (excitement) Bamboo Flutes East Spring Thunder Quickness
5. Sun (refinement) Wood Idiophones Southeast Spring/summer Wind Feeling
6. Kan (depth) Leather Drums North Winter Water Danger
7. Gen (being) Gourd Mouth organs Northeast Winter/spring Hill Solidity
8. Kun (completion) Clay Ocarinas Southwest Summer/autumn Earth Sacrifice

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46. R. Akutagawa. Izbrannoe. T.2, Moskwa, 1971, p.14.

Caption
The descent of the Buddha Amida, surrounded by twenty five bodhisattvas. Jodo school of Japanese Buddhism, 14th century.