Japan’s jazz community—both musicians and audience—has been
begrudgingly recognized in the United States for its talent, knowledge,
and level of appreciation. Underpinning this tentative admiration,
however, has been a tacit agreement that, for cultural reasons, Japanese
jazz “can’t swing.” In Blue Nippon
E. Taylor Atkins shows how, strangely, Japan’s own attitude toward jazz
is founded on this same ambivalence about its authenticity.
Engagingly told through the voices of many musicians, Blue Nippon
explores the true and legitimate nature of Japanese jazz. Atkins peers
into 1920s dancehalls to examine the Japanese Jazz Age and reveal the
origins of urban modernism with its new set of social mores, gender
relations, and consumer practices. He shows how the interwar jazz period
then became a troubling symbol of Japan’s intimacy with the West—but
how, even during the Pacific war, the roots of jazz had taken hold too
deeply for the “total jazz ban” that some nationalists desired. While
the allied occupation was a setback in the search for an indigenous jazz
sound, Japanese musicians again sought American validation. Atkins
closes out his cultural history with an examination of the contemporary
jazz scene that rose up out of Japan’s spectacular economic prominence
in the 1960s and 1970s but then leveled off by the 1990s, as tensions
over authenticity and identity persisted.
With its depiction of jazz as a transforming global phenomenon, Blue Nippon
will make enjoyable reading not only for jazz fans worldwide but also
for ethnomusicologists, and students of cultural studies, Asian studies,
and modernism.
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