INDEX
Japanese Roots, Hard to Voice Overseas
Over the past few years you’ve toured the U.S. several times as a bassist with Yuma Abe. Did those experiences prompt you to think more deeply about your own cultural roots?
Okada: I’d say they were definitely a key trigger. Everyone I met, the local musicians, the staff, the audience, was incredibly kind. But whenever I was on my own, I couldn’t help but feel just how much of an outsider I really was. Being in a foreign landscape made me keenly aware of my difference, and of how unmistakably Japanese I am.
One moment that really sticks in my memory happened in Chicago. Our originally booked accommodation fell through, and we had to stay at an Airbnb in a neighborhood tourists were strongly advised to avoid. Outside the room, I could hear gunshots — just as the rumors had suggested, it was a rough area. But while driving from there to the venue, we happened to arrive on Puerto Rican Day. Puerto Rican people were everywhere, blasting music from their cars, honking their horns, and parading through the streets. Children and elders alike waved flags from their vehicles, the whole area was alive with celebration. It was unmistakably festive—a vivid expression of people enjoying themselves while celebrating their roots. Later, I learned that such public revelry also serves as a form of visible affirmation, a way of saying “we are here.”
Watching that, I suddenly wondered: why is it so difficult to engage with one’s roots in the same way in Japan?
If people in contemporary Japan were driving down the street waving flags, the meaning would be very different—likely invoking specific right-wing ideologies.
Okada: Exactly. I’m not saying I want to march around waving flags myself. But in postwar Japan, even attempting something like that would project a completely different, tense atmosphere—far from the celebratory, communal vibe I saw in Chicago.
So it made you realize the difficulty, or the emptiness and borrowed nature, of expressing one’s own identity?
Okada: Yes. At first, I was surprised by what I saw, but gradually I also felt a little envious. From an outsider’s perspective, it might look like, “why not just do the same thing?” But Japan has its own contexts, its own social traumas, that make it much more complicated.
So this album is, in a sense, a reflection on that problem—a search for your own cultural identity?
Okada: Hmm… I wouldn’t say there’s a clear answer. Rather, it’s still a process I’m thinking through, and in some ways, I consider it a kind of life work.ng project.
