INDEX
Cultural Ruptures: From the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War
The opening track, “Mahidere Birhan,” seems inspired by Ethiopian jazz and pop. Listening to it, I couldn’t help but notice its similarity to the Japanese pentatonic scale.
Okada: Living in Japan, it’s rare to encounter Ethiopian culture directly. But when I listen to their music, I sense this strange, almost uncanny connection. Why do the scales of these two geographically distant cultures align so closely? That question has fascinated people for a long time, and it sparks the imagination, just like the “possible futures” I mentioned earlier, imagining connections between African and Asian cultures. Thinking about that is genuinely fun.
It’s similar to how rumba rhythms traveled between Cuba and Africa, or how cultural expressions moved across continents. Even if the similarity between Ethiopian music and Japanese pop is partly coincidental, it’s exciting to explore these “what if” scenarios of cultural exchange.
Okada: I recently watched a YouTube program, or maybe it was a podcast, with Kenichi Shinoda, director of the National Museum of Nature and Science. He was talking about how humans are naturally migratory, and how the movement of people and objects has shaped cultures worldwide. I think a lot of popular music emerges through this same process of migration and cultural transmission.
So it’s not something that just appeared in a single fixed location.
Okada: Exactly. That’s the image I had in mind for this album, music emerging through intersections and movement. Though, honestly, on the day of the release, I suddenly thought, “Did I really take on too much?” Laughs. Still, it’s a subject you can’t avoid confronting.
And maybe that very hesitation is what makes the album such a compelling example of reflective identity exploration.
Okada: If that’s how it comes across, I’m happy with that. As widely discussed, after the Pacific War, and going back to the Meiji Restoration, Japanese popular music had to reckon with the fact that its connection to earlier traditions had been severed. That’s why, for this album, I had no choice but to think while making it, or make it while thinking.
During the Meiji era, the Music Investigation Committee promoted Western music, which gradually spread throughout society. This was part of the broader “Datsu-A Nyū-Ō” slogan, literally meaning “Leaving Asia, Entering Europe,” which the Meiji government promoted as a guiding principle for modernization across many fields in Japan.
Okada: Right. Ever since then, the imaginative potential for “Japanese-ness” in music has largely been skipped over.
In that context, it’s difficult to envision “Japanese music” in ways that are free from nationalism, right-wing ideology, or state-driven agendas
Okada: Yes.
