Japan's jazz community - both musicians and audience - has been begrudgingly recognised 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 inter-war 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 levelled 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 world-wide but also for ethnomusicologists, and students of cultural studies, Asian studies, and modernism.
E. Taylor Atkins is Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Prelude: Plenty Plenty Soul 1. The Japanese Jazz Artist and the Authenticity Complex 2. The Soundtrack of Modern Life: Japan's Jazz Revolution 3. Talkin' Jazz: Music, Modernism, and Interwar Japan's Culture Wars 4. "Jazz for the Country's Sake": Toward a New Cultural Order in Wartime Japan 5. Bop, Funk, Junk, and That Old Democracy Boogie: The Jazz Tribes of Postwar Japan 6. Our Thing: Defining "Japanese Jazz" Postlude: J-Jazz and the Fin de Siecle Blues Notes References Discography Index
"Blue Nippon emerges from the author's mastery of jazz as a cultural medium, an in-depth knowledge of the scholarship on jazz as an intercultural and historical phenomenon, and from a concern to use cultural theory to come to terms with the specificity of the Japanese history of jazz."- Miriam Silverberg, author of Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu "This is a powerful gem of a book. Atkins's mixing of voices is wonderful and his scholarship impressive. Moreover, his complex argument is communicated in language that is straightforward, engaging, and compelling."- Christine Yano, University of Hawaii, Manoa "E. Taylor Atkins' lucidly written Blue Nippon is a welcome contribution to jazz scholarship as well as to Japanese cultural history."--Popular Music, October 2002 "Blue Nippon is the fullest account of the history of jazz in Japan to appear in any Western language to date ... groundbreaking ... Atkins's attempt to open up jazz discourse and history to the contributions of non-black, non-Americans is a brave and well-argued one. That his book should appear during a period of conservative retrenchment in jazz, as leading figures return to the comfort of racial and national stereotypes to deny the music's right to progress, is even more welcome."--Alan Cummings, THE WIRE, December 2001
