"Like a Flower on a Pond"

By Michael Walsh

The classics flourish in Japan, but how deep are their roots?

Down the long corridors of the Tokyo University of Arts and in the crowded classrooms of the Toho Gakuen school, the technicians are at work, taking the measure of one of Japan's hottest imports. They pore over its structure as carefully as they would over a new automobile design; they grasp it as firmly as they do a microchip or a reflex-camera lens, anticipating the day when their country will be as formidable in this field as it is in so many others. It is not the Three Cs--cameras, computers and cars--that fire their imagination so, but the Three Bs: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

The adoption of Western classical music by Japan has been remarkable. There are nine professional symphony orchestras in Tokyo alone, with others in such major cities as Osaka, Nagoya and Kyoto. There is a booming recital scene, featuring both native artists and foreign performers who come to Japan attracted by the high fees and attentive, respectful audiences. Music schools turn out string players and pianists who are the equal of any in their technical command and knowledge of the repertory.

Although opera and ballet have yet to take firm hold, visiting companies invariably draw large audiences. At year's end, there are so many performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that people refer to the annual flood as "Ninth pollution." During the 1982 holiday season it was performed some 100 times across the country. By any standard, it seems, Western classical music is thriving in Japan, as much a part of the culture today as the ancient lutes and zithers.

Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Although classical music has a high profile, it functions both as symbol and as art, its usefulness perceived socially as well as aesthetically. When explaining their country's fervent embrace of classical music, the Japanese almost never cite the qualities that have kept it flourishing in the West: beauty, emotional appeal, elegance. Instead, they speak of concert music almost as a commodity, whose import and manufacture they have undertaken with characteristic zeal. "We have adopted the Western style in our social life," explains Kazuyuki Toyama, a leading Tokyo music critic. "We wear Western clothes, not kimonos; we watch baseball. So do we respect Western culture, and reflect it in our daily life."

That pragmatic attitude is echoed in the quality of many Japanese performances, which tend to stress technique over insight. This is largely due to the extraordinary respect, bordering on veneration, that the Japanese have for teachers, or sensei; too often students seek to imitate a teacher's style in preference to developing an individual interpretation. The innate Japanese reluctance to assert oneself in public is partly to blame, as is the strong desire to honor the sensei by reproducing their imparted wisdom. But in Western music, which prizes individuality, such cultural conditioning is a hindrance. Notes Kimura: "The principal defect of Japanese performers today is that they don't have their own strong opinions about the music they are playing."

Says Toyama, who also runs one of Tokyo's most active concert halls: "Our musicians excel technically, but I don't know if Japan has yet produced any master artists. When you play Western music, what is most important is interpretation. We have mastered the technique. Now we have to go on." So far, few Japanese musicians have achieved international prominence; the best known is Conductor Seiji Ozawa, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. At home he leads the New Japan Philharmonic, but his career has been largely Western.

Beyond all talk of technique, though, is the larger issue of what Western music means to the Japanese. Takashi Funayama, a musicology professor at Tokyo University of Arts, compares the musical scene to a flower floating placidly on a pond. "It is big and very beautiful," he says, "but it has no roots."

The chasm between technique and emotion, however wide it is today, may be ultimately bridgeable; Japan, after all, has had only about a century to assimilate a radically foreign art form. But Western music faces other problems of a more practical nature. Because many Tokyo residents have long commutes to the central city, and because the city's buses, trains and subways stop running after midnight, concerts must begin early, about 7 p.m. But Japanese professionals often have little leisure time. Although some large companies buy blocks of tickets to distribute to their staffs, Japanese audiences are, by Western standards, disproportionately youthful.

"Western music is primarily popular today with the younger people," says Tadashi Mori, permanent conductor of the NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai, or Japan Broadcasting Corp.) Symphony and a professor at the Toho Gakuen School of Music. "The young people were crazy about rock when the Beatles were popular. Now they go to the classics." But not always just to hear the music. Says Syuji Fujii, chief director of the music division at NHK: "Music is used to make friends, to get a wife. These are just temporary music lovers."

Once the young people enter the business world, explains Fujii, many of them abandon classical music for enka, which combines both Western and traditional music elements in a kind of Japanese equivalent of American country and western. Traditional Japanese music, marked by delicate use of microtones, refined textures and free rhythm, was downgraded during the drive toward Westernization. But it remains popular, especially with older people and in the provinces, and is preserved in the Noh, Bunraku and Kabuki theaters. "We never had a national traditional music," says Toyama. "It was strictly apportioned by classes: the courts, the samurai, the merchants each had their own. But everyone can participate in the Western system." Although some composers like Toru Takemitsu have lately attempted to synthesize traditional music with Western styles, the two forms remain worlds apart, with little overlap in audience.

Indeed, it is Western, not traditional music, that has become the Japanese lingua franca. On television, the strains of Voi che sapete from The Marriage of Figaro plug Suntory whisky, and a Strauss waltz is used as a background for a refrigerator-deodorizer ad. At a children's concert by the New Japan Philharmonic recently, more than 2,000 grade schoolers in the audience rose at the conductor's behest and, in two-part harmony, sang the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth.

Japanese musicians are aware of the critics' reservations and are striving to improve. Says Naoyuki Miura, a former bassist with the Japan Philharmonic now living in New York City: "I think their criticisms are valid, but at the same time we are trying very, very hard to develop. We are looking to the future, to the day when individuality will arrive."

The challenge facing Japanese music, then, is to deepen the understanding of an art they now share with the West. Performers, having proved themselves the equal of any technically, must now transcend their sensei and find their own, distinctly Japanese voices. --By Michael Walsh This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.