Full Description
"In this illuminating debut, Marshall offers an outsider's look into Japanese culture via its music . . . Throughout, her sharp observations are interspersed with moving moments of introspection . . . This transportive work is a thrilling escape." -Publishers WeeklyFulbright and mtvU sponsored scholar Jillian Marshall offers honest and often humorous vignettes that delve far beyond Western stereotypes of Japanese culture to portray a society's deep relationship with music, and what it means to listen and understand as a cultural outsider.Following a decade of back-and-forth across the Pacific while researching her doctoral thesis in ethnomusicology, JAPANTHEM author Jillian Marshall reveals contemporary Japan through a prism of magic, serendipity, frustration, unique underground culture, learning life lessons the hard way, and an insatiable curiosity for the human spirit. The book's twenty vignettes - including what it's like to be subtly bullied by your Buddhist dance teacher, go to a secret rave in woods near Mt. Fuji, meet a pop star at a basement club while tipsy, and experience a nuclear disaster unfold by the minute - are based off first-hand experience, and illustrate music's fascinating relationship to (Japanese) society with honesty, intelligence, and humor. JAPANTHEM offers a uniquely nuanced portrayal of life in the Land of the Rising Sun - while encouraging us to listen more deeply in (and to) Japan in the process.
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS:Toward a Public IntellectualismOn NoiseHate/LoveUgo, AkitaAmerika the Beautiful, In Two Acts3/11Interlude I: Context, Lyrics, and InterviewsEn, UndergroundThe Dance TeacherIdols You Can Touch! (As Two Scenes)The Secret Mountain Party"You Came In Here, Didn't You?"Peripheral Encounters: A Series of Personal/Social/Musical ExperimentsThree Akita BijinThe Matsuyama TourDJ Interlude II: Music for the PeopleOn Making it BigAkita-benThe CelebrityPortrait of an (Underground) Artist as a Young ManEpilogue
