Smash that Bell (of Enlightenment)!

I’ve read essays here and there asking, what can be done to preserve the shakuhachi? I don’t think the shakuhachi is going anywhere, frankly. It’s established firmly enough albeit on the fringes, that it’ll continue to to be used (sparingly)—Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel, for instance (nice reference, Grandpa). But what about the tradition of shakuhachi? That’s a bit shakier ground. If it’s jazz played on the shakuhachi, is it still a shakuhachi? At what point does it cease to be a shakuhachi and become just a tube with holes drilled in it?

Several times a year, people send me a YouTube video of a young woman playing “Smooth Criminal” on shakuhachi. She’s wearing kimono and accompanied by koto (a kind of Japanese zither). If that is someone’s introduction to shakuhachi, great! I’m not such a purist that I believe only Japanese music should be played on Japanese instruments. The problem for me is playing shakuhachi without the foundation of traditional music. Especially if you want to call yourself a shakuhachi player, and especially if you want to teach shakuhachi. This is the greatest danger the shakuhachi faces. 

The Ghosts of Tsushima, an open-world adventure game designed with a very Kurosawa-aesthetic (Akira, not Kinko), introduced a lot of people to the instrument through its theme song. Again, that’s wonderful. Even if you don’t want to pursue the music further, it’s never a bad thing to broaden your horizons. But the social media era has created a culture where we post everything we do regardless of…anything. So a post of someone playing the theme to Ghosts of Tsushima that they learned from a YouTube video becomes someone else’s introduction to shakuhachi. And we’re so constantly bombarded by this kind of content that an individual doesn’t have time to be discerning. Often they’ll just say I don’t like this. I don’t like shakuhachi. Maybe another gamer recognizes the theme and is inspired, but the source is now several generations removed from the roots, all in the span of a few years or even months. For the record, the actual soundtrack’s shakuhachi player is a skilled and experienced musician.

It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time when shakuhachi was quite popular in Japan. Now, I’d hazard to guess there is greater interest in Japanese traditional music outside of Japan. In the early part of the 20th century, competition to have the biggest school was fierce, as opposed to just trying to scrape by on the few gigs you can cobble together. Interest has waned and the old masters who carry the tradition are leaving us. In their absence we’re left with TikTok and YouTube content creators as the standard bearers of shakuhachi.

So the shakuhachi is fine; tradition is the endangered species.

More anon,
Hanz