ABSTRACT
From a broader sociological perspective, hybridized art forms, as such, mirror the globalized cultural conditions that have brought non-native and indigenous elements into disparate juxtaposition in Asian countries. It also means that, from the other side of the coin, the dichotomies based on self and Other, fin-de-siècle codes of musical exoticism do not provide a suitable model that ‘mirrors’ the attitudes of Asians towards cross-cultural fusion. In the case of Japan, where Western music has been absorbed and domesticated for over a century, native composers tend to perceive traditional music as a resource like any other cultural resources; thus it would not do justice to claim (as Corbett does) that Western-trained Asian composers inversely ‘exoticize’ traditional Asian elements as the Other. Motegi’s description that the trend since the 1980s embraces ‘an awareness of the cultural identity of Japanese music in terms of its relationships with Asia and neighbouring countries’ speaks to an attitude of Utopian (pan-Asianistic) syncretism rather than ‘neo-Orientalism’ (Motegi 1999: 28).
