ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author traces modern biwa music’s trajectory from Kyushu via Tokyo to imperial Japan’s overseas territories, then to America and Europe as a vocal and instrumental sonic resource. He shows how the music was simultaneously evocative of ‘old Japan’ and also of Japan as a creative dynamo that the West rediscovered during the 1960s. The position of the biwa in the canon of Japanese music history is somewhat complex, and is characterized by the important associations of place in its rise to prominence in the Japanese music world. Biwa music almost vanished after Japan’s defeat in 1945 – a result of its endemic association with prewar ideology. The author demonstrates how both literal and metaphoric meanings of place and presence draw together biwa music’s historical transmission and transformations, the content of narratives, and the vantage-points of practitioners and audiences.
