ABSTRACT
The traditional coffeehouse – the jazu kissa or jazz kissaten – is a category of dedicated listening cafés only found on the Japanese islands, where the musical selection comes across as a carefully considered curation of the jazz canon. Starting with the coffeehouse as the symbolic hub of Japanese jazz, this chapter is an engagement with selected pockets of the various scenes, in which a multiplicity of perspectives helps us question jazz in a broader, transglobal context. This ranges from postwar Americanism (authenticity, mimicry, emancipation, nostalgia, capitalism) to the Japanization of jazz as reauthentication (experimentalism, vernaculars, technology, urbanity), as well as foreign ‘interventions’ and external-come-internal views of Orientalism (expats and exotica). In fact, jazz-Japanization is a masterful execution of jazzaerialism in practice, in which authenticity becomes fluent, and where performers skilfully play with time and space through clever and considered forms of improvisational performativity. These processes do not come easy, however, where the sounds of experimentalism and performative practices can be said to be shaped by internal tensions within a postwar Japan eager to progress (leave behind) as well as maintain (enclose) its cultural identities.
