Can Japanese Sing the Blues? "Japanese Jazz" and the Problem of Authenticity

Sometime in the early 1950s, when the legendary bebop pianist Hampton Hawes was residing in Yokohama as the leader of a U.S. Anny band, he had the following conversation with his protege, Toshiko Akiyoshi (as recreated in Nat Hentoff's The Jazz Life):

Hentoff may have taken some liberties with the wording here, but given the close and mutually respectful relationship Hawes and Akiyoshi enjoyed during the American's year-long sojourn in Japan, it is likely that they exchanged words of this nature more than once.