Uploaded June 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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I had a lovely conversation with Japanese ethnomusicologist Prof. Noriko Manabe on various aspects of contemporary Japanese music.

We talk about taiko, Japanese hip-hop, Hisaishi, Philip Ewell's work as explored in Adam Neely's video about white supremacy in music theory, "Japaneseness" in music, and the historical reasons behind why frameworks like jazz theory work so well to describe modern Japanese music. In particular, we discuss Westernized children's songs, or "shoka", and their role in Japanese musical education since the 19th Century.

For more in depth information about shoka, you can read the second chapter of Prof. Manabe's dissertation here.
dropbox.com/s/24q3he2e26dhnam/dissertation%20UMI%20copy.pdf?dl=0

Apologies for the video cutting out here and there! This is the result of some file corruption while editing a Zoom recording.