The Sound the Black Ships Brought ― Western Music Arrives

The signal of Japan’s opening was not only the roar of cannon. In the late shogunate years, the foreign fleets that appeared one after another at Japan’s ports are said to have come ashore each time with military bands in tow. At the head of the column, metal pipes no one had ever seen rang out high and clear, and drums kept a steady, regular beat. To people who had lived until then within the melodies of gagaku, the shamisen, nagauta and folk song, the Western scale must have sounded strange, powerful, and oddly new. The story of Japan’s modern music begins quietly, from the moment this foreign resonance flowed into the port towns.

The Young Men of Satsuma Who Learned the Bugle

One of the first groups to try not merely to hear the Western sound but to play it with their own hands was the band of young men sent out by the Satsuma domain. In 1869, Satsuma is said to have dispatched about thirty young men, centered on a fife-and-drum corps, to Yokohama as ‘military music trainees.’ The man who taught them was John William Fenton, bandmaster of the infantry battalion that guarded the British legation.

Unfamiliar staff notation, and brass instruments sounded with the breath. The daily practice can hardly have been easy, yet they are said to have mastered the basics of wind music in a short span. This group, later called the ‘Satsuma Band,’ is remembered as the starting point of a Western-style military band made up of Japanese players. To think that, in the very midst of the turmoil of the Restoration, there were young men who took up the bugle rather than the sword, is to be struck anew by how swiftly the age was turning.

And the story of this military band, unexpectedly, comes to be tied to a symbol of the nation. Fenton is said to have suggested that Japan, too, needed an anthem-like piece to be played on ceremonial occasions, and he volunteered to compose one himself. The words of an old poem, ‘Kimigayo’ ― said by some to derive from the strains of the Satsuma biwa ― were chosen, and Fenton is said to have set them to music. In 1870, this first ‘Kimigayo’ is recorded to have been performed before Emperor Meiji by the Satsuma Band. Yet some felt this melody did not sit easily with Japanese ears, and it was later reworked. The origins of the anthem are told in several versions; it was not settled in a single stroke.

Izawa Shuji and the First Melody to Flow Through the Classroom

If the military band was the sound of ceremonies and the army, another great current began in the classrooms of children. At its center stood the educator Izawa Shuji. In the early Meiji years, Izawa is said to have studied abroad in the United States under Luther Whiting Mason, known as a music educator. Convinced that singing nurtured sensibility and held the power to shape a people, he set out, after returning home, to root music lessons in Japan’s schools as well.

In 1879, at Izawa’s urging, the Ministry of Education set up the ‘Music Investigation Committee,’ an institution for the study of music education. Around the following year his teacher Mason was invited to Japan, and the work is said to have gathered momentum. The question laid before them was a very hard one. Should Western music be taught just as it was, or should Japan’s own ancient music form the foundation? The answer came to rest in the direction of a ‘blend of East and West.’ Borrowing Western scales and notation while drawing on Japanese words and feeling for the lyrics and the mood ― the crystallization of that search was the school song.

In 1881, the first volume of the ‘Collection of Elementary School Songs,’ said to be Japan’s first music textbook in staff notation, was published. By around 1884 three volumes had been compiled, and this song collection is said to have held some ninety pieces in all. What is intriguing is where those melodies came from. According to research, more than half of the included pieces are said to have been foreign melodies drawn from German and American school materials. In other words, many of the ‘Japanese school songs’ that children learned in the classroom were, traced to their source, foreign tunes carrying Japanese lyrics.

From Borrowed Melodies to Songs of Their Own

Setting Japanese words to foreign melodies was not merely a makeshift device. When familiar words rode atop the Western scale, people are said to have found in them a kind of feeling they had not known before. In time the school song spread beyond adaptations of foreign pieces into creations by Japanese hands. School songs that sang of the turning seasons, the scenery of one’s home village, and the joy of learning were hummed across generations, and not a few of them linger even now in the depths of our memory.

The seeds sown in this age sprouted beyond the classroom as well. Players raised in the military bands came in time to display their skill at concerts and ceremonies, widening the circle of those who studied Western music. Children who learned staff notation in the schools grew up to become bearers of the new music, or ardent listeners. The Meiji era was still a time when Western music was a learning handed down ‘from above,’ not yet an amusement people enjoyed freely. And yet the soil was surely being tilled.

So Meiji Japan, little by little, made its own the foreign resonance the Black Ships had brought ― as the sound of the army, and as the song of the classroom. The young man of Satsuma who learned the bugle and the schoolchild who wrote out staff notation may not yet have known what they were beginning. Yet the path by which music opened from the privilege of a few into something anyone could touch was surely drawn in this age. Before long, that sound would leap beyond the frame of classroom and ceremony. In the next age, a black, gleaming disc was about to carry song into the very midst of people’s daily lives.