Bluegrass Under the Cherry Blossom

[Mulboyne]

The Observer Sunday Magazine runs a regular feature where they find an off-beat classified ad and track down the story behind it. Today's ad featured an American in Chiba looking for bluegrass music playing partners.
Here's the story: A farmboy from Iowa finds the bluegrass big in Japan.

It was time to close a parenthesis in his life, to start over. He had divorced recently. Japan, Jonathan thought, would be a nice place. Besides, it's a good time to be out of the US. It's not that he's not proud to be American; he's just ashamed of what his government does sometimes. So he came to Japan to teach English. He knew the Japanese liked to pick, too. When the great mandolin player Bill Monroe visited in the early Seventies, he sparked a bluegrass craze that's going still...About a month after moving to Japan he was kind of lonely and homesick. So he took his mandolin along to the Ohanami Jam - where musicians sit and play under the falling cherry blossom. What he saw was Japanese; what he heard was American. That lifted his spirits. After that he began to find a place here, and musicians to play with. His American fiance has come to Japan, too, to teach with him. He loves Japan; from the grace and politeness of the people, to the public transport you'd never get at home...more...

[Steve Bildermann]

It was time to close a parenthesis in his life, to start over. He had divorced recently. Japan, Jonathan thought, would be a nice place. Besides, it's a good time to be out of the US. It's not that he's not proud to be American; he's just ashamed of what his government does sometimes.

So he came to Japan to teach English.
He knew the Japanese liked to pick, too. When the great mandolin player Bill Monroe visited in the early Seventies, he sparked a bluegrass craze that's going still.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1429627,00.html

Bill Monroe



Rocky top - the Band

[Mulboyne]

ArkCity.net: Woman finds common ground with musicians from Japan

...Around lunch time on Wednesday, four men from Japan walked into Shirley Booe's "Pickin Parlor" campsite in the Walnut Grove. It was the first time any of the men had been to the festival, to Kansas, or to the United States, she said. Booe said one man, Yusaku Kawai, was fluent in English. "He said he had learned it in Hong Kong," she said. Kawai told Booe that the four of them were told to look her up at the festival. To fully appreciate Booe's story, one has to go back to the 1992 festival. This was the year that she met, through mutual friends from Florida, a Japanese musician named Katsuyuki Miyazaki. He had entered the festival mandolin contest, placing third. It was Miyazaki who told the men to find Booe this year...
...The "Pickin Parlor" camp immediately adopted the men. Booe gave up trying to pronounce their names, so she started introducing them around as her sons; number one son (Kawai); number two son ( Okada); number three son ( Takeuchi); and number four son ( Oka). They, in turn, began calling her, "mom," she said..."It doesn't matter how different we all are or where we live in the world, family is what is most important to all of us," she said...more...

See also FG Thread: Old Time Fiddlin' Mountain Man Mita

[Mulboyne]

Roanoke: Japanese bluegrass - Try it, you might like it

Mixing traditional Japanese music and American bluegrass sounds as appetizing as a plate of sushi and grits. Once you get a taste of it, though, you'll want seconds. Takeharu Kunimoto plays the shamisen, a traditional Japanese stringed instrument, only he plays it kind of like a banjo. He and his band of American bluegrassers, Last Frontier, will bring their Far-East-meets-Appalachia sound to Jefferson Center on Tuesday. Kunimoto's style on the three-stringed shamisen sounds a little like a cross between an old-time tenor banjo and a mandolin. The group surrounds him with bluegrass-style banjo, mandolin, guitar and bass. When Kunimoto takes a solo, such as on his original instrumental, "Appalachian Shamisen," the instrument fits like a high-tenor harmony. "Japanese folk music and American folk music both share that lonesome, mournful sound," said J.P. Mathes, banjo player and chief spokesman for Last Frontier. (Kunimoto speaks some English but isn't totally comfortable with telephone interviews, Mathes said.) "Kunimoto's first instrument was actually the mandolin, so he was a bluegrass player first."

Kunimoto heard bluegrass on a Japanese radio station as a teenager in 1973, and he saw the genre's progenitor, Bill Monroe, during a tour of Japan the next year. Bluegrass has a small but passionate following in Japan, where several festivals bring as many as 100 Japanese bluegrass bands together. "The rhythm and sound were very unique, but I could not exactly understand the words," said Hajime Onuma, a Japanese bluegrass musician who lives in Roanoke and plays bass for a local bluegrass band called New Grass Revue. He also helped promote Last Frontier's upcoming concert. In Japan, he played bass for a band called Stove. "The first time I heard the music was on a radio station in Japan. The sound struck me. Another thing is that it is strictly acoustic. No amplifier is needed just for jamming."

Onuma has known Kunimoto for 20 years. Kunimoto came to the United States in 2003 as part of a cultural exchange program to study in East Tennessee State University's bluegrass program. He met Mathes there, and they formed Last Frontier the next year. The group has toured the United States and Japan and played at the famed CBGB in New York and at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. The group recorded an album, "Appalachian Shamisen," a collection of original and traditional bluegrass songs. The group was also featured on the PBS show "Song of the Mountains." According to Mathes, after a woman in Washington, D.C., saw their performance on that show, she looked up the band's schedule and made a road trip to Marion to see them play live. Kunimoto spends most of his time in Japan, where he is an actor, artist, narrator for Japanese children's films, storyteller and musician. The United States tour will be short, followed by a two-week tour of Japan in early July. "It's the 'Virginia to Tokyo' tour," Mathes said.