Nakamura concedes that traditional shamisen can be prohibitively expensive – he paid more than $2,000 for his first one – and are notoriously difficult to maintain. The trio also have plans to launch an online shamisen course. He now performs regularly and has partnered with KiKi a female tsugaru shamisen duo, to organise overseas concerts. “I really felt it was going to be the year of the shamisen,” said Nakamura, who gave up his office job two years ago to play professionally. The Canadian had been booked to perform in Japan and overseas every month this year until Covid-19 came along. It’s already becoming an old person’s instrument.”īut Norm Nakamura, a professional tsugaru shamisen player, believes that reports of the instrument’s decline are exaggerated. “The shamisen will never disappear, but it will be confined to a small number of people. “Traditional instruments have lost their appeal because the Japanese ear is no longer receptive to that kind of music,” Tanaka said. More recently, the instrument was granted a boost from the world music movement of the 1990s and, in the early 2000s, the popularity of the shamisen-thrashing Yoshida Brothers. He looks back fondly on the 1970s, when the public broadcaster NHK regularly aired TV and radio programmes about Japanese music, leading to a boom in interest in traditional instruments and minyo folk songs. Takafumi Tanaka, editor of the Hogaku Journal, a publication dedicated to traditional Japanese music, attributed the decline in shamisen sales to a national identity crisis. He believes the instrument’s best chance of survival rests on tsugaru shamisen, a relatively recent genre that combines improvisation with a powerful sound and fleet fingerwork, rather than the more genteel melodies that waft through the geisha teahouses of Kyoto. Industry data shows that Japan produced 14,500 shamisen in 1970, but by 2017 the number had plummeted to just 1,200. Young people seem more interested in western instruments like the guitar, the violin and the piano.” “Lots of players are in their 70s, but there are very few under, say, 40 or 50. “We used to make 800 a year, but now it’s closer to 300. “I don’t make anywhere near as many shamisen as I used to,” said the 80-year-old, who took over the business from his father in his late teens. While the coronavirus-enforced cancellation of live performances was a factor, the struggle to keep the shamisen tradition alive began long before the pandemic. In May, when he didn’t receive a single order, Otaki told his 14 employees he had no choice but to close the business. But the market is shrinking, and the sound of an instrument many associate with a “lost” Japan is itself at risk of becoming a cultural relic. Since it was founded 135 years ago, Tokyo Wagakki has come to dominate Japan’s shamisen scene, accounting for more than half of all the instruments produced in the country.
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