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Working Words: New Approaches to Japanese Studies

Title
Ongaku, Onkyō / Music, Sound

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https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9451p047

Author
Hosokawa, Shuhei

Publication Date
2012-04-20

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University of California
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Ongaku, Onkyō / Music, Sound

Shuhei Hosokawa

Introduction

Ongaku (music) is a word that underwent a great transformation in the process of

modernization. This article will illustrate a lexical history of this word in order to grasp

how the conceptualization of what John Blacking has termed “humanly organized sound”

differed between pre-modern and modern Japan.

The word consists of two characters, 音 (on or oto, sound) and 楽 (gaku, a species

of human sound expression). It is documented in one of the oldest books in Japanese,

Hitachinokuni Fūdoki (History and Geography of the Hitachi Region), compiled in 713.

Since the Japanese phonetic scripts had not yet been invented, the text was written

exclusively in Chinese ideograms, resulting in endless controversies among scholars on

how to read it. While one annotator reads the two characters in question as utamai (song

and dancing), another chooses mononone (sound of things, sound of instruments).1 Both

of these are vernacular words concerning sound.

1
Kikkawa Eishi, “„Ongaku‟ to iu Yōgo to sono Shūhen” (on the term of “ongaku” and its related topics),
Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku Ongakugakubu Nenshi, vol. 2, 1975, 37-62. I will consult it throughout the
following section. See also Hirano Kenji, “Nihon ni oite Ongaku towa Nanika” (what is ongaku in Japan?),
in Gamō Satoaki et al. ed. Nihon no Ongaku Ajia no Ongaku: 1 Gainen no Keisei, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,
1988, 17-38. On the concept of “humanly organized sound,” see John Blacking, How Musical Is Man,
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973, chapter 1.
 2

Like many non-European cultures, before contact with the West Japan had no all-

embracing term referring to any humanly organized sound, religious or secular, vocal or

instrumental, aristocratic or plebian, solo or group, vernacular or non-vernacular, national

or foreign. Instead of the generic term, Japanese used specific genre names.2 The lack of

lexical equivalents for “music” can be explained by the socio-cultural dividing of

“musicking” practices according to class, use, instrument, and school (ryūha).3 There

were no common notations, terminologies, spaces, or teaching and performing

institutions. This institutional separation made the world of individual genres almost

self-contained. Without the cognitive power of an all-inclusive concept, Buddhist chant

and Shintoist ensemble remained only functional in their religious context, while the nō

music of the samurai class could not be discussed in the same terminology used for the

shamisen genres of the plebian class. Japanese music historiography is more a bundle of

parallel developments of distinct genres and schools than the kind of dynamic succession

of stylistic change that characterizes music in the West.4

The written word that is today read as ongaku first designated foreign (Chinese)

music around the eighth century. Jesuits as well as Dutch traders (sixteenth to nineteenth

century) used it as a translation for “music,” though the word hardly entered everyday

language until the Meiji government launched Western-oriented music education in the

2
Western concepts of genre do not necessarily correspond to the vernacular classification of Japanese
music (shumoku). Here I use the term of “genre” for convenience.
3
The term “musicking” is taken from Christopher Small.
4
Kikkawa Eishi, Nihon Ongaku no Seikaku, Tokyo: Ongakuno Tomosha, 1974, 19ff.
 3

1880s. Although unnoticed by Meiji intellectuals, the epistemological gap between the

foreignness implied in the vernacular conceptualization and the humanism and

abstraction in the Western one was immense. Modern education has today successfully

established the equivalence of ongaku and music. Yet, in recent years the concept of

music/ongaku has become obsolete for some contemporary electronic improvisational

artists, who redefine their sonic artifacts simply and polemically as onkyō (sound, the

sonic). Following an examination of the semantic formation and transformation of

ongaku in the process of modernization, I will thus examine the circumstances of its

annihilation.

A Foreign Sound

According to the music historian Kikkawa Eishi, the word that can be read as “ongaku”

appeared for the first time in the official history Shoku Nihongi (794-97). Kikkawa

presumes that the ongaku in this national history designates the music of the imperial

court and Buddhist temples, namely music from China and the Korean peninsula as

distinct from indigenous songs and dances (utamai). Kikkawa believes that the word

ongaku rarely entered into even aristocratic parlance. He adds that the two-character

word in question appeared in a Chinese chronicle dated B.C. 239, but that it was merely a

juxtaposition of two characters on (yin in Chinese; sound of voices and things belonging

to the lower social strata) and gaku (yue, sound of instruments, practiced by the upper
 4

strata), which may have resulted in the sense of “vocal and instrumental, upper and lower

sounds.” The Japanese ongaku emerged around the Kamakura period as a substitute for

gaku, since Japanese literati historically preferred two-character terms to one-character

ones, occasionally inventing combinations of characters almost non-existent in China.

The word ongaku, however, remained on the margins of Japanese vocabulary.

During the Edo period there was not a single book among the numerous publications on

the instruments, anthologies of lyrics, and other music-related works that used the word

ongaku in its title. Instead of ongaku, the word 音曲 ongyoku, which consisted of

characters meaning “sound” and “tune,” was usually used to refer mainly to shamisen

music, that is to say, popular music. Ongyoku, however, was not as inclusive a concept as

music because it usually excluded religious genres, lower-class (rural) songs, children‟s

songs, and other genres.

One of the rare contexts in which the term was current in the Edo period was in

kabuki backstage music. Theater musicians used ongaku to refer to certain sound effects

used specifically for scenes at Buddhist temples, for the appearance of a heavenly lady of

Chinese legend, and other special scenes. It was a gagaku-flavored sound (gagaku being

the ancient music of the imperial court imported from the continent). In other words,

ongaku was almost exclusively associated with foreign sound over the centuries, though

the term was a sort of technical term deployed among specialists. The lexical connection

of ongaku with gagaku is also evidenced by the first book title using the word: Ongaku
 5

ryakkai (Brief notes on ongaku), published in 1868 by the Gagaku-kyoku (Gagaku

Department of the Ministry of Imperial Affairs), which deals exclusively with gagaku.

The Western Impact on Ongaku

The oldest Japanese-European language dictionary, Vocabvlario da Lingoa de Iapam com

a Declaração em Portvgves (1603), has an entry reading, “Vongacu. quanguen: song, or

music together with musical instruments.” It suggests that at least for Western

lexicographers the Japanese word ongaku had certain currency and that it was almost

synonymous with kangen, a Chinese word (guan xian) for orchestra found in Heian-

period Japanese literature. A contemporary Spanish dictionary (Vocabvlario de Iapon

Decalarado Primero en Portvgves por los Padres de la Compañia de Iesvs de Aquel

Reyno, y Agora en Castellano en el Colegio de Santo Thomas de Manila, 1630, Manila)

kept this translation. Dutch-Japanese dictionaries compiled during the Edo period,

following the Portuguese and Spanish precedents, translated musiek as ongaku (for

example, Haruma Wakai, or W.T. Halma Nederduits Woordenboek, 1796). This lexical

correspondence was taken over by the earliest English-Japanese dictionary, Eiwa Taiyaku

Shūchin Jisho (1862). The transparent relationship between (Western) music and ongaku

was thus becoming established as Western-Japanese language contact strengthened.

The word ongaku entered into common vocabularies beginning in the 1870s

through bureaucratic documents related to the inauguration of the school curriculum.

 6

Knowing that primary schools in the West had singing classes, the Ministry of Education

mandated an officer to investigate them in Boston. Upon the officer‟s return, the Ministry

laid plans to establish the Institute for Music Research in Tokyo (1879), which later

became the Tokyo Music School (1888), the premier conservatory in the country.5 One of

the first tasks of Meiji cultural leaders was to formulate a concept of ongaku modeled

after the Western concept of music. Ongaku often denoted simply Western music. Many

publications by the staff of the Institute for Music Research and Tokyo Music School

were titled ongaku-something, and discussed Western methods of teaching singing, how

to play Western instruments, the virtue of Western music and other issues concerning

Western music. By contrast, contemporary journals specializing in Japanese music were

titled Kabuongyoku (1907-1909) and Hōgaku (1915-1920). It seems that the editors felt

uncomfortable with the word ongaku.6 The semantic contradiction between literal

meaning and common usage suggests the difficulty of including the traditional genres in

the concept of music/ongaku.

Ongaku‟s association with the West continued to imbue the word with highbrow

connotations. In his 1922 expedition to Taiwan, the ethnomusicologist Tanabe Hisao

asked a local Japanese officer if the aboriginals had ongaku. The officer‟s reply was

5
See Luciana Galliano, Yogaku: Japanese Music in the Twentieth Century, trans. by Martin Mayes,
London: Scarecrow, 2002.
6
The former (kabuongyoku) is a term embracing the shamisen, koto, shakuhachi and the related vocal and
theatrical genres popular in the Edo period (combination of kabu, “singing and dancing”, and ongyoku,
“sound and tune”) while the latter (hōgaku) is a Meiji coinage whose referents usually overlap with Edo
music, though its literal meaning is “our country‟s music.”
 7

categorical: “they have songs but no ongaku.”7 As an ethnomusicologist, Tanabe of

course conceived the aboriginal sound expressions as ongaku, yet the officer did not. For

him ongaku was exclusively connected with the civilized (and instrumental sound).

Episodes like this reveal the discrepancy between scholars‟ and ordinary people‟s

conceptualizations of ongaku and show how Western music was a paradigm for ongaku

in many people‟s minds.

“Pre-music”: Takemitsu Tōru and the Aesthetic of the Non-developmental

“Pre-music (ongaku izen)”: this was the review the young Takemitsu Tōru (1930-96)

received for his first public appearance in 1950 (December 12, 1950, Tokyo Shinbun).

The music critic Yamane Ginji‟s negation of Takemitsu‟s Lento in Due Movimenti is

probably the best-known statement in the whole body of criticism on Takemitsu. This

work for solo piano was once lost yet “recomposed from memory” in 1989 with the new

title of Litany. The two movements of Lento/Litany show little consequential dynamism

or contrast (like fast and slow movements, development of shared motifs, variations on a

theme), but flow without orientation.8

The work begins with a single sustained tone in pianissimo that is followed by a

melodic figure in unstable rhythmic patterns with triplets and pauses. Unless they pay

7
Kikkawa, “Ongaku toiu…”, op.cit., 58.
8
To what degree the recomposition is faithful to the original is a matter of conjuncture. See Peter Burt, The
Music of Tōru Takemitsu, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, 28ff; Konuma Jun‟ichi,
Takemitsu Tōru: Oto, Kotoba, Imêji (Takemitsu Tōru: sound, word, and image), Tokyo: Seidosha, 27.
 8

close attention, listeners will miss the first note that emerges from the silence. For a critic

attuned to German music, Takemitsu‟s work was too static and monotonous to be called

music. “Pre-music” was the ultimate sentence with which to exile the work from the

garden of art.

The bleak phrase of an authoritative critic, despite the disappointment it caused

the composer, unintentionally pointed out the essence of Takemitsu‟s aesthetic. For

Yamane, the suffix izen (“prior to”) implied “less than” (ika) but Takemitsu elaborated an

aesthetic in opposition to this: the quality and complexity of each note was more

significant than the syntactic organization of a series of notes. In Lento/Litany the

composer, who was not yet established, showed what would prove to be his lifetime

penchant for the decaying sound shape, for the slow indefinite flow of a sound bloc, and

for slowly changing tone colors. He seems to make a step toward the primordial state of

sound, music before music, or sound-making before music.

About twenty years later, he articulated his quest for the primordial in an essay

titled “A Stammerer‟s Manifesto” (Kitsuonsha sengen).9 In this allegorical essay,

stammering is not a clinical malfunctioning of the vocal organs but a metaphysical

“revolutionary song.” It is a return to the act of pronunciation prior to the point at which

9
Takemitsu Tōru Chosakushū (writings of Takemitsu Tōru), vol. 1, Shinchōsha, Tokyo, 2000, 68-88. I once
interpreted Takemitsu‟s poetics of primordial language through the lens of Octavio Paz (The Bow and the
Lyre, The Grammarian Monkey) and J. M. G. Le Clézio (Hai). See Hosokawa, “Mekishikofū Takemitsu
Tōru” (Takemitsu Tōru a la mexicana), Various Authors, Ongaku no Techō: Takemitsu Tōru, Tokyo:
Seidosha, 1981, 150-54.
 9

semantic communication intervenes in language. The stammerer, in his metaphysics,

needs heavy bodily investment to pronounce each phonetic element, and his act of

voicing a word is never repeated. To be precise, the same word is pronounced in hundreds

of ways that slightly differ one from another. This represents a jump from routine

enunciation based on the communication of meaning to primordial vocal delivery based

on bodily action. The stammerer is keen to the discrepancy between the signification and

the word, and sublimates it to bodily enunciation. The language pronounced by the

stammerer therefore has a body. When stammered, the superficial meaning of language is

decomposed and the “naked meaning” emerges from beneath. Stammered language then

comes closest to the truth.

Takemitsu‟s aesthetic of the non-developmental is clearly summarized in his oft-

quoted essay titled “One Sound” (1969). It was written as a footnote to his compositions

for Japanese traditional instruments (Eclipse, November Steps). In this essay, he makes an

explicit contrast between the structure-oriented aesthetic of Western music and the sound-

oriented one of Japanese music. What he sought was more the sound-event: the sound-

occurrence rather than the sound-structure. “One sound” from a Japanese instrument is

more than a note in a larger structure, he asserted; it is complete in itself and connected

more with the absence of sound than with other serial sounds; it belongs to Nature rather

than the shallow “originality” of a single composer:

 10

The sounds of a single stroke of the biwa plectrum or a single breath

through the shakuhachi can so transport our reason because they are of
extreme complexity; they are already complete in themselves. Just one
such sound can be complete in itself, for its complexity lies in the
formulation of ma, an unquantifiable metaphysical space (duration) of
dynamically tensed absence of sound. For example, in the performance of
Nō, the ma of sound and silence does not have an organic relation for the
purpose of artistic expression. Rather, these two elements contrast sharply
with one another in an immaterial balance.10

Here the composer suggests a passage from music to sound, from sound to silence, from

virtuosity to anonymity, and from structure to Nature. In this aesthetic thought, silence is

as polysemic, complicated and infinitely vital as sound. Sound makes silence as

expressive and meaningful as the sound intended by the composer and performed by the

player. Ma (silence, interval, timing) has been “perceived as a space made up of infinite

inaudible but vibrant sounds, as the equal of individual complex audible sounds.” In

relation to ma, “sounds themselves have no pre-eminence of expression” and “move

toward an unnameable point beyond the personal,” that is Nature. As a Japanese

composer with Western training, Takemitsu‟s direction was less to express an illusory

individuality by novel techniques than to “return to a condition of equality with

nothingness.”

The references to ma and shizen (Nature) in “One Sound” may appear banal to

today‟s readers, yet few Japanese composers had discussed them clearly before

Takemitsu (Mayuzumi Toshirō was one exception). In fact, the concept of ma was
10
Takemitsu Tōru, “One Sound” (translated by Hugh de Ferranti), Contemporary Music Review, 1994, vol.
8/2, 3-4.
 11

“aestheticized” from the 1960s when the zen-influenced interpretation or (self-)

mystification of Japanese culture became popular among those who had started

questioning the superiority of Western culture. Ma thus became one of the most recurrent

tropes in the discourse on Japan‟s particularity by Japanese and non-Japanese alike.

Onkyō: No Music, (Almost) No Sound

Takemitsu‟s quest for the primordial state of music, or the sounding before structured

“music,” was unexpectedly taken up just after his death by Japanese underground

improvisers—in spite of a clear distance between them in modes of expression, audience,

performance spaces, and instruments. These improvisers usually play in small galleries

and rooms, creating sound with electronic devices. For average concert music and

popular music listeners, their performances are likely to appear as “pre-music” because of

the lack of perceivable sonic units appropriate for the current concept of “music.” Their

performance was tentatively categorized as the “sound” or onkyō.

Throughout the twentieth century the semantic territory of music has been

constantly challenged and contested by experimental artists. Among several options to

label the new sound productions in Japan toward the end of the century, onkyō became

the most salient. Like the majority of genre names, no explicit agreement on the meaning

has been reached, but the disagreement itself has made the term viable. Most members of

the onkyō scene, if one can speak of such a thing, know the elusiveness of the genre and
 12

prefer to be unlabeled. Very few users of the word onkyō believe in its stability and clear-

cut definition. For all the distrust in the genre name, naming has the advantage of

reflecting coherently upon a cohort of performers otherwise disparate.

This word consists in the two kanji characters: 音 (oto, on, the first character of

ongaku) and 響 (kyō, hibiki). Both characters signify sound in general but the latter

means more specifically “to transmit the vibration of sound by means of air; to move

something by vibration.”11 In other words, it refers to the vibration of air and its

consequences (echo, reverberation). The word onkyō is composed of the coupling of two

almost-synonymous characters and denotes literally and redundantly “sound and

vibration.” The word was not used in Japanese writing before the Meiji period. It was

Western-trained physicists who adopted it for the translation of acoustics. The first

appearance of onkyō is documented in Butsuri Kaitei (Steps in physics) edited by

Katayama Junkichi and published by the Ministry of Education in 1876. The 1886

Vocabulary of Engineering (Kōgaku Jii, supervised by Kōgaku Kyōkai [Association for

Engineering]), translates “acoustics” as onkyōgaku (study of onkyō).12 In short, onkyō,

unlike ongaku, has an explicit connection with science and technology. It is concerned

with physics rather than with human expression. Onkyō, by definition, is all-inclusive,

without distinction of music or non-music, noise or non-noise.

11
Tōdō Akiyasu, Kanwa Daijiten (grand dictionary of kanji), Gakken, Tokyo, 1980, 1468.
12
See Nihon Kokugo Daijiten (Great Dictionary of Japanese Language), Shōgakkan, Tokyo, 2001 (third
edition).
 13

In 1908, Tanabe Hisao (1883-1984) published Onkyō to Ongaku (Acoustics and

music) under the supervision of Tanaka Shōhei (1862-1945), a student of Helmholtz in

Berlin, the first Japanese scientist to specialize in acoustics, who was also famous for his

invention of an organ in genuine tuning. Tanabe, who graduated from the Department of

Physics, Tokyo Imperial University, later became one of the most prolific Japanese music

scholars before the war. Tanabe‟s book first outlines the basic notions of acoustics such as

wavelength, frequency, and auditory sense. These are applied in the second part of the

book to the mechanisms of Western instruments. The third and final part briefly

introduces the fundamentals of Western music theory (scale, rhythm, harmony,

dissonance/consonance, form, composition). In Tanabe‟s words, music art has subjective

(aesthetic) and objective (physical) aspects. Without comprehension of the latter, the

former cannot be fully grasped. Ongaku is structured from onkyō. The book was intended

to bridge Western science and art, the two Meiji novelties.

It is already a mystery who first applied onkyō or onkyō-ha (the acoustics scene,

circle or orientation) to certain new trends in Japanese improvisation. Some attribute it to

an owner of the underground record shop Paripekin in Shibuya, Tokyo, around the mid-

1990s.13 Like “J-pop” (Japanese pop), which was coined at HMV Shibuya around 1990

to call public attention to the rock/pop music made by Japanese artists, onkyō was

13
Nagata Kazunao‟s statement. Nagata, Otomo Yoshihide and Nakahara Masaya (dialogue), “‟Gendai
ongaku‟ kara tooku hanarete”, Yuriika, March 1998, 202.
 14

presumably put in use first by a record shop. In onkyō, new trends that were difficult to

categorize either as music or as noise finally found a convenient name. Because of its

phonetic freshness and semantic openness, the word spread rapidly.

One of the principal venues for onkyō artists was Off Site (2000-2005), a tiny

room in an old apartment building in Tokyo. Mainly due to spatial restrictions,

performances had to be kept as quiet as possible and this acoustic imperative gave rise to

an aesthetic of quasi-silence. One of Off Site‟s regular groups was Filament (a duo of

Ōtomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M). Filament‟s performance consists in a sine wave

generated by a sampler and the dim sound/noise generated by electric/electronic

apparatuses including turntable and stylus, CD player, and MD player without discs.

Filament refuses the emotional uplifting and communicative exchange of other

improvisational forms (free jazz and psychedelic music, for example) and “unmakes”

sound so extremely that casual listening will not capture anything (though the drone of

the sine wave is almost omnipresent and the occasional click and hum noises can be

perceived if one is very attentive to the sound). According to Ōtomo, who respects

Takemitsu as one of his numerous and eclectic sources for inspiration, the musician is not

the medium of emotion or individuality expressed in sound but an “impotent someone

who makes sound.”

Filament attentively provides a foreground sound almost indistinguishable from

background sound, exploiting the electronic apparatuses in their primal state, or in the
 15

state unloaded by the disc. Filament goes a step beyond the turntablists who invented a

new function for an instrument usually used for playing the analog record. The aesthetic

behind Filament is not far from that of ideal sound of the shakuhachi explained in

Takemitsu‟s “One Sound”: the sound “which the wind draws from a grove of rotted and

dried bamboo.” Instead of the wind blowing through a grove of bamboo, Filament

produces the sound made by the physical vibration of the speaker units transduced by the

electrons dancing in the circuit. This purely electronic and mechanical sound is probably

shizen (Nature) for them. The sound volume is so imperceptible that the clicking of a

wristwatch or the hum of an air duct can occasionally be perceived, sometimes to the

extent that it becomes disturbing. In other words, the audience pays acute attention to the

existence of all sound in the performance space. In the process of capturing the minimum

volume of sound deliberately made or incidentally generated, the listeners submit

themselves to “deep listening” (to use Pauline Oliveros‟ term) of acoustic space.

Crucial for their performance, in Ōtomo‟s explanation, is not the resulting sound

itself but the acoustic condition of the space where the performers and listeners are. The

sound they make is not always what the listeners listen to, and it is the latter that Filament

is more concerned with. For Ōtomo, none of the existing concepts of music making such

as composition, improvisation, performance, playing, or composition-in-improvisation

are appropriate to define Filament.14

14
On the detailed discussion on Filament, see Sasaki Atsushi, Tekunoizu Materiarizumu (technoise
 16

The aesthetic core of onkyō lies, according to the perceptive critic Sasaki Atsushi,

in the priority of texture over construction, listening over performance, and sensation of

the sounding world over the sound of a tangible source. To paraphrase, the performers are

more attentive to the timbre of each moment than to the cohesive or non-cohesive

structuring of sound along a temporal axis, concentrating on the whole sounding

environments rather than on the sound intentionally made for the sake of expressing their

subjectivity. The most admirable thing for onkyō, according to Sasaki, is recognition of

the fact that sound exists in our sensory world rather than the identification of particular

sounds as better or worse, more or less beautiful than others. It is easy for us to recall the

aesthetic after John Cage‟s 4’33’’, La Monte Young‟s eternal drone, Stockhausen‟s

electro-acoustic collage, and, for that matter, Takemitsu‟s “one sound.”

From the beginning, the category of onkyō was applied to non-Japanese acts. One

music critic, for example, calls Throbbing Gristle‟s 1986 album TG1 its distant precursor.

For him, onkyō requires a “hard listening” (Throbbing Gristle‟s slogan) that contrasts

with the “easy listening” of ambient music. Onkyō-ha, in his conceptualization, is

characterized by the cut up, collage, sampling, dense, tense and harsh texture of disparate

sound fragments, and “claustrophilia” (like John Wall‟s FRCTUUR, 1997) in opposition

to smooth sound flow, relaxed mood, and “agoraphilia” (as in Brian Eno‟s Music for

materialism), Seidosha, Tokyo, 2001, 119-125, 134-162.

 17

Airports, 1979).15 This interpretation is only one of many ways of understanding onkyō.

In the Japanese press there are also the Chicago onkyō-ha (Jim O‟Rourke, etc.) and the

Argentine onkyō-ha (Fernando Cabusacki, etc.). The arbitrariness of terminology here is

quite obvious.

The music critic Kitazato Yoshiyuki questions whether local specificity is relevant

in the aesthetic of onkyō-ha, which is to him a transnational coeval movement without

hegemonic center and common direction. At the same time, however, he also recognizes

unique qualities in local Japanese musicians not found in French, American or Italian

improvisers. He does not explain what this „Japaneseness‟ is, and he is wary of the

implied nationalism of his statement. He is conscious of the contradiction between the

singular aesthetic of experimentalists around the world and aesthetics based on locality or

the nationality. Kitazato‟s sense of Japaneseness does not draw on mysterious traditional

aesthetic categories such as ma but on the highly hybridized life in contemporary Japan.

Asked by a French critic about the influence of the Japanese tradition, Ōtomo replied that

so-called tradition is often a recent invention and that he had had no direct contact with or

knowledge of it in his past (he only studied it through books and recordings). The so-

called music tradition, he continues, became familiar to him largely through the filter of

Japanese pop songs in the 1960s that mixed and transformed folk ingredients. In a similar

sense we may note that Takemitsu, having grown up with Western classical music, French

15
Igarashi Gen, “Ambient/Onkyōha”, Yuriika, March 1998, 246-47.
 18

chanson and jazz in his adolescence, only came to traditional Japanese music when he

consciously took it up in his thirties.

According to Kitazato‟s critique, the terminological abuse of onkyō derives from

the fact that it was initially promoted as a newly emerging genre. In 2003, he recognized

that onkyō-ha was rushing to two extremes: in the inclusive (maximalist) definition, it

had come to refer to any electronic/improvisational practices (any music/sound is

physically onkyō); in the exclusive (minimalist) one, it only denoted the Off Site artists.

The explosion of onkyō-ha in music journalism implied for him the “loss of orientation in

the limitlessly expanding globalization” and a “reality and perspective that have

minimum depth” in today‟s totally disoriented world.16 The chaos surrounding onkyō is

therefore homologous to the messy world from which the term and its sonic referents

were born.

The foreign press soon adopted the Romanized term onkyō to designate new

trends in the Japanese experimental music scene. This may have resulted from the

frequent international tours of Japanese artists and the English-language cyberspace

shared by the worldwide scene. Onkyō as a new word may be catchy for those who are

impatient to know about the Tokyo scene. It was circulated abroad not as an alternative

for ongaku, but as a new cryptic brand coming from the Far East. Just as borrowed

16
Kitazato‟s front-page columns in News Ombaroque, vol. 56 (February-March 2003) to vol. 58 (June
2003).
 19

katakana words do in Japanese, it packages and conveys an exotic touch overseas. Such

terminological exportation usually stimulates Japan‟s cultural nationalism because it

proves the universal appeal of national artifacts that are usually regarded as viable only

domestically. Manga, anime and butoh are among the recent examples of this

transnational spread of Japanese cultural forms with original tags. Can onkyō achieve a

triumph such as anime and manga have achieved? Probably not. For its magical power

has already declined within a decade of its birth and it has enjoyed limited commercial

success. What is surprising about onkyō is its extreme ephemerality. As early as 2001,

Ōtomo, who had somehow contributed to the promulgation of the word abroad, refused

the label, probably from an awareness of the Orientalist connotation that arises when a

Japanese word is borrowed in a Western text.17

Two years later the term no longer seemed relevant to the latest sound-making

practices. In the words of Nakamura Toshimaru, another central figure in Japanese onkyō,

“I wouldn‟t use that term myself. It describes too much. I prefer the more neutral words

like improvised or experimental.”18 Onkyō came to denote a certain style (low volume,

electronic devices, anti-climax, relevance of no-sounding sequences, concentration on

timbre, tense stillness, etc.) that meant artistic stagnation for him. The term onkyō was

once accepted for its all-embracing semantic range concerning sound, but within a half

17
Quoted from Otomo‟s interview for the French magazine Revue & Corrigée:
(http://japanimprov.com/yotomo/yotomoj/interviewj01.html, as of October 6, 2005).
18
Quoted from Clive Bell, “Site for Sore Ears”, Wire, July 2003, 44.
 20

decade it became too “descriptive” for him. It is a familiar story that labeling is a concern

of writers and the market, not musicians themselves. Just as many eminent musicians

have rejected the genre names attributed to their performance and preferred to have their

work labeled simply “music,” onkyō performers would rather be labeled by the mode of

sounding practice (improvisation), by their position in the cultural map, or by the

emphasis on process rather than result (experiment). This suggests that “music” is no

longer an appropriate option for self-recognition. Ongaku is dead, but onkyō is dead, too.

What name will be given to those experimental improvisers who are radically cut

off from the existing institutions and who refuse any name? Naming the shrewd is hard to

do for any music/sound critic. Who dares baptize the latest mavericks with a new name

that will sound merely nostalgic in a few years? Judging from the general absence of the

“struggle for meaning” concerning onkyō (Kitazato was among only a few music critics

sensitive to definitions), I sense that the very act of naming is dead. The audience of

experimentalists, having an acute historical consciousness of avant-garde and

underground scenes, is already wise enough to know the futility of a name. The name

onkyō will be kept only in the record shops, which put priority on easy classification for

the utility of consumers regardless of aesthetic justification or the artists‟ self-identity.

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Conclusion

This paper is intended to highlight several moments in Japanese history when the

terminology concerning human sound-making was problematic. From mononone and

utamai in the early written Japanese of the eighth century to onkyō in the early twenty-

first century, several terms have been applied to certain types of sound-making. They are

not always interchangeable, not only because of the different processes of making sound

and the sounds resulting from them, but also because of the different ideas invested in

each regarding the human, performance, and sound.

The word ongaku came from compounding Chinese characters, but the meaning

and usage have been changed in the course of its linguistic travels. Ongaku downplays

the Confucian cosmology implied by the Chinese concept of gaku, while establishing a

new signification of musical “Chineseness.” It is natural that in the tradition of kabuki,

the same word still denoted genres deriving from Chinese music. Despite little currency

in everyday language before Meiji, the word was almost the only option for early Meiji

bureaucrats and educators to translate the Western concept of music.

Ongaku for postwar experimentalists was a yoke, the institutions and conventions

they fought against. The first detractor of Takemitsu assumed that concert “music” should

follow a certain canon. The natural-scientific word onkyō was re-formulated to designate

the semantic terrain outside of institutionalized ongaku with a hope of embracing the

whole or some fringes of ongaku. But the fluidity of the electronic/improvisational scene
 22

has been too rapid and amorphous for words to pin down. The refuting of all labels

reflects the aesthetic habitus of members of the scene, too. The word onkyō was from the

beginning doomed to be short-lived.

How to name humanly organized sound appears to be a matter of trifling concern

compared to the discussion of music/sound itself. Language is, however, not extrinsic but

intrinsic to cultural cognition. The conceptualization of music/sound itself is indeed a key

component in modern European aesthetics. It is through language that one charts the

sounds one hears, performs, dances to, and composes. This essay has shown the

historiographical relevance of conceptualizing music/sound on a generic level. Historians

of Japanese music, regardless of the periods and genres they examine, have to be

conscious of the historicity of the most basic concept of their research, ongaku. To the

extent that they choose to use it, they are forcefully configured, at least in part, by a

Western knowledge system. Ongaku study free from it is not possible. Writing about

ongaku is already part of “translation culture” (to use Kobayashi Hideo‟s term) in a way

similar to writing about bungaku or rekishi.19 The question of translation is therefore

fundamental for any Japanese ongaku historiographer.

19
See Dennis Washburn‟s essay on “Bungaku” in this collection.