LAC Forum: Tango in Japan by Dr Yuiko Asaba

“Why do Japanese people love tango so much?” One Argentine musician turned around to ask me this question during a tango orchestra rehearsal in Buenos Aires in 2006. I was living in the vibrant capital city of Argentina, performing as a violinist with the Orquesta Nacional de Música Argentina “Juan de Dios Filiberto.” As I conducted archival and oral historical work while living as a tango musician in Buenos Aires, my background as a Japanese individual inspired many friends and colleagues in Argentina to ask me questions similar to the above: why tango in Japan? These questions were frequently followed by personal stories from tango concert tours that they had undertaken across Japan, or well-known historical narratives they had heard about concerts given in Argentina by Japanese tango musicians, such as Fujisawa Ranko, Abo Ikuo, or Hayakawa Shinpei and the Orquesta Típica Tokio, dating back to the 1950s. Such stories about tango in Japan, together with my embodied experiences of working as a tango violinist in Japan and Argentina, revealed the significance of tango in Japan embedded in the Japan-Argentina musical connections that have bypassed the Euro-American West, dating back from the early twentieth century to the present day.

Tango’s history in Japan, since the 1910s, has entailed multiple processes of attraction, rejection, and self-transformations in the Japan-Argentina connections, shaped by global racial, class, and cultural politics. By analysing these processes, my recently published monograph[1] illuminates historical and ethnographic undercurrents of how Japanese musicians, dancers, aficionados, and the wider public have embraced tango as a new vehicle of expression, entertainment, and academic pursuit since the 1910s. Through the lens of what I call the Cosmopolitan Otherness,[2] this book engages with the Japan-Argentina connections through tango that demonstrate diverse modes of cultural transmission outside the so-called West. The History Seminar presentation that I gave at the Latin American Centre, Oxford, drew on the primary findings of this book. This article derives from the presentation and the conclusion chapter of my monograph.

Introduced in Yokohama in 1914 by North American dancers, tango was widely welcomed as a form of social dancing in Japan, later becoming associated with the “middle culture” in post-World War II Japan, perceived, loved, and performed in the realm that felt close to, but not quite, Western art music: an ongoing phenomenon in Japan. Indeed, Japanese people’s love of tango has always been entangled with the simultaneous processes of legitimization, striving to digest a dance-culture of the “white” Europeans outside the West, accompanied by aspects of Othering. For the dance, many Japanese dance aficionados motivated by national prejudices rejected Argentine tango style from Buenos Aires in the 1930s while legitimizing British tango dance: an ethos that was in effect until the late 1980s. These tensions of Othering involved body politics, wherein the adaptation of the Argentine style of tango dance, seen as being from a “less developed country,” was rejected in its early history in Japan.

Yet the music of Argentine tango from Buenos Aires was embraced enthusiastically from as early as the 1920s, including by the same Japanese dancers who rejected the Argentine style of tango dancing. The prioritization of tango music’s authenticity by looking at Argentina thus proliferated from the late 1920s in Japan, through listening to tango records from Argentina and by Japanese tango enthusiasts travelling to the distant country. In the 1950s, influential tango music aficionados in Japan chose to differentiate tango from “other Latin American musics” that included “indigenous musics,” attempting to carve out an elite status for Argentine

tango music in Japan. This creation of tango music’s identity in Japan as an Argentine but not Latin American music came to occupy a perceived space of “middlebrow culture” in post-World War II Japan. This categorization has had a long-lasting legacy in Japan. Tango music is now performed at Western art concert halls, whilst simultaneously receiving continued prejudice from some Western art music performers and listeners in Japan.

Examining the historical and ethnographic dynamics of tango in Japan, therefore, cannot be undertaken through the simplistic frame of West-East, nor through a Japan-Argentina nexus alone. The prioritization of Argentine tango music’s authenticity in Japan, cultivated historically in phases since the late 1920s, strengthened further the Japan-Argentina relations from only a decade after tango’s first introduction in Japan. Intertwined with the globalized pursuits of “modernization” at the start, the Japan-Argentina connection has cultivated, and continues to transform, Japanese people’s imaginations about Argentina, creating in turn a contemporary “hub” of tango in 2020s Japan. The contested tensions between the “allure” and “danger” of a cosmopolitan Other—the “elegant” and “vulgar” dichotomy which shaped tango’s early reception in Japan—has created, in turn, a cultural space of simultaneously-felt pleasure and denial, creativity, appreciation and academic pursuit that continue to take many people’s imaginations outside the West, and beyond Western art music, in contemporary Japan. The ongoing creations of tango music in Japan is now interlocking with the new modernities of neighboring East Asian countries through inter-regional tango collaborations too.

To be sure, investigating the “why” of tango in Japan reveals its histories as a form of social dancing, listening practice, and academic pursuit, all of which are tangled with the simultaneous processes of allure and rejection. Tango is no longer the mainstream dance-music genre in Japan. Yet the key uniqueness of tango in Japan lies in it being the only non-Euro-American genre that has been adored by many for over a century in Japan, and in the multiple layers of historical tension surrounding such love.

This article, specially written for our LAC FORUM, is based on Dr Yuiko Asaba’s seminar paper presented at the Oxford Latin American History Seminar.  Dr Asaba is a Lecturer (equiv. Assistant Professor) in Music at SOAS University of London. In her research, Yuiko examines aspects of migration, maritime history and globalisation surrounding popular music in and from Japan, with particular focus on Latin American genres. She is the author of the monograph, Tango in Japan: Cosmopolitanism Beyond the West, and has published articles including in the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture and the Cambridge Companion to Tango. Funded by the European Commission, Yuiko is currently developing her next book on Japanese tango performers in Shanghai and Manchuria, 1930s-1940s, and an edited volume on the Asia-Latin America musical relations. Holding a PhD in Music from Royal Holloway, University of London, Yuiko is also a tango violinist and has worked as a member of the Orquesta Nacional de Música Argentina “Juan de Dios Filiberto” in Argentina, and Tango Orchestra Astrorico in Japan.

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