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The United States may be the birthplace of jazz — with roots in New Orleans and refined on the stages of New York City — but Tokyo now boasts over 100 live jazz clubs, more than the Big Apple, and Japanese fans buy more jazz recordings than anyone else in the world.
What gives? How did a rules-bound, risk-averse society come to embrace a musical genre that valorizes improvisation and celebrates the unpredictable?
Jazz first arrived in Japan via Filipino and American musicians in the 1920s, buoyed by waves of Westernization that swept through the nation’s Meiji and Taisho eras. But it was abruptly banned as “enemy music” in 1941, when Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor turned America into an enemy overnight.
