Tango in Japan: Cosmopolitanism beyond the West

Why do Japanese people love tango? Starting with this question, which the author frequently received while working as a tango violinist in Argentina, Tango in Japan reveals histories and ethnographies of tango in Japan dating back to its first introduction in the 1910s to the present day. While initially brought to Yokohama by North American tango dancers in 1914, tango’s immediate popularity in Japan quickly compelled many Japanese performers and writers to travel to Argentina in search of tango’s “origin” beginning in the 1920s. Many Japanese musicians, dancers, aficionados, and the wider public have, since then, approached tango as a new vehicle of expression, entertainment, and academic pursuit. The sounds of tango provided comfort and a sense of hope to many during the most turbulent years of the twentieth century, carving out distinctive characteristics of contemporary Japanese tango culture. Bypassing the West-East axis of understanding cultural transmission, Tango in Japan uncovers the processes of attraction, rejection, and self-transformation, illuminating the tension of cosmopolitan endeavors away from the Euro-American West.

Based on Asaba’s field and archival work undertaken in both Japanese and Spanish languages in Japan and Argentina across two decades, and drawing on her own background as a tango violinist who performed as a member of tango orchestras in both countries, the discussions move between historical and ethnographic narratives, offering a comprehensive account of tango culture as it emerged in the history of a Japan-Argentina connection. Serving as the first in-depth work on the Japan-Argentina musical relationship, Tango in Japan tells a story that reflects the modern transformations of Japan and Argentina, and the global historical backdrops surrounding both countries.

• Yuiko Asaba, Author

  Yuiko Asaba is lecturer in music at SOAS University of London. She has worked as a violinist in tango orchestras in Argentina and Japan.

• In this book, Asaba firmly vanquishes any exoticizing interpretation of tango in Japan, but also shows how the history and institutionalization of tango in Japan adheres to similar structures in other areas of the arts. Her analysis places something as seemingly superfluous as tango within a larger narrative about the experience and meaning of modernity in Japan, showing how participatory popular culture and the ‘middlebrow’ aesthetic space occupied by tango in Japan contributes to larger forces in social life and history.
  —Morgan James Luker, Reed College