Okeikoba: Lesson Places as Sites for Negotiating Tradition in Japanese Music

Abstract

For centuries artistic traditions in Japan have been referred to using the term d??literally or path?a metaphor that conceives of tradition as a process (Cox 2003:51) that artists follow in pursuit of a distant, yet theo retically attainable, goal of artistic perfection (Rohlen and LeTendre 1994:375). While the way of art lives temporarily in the mortal bodies of practitioners who are in a constant state of personal development during their lifetimes, the transmission of the way from master teachers to dedicated students al lows tradition to continue in perpetuity as the way passes from generation to generation. While this conception of the way of art enables tradition to live fully in the present, modern societies generally take a reflexive view of tradition (Giddens 1994) in which tradition is conceived of as something that is distant from the present and even antithetical or hostile to modernity (Shils 1981:7). Nevertheless, artistic traditions in modern society maintain a heritage status as valuable cultural resources in danger of vanishing, thus requiring protection, maintenance, revitalization, and perhaps even reform in order to adapt to modern conditions. Such a reflexive view makes tradition in a modern society something that is negotiable or invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). In Japan, the tension between the living continuity of the way and the need for adaptability to present-day realities plays out in the negotia tions of tradition between teachers and students in the most important site of transmission: the lesson place. This paper examines a few of these sites, located both inside and outside Japan, in order to understand how the way of tradition is negotiated in the modern world between particular individuals in particular locations. Tradition is best understood not as a fixed doctrine imposed from above by elite culture-bearers, but rather as a general process of handing (Williams 1976:269) in which the significance lies more in the action of handing down than in the content that is handed down. This is certainly