With this year's International Jazz Day concert taking place in Osaka, an East Asian historian (a musician himself) describes how the music came... If you've witnessed a headlining performance from ...

A Hope College professor and his student research team have received support to study how the distinctly American art form of jazz has thrived in Japan for decades. Dr. Robert Hodson, associate ...

In May 2025 Japan welcomed an estimated 3.693 million visitors, marking a surge in global fascination with the country—up 125% (more than double!) compared to a decade ago. Many come for the exquisite ...

The recent natural disasters in Japan, and the scale of the resulting devastation, leave even those of us far outside the country with a sense of sadness and loss. We are bound by humanity, but also ...

The music market in Japan—second only to the U.S. in terms of revenue—generates more than two-billion dollars in sales annually. Enthusiasts and collectors of jazz recordings had long ago discovered ...

“Japanese-influenced listening bars” may be the latest, greatest trend in US bar culture, but their high-end sound systems and even more highfalutin aesthetic draw from a much more humble practice: ...

Andrew Trim was born near Chicago, but in 1988, when he was five years old, his parents, who were missionaries, moved their family to Nagano, Japan. Trim guesses that the six people in his family were ...

Vivacious melodies filled the streets of Yokosuka city for three days as dozens of bands brought their music just outside the home of the U.S. 7th Fleet. Dulcet vocals, dynamic saxophone solos and ...

Courtesy of login.jp (“archiving the Japanese experience through music”), a jazz jungle mix by Takuya Nakamura, play ...

Given just days to pack up after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 in February 1942 empowered the military to detain and relocate Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, ...

So how did this music get to Japan in the first place? How did the island nation which fought the U.S. in WWII come to embrace an art form that originated in black America? And does the history of ...