Japanese Music

Gagaku, 'elegant music', arrived from China, Korea and other parts of Asia from the fifth to the ninth centuries and was consolidated at the Heian court. It is still performed by the Music Department of the Imperial Household Agency and at major shrines and temples, with instruments such as the shō mouth organ, the double-reed hichiriki, the ryūteki flute, drums and gongs. Bugaku is its dance form.

Buddhist chant (shōmyō) and the music of Noh theatre, with its flute, drums and the chanted utai, belong to the same older layer of Japanese music.

In the Edo period urban music flourished. The shamisen, a three-stringed plucked lute derived from the Okinawan sanshin in the sixteenth century, became the voice of the townspeople's culture, accompanying kabuki, bunraku narration and the songs of geisha. The koto, a long zither with thirteen strings, was developed into a solo and chamber instrument by Yatsuhashi Kengyō in the seventeenth century, whose piece Rokudan no Shirabe is still a standard. The shakuhachi, an end-blown bamboo flute, was played by komusō monks of the Fuke sect of Zen as a spiritual practice.

Min'yō, folk songs tied to work, fishing, festivals and regions, survive in every part of Japan, from the Sōran Bushi of Hokkaido's herring fishermen to the Awa Odori of Tokushima. The Bon dance (bon odori) of summer keeps many local songs alive.

Ensemble drumming (kumi-daiko) on large taiko drums developed as a stage art after the Second World War. The group Kodo, based on Sado Island since 1981, carried it to concert halls worldwide.

Twentieth-century Japanese popular song is called kayōkyoku, a broad term for songs mixing Western harmony and instruments with Japanese melody. Its postwar queen was Misora Hibari, active from childhood in the late 1940s until her death in 1989. In 1963 Sakamoto Kyū's Ue o Muite Arukō, released abroad as Sukiyaki, became the first Japanese song to top the US Billboard chart.

Enka, a sentimental ballad style with vibrato-rich singing, themes of lost love, the harbour, sake and the hometown, and a kimono-clad stage image, split off as its own genre in the late 1960s. The NHK Kōhaku Uta Gassen, a song contest broadcast every New Year's Eve since 1951, has long been a national showcase for both.

In the 1970s and 1980s the new music of singer-songwriters and city pop, polished urban pop influenced by American soft rock and funk, captured the mood of the booming cities; tracks such as Takeuchi Mariya's Plastic Love (1984) found a new global audience online decades later. Yellow Magic Orchestra, formed in 1978 by Hosono Haruomi, Sakamoto Ryūichi and Takahashi Yukihiro, pioneered electronic pop.

The term J-pop spread around 1990. The following decade was the peak of CD sales, with artists such as Utada Hikaru, whose debut album First Love (1999) is among the best-selling albums in Japanese history, and producer-driven acts. Rock bands developed visual kei, a style of flamboyant costume and make-up associated with X Japan and many later bands. Idol groups, from the solo idols of the 1970s and 1980s to large ensembles such as AKB48 (2005), form their own industry built on fan events. Vocaloid software, with the virtual singer Hatsune Miku (2007), and anime songs (anison) are further pillars of the scene.