I came across Japanthem, a book written by Jillian Marshall and published in 2022, in my local library and decided to borrow it. The main draw for me was the topic of Japanese music, which is mentioned several times on the cover, not to mention the title contains the word “anthem”, which is a reference to music.
The first twenty pages or so comprise an introduction (by Steven F. Pond), and the first chapter “Toward a Public Intellectualism”. I found both of these somewhat boring, especially since they were mostly about academia with little discussion about Japan or Japanese music, though I guess those interested in research might enjoy reading these parts.
But I kept reading and soon got to “On Noise”, a wonderfully interesting chapter. Marshall does a great job of talking about her experiences in Japan in an amusing way, using her wealth of experience and lots of accurate descriptions. I especially appreciated how she inserted Japanese phrases here and there (although I already knew a majority of these, I did learn a few things, and it was good to review the rest).
The next chapter, “Hate”, is about the author’s Love/Hate relationship with Japan. While I enjoyed this chapter overall, parts of it are basically the author taking out her frustrations with Japan in a very emotional way, and reading those left a bitter taste in my mouth. The details about China were interesting, though not related to Japan except as a point of comparison. The author basically admits to venting at one point, and I wasn’t expecting that sort of perspective from an academic researcher.
The content immediately after (until around page 65) was a bit less personal than the “Hate” chapter, and frankly there was a good amount of interesting culture that I was unfamiliar with.
Though I enjoyed much of what I read to this point (except for the introduction and first chapter), I decided to put the book down and stop reading. The first reason was that, while I found the cultural parts interesting, I’m the type of person who wants to experience those myself instead of learning through someone’s second hand experiences. If I’m going to read a travelogue or opinion piece on a country, I’d prefer to pick a country I haven’t been to over ten times, and have plans to visit again in the near future.
The other reason was that, except for a few sparse references, there was very little talk of music in the first third of the book (there’s around 200 pages total). The main thing I got out of the book in terms of music is the differences between Tokyo and Osaka, and how the chaotic, noisy environment of the former contributed to its unique music scene. That itself is a nice piece of info, but for someone with “years of immersive research in ethnomusicology” I expected much more detail about music: different genres, stories about how those genres came to be, etc.
I skimmed the book and it looks like the next chapter doesn’t talk about music at all, though the one after that is more music-focused. Plus a few of the other chapters later in the book are apparently about music. But to me, the book’s focus has already been established as being more about the author’s experiences than any detailed academic study of Japan’s music scene.
If you want to learn more about Japan and are the type of person that doesn’t mind accounts of living and traveling in Japan with a potentially strong personal bias, I think this is a good book to try out. But if you are seeking a book focusing on Japan’s music scene, then look elsewhere.