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"Fulbright and mtvU sponsored scholar Jillian Marshall offers honest and often humorous vignettes that delve far beyond Western stereotypes of Japanese culture to portray a society's deep relationship with music, and what it means to listen and understand as a cultural outsider"--Amazon.com.
List of contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS:- Toward a Public Intellectualism
- On Noise
- Hate/Love
- Ugo, Akita
- Amerika the Beautiful, In Two Acts
- 3/11
- Interlude I: Context, Lyrics, and Interviews
- En, Underground
- The Dance Teacher
- Idols You Can Touch! (As Two Scenes)
- The Secret Mountain Party
- “You Came In Here, Didn’t You?”
- Peripheral Encounters: A Series of Personal/Social/Musical Experiments
- Three Akita Bijin
- The Matsuyama Tour
- 初DJ の経験
- Interlude II: Music for the People
- On Making it Big
- Akita-ben
- The Celebrity
- Portrait of an (Underground) Artist as a Young Man
- Epilogue
About the author
Jillian Marshall grew up in a rural town in Vermont, just south of the French-Canadian border. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 2009, she moved to a fishing village in Japan to teach middle school English. She came back to the US to pursue a doctorate in ethnomusicology at Cornell University, frequently returning to Japan to conduct research on contemporary Japanese music. Following the completion of her PhD in 2018, she left academia +in pursuit of a more public intellectualism. In addition to writing, Jillian currently teaches the languages and history of Japan and China; she is also a lifelong musician, and plays trumpet and piano. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Summary
Both personally revealing and informed by years of Fulbright- and MTV-sponsored research, JAPANTHEM’s honest vignettes delve beyond the aspects of Japanese culture that have captivated the western world to portray a society’s deep relationship with music, and what it means to listen and understand as a cultural outsider.
Following a decade of back-and-forth across the Pacific while researching her doctoral thesis in ethnomusicology, JAPANTHEM author Jillian Marshall reveals contemporary Japan through a prism of magic, serendipity, frustration, unique underground culture, learning life lessons the hard way, and an insatiable curiosity for the human spirit. The book’s twenty vignettes — including what it’s like to be subtly bullied by your Buddhist dance teacher, go to a secret rave in woods near Mt. Fuji, meet a pop star at a basement club while tipsy, and experience a nuclear disaster unfold by the minute — are based off first-hand experience, and illustrate music’s fascinating relationship to (Japanese) society with honesty, intelligence, and humor. JAPANTHEM offers a uniquely nuanced portrayal of life in the Land of the Rising Sun — while encouraging us to listen more deeply in (and to) Japan in the process.
Additional text
“In this illuminating debut, Marshall offers an outsider’s look into Japanese culture via its music . . . This transportive work is a thrilling escape.” —Publishers Weekly
“Jillian Marshall is a kindred spirit: I too love Japan, music, and champion the bridging of academia with the public sphere. What a fun, accessible journey in a place considered too often, and incorrectly, as inscrutable.” —Nancy Snow, Senior Adviser, Kreab Tokyo; author, Japan’s Information War
"Japanthem is a lively, sparkling, and very personal book, both about Japanese music and culture and about Marshall’s ambivalent relationship to academia. Born as a doctoral dissertation, the book couldn’t be further from the dry and scholarly reading experience of an academic book, which is the idea. Yet the author’s expertise and lived experience as a “researcher” figure centrally in the story she tells, and her knowledge of Japan’s musics, culture, media, and language. Part travel writing, part memoir, part ethnography, Japanthem immerses you in the author’s encounters with diverse facets of Japan and its music. The portrait of Japan that emerges is quirky, funny, and humane, both loving and, at times, appalled. Marshall closely observes Japanese musical culture and yet holds it at a certain distance, seen honestly through her outsider’s eyes. Throughout, Marshall’s writing crackles with wit and humor and emotional honesty, richly drawn characters and complicated situations.” —Aaron A. Fox, Associate Professor of Music; Director of Center for Ethnomusicology, Columbia University
