The Japanese Country Twang

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I wrote this article for Awa Life, the newsletter for JETs in Tokushima Prefecture, which came out today:

Six Japanese men in cowboy hats, vests and plaid flannel shirts, a group by the name of Cabin Home, fiddled, strummed and jammed away Typhoon Songda’s howling winds as they took the stage on Sunday, May 29th.

I was an attendee of the fifth semi-annual Tokushima Bluegrass Festival, supporting Fumio Fukui-sensei, the machinery and electromechanical systems teacher at my technical high school. After eight months of working together, he had finally shared his secret with me: not only is he fluent in English, but he also plays and sings country, bluegrass and folk music.

“ is very simple and easy,” Fukui-sensei told me. “Everyone can play and sing, but it is very deep. Bluegrass and country music has good message to live peaceful.”

As I discovered at the festival, Fukui-sensei isn’t the only musician in Tokushima to have fallen in love with these traditional American styles. Cabin Home was just the first of a full day of performers to bring the bluegrass spirit to the other side of the world.

Under the stage name Dr. F, Fukui-sensei played a bilingual rendition of “Lorena,” a lament of lost love written in 1865. He has translated between ten and fifteen songs from English to Japanese.

“The bluegrass population is small, so the network is very strong,” Fukui-sensei said. Throughout the performances, musicians joked, sipped beer and cheered each other on in an atmosphere of family, old friends and celebration. But as I participated in this ultra-niche corner of Tokushima culture, I wondered how they had all discovered the foreign genre.

“I started to play music in classical guitar,” Fukui-sensei said. “When I entered high school, sempai was playing bluegrass music in musical club, so I started to play guitar and banjo.” Since then he’s added the fiddle and the flat mandolin to his repertoire, and is now, along with his wife, experimenting with the Irish tin whistle.

In his twenties, Fukui-sensei explored the roots of bluegrass music in the United States, road-tripping down the Blue Ridge Parkway through Virginia before hitting West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Indiana, where he attended the oldest bluegrass festival in America.

“Dianne said my English sounds like southern American accent,” Fukui-sensei said (Dianne, another ALT, also works with him).

With the help of Mr. Stephen Burke, who interpreted, I also had the chance to chat with the four-member group Thirty Grass Boys as they warmed up in a tatami room. Bassist Kubota Yoshihisa discovered bluegrass music in college, and Haba Shigehito found bluegrass through his interest in the mandolin. As their name suggests, the group has been together for thirty years.

Through this whole experience, from talking to Fukui-sensei for the first time, to exchanging CDs and seeing him perform at the Tokushima Bluegrass Festival, I’ve learned that music is a powerful cultural bridge. It transcends language and nationality and brings people together.

If you want to experience it for yourself, Fukui-sensei and some others perform at 7:00 on the last Wednesday of every month at Beretta Restaurant in Tokushima City. As for the festival, the verdict is in. In the words of Burke, “it was folk-in’ awesome.”

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