(Cancelled) Foreign Language Series: Japanese

(Cancelled)  OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | “Japanese Religion and Popular Music” with Jennifer Milioto Matsue, Professor, Department of Music, Asian Studies and Anthropology, Union College. 

Within Japan religion is difficult to identify, with much mixture and an ambiguous position in contemporary society. Not surprisingly, there are few examples of prominent popular music performers, genres, or scenes that explicitly play with religious iconography, texts or practice. Considering reasons for this, however, reveals much about Japanese culture’s experience of religion in general. This presentation explores this complicated connection between religion in Japan and various popular musics, including heavy metal, hip-hop, psy-trance and hardcore, in the end requiring an extremely flexible read of what religion means for Japanese in their daily lives.    

Jennifer Milioto Matsue is an ethnomusicologist at Union College specializing in modern Japanese music and culture. She has conducted research on numerous music cultures in contemporary Japan including the Tokyo hardcore rock scene, nagauta (chamber music featuring the three-string lute shamisen), taiko (Japanese ensemble drumming), Vocaloid Hatsune Miku, and now religious dance in Japan and Bali. She is the author of the monograph Making Music in Japan’s Underground: The Tokyo Hardcore Scene (Routledge 2008) and Focus: Music in Contemporary Japan (Routledge 2015), as well as several articles on related topics.