by liberal japonicus
If you don’t know the old joke referenced in the title, the answer is ‘Practice. Lots of Practice’. And with that, here is the first youtube video.
Yes, that’s elementary school kids. If you didn’t notice, they don’t have any sheet music, everything is being played from memory. Even more shocking to me is that the school, Funabashi Municipal Narashinodai Daiichi elementary school, is a public school. According to the school’s official policy document, the brass band has practice from 7:20 AM to 7:45 AM for morning practice, 3:45 PM to 5:45 PM for after-school practice and enforced rest days on the weekend.
The Japanese name for school band is Suisogakubu (吹奏楽部), but they are often referred to as Burabando, which is short for Brass Band. There is a national contest, preceeded first by local contests, followed by prefectural contests which then feed into 11 regional contests where only 2 or 3 from each region advance to the national finals, so the bands performing at the national level represent the top 0.5% of competing bands. An interesting point, all bands are given either a gold, silver or bronze prize for performance, giving rise to the dame kin or ‘dud gold’, where a band receives a gold award but doesn’t advance to the finals. Here is the 2025 Junior High School winners.
I majored in music, with a vague dream of playing horn professionally, but I had neither the baseline skill that made some things easier nor the drive to master the things that were really hard, though I did get to a semi-pro level. When I first came to Japan, I went to a school with a good brass band and I could keep up with them. They were also pretty amazed that I could sight read the pieces they had been playing for half a year and one of the fundamental differences was that they didn’t spend any time on sight reading, which is basically getting a piece of music and playing it without having practiced it. Mississippi and a number of other states have a sight reading portion to the state contest and for all my auditions there was some sort of sight reading that we were asked to do, but it is not something they do here in Japan.
Folks who are interested in why there is such a high level of achievement for what is essentially a foreign cultural expression should take a look at Wind Bands and Cultural Identity in Japanese Schools by David Herbert. When he initially went to Japan to research this, he was looking for the ‘secret sauce’ that got Japanese adolescents to perform at such a high level. What he discovered was that the achievement was based on a framework of collective learning, peer tutoring and social interaction.
I have a cd of one of these bands playing Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, but can’t locate a youtube version. But folks might say that I’m just picking out the best, the top 0.5%, and if I did that for the US, you’d probably get the same level. Well, this next video is another public school that only got to the Regional competition and did not go on to the National. The band only has 25 players so in all likelihood, there is not a huge number of players vying for parts.
Another thing that amazes me is that after reaching a level of performance that would be enviable for a university music major by the end of HS, most of the students just put up their instruments and don’t play anymore. Estimates of students who continue to play range from 1-5%.
Yet the idea of playing music has a astonishing hold on a lot of Japanese. When I first came to my university, there was a university orchestra and, in typical Japanese fashion, it would choose a program, practice it all year and then perform a concert. My first year, they played Holst’s The Planets and I joined the orchestra the 2nd year. Our school often hires graduates from our university for office positions and one of those students played in that concert and then was an office worker at our school. I was talking to her and said that I remembered her from the concert, playing 2nd violin and we had a few opportunities for small talk about music. I asked her why she wasn’t didn’t continue to play in the orchestra. She said to me ‘to be honest, I never learned how to read music’. (just to note, the 2nd violin part is 16 pages long…)
For the last video, to underline the position of brass bands in Japanese secondary education, is the song Shukumei by the group Official Hige Dandism (in Japanese Official髭男dism, as a linguist, the combining of roman letters and kanji is pretty fascinating and shows how integrated the writing systems are becoming). The original version of the song was a standard pop version you can see here, but the song was chosen as the theme for the 2019 Summer Koshien (the National High School Baseball tournament) and TV Asahi had the group do a collaboration with a wind ensemble made up of students from many different schools. Having been a band nerd, the fun the kids have in performing is pretty infectious. Enjoy!
the combining of roman letters and kanji is pretty fascinating and shows how integrated the writing systems are becoming
I have seen kanji and kana, of course. And romanji. But a combination of kanji and romanji is a new one. Perhaps it has emerged in the
yearsdecades since I studied the language….Interesting. I’m fairly familiar with how China does their music education because of the music writing class I’ve taught. There the emphasis is more on testing and certification than on ensemble playing. I’m sure that there must be a lot of young people who did the lessons and found something they loved, but most of the students who have written essays about their experience complain that it was too much about technical ability and challenge, and not nearly enough about play. They were pushed into it by their parents in order to have an objective certification of their diligence and discipline. Expression was secondary. Their stories are mostly about rediscovering music and learning to love it only after they had either refused any further lessons, or crashed and burned out of the competitive testing at a lower level of proficiency. They only learned to love playing after they came back to it with no outside pressure to excel.
Are there parallels in Japan, or is this one of those cultural differences over how each nation expresses their collectivity?
I used to have a Samoan client who showed me videos of Samoan marching bands–a very big thing there. He said that every town had a marching band. There’s a big festival when marching bands from all over come to one city and march in a huge parade. Each band has a clown that messes with the band while they march–laying down in the road, running in and out of the ranks etc. I have no idea why the concept of a marching band resonated with Samoans. Maybe because they have a tradition of drumming and group singing combined with movement?
Band — both marching band and wind orchestra — was one of the really positive things for me in high school. Not just the music. Our band director was a retired US Army master sergeant, and by the time I was a senior I realized that if you paid attention, he was also giving you a master class in motivating young adults.
I think Japan does have that Chinese heritage of music education for young people, but the Cultural Revolution destroyed large ensembles of Western music, so you don’t have the same ethos as Japan.
The institutions in China have been rebuilt in the intervening 50 years, and music is a required subject for primary and secondary school, but that discontinuity, plus the fact that academic subjects are more highly emphasized means that the situation is a little different from Japan.
You do have the same thing here with students who said that their mother (usually, the father most of the time doesn’t deal with this) forced them to play piano, but a number of them say that they hated it at the time, but now appreciate it.
A couple of anecdotes, in Japan, every jhs and hs has a class chorus competition and it always surprised me that there was always at least 1 or 2 students within the class who played piano well enough to accompany. The whole thing is often run by the students, so you get this move away from a teacher centered thing to student led.
Another factoid that always amazed me, when a broadcaster records/televises a concert, they don’t have to train the broadcast staff, they can simply give them annotated orchestra scores because they all can read music to a degree that the score acts as a shot list.
In Willie Ruff’s autobiography, Call to Assembly, there is a chapter about the Mitchell-Ruff duo (Ruff plays french horn and bass) going to visit China and lecture at the Shanghai conservatory in 1981, which was 5 years after the end of the Cultural Revolution. The whole chapter is interesting, but this is particularly relevant
One [question] came from an older Chinese teacher. “When you created ‘Shanghai Blues’ just now,” he asked, “did you have a form for it, or a logical plan?”
I said, “I just started tapping my foot, then a theme suggested itself, which I played on the horn, and Mitchell heard it. And he answered And after that we heard and answered, heard and answered, heard and answered.”
“But can you play it again?” the professor asked.
“We never can.
He would not accept my answer. “But that is beyond our imagination. Our students here play a piece a hundred times, or two hundred times, to get it exactly right. You play something once-something that has great value-and then you throw it away.”
I said that if we played the same music twice in an improvisation, the second time would be no improvisation at all. “We call improvisation the lifeblood of jazz because the performer is challenged to do it better each time.”
The old teacher as much as threw up his hands. The mystery persisted.
This isn’t to suggest that there are no Asian musicians who improvise, on the local level, there are some folks here whose concerts I go to and have great chops. (perhaps the topic of a future music thread), but I think all of them have had a period overseas where they immersed themselves and then have returned.
when my wife and i were in Japan many years ago we wandered into a club one afternoon, somewhere in Tokyo, and watched a local rock band of young guys playing songs for their not-quite-a-dozen friends – just like local bands everywhere.
last week, YouTube started recommending a bunch of Japanese post-rock / noise bands to me for some reason. i can’t even read their titles or band names, so clicking on one is a pure crap shoot.
i like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7apuNjIRe0
I have no idea if this is of any interest to anyone, but it is a gift article from the Atlantic by James Parker called The Great Mystery of Drumming, about a book called Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers by John Lingan. I’ve heard of neither of these guys, but maybe some people here have.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/rock-music-history-drummers/684955/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCfu6mZ7op8KFvj2oLcbyLWg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
cleek – that one is fun. For Japanese post-rock I think the grandmasters are probably MONO.
https://youtu.be/hlh6-M04pt0?si=IcY6ROkql4hsqP7P
cleek, nous, that’s really interesting, at my university and I believe at every other university, there is always a large contingent of students who are in a band, and I think the large majority of them leaning to heavy metal/hard rock. I’m wondering if it can be connected to the love of classical music, it is hard for me to see it as the same, though it could very well spring from the same source.
I always think of noise rock, math rock, and post-rock when I think about influential Japanese musicians: MONO, Toe, Boris, Merzbow – all hugely influential far beyond Japan itself. (I’m tempted to throw Sigh into the mix as well, with their avant-garde black metal catching some of that noise and dada influence.)
It seems to me that Japanese rock splits itself into the groups that are coming at things from an Idol influenced direction – having a huge emphasis on visual presentation and fandom – and the more otaku side that is dedicated to exploration of some aspect of music with willful disregard for the Idol ethos.
I would say that I prefer the latter over the former, but I listen to a lot of BABYMETAL, so I am not immune to the charms of the idol aesthetic.
SLAYER!!!
(Sorry, it’s kind of mandatory for me to do that.)
YouTube knows all.
it just suggested i watch this Kyoto highschool marching band:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qce6Mu5dHzQ
That’s Kyoto Tachibana HS. I hesitated to add it because it is a private school and so draws a lot of students because of the marching band (as well as the volleyball and soccer clubs) Fun fact, it was originally Kyoto Handicraft Girls’ School and changed its name in 1957, going co-ed in 2000 (the band was formed in 1961 with the “original goal of improving girls’ health” according to a fan website)
https://kyototachibanashsbandunofficialfanblog.wordpress.com/tachibana-fact-sheet/
one of the comments on that Kyoto HS vid said the reason there were so many women in the band was because marching band is seen as a ‘girly’ thing in Japan.
?
it being a former girls-only school makes more sense, though.
When I was in college (late ’60s), the Cal Band was still men only. I knew several women who had been in their (California) high school marching band, and were seriously miffed that they were excluded.
I know that the age difference between these musicians and Drum Corps International (22 max age) is vast, but the marching band show had me thinking about how much fun I used to have watching the DCI championships on PBS with my late brother back in the ’80s, and set me to looking for a modern show that could give me a sense of the current state of DCI showmanship:
https://youtu.be/8EktPlyf7Ok?si=CEO9hjqJqB4bRi5d
Bluecoats: Downside Up 2016 performance.
Their 2014 show – Tilt – is also pretty amazing from a technical standpoint as they are performing the whole thing at an angle to the field markings, which seems like it would take a ton of practice to pull off consistently. I liked the music for the 2016 show a little better, though, so that’s what you get.
re: marching band as being for girls
Both marching and school band, when transported to Japan, became something that women could excel at. Instrumental stereotypes run deep (if you don’t know about Abbie Conant, it’s worth it to read about it. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in a chapter in Blink which brought a lot of attention. I would pass that on, but Gladwell wrote the chapter without ever contacting Conant or even giving her the courtesy of letting her know she was going to be the focus of a chapter in his book. I guess some people would argue that he brought attention to her case, I tend to think this is shitty on the part of Gladwell)
Unfortunately, because brass band is often for women, it is often viewed as a skill to raise a woman’s marriagability. English functions in a similar way and I tell people that in some ways, my job is like teaching needlepoint in Victorian England.
Since the topic is Japan-related, here’s a video on Japan’s declining population numbers and its resistance to immigration. The video is a bit lengthy and overwrought, but it addresses the demographic problems Japan is facing, such as a death rate that is approximately double the birth rate.
“This video explores Japan’s unique stance on immigration, contrasting it with global trends and examining the nation’s internal challenges. We look at the severe Japanese population decline and the resulting aging population, which are central to current societal pressures. Learn how Japan’s birth rate decline and shifting demographics are influencing its politics and future direction amidst global issues.”
Japan’s Clash With ISLAM Is Escalating — And the Nation Is Saying “NO MORE”
The opening of Charles’ video
While the West drowned in its own diversity, Japan watched… and remembered who it was.
Not with panic. Not with shame.
But with the cold, ancient clarity of a country that knows what it’s willing to die for.
In a world that celebrates mass immigration — Japan says no.
It is AI generated (the “Not with panic. Not with shame.” is a tell) and it is astonishing that not one of the videos discusses the shitshow that the US is operating currently. It’s bullshit clickbait.
check out the list of other videos from that channel.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheFallOfNations
RUSSIA JUST KILLED ITSELF
CHINA IS FALLING APART
GREENLAND DESTROYS RUSSIA
DEATH BY VODKA
THE DEATH OF RUSSIA
RUSSIA IS GOING DOWN
PUTIN IS DONE
BLACK DAY FOR PUTIN
END OF ALASKA
END OF NORTH KOREA
IMMIGRATION KILLED CANADA
christ
Wow – Christ indeed
GREENLAND DESTROYS RUSSIA
Considering what Ukraine is doing to Russia, not necessarily impossible. The most surprising part is that it hasn’t been front page news around the world. Where is the MSM in this??? Looks like a cover-up.
😝
A more viable alternative.
Fall of Civilizations
Ever seen Girls and Panzer? 😉
(For those who are not accustomed to the franchise: The premise is that “sensha-do” (tanking) is a 100% female thing and a prestige sport for girls who battle it out in WW2-era tanks) Lots of marching music there.