Why do Japanese people love tango? Starting with this question, which the author frequently received while working as a tango violinist in Argentina, Tango in Japan reveals histories and ethnographies of tango in Japan dating back to its first introduction in the 1910s to the present day. While initially brought to Yokohama by North American tango dancers in 1914, tango’s immediate popularity in Japan quickly compelled many Japanese performers and writers to travel to Argentina in search of tango’s “origin” beginning in the 1920s. Many Japanese musicians, dancers, aficionados, and the wider public have, since then, approached tango as a new vehicle of expression, entertainment, and academic pursuit. The sounds of tango provided comfort and a sense of hope to many during the most turbulent years of the twentieth century, carving out distinctive characteristics of contemporary Japanese tango culture. Bypassing the West-East axis of understanding cultural transmission, Tango in Japan uncovers the processes of attraction, rejection, and self-transformation, illuminating the tension of cosmopolitan endeavors away from the Euro-American West. Based on Asaba’s field and archival work undertaken in both Japanese and Spanish languages in Japan and Argentina across two decades, and drawing on her own background as a tango violinist who performed as a member of tango orchestras in both countries, the discussions move between historical and ethnographic narratives, offering a comprehensive account of tango culture as it emerged in the history of a Japan-Argentina connection. Serving as the first in-depth work on the Japan-Argentina musical relationship, Tango in Japan tells a story that reflects the modern transformations of Japan and Argentina, and the global historical backdrops surrounding both countries.

What is tango? Dance, music, and lyrics of course, but also a philosophy, a strategy, a commodity, even a disease. This book explores the politics of tango, tracing tango's travels from the brothels of Buenos Aires to the cabarets of Paris and the shako dansu clubs of Tokyo. The author is an Argentinean political theorist and a dance professor at the University of California at Riverside. She uses her ?tango tongue? to tell interwoven tales of sexuality, gender, race, class, and national identity. Along the way she unravels relations between machismo and colonialism, postmodernism and patriarchy, exoticism and commodification. In the end she arrives at a discourse on decolonization as intellectual ?unlearning.?Marta Savigliano's voice is highly personal and political. Her account is at once about the exoticization of tango and about her own fate as a Third World woman intellectual. A few sentences from the preface are indicative: ?Tango is my womb and my tongue, a trench where I can shelter and resist the colonial invitations to '`'universalism,'? a stubborn fatalist mood when technocrats and theorists offer optimistic and seriously revised versions of '`'alternatives' for the Third World, an opportunistic metaphor to talk about myself and my stories as a success' of the civilization-development-colonization of Am ca Latina, and a strategy to figure out through the history of the tango a hooked-up story of people like myself. Tango is my changing, resourceful source of identity. And because I am where I am?outside?tango hurts and comforts me: '`'Tango is a sad thought that can be danced.'?Savigliano employs the tools of ethnography, history, body-movement analysis, and political economy. Well illustrated with drawings and photos dating back to the 1880s, this book is highly readable, entertaining, and provocative. It is sure to be recognized as an important contribution in the fields of cultural studies, performance studies, decolonization, and women-of-color feminism.

Beginning in 1990, thousands of Spanish speakers emigrated to Japan. A Cultural History of Spanish Speakers in Japan focuses on the intellectuals, literature, translations, festivals, cultural associations, music (bolero, tropical music, and pop, including reggaeton), dance (flamenco, tango and salsa), radio, newspapers, magazines, libraries, and blogs produced in Spanish, in Japan, by Latin Americans and Spaniards who have lived in that country over the last three decades. Based on in-depth research in archives throughout the country as well as field work including several interviews, Japanese-speaking Mexican scholar Araceli Tinajero uncovers a transnational, contemporary cultural history that is not only important for today but for future generations.

Colonel Sanders, Elvis, Mickey Mouse, and Jack Daniels have been enthusiastically embraced by Japanese consumers in recent decades. But rather than simply imitate or borrow from the West, the Japanese reinterpret and transform Western products and practices to suit their culture. This entertaining and enlightening book shows how in the process of domesticating foreign goods and customs, the Japanese have created a culture in which once-exotic practices (such as ballroom dancing) have become familiar, and once- familiar practices (such as public bathing) have become exotic. Written by scholars from anthropology, sociology, and the humanities, the book ranges from analyses of Tokyo Disneyland and the Japanese passion for the Argentinean tango to discussions of Japanese haute couture and the search for an authentic nouvelle cuisine japonaise. These topics are approached from a variety of perspectives, with explorations of the interrelations of culture, ideology, and national identity and analyses of the roles that gender, class, generational, and regional differences play in the patterning of Japanese consumption. The result is a fascinating look at a dynamic society that is at once like and unlike our own.

Tango music rapidly became a global phenomenon as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, with about 30% of gramophone records made between 1903 and 1910 devoted to it. Its popularity declined between the 1950s and the 1980s but has since risen to new heights. This Companion offers twenty chapters from varying perspectives around music, dance, poetry, and interdisciplinary studies, including numerous visual and audio illustrations in print and on the accompanying webpages. Its multidisciplinary approach demonstrates how different disciplines intersect through performative, historical, ethnographic, sociological, political, and anthropological perspectives. These thematic continuities illuminate diverse international perspectives and highlight how the art form flourished in Argentina, Uruguay and abroad, while tracing its international and cultural impact over the last century. This book is an innovative resource for scholars and students of tango music, particularly those seeking a diverse international perspective on the subject.

This is the first book to cover in detail all genres of Japanese music including court music, Buddhist chant, theatre music, chamber ensemble music and folk music, as well as contemporary music and the connections between music and society in various periods. The book is a collaborative effort, involving both Japanese and English speaking authors, and was conceived by the editors to form a balanced approach that comprehensively treats the full range of Japanese musical culture.

Through a close examination of economic trends and case studies of particular families, this study demonstrates that Japan’s protoindustrial economy was far more volatile than portrayed in most studies to date. Few rural elites survived the competitive and unstable climate of this era. Onerous exactions, interregional competition, market volatility, and succession problems propelled many wealthy families into steep decline and others into drastic shifts in the focus of their businesses.