America's Japan and Japan's Performing Arts: Cultural Mobility and Exchange in New York, 1952-2011

7. Closure and Counterpoint: The JapanNYC Festival, the Earthquake and Tsunami Benefit Concerts, and Circuits of Mobility and Exchange, 2010-2011

186 7 Closure and Counterpoint The JapanNYC Festival, the Earthquake and Tsunami Benefit Concerts, and Circuits of Mobility and Exchange, 2010–2011 For the last few decades, the pendulum of Japan’s images overseas has swung back and forth between positive and negative poles, and between universalist and particularist approaches.1 In his introduction to Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto Stephen Greenblatt cites the “urgent need to rethink fundamental assumptions about the fate of culture in an age of global mobility.” Some cultures, he notes, “are routinely celebrated for their depth, authenticity, and wholeness.” Others “are criticized for shallowness, disorientation, and incoherence.”2 Within the narrative framework of America’s Japan, both celebration and criticism regularly—and sometimes simultaneously—characterize the reception of the performing arts. When I started this project, I could not have predicted the two sets of Japan-focused performing arts events that provide a ready-made endpoint for my look at how “Japan” and “Japanese culture” have been discursively constructed, reconstructed, and transformed in response to productions of theater, music, and dance that have taken place in New York since the postwar 1950s. There was the JapanNYC festival— which ran from September 2010 to April 2011—initiated, coordinated, and in part hosted by Carnegie Hall. And there were the post-earthquake and tsunami marathon concerts, which were swiftly and skillfully pulled together by composer-musician John Zorn in March and April 2011 to raise money for Japan Society’s relief fund.3 Both sets of events unfolded against the backdrop of the ongoing flow of Japan-related programming that also happened to be scheduled around the city during the same period. JapanNYC was huge, with its multitude of presentations and venues Closure and Counterpoint 187 easily constituting the single most extensive (mostly)-live-arts-Japan initiative ever to take place in New York. There were the concerts at Carnegie Hall—the Saito Kinen Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa with soloists who included Mitsuko Uchida (piano), Yukio Tanaka (biwa), and Kifu Mitsuhashi (shakuhachi); the NHK Symphony Orchestra under André Previn; and the Bach Collegium Japan led by Masaaki Suzuki. Shamisen artists Yutaka Oyama and Masahiro Nitta also appeared at Carnegie Hall, as did violinist Midori; pianist Aimi Kobayashi; and jazz pianist, conductor , and composer Toshiko Akiyoshi. “A Tribute to Toru Takemitsu” was the title of another Carnegie Hall festival program with guitarists Kazumi Watanabe and Daisuke Suzuki, accordionist Coba, and percussionist Tomohiro Yahiro. Asia Society offered a concert by the rock band Shonen Knife in conjunction with its art museum exhibition Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool. Le Poisson Rouge hosted experimentalist rock musicians Deerhoof. Lincoln Center was the setting for the Kodo Drummers and the Martha Graham Dance Company (in pieces featuring sets designed by Isamu Noguchi). Lincoln Center also presented the Juilliard Percussion Ensemble under Daniel Druckman and the New Juilliard Ensemble under Joel Sachs playing works by contemporary composers from Japan. Soh Daiko gave performances at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts and at Lehman College. Two separate programs at Columbia University ’s Miller Theatre—“Glories of the Japanese Traditional Music Heritage: Winds and Strings of Change” and “Glories of the Japanese Traditional Music Heritage: Japanese Sacred Court Music and Ancient Soundscapes Reborn”—included musicians Yukio Tanaka (biwa), Kifu Mitsuhashi and James Schlefer (shakuhachi), Yoko Nishi (koto), Hitomi Nakamura (hichiriki ), Takeshi Sasamoto (ryuteki), and Mayumi Miyata (sho). Eiko and Koma appeared at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. The Kashu-juku noh theater was at Japan Society, which also was the locale for Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art—a gallery show based on the work of fifteen artists “who reject the outworn narratives of cuteness and infantilism fashionable in Western presentations of Japanese contemporary art.”4 Also under the JapanNYC umbrella were the Film Forum’s two-week series of films scored by Toru Takemitsu and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s exhibition of bonsai from the C. V. Starr Bonsai Museum—the same C. V. Starr who in 1958 underwrote the new Metropolitan Opera production of Madama Butterfly crafted by kabuki director Yoshio Aoyama and scene and costume designer Motohiro Nagasaka. In some ways it was puzzling why Carnegie Hall would hold a festival celebrating Japan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Publicity 188 America’s Japan and Japan’s Performing Arts material invited audiences to “[d]elve into the dynamic artistic world of a country...