interview Otomo Yoshihide Post-March 11, 2011 Musical Explorations Showing “The Thing that Isn’t That” (1/7)
interview and organized by Ito Junnosuke
published in Beyond Boundaries: Comparative Civilizations Now 23 (2023)
translated by Suzuki Yoshiyuki and Cathy Fishman(Futarri)
This text is the complete transcription of an interview with Otomo Yoshihide that is included in my master’s thesis, “Otomo Yoshihide Post-3/11—The Politics of Powerless Music,” which I submitted to the Comparative Civilizations program in the 2021 academic year. Known for his improvised performances on guitar and turntable and his music for movies and TV dramas, Otomo has also been supporting a variety of cultural activities in Fukushima Prefecture since 2011. These include Project FUKUSHIMA!, which he launched together with fellow musician Michiro Endo and poet Ryoichi Wago, as well as the reorganization of the Fukushima Waraji Festival and the creation of school songs at Tomioka Elementary School and Junior High School. My thesis positioned and analyzed Otomo’s musical practice as an alternative to the music in “reconstruction support songs” and anti-nuclear power demonstrations. The text has been partly revised.
The power of music is used both ways
Q: First, I’d like to ask you about the phrase “the power of music.” Just after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, “the power of music” and “the power of song” were often used on TV song programs, for instance. In interviews and so on that
I read after the disaster, you remarked that we need to be worried about the power of music, and in fact it’s all right for music to be powerless. Was there something specific that motivated these comments?
Otomo: There wasn’t any incident that motivated them directly. I think this was about 20 years ago, but I probably wrote in [the magazine] STUDIO VOICE that musicians should be powerless. (1)
Q: That was in 2001. You wrote, “hearing the radical nature of powerlessness.”
Otomo: Right. The reason I wrote that is that music has power. Everyone talks about the power of music as if it’s a good thing, but military songs are music,too. So I think I already had a strong feeling at the time that the power of music is used both ways. The first time I realized this was probably when I was a student—at Meiji University I was in a folk music seminar, although I never went to school. I wasn’t even taking this seminar officially. I found out that a folk music seminar was offered as a general education class in a different department, so I attended Professor Akira Ebato’s folk music seminar for about two years. I didn’t get course credit or anything, but I actually wrote a paper. It was called “Control of music during the Pacific War.” I don’t remember why I chose that topic. At the time there were hardly any books about it, so I researched it as best I could on my own. For some reason I was doing researchon how music has been controlled. It seems to me that I already had an awareness of the issue at the time. In short, at that time I was probably thinking in a young person’s way about how music acts upon society. And I had the thought that this wasn’t only a good thing, which was why I thought it was dangerous for musicians to try to acquire power. But I don’t know the reason. Actually I don’t think there was a direct reason. Anyway, I think there were various things that happened. Another thing is that in my twenties I joined guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi’s class. He was my teacher—I mean, he really influenced me and I looked up to him. Of course, Takayanagi-san was someone who had a lot of power—in terms of music, too. I joined his class because I was drawn to that, but I might also have rebelled against it, when I think about it now…in the background. To be honest, though, I don’t really know the reason. It was just that at some point I started thinking that music isn’t only a good thing, it’s also a scary thing. That might have been perverse, because when someone talks about the power of musicians or the power of music, basically they’re almost always saying that music has positive power. I was questioning that. Then I think I gradually got to the point where I was saying it should be powerless. That’s why, after the Tohoku earthquake, when people were speaking in a simplistic way about using the power of music, I thought I definitely wasn’t going to get involved in that kind of thing.
