Asakusa-Tsugaru-jamisen: Musical Place Making and Conceptual Blending in Twenty-First-Century Tokyo

Abstract:Master player Fukui Kōdai uses Tsugaru-jamisen to create a rustic and traditional-Japanese sense of place at his restaurant, Waentei Kikkō, in the Tokyo neighborhood of Asakusa. However, the historical status of the shamisen in Asakusa and the present-day popularity of Tsugaru-jamisen among Japanese youth complicate Fukui's musical place making. These factors create contradictions in how time period, genre categories, and geography conceptually define the restaurant for contemporary visitors. This article proposes to resolve these contradictions by introducing the idea of conceptual blending, demonstrating how Fukui's musical restaurant encompasses both past and present, urban and rural, remote and local, Japanese and global.