The Women behind Western Music and Japan

"New Women" and "Old Women" advertisement from 1912 featuring Women with Violin

Next week, I head to Tokyo for an intensive archival research project funded by the Center for Japan Studies and the Moore-Johnson Musicology Fund at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa. My main objective is to gather archival and secondary materials of Japanese composers active between 1890 to 1930 who composed music "in Western styles." One of the fascinating, yet still relatively little-known, aspects of this history is the significant role women played in establishing and sustaining Western-style music-making in modern Japan.

The first Japanese composition of Western classical music is attributed to Kōda Nobu 幸田延 (1870–1946), whose studies at the New England Conservatory (1889) and the Vienna Conservatory (1890–95) have received increasing attention from scholars and performers. While in Vienna, Kōda studied with the respected and influential composer Robert Fuchs (1847–1927), whose students also included Gustav Mahler, Jean Sibelius, and Hugo Wolf, among others. Kōda composed her first violin sonata in 1895, while still in Vienna, making it a work of considerable historical significance in music history. 

Watanabe Kyōko (Violin) and Yoshioka Yui (Piano) 2018 recorded at 

Universität Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien. 

Among Euro-American music lovers, perceptions of Japanese women have often been shaped by figures such as Cio-Cio-san from Puccini's Madama Butterfly or the female characters in Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado. The controversial portrayals of these women remain subjects of discussion, most recently at our inaugural musicology colloquium with guest Dr. Kunio Hara. In my current work, I am interested in highlighting another side of Japanese women's history—those who courageously left their homes to study music abroad, as well as those who used their voices as composers to advocate for women's rights. Among the composers who followed Kōda were Matsushima Tsune 松島 彝(1890–1985), Yoshida Takako 吉田隆子(1910–1956), Kanai Kikuko 金井喜久子(1911–1986), and Ōki Hideko 大木秀子 (1919–2008). Not all of these women would have identified themselves as feminists, but the barriers they encountered as composers, and their subsequent obscurity, reflect broader questions about gender and the place of women composers in Western music history.

Japan's feminist movements remain relatively little known outside the country, although, like other counterparts in Europe and in America, Japanese women were actively engaged in movements seeking greater equality within their own society. This week, I spent a considerable amount of time reading some of Japan's earliest feminist literature, published between 1911 and 1916 by the Japanese Bluestockings (青鞜)—a term they borrowed from their English sisters. The pages of these monthly issues are filled with original poetry and novellas written by educated Japanese women. Writers such as Hiratsuka Raichō 平塚らいてう (1886–1970) and Itō Noe 伊藤野枝 (1895–1923) published powerful works that challenged prevailing attitudes toward women's roles in society, at times attracting censorship for their progressive ideas. 

Cover of Seitō 青鞜 with English "Bluestocking" on Jar

Much like the music that shaped Japanese musicians during this period, feminist thought in Japan was also influenced by European "New Women" literature that emerged in the 1890s. Among the works circulating in Japanese translation were writings by the Swedish feminist Ellen Key and Russian mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya, As I was thumbing through these various writings, I was especially struck by the Japanese translation of The Mirror of Music (1895), a psychological novella by Stanley Victor Makower about a fictional female composer. The story appeared in Japanese translation across several issues of Seitō 青鞜 in 1913, complete with music examples referencing Beethoven, Chopin, and Schumann among others. 

Anyone reading this popular journal in Japan would have encountered nuanced descriptions of European classical music, requiring a sophisticated understanding of the works themselves which form an important part of Makower's storytelling. That this strange psychological thriller about the experiences of a gifted female composer found its way into the hands of Japanese feminists seeking freedom to embrace art and literature as part of their lives is particularly fascinating to me. It reveals the complexity of globalization in the early twentieth century, when Japanese thinkers, writers, and musicians actively engaged with ideas and artistic traditions that were circulating throughout the world around them. 

Since around 2015—over a decade now (!)—I have been gathering research and teaching materials to highlight the fascinating history of how European Classical music became the de facto musical language of modern Japan. Back in 2015, I had just completed my doctoral work on medieval English music theory and was eager to explore a more global perspective on music history. At the time, the concept of Global Musicology was still relatively unfamiliar, although research led by Reinhard Strohm through the Balzan Musicology Project was already well underway (the project ran from 2013 to 2016, with its findings published  by Routledge University Press in 2018). Since then, Global Musicology has gained considerable momentum, championed by scholars such as Daniel Chua through the International Musicological Society's  Musicological Brainfood series, and has become an increasingly familiar approach to musicological inquiry.

I first taught my "Global Musicology" course at the Boston Conservatory in 2017, focusing on the history of music conservatories around the world. I began with the founding of the Leipzig Conservatory before turning to institutions in St. Petersburg, the National Conservatory of the Music of America (founded by Jeannette Thurber), and the Tokyo and Shanghai music conservatories. By investigating how and why music conservatories were established during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, my students and I explored the impact of a globalized music education during a period of  intense nation-building. My chapter on the founding of Juilliard and its connection to Asia is forthcoming in 2027 with Harvard University Press as a series of studies titled The Loeb Classical Library and Its Progeny: Proceedings of the Fourth James Loeb Biennial Conference, Munich and Murnau.

To the modern Japanese musician, music is ドレミ (do re mi). With the immense popularity of Joe Hisaishi's global concert tour in 2026, the music of Japanese composers is resonating also with audiences around the world. The early adaption of Western music in Japan is a complex history—one that I spend sixteen weeks exploring with my students in my Western Music and Japan class at UH Mānoa—and one that is only now gaining wider attention in Japan itself. My hope is that my research and teaching on these Japanese women composers will deepen English-speaking readers' understanding of the many facets of classical music in the twentieth century—not simply as a European tradition that spread across the world, but as a global musical culture that Japanese composers helped shape.