Henry Johnson

University of Otago · Music

http://www.brill.com/products/book/shakuhachi The shakuhachi is a traditional Japanese end-blown bamboo flute with a long history in a wide array of social, cultural, and geographic spheres. This book unravels some of the roots and routes connected with the shakuhachi, and discusses instrument types, construction process, social transmission, and...

The uninhabited yet socially active and culturally important Japanese island of Chikubu (Chikubu-shima) is situated towards the northern end of Lake Biwa in the Kansai region of Japan’s largest island of Honshū. Chikubu Island is linked to Shintō and Buddhist ritualistic culture and hosts tens of thousands of day-tripper pilgrims who travel there e...

Review of Identity, Language and Belonging on Jersey: Migration and the Channel Islands. By Jaine Beswick.

This article interrogates how the small Japanese island of Enoshima () signifi es island heritage across space and place. Applying a critical approach at the intersection of island studies and heritage studies, Enoshima is explored through the lens of observational study in connection with the three interconnected themes of environment, ritual, and...

Applied ethnomusicology

Wooden Overcoats is an independent comedy fiction podcast from 2015 about rival funeral homes set on the fictional island of Piffling. Study of the podcast offers a window into contemporary fictional Channel Island representation, a critique of which can help in comprehending the space and place of islands in literary studies more broadly. This art...

The Bailiwick of Guernsey is a British jurisdiction in the Channel Islands comprising several islands and forming a binary with the neighbouring Bailiwick of Jersey. The Bailiwick is an archipelago of administrative similitude and island-based jurisdictional difference. It is a dependency of the British Crown with a sense of independence and with i...

*** New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 23(1), 21-36. *** This article is a study of a photo of the Wellington Chee Kung Tong (Wellington Chinese Masonic Society) orchestra taken around 1925. As dominant themes, the photo especially signifies music and identity, and demands answers regarding how it might be interpreted about 100 years after its...

Looks at modern Japanese musical cultures, including music education, traditional music, western art music, and popular music. Provides perspectives on the relationship between Japanese music culture and global flows. Draws together new research from international scholars working in the fields of cultural studies, ethnomusicology, history, theat...

Shintō, the national religion of Japan, is grounded in the mythological narratives that are found in the 8th-Century chronicle, Kojiki 古事記 (712). Within this early source book of Japanese history, myth, and national origins, there are many accounts of islands (terrestrial and imaginary), which provide a foundation for comprehending the geographical...

This chapter discusses affective media in terms of discrete Western musical elements in Japanese koto (thirteen-string zither) music, especially from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Attention is given to sonic, visual and behavioural spheres of such influence as a way of discussing three broad and sometimes overlapping domains concern...

The late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century saw the drum kit emerge as an assemblage of musical instruments that was central to much new music of the time and especially to the rise of jazz. This article is a study of Chinese drums in the making of the drum kit. The notions of localization and exoticism are applied as con...

This article presents an ethnographic case study that discusses the festivalisation process of a public Diwali festival as celebrated in the southern city of Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand. In Aotearoa, support for Diwali festivals has spread with the growth and diversity of the Indian diaspora, including both top-down and ground-up backing. Differe...

Koza Dabasa explores Okinawa's island culture and its ghosts of war through the lens of Nenes, a four-woman pop group that draws on the distinctiveness and exoticism of Okinawan musical tradition. Both a tropical island paradise and the site of some of the bloodiest battles of World War II, Okinawa has a unique culture and a contentious history. It...

Book Review: A history of sound, music, and performance in the Great War. Sound Studies (2020), DOI: 10.1080/20551940.2020.1867395 At first glance, one might imagine that a book with the title Sounds of War would literally be about the acoustic environment pertaining to the cacophonous sounds of war, the noise of shooting and the explosions of ar...

Charlie King (Li Kee Hing), as he was known, spent most of his life in the southern New Zealand gold-mining settlement of Waikaia. Arriving there in the mid 1870s, he was one of many Chinese miners in New Zealand, and he worked closely with other miners from his village in China who had also travelled to New Zealand. Unlike many Chinese who eventua...

The socio-cultural milieu of colonial New Zealand changed significantly in the 1860s as a result of the discovery of gold and the subsequent immigration of Chinese miners at the invitation of the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce. At first, Chinese miners arrived from the Australian goldfields, where they had earlier migrated, and later from southern Chi...

This article explores some features of popular music production by uncovering the palimpsestic geography of Okinawa, and in particular the octogenarian island idols of Kohama that have achieved stardom at home and outside their small island setting. As an island Other on multiple levels of separation beyond the mainland, and imagined in terms of ge...

New Zealand’s Pacific diaspora is a significant part of the cultural diversity of the nation. While many Pacific peoples have migrated to New Zealand as a result of colonialism or continued political ties, others have moved as a result of such factors as location, employment or lifestyle. The nation’s Fijian diaspora is significant in many ways. In...

This paper takes a critical comparative approach to the reshaping of land, sea and space that often transform islands. I show how island physicality is part of a fluid process of reshaping the environment by discussing four dynamic spheres of change: upward, downward, outward and inward. Islands are sometimes joined to a mainland or to each other a...

New Zealand has a number of active taiko (drumming) groups, each of which has distinct links to Japan. This article introduces taiko in New Zealand in connection with the notions of authenticity and identity construction in transcultural context (i.e., connecting with two or more cultures – e.g., Kostogriz and Tsolidis 2008; Pratt 1992), for both J...

The small island of Okinoerabu in the Nansei archipelago to the southwest of Japan is located at a crossroads of sub-national cultural flows and exhibits a distinct cultural emblem of island identity in the form of a prominent performing art called eisā. This performance style, which combines drumming, choreography and live or recorded music, has i...

The small island of Okinoerabu in the Nansei archipelago to the southwest of Japan is located at a crossroads of sub-national cultural flows and exhibits a distinct cultural emblem of island identity in the form of a prominent performing art called eisa. This performance style, which combines drumming, choreography and live or recorded music, has i...

This article offers original insights into the construction of musical meaning through an intensification and bricolage of postmodern discourse as a result of music video as online media. The discussion contributes to contemporary popular music scholarship by discussing the ‘Stranger People’ video by Doprah, an indie band from Christchurch, New Zea...

New Zealand has a number of active taiko (drumming) groups, each of which has distinct links to Japan. This paper introduces taiko in New Zealand in connection with the notions of authenticity and identity construction in transcultural context, for both Japanese and non-Japanese. The research focuses on the creative settings of musical performance,...

On the island of Jersey, the success of local industries including agriculture, tourism, and financial services has helped grow the population of permanent residents, contract workers, seasonal workers, and short-term tourists. As a result, between 1950 and 2015 the island’s population nearly doubled from about 55,000 to 100,000, and, consequently,...

Sakurajima (Cherry Island) began its existence about 26,000 years ago as a volcanic island rising from the northern end of Kagoshima Bay in the south of the island of Kyūshū, Japan. What makes Sakurajima a topic of significance in the field of Island Studies is that it is no longer an island, yet maintains many island-like characteristics—an island...

In 2007, Jersey’s government launched a competition in search for an anthem to celebrate the island’s identity. Even though the island uses ‘God Save the Queen’ as its official anthem because of its allegiance to the British Crown, there are increasingly more occasions for the island to have its own anthem, such as at the Island Games or the Common...

Amami Park is a nature and culture centre located in the Amami islands in the southwest of Japan. Objects are displayed on one site and marketed for tourists, whether on-island, in the Amami islands or more distant. This article discusses Amami Park in terms of the themes of sea, land and islandness, which emerged as topics for discussion during th...

This book is the first to explore style and spectacle in glam popular music performance from the 1970s to the present day, and from an international perspective. Focus is given to a number of representative artists, bands, and movements, as well as national, regional, and cultural contexts from around the globe. Approaching glam music performance a...

Over the past few decades, New Zealand’s cultural landscape has changed as the result of increased immigration from Asia. One consequence of this transformation has been an increased number of public celebrations that place Asian cultural practices at their core. These “festivalscapes” act as contact zones in the study of Asia in the making of Aote...

Journal Issue Cover – La Maîtresse Île is the largest of the islets in the Les Minquiers reef, part of the Bailiwick of Jersey, Channel Islands. It is about 100 metres long by 50 metres wide, and has 12 stone cottages in various states of repair. © 2015 Henry Johnson.

The Minquiers and Écréhous reefs are located in different parts of the Gulf of St Malo between the British island of Jersey and the French mainland. As a part of the Bailiwick of Jersey, they are geographically very close to the international sea border between Jersey and France, and have had a history of disputed sovereignty. Due to their respecti...

This article is a study of musical ownership and pop-folk on the island of Jersey. Focusing on the amateur pop-folk band Badlabecques, the discussion highlights how traditional songs have been sustained through intervention, technology and creative practice. What makes this band different to most mainstream groups performing in a similar style is t...

This article discusses ensemble drumming on Kikaijima (Kikai island) in Japan. We apply the metaphor of travel to these drum groups, which reveals how this small island culture is able to sustain, invent, or adopt styles of drumming within the national context as a result of its geographic location, cultural heritage, and island identity. Ethnograp...

Over the past few decades, the islands of Sark and Brecqhou have featured in much media and legal discourse. Such factors as jurisdictional contestation, tension and criticism have arisen either between the owners of the private island of Brecqhou and the jurisdiction in which it is located, or as a result of other factors that have an association...

The title of this edited volume published in 2014 explains clearly the nature of the book – collaboration. In this case, the focus is on collaboration between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, although many readers would be able to relate this aspect of music research methodology with other (post) colonial or field study locations. From th...

At the outset of the twenty-first century, the survival of many minority and indigenous languages is threatened by globalization and the ubiquity of dominant languages such as English in the worlds of communication and commerce. In a number of cases, these negative trends are being resisted by grassroots activists and governments. Indeed, there are...

This chapter offers an insight into the construction of community through music and the music industry in response to Japan's 3/11 triple disasters: earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident. Disasters have the power to capture the emotions of people in far-reaching ways. Such events as acts of war, terrorism, earthquakes, tsunamis or major accident...

Sark is a British Crown Dependency that could be described as a type of micronation. It has been a fief of the Crown since the 16th century, and in the 21st Century instituted a form of democratic government. While not part of the UK, nor a sovereign state in its own right, Sark is a self-governing territory within the Bailiwick of Guernsey, and ha...

Jack [John] Stanley Body is a New Zealand composer whose eclecticism is culturally and geographically very wide; he is prolific in his creative outputs; he is well-known nationally and internationally within and across a range of compositional styles; and he is celebrated in New Zealand, having received a New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in the Ne...

This paper discusses cultural sustainability in the context of linguistic heritage on the island of Jersey (one of the Channel Islands just off the north of France) in three spheres of analytical and critical enquiry: language revitalisation, intervention and popular music. Over the past century, the island’s indigenous language, called Jèrriais, h...

This article explores the potential for web-based interactive music resources to represent and sustain music-culture heritage via digital means. Our focus is the University of Otagos virtual Indonesian gamelan (iGamelan): an immersive online resource featuring interactive musical instruments, an audio-video gallery, and information archive. Designe...

Japan has a variety of ‘guitars’ (using a wide definition of the term) and other types of lute. There are instruments that are considered traditional, or old in the Japanese historio-cultural context, many of which actually have acknowledged roots from outside Japan; there are instruments with a form that was clearly transplanted as a result of the...

The phenomenon of cultural revitalization in Jersey: A case of symbolic counterbalance to Globalization This paper examines the phenomenon of cultural revitalization in Jersey as asymbolic counterbalance to changes that are closely linked to globalization. The first part of the article explains how Jersey’s involvement in global business has led to...

Amami Ōshima to the southwest of Japan is an island between cultures. Geographically situated between Okinawa prefecture to the southwest and the much larger island of Kyūshū to the northeast, Amami Ōshima is the largest of a chain of islands known as Amami-guntō (the Amami archipelago) within Kagoshima prefecture and the Nansei archipelago. In the...

This article maps neo-traditional drumming in the Amami islands. Over the past two to three decades, a number of ensemble drum groups have emerged throughout the Amami islands. These drum groups cover three main styles of drumming: eisā, wadaiko and shimadaiko. With influences from Okinawa, mainland Japan and Amami respectively, and acknowledging t...

This paper examines the phenomenon of cultural revitalization in Jersey as a symbolic counterbalance to changes that are closely linked to globalization. The first part of the article explains how Jersey's involvement in global business has led to a rapid decline of its Norman heritage, particularly an Anglicization of the society. In the second pa...

A review of Chris Rojek, Pop Music, Pop Culture (Polity, Cambridge, 2011) and Tara Brabazon, Popular Music: Topics, Trends & Trajectories (Sage, London, 2012).

This article studies the interconnection between song, endangered language and sonic activism on the island of Guernsey in the Channel Islands. The discussion focuses on the role of song as a vehicle for helping to nurture a context of language promotion, and how new traditional music culture has been created as a result of linguistic activism. One...

Jersey has attained a recognized international reputation especially in agriculture, tourism and finance. Over the past century, this small island has developed rapidly as a tourist destination and, since the 1960s, as a leading international finance centre. This paper discusses how a public-private organization uses a notion of islandness in order...

This article discusses one community taiko (Japanese drumming) group, called Takumi, in Aotearoa/New Zealand as a case study for understanding multicultural community music-making in the transcultural imagination. The group under study operates by a community of performers working together with a shared purpose, and is essentially the result of its...