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Japanthem: Counter-Cultural Experiences, Cross-Cultural Remixes
A thrilling depiction of contemporary Japan by Fulbright MTVu-sponsored scholar Jillian Marshall, revealed through a prism of underground music, serendipity, and feminist disparity, based on 10 years of study in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Following a decade of back-and-forth across the Pacific, while researching her doctoral thesis in ethnomusicology, Japanthem author Jillian Marshall reveals contemporary Japan through a prism of magic, serendipity, frustration, unique underground culture, learning life lessons the hard way, and an insatiable curiosity for the human spirit. The book’s twenty vignettes — including what it’s like to be subtly bullied by your Buddhist dance teacher, go to a secret rave in woods near Mt. Fuji, meet a pop star at a basement club while tipsy, and experience a nuclear disaster unfold by the minute — are based off first-hand experience, and illustrate music’s fascinating relationship to (Japanese) society with honesty, intelligence, and humor. Japanthem offers a uniquely nuanced portrayal of life in the Land of the Rising Sun — while encouraging us to listen more deeply in (and to) Japan in the process.
Following a decade of back-and-forth across the Pacific, while researching her doctoral thesis in ethnomusicology, Japanthem author Jillian Marshall reveals contemporary Japan through a prism of magic, serendipity, frustration, unique underground culture, learning life lessons the hard way, and an insatiable curiosity for the human spirit. The book’s twenty vignettes — including what it’s like to be subtly bullied by your Buddhist dance teacher, go to a secret rave in woods near Mt. Fuji, meet a pop star at a basement club while tipsy, and experience a nuclear disaster unfold by the minute — are based off first-hand experience, and illustrate music’s fascinating relationship to (Japanese) society with honesty, intelligence, and humor. Japanthem offers a uniquely nuanced portrayal of life in the Land of the Rising Sun — while encouraging us to listen more deeply in (and to) Japan in the process.
- GenresNonfictionJapan
230 pages, Paperback
Published April 12, 2022
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1094 people want to read
About the author
Jillian Marshall
1 book12 followersJillian Marshall grew up in a rural town in Vermont, just south of the French-Canadian border. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 2009, she moved to a fishing village in Japan to teach middle school English. She came back to the US to pursue a doctorate in ethnomusicology at Cornell University, frequently returning to Japan to conduct research on contemporary Japanese music. Following the completion of her PhD in 2018, she left academia in pursuit of a more public intellectualism. In addition to writing, Jillian currently teaches the languages and history of Japan and China; she is also a lifelong musician, and plays trumpet and piano. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 21, 2022
I really loved the beginning of this book in which the author discussed the process of becoming a PhD and how she decided to pursue this. I have always envied those who put great effort into earning a PhD so I found it fun to learn about the author’s experiences.
The bottom line afterward was that the author did not want to continue in the world of academia as a professor so she turned her dissertation into a series of captivating vignettes to try her hand at being a writer. I was interested in this book’s overlying themes—-Japanese traditional music, Japanese pop music, Japanese underground music, and the essence of being a gaijin (foreigner) in Japan.
The author minced no words in communicating her feelings about her experiences in a Japan, albeit sometimes a bit harshly. As she did so, I reflected upon my own knowledge of Japan through hearing about my older son’s trips there and from my own reading of contemporary Japanese literature. For me then, this book was an engaging read about a country I never visited yet whose culture and people were surprisingly familiar to me.
The bottom line afterward was that the author did not want to continue in the world of academia as a professor so she turned her dissertation into a series of captivating vignettes to try her hand at being a writer. I was interested in this book’s overlying themes—-Japanese traditional music, Japanese pop music, Japanese underground music, and the essence of being a gaijin (foreigner) in Japan.
The author minced no words in communicating her feelings about her experiences in a Japan, albeit sometimes a bit harshly. As she did so, I reflected upon my own knowledge of Japan through hearing about my older son’s trips there and from my own reading of contemporary Japanese literature. For me then, this book was an engaging read about a country I never visited yet whose culture and people were surprisingly familiar to me.
September 28, 2022
Most of us have listened to music, written an essay, read about another country, kept our cool when we wanted to punch. Some of us have gone to all nighters, traveled to another country and learned a few phrases and have thrown a party or two.
But Jillian Marshall has to be one of the few people who did it ALL, at ONCE. From underground to traditional music to mainstream in one of the largest cities in the world and in a tiny fishing village, she may be the only one who lived, ate, danced, studied in three different cultures within one island country, and eloquently laid it all out the journey in her book, Japanthem.
I really enjoyed this book because it covered so much in short story type format; culture without being dry, stories that mad me laugh as well as cringe (how do you show up in NYC with $50 for two weeks?) and a real American's insight into a culture so few Americans really understand.
If any one thing is of interest to you, this entire book is well worth the read. Thanks!
But Jillian Marshall has to be one of the few people who did it ALL, at ONCE. From underground to traditional music to mainstream in one of the largest cities in the world and in a tiny fishing village, she may be the only one who lived, ate, danced, studied in three different cultures within one island country, and eloquently laid it all out the journey in her book, Japanthem.
I really enjoyed this book because it covered so much in short story type format; culture without being dry, stories that mad me laugh as well as cringe (how do you show up in NYC with $50 for two weeks?) and a real American's insight into a culture so few Americans really understand.
If any one thing is of interest to you, this entire book is well worth the read. Thanks!
January 20, 2024
Thank you to Three Rooms Press and Goodreads Giveaways for providing an ARC of this book.
I have long nurtured an interest in Japan. Not the aspects of it captured by obvious cultural touchpoints, but the parts represented by more obscure, off-the-grid museums, art, theater, and music. It’s because of this interest that I was excited to read “Japanthem.” Written by Jillian Marshall as an adaptation of her doctoral dissertation in ethnomusicology, the book aims to offer 20 vignettes surrounding the place of music in Japanese culture. Tales of a gaijin participating in a traditional dance ceremony? A secret rave at the base of Mt Fuji? Meeting a pop star in a basement club? Count me in.
Unfortunately, I had mixed feelings about this book. Despite being a slim volume, it somehow comes off as simultaneously too much and not enough. This is perhaps reflective of the challenges of excerpting material from one’s dissertation for a wider audience while also not losing the substance of what makes that material interesting in the first place. The end product felt like it was written by two different authors.
The front half of the book was the least engaging for me. The introduction, which is essentially about how the author found herself in a PhD program and then stumbled through her academic work with a mixture of anxiety and drugs, starts things off on a shaky foot. I believe it is intended to engage the reader through its transparency, but it sells the author short and is a curious contrast to her expressed frustrations throughout the book about times when she wasn’t being taken seriously. Music isn’t discussed with any substantive focus for the first 75 pages (which is a good chunk of the full 200-page text).
It’s incredibly difficult to balance the insider perspective that comes from living for many years in another country with the outsider perspective that comes with being an American in a culture as cautious about foreigners as Japan tends to be. Richard Lloyd Parry is one of the few writers I’ve read who seems to be able to elegantly hold both vantages. The balance is less successfully held in this book, in which Marshall seems to frequently lose her positionality as a researcher to indignant reactions about how she’s treated. And so, it was a bridge too far for me when she adopted language so important to marginalized people in the United States to describe herself as a victim of microaggressions in Japan. Were people cold to her at times? Yes. Did they often treat her as a foreign curiosity more than a human being? Undoubtedly. Is she also a White American woman with university funding living in Japan for the explicit purpose of studying the people there? Yup.
And yet…The book picks up in the back half, and there are some vignettes that quite successfully paint a picture. The most realized of these for me was the story about her evolution with her dance teacher, who is openly disparaging of the author for some time, but eventually shows a tiny shift in their interactions that speaks of greater meaning. Marshall tells this story well, including being able to balance her own internal reactions with empathy and greater understanding for what in her teacher’s life may have led to her distance. Other moments, like the vignette of being there during the tsunami and knowing that her being made the butt of jokes is informed by people’s suppressed fear, or her descriptions of the nurturing relationships with her Japanese “fairy godmothers,” have a nuance to them that fosters insight.
About 3/4 of the way through the book, there is a blog post that Marshall published with mtvU as a condition of her fellowship. It is essentially a condensed repetition of content from earlier in the book. It’s moments like these that came across as more of a grab-bag “what else can I include?” approach to constructing the book than a more fully realized one that might have produced a text in which the parts add up to a greater whole.
Ultimately, this book has the potential to be so much more—like the studio cut of a film that has promise but is missing key material that can only be seen in the director’s cut. I’d probably gladly sit with the author over coffee and eagerly hear her tell stories about her time in Japan. But as a reader, I wanted a finer balance between storyteller and researcher than I got. Perhaps I need to read her dissertation.
I have long nurtured an interest in Japan. Not the aspects of it captured by obvious cultural touchpoints, but the parts represented by more obscure, off-the-grid museums, art, theater, and music. It’s because of this interest that I was excited to read “Japanthem.” Written by Jillian Marshall as an adaptation of her doctoral dissertation in ethnomusicology, the book aims to offer 20 vignettes surrounding the place of music in Japanese culture. Tales of a gaijin participating in a traditional dance ceremony? A secret rave at the base of Mt Fuji? Meeting a pop star in a basement club? Count me in.
Unfortunately, I had mixed feelings about this book. Despite being a slim volume, it somehow comes off as simultaneously too much and not enough. This is perhaps reflective of the challenges of excerpting material from one’s dissertation for a wider audience while also not losing the substance of what makes that material interesting in the first place. The end product felt like it was written by two different authors.
The front half of the book was the least engaging for me. The introduction, which is essentially about how the author found herself in a PhD program and then stumbled through her academic work with a mixture of anxiety and drugs, starts things off on a shaky foot. I believe it is intended to engage the reader through its transparency, but it sells the author short and is a curious contrast to her expressed frustrations throughout the book about times when she wasn’t being taken seriously. Music isn’t discussed with any substantive focus for the first 75 pages (which is a good chunk of the full 200-page text).
It’s incredibly difficult to balance the insider perspective that comes from living for many years in another country with the outsider perspective that comes with being an American in a culture as cautious about foreigners as Japan tends to be. Richard Lloyd Parry is one of the few writers I’ve read who seems to be able to elegantly hold both vantages. The balance is less successfully held in this book, in which Marshall seems to frequently lose her positionality as a researcher to indignant reactions about how she’s treated. And so, it was a bridge too far for me when she adopted language so important to marginalized people in the United States to describe herself as a victim of microaggressions in Japan. Were people cold to her at times? Yes. Did they often treat her as a foreign curiosity more than a human being? Undoubtedly. Is she also a White American woman with university funding living in Japan for the explicit purpose of studying the people there? Yup.
And yet…The book picks up in the back half, and there are some vignettes that quite successfully paint a picture. The most realized of these for me was the story about her evolution with her dance teacher, who is openly disparaging of the author for some time, but eventually shows a tiny shift in their interactions that speaks of greater meaning. Marshall tells this story well, including being able to balance her own internal reactions with empathy and greater understanding for what in her teacher’s life may have led to her distance. Other moments, like the vignette of being there during the tsunami and knowing that her being made the butt of jokes is informed by people’s suppressed fear, or her descriptions of the nurturing relationships with her Japanese “fairy godmothers,” have a nuance to them that fosters insight.
About 3/4 of the way through the book, there is a blog post that Marshall published with mtvU as a condition of her fellowship. It is essentially a condensed repetition of content from earlier in the book. It’s moments like these that came across as more of a grab-bag “what else can I include?” approach to constructing the book than a more fully realized one that might have produced a text in which the parts add up to a greater whole.
Ultimately, this book has the potential to be so much more—like the studio cut of a film that has promise but is missing key material that can only be seen in the director’s cut. I’d probably gladly sit with the author over coffee and eagerly hear her tell stories about her time in Japan. But as a reader, I wanted a finer balance between storyteller and researcher than I got. Perhaps I need to read her dissertation.
October 26, 2023
Highly recommended. It is easy to read, yet rich in content, for casual readers as well as musicians and Japanophiles. Cross cultural in the best way.
With a family member living and working in Japan, I valued the analysis of how Japanese culture can both inspire and frustrate newcomers and "outsiders." Marshall is only able to do this by reflecting on her own personal experiences in diverse Japanese contexts. So true, so empathetic, and so useful.
She's also able to draw connections between traditional music scenes (mostly led by older Japanese women) and underground scenes (younger people dancing in basements), as well as analyze Japanese pop music in context. Any music lover would find these observations fascinating.
Finally, this book is a model of sorts for "post- academic" action, trying to bring the power of crisp academic thinking to public audiences and discourse. Not easy, but Marshall somehow pulls it off. It's actually kind of a page turner. Check it out.
With a family member living and working in Japan, I valued the analysis of how Japanese culture can both inspire and frustrate newcomers and "outsiders." Marshall is only able to do this by reflecting on her own personal experiences in diverse Japanese contexts. So true, so empathetic, and so useful.
She's also able to draw connections between traditional music scenes (mostly led by older Japanese women) and underground scenes (younger people dancing in basements), as well as analyze Japanese pop music in context. Any music lover would find these observations fascinating.
Finally, this book is a model of sorts for "post- academic" action, trying to bring the power of crisp academic thinking to public audiences and discourse. Not easy, but Marshall somehow pulls it off. It's actually kind of a page turner. Check it out.
October 6, 2024
I am biased towards personal accounts of living in Japan and/or studying Japanese as someone who shares this experience. Regarding this book in particular, I loved the author’s voice. I recently read another book about Japan/Japanese written in first person, “Fifty Sounds” by Polly Barton. I feel like Barton and Marshall have similar voices and it would be interesting to hear them in conversation. They’re both very attuned to sound as well and it was interesting to hear both of them talk about that aspect of the Japanese language.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews