For David Wheeler's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
"A Shakuhachi Odyssey -- Enchanted by Timbres of Heaven" is a collection of autobiographical essays, cultural musings, musical stories and more. It beat out over 200 competitors to receive last year's Rennyo Sho, a nonfiction literature prize sponsored by the Honganji Temple Foundation and ...
Real classical Japanese music is a rare thing today. There is a wide-ranging repertoire for Japanese traditional instruments, but there are few performers who specialize in the classics of these genres, or whose musical education focused on those classics. Two such women, however, about half ...
While Japanese traditional instruments boast long histories (up to 1,200 years in some cases, since their importation from the Asian continent) most reached their present forms hundreds of years ago and have not changed since. The conventional 13-string koto, a zither with moveable bridges, is ...
