The most compelling, expressive and soulful instrument of all is the human voice. Outside the world of Western music, there are many vocalists who have the ability to capture a certain indefinable sense of yearning. Voices with a fiery beauty and explosive power; intimate, haunting, ageless, mysterious. Some of the best known are West Africa's Salif Keita and Youssou N'Dour, or from Pakistan the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, but there are several other lesser-known names from around the world.

So, who could possibly be Japan's representative in such illustrious company?

Step forward Takio Ito.

As with other great singers, Ito is not only blessed with an inimitable voice, but has constantly striven to develop and expand his tradition, in Ito's case minyo, or Japanese folk music.

Takio Ito was born in Tomakomai, Hokkaido in 1950, the younger of identical twins and the last of 13 children. His father was a poor fisherman in a seaside village which didn't even have electricity until he was 12 years old. According to Ito, his expanded vision was conceived growing up and listening to his family's singing. They would sing minyo, but Ito never knew that was what it was called.

"Sometimes I helped my father fish on his boat," Ito recalls now. "As he rowed or drew the fishing net he'd sing out 'o-o-shi, ko-o-shi' or 'yara dokkoi, dokkoi sho.' I couldn't figure out if it was a call or a song, but now I believe he was singing for himself, and it soaked into my body and heart. That's why I don't like to distinguish one music style from others."

Minyo (derived from the German word Volkslied) is the standard term for folk songs, and is associated with particular communities or districts throughout Japan. Songs typically relate to work, weddings, drinking, or as prayer for the spirit of a tree or animal. Those lyrics can be personal or local or sometimes near nonsense.

The real meaning and spirit of minyo, however, is believed to have somehow gotten lost during the modernization in Japan in the Meiji Era. The government strove hard to root out traditional culture, deemed not suitable for a Western-style nation. Many minyo songs were rewritten, and only government-approved minyo were recorded or played on the radio.

Pockets of true minyo survived in rural regions, including Ito's hometown. It was the devastation of minyo that eventually led to the evolution of "Japanese pops," and some believe that minyo as currently understood are not folk music at all.

"The image of minyo is that of traditional music," says Ito, "but minyo has always been for the common people. It was simply the popular music of the time."

The rather conservative Minyo Association and other preservation societies have probably fostered the traditional image, and have strict credentials for issuing teaching licenses. At 18, Ito was a certified teacher, the youngest ever. He went on to win the national minyo championship three years running, and his reputation was firmly established.

Ito found the confines of membership at the association stifling to his creativity, however, and quit in 1981, declaring his teachers could tell him nothing. He became independent, thereby forgoing the chance to perform publicly at Minyo Association functions or teach.

"They [the association]," he says, "called me crazy.

"Minyo have always changed through the years, though, and adapted and been influenced by each particular period of time. Because minyo are thought of as traditional these days, and taught as such, you don't hear them in the cities or on the streets any more. I wanted to let people know what minyo are, so to do that I mixed minyo with jazz or rock and played at the usual live houses.

"In reality there are no rules to minyo," he goes on. "You sing how you feel. That can be happy or sad, or I get some power from the audience and I just express my feelings. My father used to sing 'Soran Bushi' [a Hokkaido fishing song] differently every time. The original working style of minyo was just voice and clapping."

Ito's own updated, powerful, rocking version of "Soran Bushi" has become one of his trademark songs, and has even been adopted by schools in various places around Japan, some of which have formed troupes of dancers to accompany the song.

"One of the points of minyo is the call-and-response vocals," Ito observes. "That can help make you feel at one with the people you're with."

As an independent voice, Ito has been expanding the realms of minyo by incorporating jazz and rock, as well as other Asian and Japanese traditional elements, while bass, guitar, violin, piano and drums are combined with shamisen, shakuhachi and taiko.

In some ways, Ito represents the true soul of Japan, and shows how a tradition can keep its essence and evolve without selling out to Western music.