It's Saturday night, and the basement rock 'n' roll club Penguin House in Koenji is packed to bursting. As late-coming guests crowd down the stairs, the performer, Dai Yamamoto, takes the stage and tunes up his instrument.

"I'm not much for talking," Yamamoto says. "I'm just going to play on through here. Hope you like it."

Ja jan . . . ja jan jan jan . . .

The powerful, percussive sound of Tsugaru shamisen fills the house. The audience of students, artists and young company employees is rapt.

Tsugaru shamisen -- Japan's bluegrass, Japan's flamenco -- is a passionate, gut-level music rooted in the hard life of the Tsugaru Peninsula, the northernmost tip of Honshu, where apples grow better than rice and the winters are bitter cold.

The south wind of Okinawa shima-uta (island songs) that blew during the '90s has swung round to the north, and is blowing new life into all of Japanese traditional music. The audience at Penguin House is sailing on it.

A trio of high school students occupy one table. "I liked it a lot," says Kosuke Yoshikawa. "It's the first time I've heard it, but a friend told me it was really good."

His friends Yohei Kojima and Ryo Yamashika agree. "It's kakko ii," says Yamashika. "Yeah, we'd like to hear more of it."

Across the room, young company man Tetsuya Maruta sits with two college student friends. "I'd call it Japan's techno," Maruta says. "It's got that powerful, dancing beat."

"No," says his friend Yumiko Kubo. "I thought it had more of a, kind of, I don't know, spiritual thing . . ."

"Anyway, a lot of people are getting into shamisen again these days," puts in Yukiko Sakawa, "It's really making a comeback."

Yamamoto himself is a case in point. Tokyo born and bred, Yamamoto was an accomplished rock and blues guitarist who had never really listened to the banjolike instrument till he was in his 20s.

"There was a min'yo sakaba [folk-song bar] near where I lived, and I used to hear the shamisen playing as I went by," Yamamoto says. "Then I spotted a used shamisen in a secondhand store and decided to give it a try."

Yamamoto started going to the min'yo sakaba, where he found an accomplished Tsugaru player to teach him. Today he plays shamisen in some of the same venues, like Penguin House, where he used to play rock 'n' roll. Often he takes the music to the street in the old kadozuke busking tradition, playing in front of Ikebukuro Station and other spots. A crowd quickly gathers every time. Besides money, many throw business cards into the hat, so Yamamoto has built up a good mailing list of fans.

"It's great to be able to hear something like this," says Ako Yamada, who is one of them. "We don't get much exposure to this kind of really Japanese thing. We need to get more in touch with our roots."

New takes on tradition

Getting in touch with their musical roots is something more and more young Japanese seem to be doing these days, and Tsugaru shamisen has been leading the way with young, publicity-conscious performers like the Yoshida Brothers and the female duo Anmitsu.

The Yoshida Brothers, Ryoichiro and Ken'ichi, electrified the Japanese music world by racking up sales of 90,000 on their first album in 1999 and 80,000 on their second album last year -- unheard-of figures for a hogaku release. Their shamisen skills are augmented by a flair for showmanship that combines a rock 'n' roller attitude (and hairdos) with gaudy silk kimono. Unlike Yamamoto, though, the Yoshidas came up through the ranks of conventional min'yo training. Hailing from Hokkaido, they started learning shamisen at age 5, and have competed and won championships in regional and national min'yo competitions since they were in middle school.

"The Yoshida Brothers' success shows that hogaku needs something extra," says their producer, Akio Aoki. "There are plenty of skilled musicians, but it takes showmanship to sell albums."

Takafumi Tanaka, editor of the Hogaku Journal, says he's encouraged by the attention the Yoshidas have received, which he feels will benefit Japanese traditional music generally.

"Japan is taking a fresh look at its own culture," Tanaka observes. "It's affecting everything, not just music; look at the revival of yukata kimono, with their bright, new designs, or the fad for Japanese cuisine and regional sake."

Hogaku Journal is putting its money where its mouth is: Last year it opened a live house, Waon, across from Nippori Station, exclusively to present Japanese traditional music.

A factor is the internationalization of Japan's youth. Travel abroad and foreign visitors often make young people more aware of their own culture.

"I had a friend come to visit from overseas," says Masami Ito, 23, "and she asked a lot of questions about Japanese culture. It made me realize I didn't know a whole lot about it." Ito started listening to koto music to make up the gap -- and found she liked it.

Rising wave

Some elements of the "fresh look" have been building up for some time, like the wadaiko drum group Kodo, which has won international renown, spawned dozens of imitators in America and Europe as well as at home, and generally revitalized Japanese festival drumming.

Others reflect the emergence of a new generation in old artistic families, like twentysomething Motoya Izumi, star of NHK's serial drama "Hojo Tokimune" and heir to the 15th-century Izumi school of kyogen (noh comedy).

Another is Hideki Togi, whose family has served the Imperial court as gagaku musicians since the eighth century. After an international upbringing, Togi dreamed of becoming a rock star, but decided to give his ancestral calling a try and entered the Imperial Household Agency music department.

After several years in the court orchestra, he resigned to pursue a solo career, playing gagaku classics, his own new compositions -- and even some rock tunes. In the process he's cut over a dozen top-selling albums, won thousands of adoring (mostly female) fans and become a regular on several television shows.

Through Togi and other young gagaku musicians, this music, once the closely guarded preserve of a tiny elite group, has found a mass audience.

Daigo Suito, a music education major at Gakugei University, is also heir to a hogaku tradition, the Nishiki school of Satsuma biwa music. The biwa, or Japanese lute, has already fallen in and out of fashion many times over the centuries; its last great revival at the end of the 19th century extended into the 1930s and produced several new schools, some of which, including the Nishiki style, are still going. Suito is not overly impressed by the Tsugaru shamisen boom as such.

"Youth music fads generally run about three years," Suito says. "The Tsugaru shamisen thing will fade again, too."

The important thing, as Suito sees it, is the impetus it gives traditional music as a whole. The fashion makes people willing to listen and give it a chance. Even after the boom has faded, people who heard it and liked it will remember it. Some people will stay interested and even take it up themselves.

Hogaku Journal's Tanaka has faith in the future. "The real boom in Japanese music is just starting," he says.