'What’s jazz got to do with it?' Reframing international perceptions of Japan through the Tokyo Jazz Joints project.

For all the symbols that Japan evokes in the popular imagination, it is safe to say that jazz music probably comes far down the list for most – if indeed it even ranks at all. And yet, Japan has been a hotbed for the evolution of jazz culture since pre-World War II. After 1945 these seeds blossomed in the explosion across the country of jazz kissa – the uniquely Japanese phenomenon of dedicated jazz listening spaces. Remarkably, despite the growing global interest in Japan’s listening culture, driven in part by the worldwide revival in vinyl and analogue audio equipment, jazz kissa did not register on the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ radar. On the contrary, they remain othered spaces in Japan, that are symbolic of a diminishing material culture, still worthy of suspicion. Due to changing tastes, ageing owners, urban gentrification and lack of heritage preservation, jazz kissa are at risk of vanishing altogether from the country’s musical landscape. Through the prism of the Tokyo Jazz Joints project, an audiovisual document of Japan's jazz kissa culture created by photographer Philip Arneill and broadcaster James Catchpole, this visual paper will reframe the deep and meaningful relationship between Japan and jazz music, something that is only beginning to properly receive the international recognition it deserves. Using images from the Tokyo Jazz Joints project it will demonstrate the way in which Japan not only embraced a new and foreign musical genre, but subsequently enshrined it through the creation of a nationwide network of pseudo-religious spaces that are temples to jazz culture.