Tango in Japan: Performance, Affect, and Knowledge Production, 1945-2023

Many contemporary Japanese tango musicians believe the ability to convey emotions is key to a “good” Argentine tango music performance.

They frequently draw upon their life experiences to convey Argentine tango’s powerful, and sometimes painful, emotions, fabricating discourses surrounding tango’s authenticity in Japan. In over a decade of my fieldwork in Japan, many musicians and singers emphasised to me how life experience and feelings are interwoven. They believe that life feeds into such powerful feelings, and that empathy constitutes a key characteristic of a good tango musician.

I build on these discourses and narrow my focus to the specific concern of the aesthetics of tango, showing how tango musicians and tango aficionados in Japan relate themselves to the aesthetics of emotion through performance, narratives, and knowledge production. I examine how tango performance is discussed in relation to emotion, regardless of their background, socio-economic status, and personal circumstances. I further examine how this discourse around aesthetics, in turn, aids in one’s understanding of the way tango performance imparts emotion.

Through historical and ethnographic approaches applied to my research and fieldwork in Argentina and Japan, this talk illuminates the cultivation of narratives surrounding the portrayal of emotion through tango performance in the transcultural contexts of modernity. This talk is based on the author’s forthcoming monograph, titled Tango in Japan: Cosmopolitanism Beyond the West, currently in production with the University of Hawai‘i Press for publication in 2024.

About the speaker

Dr Yuiko Asaba is Lecturer (equiv. Assistant Professor) in Music at SOAS University of London. Her research examines the significant presence of Latin American music in the AsiaPacific. Yuiko’s forthcoming first monograph, titled Tango in Japan: Cosmopolitanism Beyond the West, is in production with the University of Hawai‘i Press for publication in 2024.

Yuiko is also a Tango violinist, and has previously performed professionally as a member of tango orchestras in Argentina and Japan.

Contact 

• Email: centres@soas.ac.uk

Photo: Yuiko Asaba (vocal) with Tango Orchestra Astrorico. Photo used with the kind permission of Asaba Rica.