...at the Sound of the Tone: Canon in the Smelting Pot: Kanno Yoko

Somewhere along the foggy banks of my memory, there is an article titled "Japan: The Land Feminism Forgot." I can't find the article, not for lack of trying, but because when I searched "The Land Feminism Forgot," I found it was not just an article. It was a bit of headline trope, phrased alternately to emphasize a country (I found an article for Italy with basically the same title, as an example) or for a demographic of women (either married women or single women, depending on the slant of the writer, I suppose).

The top hit I found was a BBC article* discussing "Western Myths about Japan," and they bring up the phrase verbatim. Dr. Christopher Harding writes "Japan has been seen as the land that feminism forgot. Both Japanese and Western commentators have tended to see the geisha girl as the ideal of Japanese womanhood - attractive and subtle, subservient to men, but clever enough to be good company." This "geisha girl" ideal was leveraged by an artist in a previous article, Tamaki Miura, to craft her performances of Madame Butterfly. Her personal life, on the other hand... Lets say the Japanese media had a difficult time reconciling the two personas.

How entire countries could come to be viewed as "left behind" by feminism, or to lack feminist thinking entirely, has much to do with media representation. (As an aside: Portland, OR is learning the hard way how much media representation matters. That's for another time. Maybe.) Speaking anecdotally, it seems like much focus is spent on Japan's problems with things like groping on subways or the as yet uncracked glass ceiling. My sense is, whenever these topics come up, it comes up with an air of superiority, as if America has solved these problems and those poor backwards Japanese are languishing in the distance. (More related aside: this attitude seems to be present for the Middle East and Africa as well.)

As if. Of course there are feminists in Japan, but I suspect the language barrier in consort with a host of implicit assumptions prevents their names from travelling far. I will not pretend to be an expert**, so if you're curious you can look up some of the historical movement: Shin Fujin Kyokai (新婦人協会), or The New Women Association, in 1919; the Sekirankai (赤蘭会), or The Red Wave Society, in 1921; uman ribu, or Women's Lib, in the 1960's and 70's... There's a lot of there there, and there's always more to be said.

*Three Western Myths About Japan

**For the love of all that is holy, don't take me as the final word on any of this.

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One trend which has been pretty consistent in my Composer for Every Country series has been - women who compose academic music ("classical") don't pop up in Google searches very often unless you search for them specifically. Even if you do, you don't always find many. The pop world, on the other hand, is a place where women composers have consistently found prominence and success, and it seems like this has been true as far back as the 19th century with the advent of the salon.

There's plenty of ink to be spilled about how women consistently end up in the world of popular music, how such music's ephemeral nature and lack of perceived seriousness and "genius" work to quickly erode women out of the historical record... But that's not what I'm here for, go look for someone who actually knows what they're talking about.

Searching for women composers in Japan, I find a handful of women working in the academic and symphonic stage world, and a whole lot working as composers for anime or video games. Michiru Yamane, Manami Matsumae, Harumi Fujita, Yoshino Aoki... The list goes on. But for today, I'm going to focus on a composer very near and dear to my heart: Kanno Yoko. As a film composer, I do not hesitate to say that Kanno Yoko is a composer of a caliber on par with John Williams. I am well aware that in certain circles, that is damning with faint praise, but lets be real - the attitude relegating film scoring to a lower tier of talent and compositional skill is part of the reason there's such a mess of inequality to begin with.

Anyways. Kanno Yoko's work spans a number of disparate genres, both in anime and music, and she has provided the scores for (in no particular order): Wolf's Rain, about a group of wolves looking for Paradise in an apocalyptic future; The Vision of Escaflowne, a story about the conflict of individual freedom and fate and giant robots... and... Isaac Newton? Somehow?; Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a story about... something... there's a lot of talking and then shooting and then talking some more; and Cowboy Bebop which is probably the best story ever told. Say what? That's an exaggeration? Fight me.