Art Emerges from Conflict - Whether it is Music or Literature

I was born and raised in Japan, and yet here I find myself immersed in an English-speaking environment on Facebook every day. This is not only to improve my fluency in English but also to determine how much of my identity I can maintain outside of my native language and what kind of effort is required to do so. As a non-native English speaker in a world dominated by English, I have experienced countless disadvantages and injustices that come with it.

Japanese people who are active outside of Japan, particularly in the Europe and America-centered world, likely have experienced similar frustrations, albeit to varying degrees. A Japanese musician who passed at the end of March created numerous tunes that were praised as "emotionally moving across borders" and gained a fan base around the world. However, during an interview conducted a year and a half before his passing, he spoke modestly about how his subsequent musical career was mostly a series of defeats after moving his base of activities to NYC/US. He frankly discussed the difficulty of maintaining his Japanese identity while pursuing a global music career.

By the phrase "Japanese identity" in this context, I mean both the image of Japanese identity held by Westerners and that of "Japanese people who are successful in the world" that those who have grown up in Japan aspire to. The two rarely coincide. While his music has been described as a fusion of "East and West," as someone with some knowledge of music analysis, I believe that his music is something where his conflict with these two images of "Japanese identity" is musically sublimated. Sadly, I have not heard anyone explicitly notice this.

He finally ended his battle with cancer after over eight years, while my life continues. I believe there is much to learn from his life, including lessons from his negative side. While I am not a professional composer and do not have ambitions to release music, there may be some underlying themes that connect my daily English writing on Facebook with the music he created even while battling his illness.