I wrote a piece about dad music for Néojaponisme, and about Kwaidan for the Japan Times.

In other news, I was reading Philip Flavin's chapter on koto music in the Ashgate Research Companion to Japanese Music (ed. Alison McQueen Tokita, David W. Hughes) and I found this:

Most of Hirano [Kenji]'s important scholarly works — as with many other Japanese musicologists — are found in the detailed explanations accompanying record collections. (These collections are prohibitively expensive and soon out of print.)

I mean, the collections referred to are prohibitively expensive, it's true. But the book containing these sentences costs £85.50 with direct-from-publisher web purchase discount. The kettle may be jumbo-sized, but that doesn't make the pot any less black.

(Incidentally, those collections do have one merit in their pricing scheme: transparency. One CD in Japan costs 3000 yen + tax; a 60-CD box set costs 180,000 yen + tax. Done.)