Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how street musicians in Tokyo restrict their musical practices to small spaces and tightly bounded social groups in order to create the conditions within which they become recognised as the artists they imagine themselves to be.

Paper long abstract:

Most musicians in Tokyo today are "going nowhere" (Martin 2016). So what do the thousands of musicians and bands who play in the metropolis' five hundred live houses each night imagine themselves to be doing? How do the artists gain a tangible sense of their envisioned musician-selves without industry support or recognition? This paper explores how individuals create and sustain musical authenticity by intentionally limiting the scale of their activities to local neighbourhoods, urban micro-sites and tiny live house communities. Doing so simultaneously involves a shift in the unit of valuation, from fan numbers and record sales to creative output and sharing, and regular emotional release during performances before their peers.

Changes like these in the creative process have been foreshadowed. Shinji Miyadai (1995) has noted an increasing pattern of communicative behaviour among young people in Japan characterised by division into small, isolated groups: what he called 「島宇宙」("island universes"). Since this time anthropological literature has demonstrated how the act of imagining new selves and lifestyles into being involves a concomitant change in the scale and frame of reference of social behaviour (Kavedzija 2017; Yamakoshi and Sekine 2016; Slater 2015; Obinger 2015; Cassegard 2013).

Accordingly, where others have hitherto illuminated macro-scale networks and international flows within Japanese music scenes (Novak 2013; Matsue 2008; Condry 2000), I emphasise how "island universes" comprised of street corners and smokey basements act as the dominant sites of creative musical practices in Tokyo today.