Tango in Japan

Yuiko Asaba is lecturer in music at SOAS University of London. She has worked as a member of tango orchestras in Argentina and Japan as a violinist.

In this book, Asaba firmly vanquishes any exoticizing interpretation of tango in Japan, but also shows how the history and institutionalization of tango in Japan adheres to similar structures in other areas of the arts. Her analysis places something as seemingly superfluous as tango within a larger narrative about the experience and meaning of modernity in Japan, showing how participatory popular culture and the 'middle brow' aesthetic space occupied by tango in Japan contributes to larger forces in social life and history. - Morgan James Luker, Reed College