Scoring Japan’s Pasts and Futures / 1: Legends, Folklore, Monsters, and Historical Drama

This chapter discusses the ways in which anime from the 1960s through the early 2000s have musically depicted altered versions of the past, including folklore. These soundscapes range from jazz and rock towards more eerie atmospheres, created largely through the use of traditional instruments and some kabuki-influenced gestures, although in the 1960s to mid-1980s, the two were more aurally discrete. While traditionalism was as far as possible from the technologically-soaked Japanese imagination of the 1980s, some of the soundscapes of futurist, dystopian settings merged with the concepts of fantastical past worlds to create a pastiche of modern rock overlaid with traditional Asian instrumentation. The aurality of legends and historic topics in the 1990s and early 2000s then turned towards incorporating the traditional sounds into the global, with a preference for rock. The rest of the chapter is devoted to two more recently active composers, Toshio Masuda and Yūki Kajiura.