Comparative History of Western Music Acceptance in Indonesia and Japan

Abstract

Indonesia and Japan share a similar historical background in their contact with Western music. Sixteenth-century Indonesia and Japan, upon which these investigations would be based, marked the beginning of the early acceptance of Western music, mainly through the Portuguese merchants and missionary activities in both countries. It was primarily the spice trade on the Straits of Mallaca that brought the Portuguese ships to land and noticed what they called the  'spice island' (formerly Mollucas, now Maluku) of Indonesia in 1511. In Mallaca, the Jesuits met a Japanese man named Yajiro, who told them about his country, becoming the first Japanese Christian and bringing the Jesuits to Japan in 1549. Amongst so many kinds of Christian impacts, introducing Western music would become the primary concern in this paper. Sixteenth-century Gregorian songs can still be found in Maluku and Flores of Indonesia and in Kyûshû of Japan, even though, for the time being, its texts have become very corrupted. The current musical life situation in Japan is comparable to that of Western countries; in the US, there are fine orchestras in almost every large city in Japan. In Indonesia, on the contrary, there is no single professional orchestra yet, even in Jakarta today