In 1977 I lived in a suburb of Tokyo, sharing the quiet residential back streets with silent cyclists and many cats. Occasionally at weekends a Chindonya duo – saxophone and percussion, both men dressed as geisha – would wander the streets, noisily advertising a new local ‘food centre’. A ten minute walk took me to a tofu shop where I could buy a little blue plastic bag, holding water and a slab of pure white tofu. While waiting for customers, the tofuya-san lay on his back on the tatami, lazily blowing a shakuhachi as you might strum a guitar while sitting on a porch. A keen shakuhachi student myself, I was delighted.

Fast forward to 2020 and this seems an increasingly unlikely scene, even in Japan’s rapidly depopulating countryside. Where are these casual amateur shakuhachi players? In the 1970s Japan’s traditional music scene was even more inward-looking than it is now, and some shakuhachi teachers were reluctant to engage with the trickle of eccentric westerners who wanted urgently to learn. Secretive and factional, no one then would have said traditional music was in particularly rude health, but at least there were a dozen major players active. Watazumido died in 1992, Katsuya Yokoyama in 2010. If they were the summit of the pyramid, the base was thousands of amateur players. Around 1990 I visited Mejiro (a specialist Tokyo shop dealing in shakuhachi), and saw the whole top floor occupied by a workshop for eager shakuhachi makers.

In both 2018 and 2019 I visited Japan. I played shakuhachi informally – a sort of teatime entertainment – for several days, in a ceramics gallery in Fukuoka that was displaying my potter friend’s work. Later I played several times at the vast new Lush shop in Shinjuku – Lush is a British company offering a dizzying range of bathtime products – in the company of violinist Midori Komachi. On both occasions I met people who said they were especially pleased to hear me because “it’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone play this instrument”. Another response was, “My grandfather used to play,” and indeed while we were in Shinjuku, Midori herself heard for the first time that her grandfather had played shakuhachi.

I went back to Mejiro, where the shop has halved in size. The whole ground floor is now a bar, painted in cerise pink, named Panier De Légumes. Upstairs the owner was as helpful as ever, but finding it difficult to conceal her gloom about Japan’s steeply declining interest in the shakuhachi. Few young players are coming forward and the business is propped up by non-Japanese enthusiasm.

And that enthusiasm is explosive. In the past two decades shakuhachi playing of every hue has taken off outside the instrument’s home country. Non-Japanese players tend to be evangelical: sharing on social media, teaching via internet, attending international festivals designed to impress the outside world with the instrument’s range. Unburdened by Japanese caution, decorum or a heavy sense of inheritance from the lineage, they cast wabi-sabi to the winds in an informal, backslapping free-for-all. Even though Australia and America probably lead the way in sheer numbers of teachers and players, it’s the European Shakuhachi Society that sets the pace online, with a regular newsletter, occasional journal, website, forum and a Facebook page that just seethes! One example of who’s playing these days: my friend Shabaka Hutchings, a leading saxophonist on London’s new jazz scene, has bought a decent instrument. While in Japan for the 2019 Fuji Rock festival, he astonished the Mejiro shop staff by walking over from Shibuya in the height of the summer heat.

A lot has been written, including academic studies, about these newcomers to the shakuhachi and how they see things. Far less has been said about how no one in Japan can barely be bothered to pick the thing up. As if my tofuya-san preferred to stare at his phone, his flute left on the shelf. Of course there are brilliant exceptions. Dozan Fujiwara, now 48, teaches a dozen students at Geidai (Tokyo University Of The Arts), and talks in an interview of “an increasing number of women studying it today... There are active shakuhachi teachers all around the country today.” Although in fact several of his Geidai students are from overseas. Meanwhile Japanese women have had to defy centuries of hard prejudice to even begin to play; of these perhaps the most impressive is Mamino Yorita (aged 30). I love her uninhibited style, combined with a poise that absolutely refuses to hurry.

I would agree that Japan still has a number of skilled players at the highest level, but they are surrounded by a culture that is less and less interested. Perhaps Japan is now paying the price for failing to support education in traditional music since 1871, for deciding that the true meaning of modern is ‘western’. Moreover, here are five reasons why you would not think of taking up the instrument:

1. It has a reputation for difficulty. The one thing we all know about the shakuhachi is “kubi-furi sannen”. If it takes three years to move your neck correctly, playing my favourite anime theme may take decades.

2. It’s expensive. The bamboo costs more and more. Then there’s the compulsory tickets for the teacher’s concerts.

3. It’s old fashioned (my grandfather liked it. And the koto sounds like a posh restaurant).

4. There’s no context. It’s hard to know what was the context in which my tofuya-san played, but when you study an instrument you need some life support system around you: perhaps your teacher’s other pupils, your friends’ mild interest, a club, a drinking party where you are invited to play. Without that you’re on your own.

5. Some hangover from the war, when traditional music became associated with Japanese nationalism. After 1936, the CIB (Cabinet Information Bureau or Naikaku Johokyoku) controlled all mass media, including music and theatre. Foreign songs were out; shakuhachi, koto, shamisen and military marches were in. In an ominous echo of Soviet cultural policy, the CIB stated: “Apart from its political nature, culture does not exist.”

I sought the opinion of Robin Thompson, an expert on Ryukyu Islands music, currently living in Okinawa. He points out the importance of family transmission: “The shakuhachi is perhaps the Japanese instrument least encumbered by family heritage, meaning that it’s more or less open to anyone who wants to learn it. I suppose this is both an advantage and a disadvantage, the latter in the sense that no one is forced to take up the instrument because it goes down in the family from father to son or from mother to daughter. Without the background of family transmission I suspect there would be far fewer players of the koto and the shamisen too.”

Surveying today’s shakuhachi landscape, it appears that non-Japanese players have taken ownership of the instrument and subjected it to globalisation. Possibly that means we should be cautious, and aware of our effect on the tradition. Always remembering that musical traditions are constantly changing, and the shakuhachi was by no means preserved in aspic when the foreign devils arrived. On the plus side, western players have arguably reinvigorated and liberated the instrument. The shakuhachi is now free to be surprising, to tackle almost any musical job; and Japan could adopt this new template to encourage young people to engage with their traditional musics. And might there be a down side?

"Oshusashi" as performed by Okuda Atsuya:

One clear change in the shakuhachi agenda is the trend outside Japan to playing and making jinashi flutes (no lacquer). The coating of the flute bore in lacquer, boosting volume, was a recent development in shakuhachi history, and the call to return to raw bamboo is a revivalist, back to basics move. A leading jinashi player in Japan is Atsuya Okuda, himself previously a jazz trumpeter. Okuda’s influence on non-Japanese players has been considerable, and their favouring of raw bamboo has fed back into Japanese thinking. Okuda’s student, Seppuku Pistols member Katsuya Nonaka, has made a documentary film titled Future Is Primitive, an eloquent plea for a return to roots in both shakuhachi and skateboarding, two areas that Nonaka sees as threatened by the bulldozers of contemporary capitalism.

Future Is Primitive: Katsuya Nonaka visits Hong Kong during protests in 2019:

Another voice: Rei Jin, like Dozan Fujiwara, is another youngish professional player teaching at Tokyo’s Geidai University. I was able to ask Jin sensei his opinion via his pupil, the Japan based British composer Francesca Le Lohé. Jin is less pessimistic, and recalls the hundreds of company based shakuhachi clubs after the Second World War: “In Japan, it seems the greatest numbers of people playing shakuhachi as a hobby was just after the war, during the period of high economic growth, and when companies had social clubs. In comparison, there doesn’t seem to be another time before or after that ‘baby boom’ when there was such a great number of enthusiasts. If you think of it like this, it could be easy to feel pessimistic by comparing the decreased number of enthusiasts to a time when there were many – however, it might be better to keep in mind that there weren’t that many enthusiasts in the first place. In general, it seems that among those things described as ‘traditional’, a lot were actually created in recent times.”

In other words, my arrival in Japan (1976) maybe coincided with a golden age for amateur shakuhachi, an unexpected side effect of Japan’s economic miracle.

I’ve spoken to Japanese musicians who are impressed by the west’s enthusiastic adoption of the shakuhachi, and wish some of that outgoing pizzazz could rub off on the Japanese. I would say be careful what you wish for. Look at the didgeridoo, pilfered from Australian tribes and warmly embraced by buskers across the globe. And look at Daoism, look at Zen, maybe not quite what they were a hundred years ago. Have we transformed Asian religions into an inane mental gym workout? (see self-help book Ten To Zen by Owen O’Kane for one grim example). In the awesome words of urbandictionary.com, “Can you pass the Zen, please?”

We should also beware of our selective memory of what the shakuhachi is. We like to recall Zen monks and wandering, basket-hatted komuso priests, that all-male cast of our favourite period drama. We risk overlooking the messier history of amateurs playing popular songs at parties, some costumed for fun as komuso, and hundreds of women playing in geisha houses and restaurants. And tofu makers lying on their backs to play a tune.

I always saw the shakuhachi as an extremely Japanese instrument, an important part of the Japanese cultural jigsaw, and I would be saddened if the Japanese lost control of its future. Neither would I like rootless cosmopolitan composers to co-opt it as a sound source, devoid of any cultural baggage. I moved to Tokyo because I believed that if you study an instrument in its context you will understand it, and therefore yourself, more deeply. The tootling tofuya-san was another piece of that jigsaw.

Clive Bell’s shakuhachi teacher Kohachiro Miyata: