Makoto Harris Takao

Faculty

Assistant Professor of Musicology
Affiliated Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures

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About Makoto Harris Takao

About

Affiliated Faculty with the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies and the Center for Global Studies

As a cultural historian with a background in Asian Studies, I approach my craft with an interdisciplinary eye, employing music to map Japan’s international relations from the sixteenth century to the present day. My research interests are accordingly varied, spanning work in and between the fields of Japanese religious history, conceptual history, popular music studies, global music history, and the history of emotions.

While a doctoral fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions, I completed a joint PhD in history and musicology at the University of Western Australia. Prior to my appointment at UIUC, I was based in Berlin where I held a postdoctoral position and later a research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Center for the History of Emotions) and was a lecturer and core faculty member for the Master’s Program in Global History at the Freie Universität.

My current book project, The Clef and the Cross: Music and Kirishitan Transculturation in Sixteenth-Century Japan, asks what it meant to sound Kirishitan (Japanese Christian) and in what ways these practitioners “sounded” their belonging. These questions guide a reassessment of how scholars to date have understood the role of music during Japan’s so-called “Christian Century” (1549–1650). Emerging out of ethnographic work on Nagasaki’s “crypto-Christians” today, it looks to the vicissitudes of the Kirishitan faith as a mirror to reflect, if not refract, a more nuanced understanding of their devotional acts as transcultural formations of sound, music, and movement. To do so, I model a way of tracing multiple auralities in Eurocentric archives that reveals as much about Catholic ideas of musical practice as it does about the indigenous sound worlds of sixteenth-century Japan. Although this book offers a more informed understanding of the global mobility of “European” music, it does so as a way to probe at the disciplinary cracks between musicology and cultural history, as well as between the historiography of Catholicism and of early-modern Japan. Employing an intercultural methodology, I look to these spaces between to reveal hidden histories of instrumental, vocal, and theatrical practices among the Kirishitan that made sense of Catholicism through largely Buddhist frameworks. Underlying these case studies is an argument that the “syncretism” of vocal traditions among Japan’s crypto-Christians today is not only born of their historical persecution but is also testament to a faith that had already embraced transculturation some four-hundred years ago.

I am concurrently working on a second book project (Never End: Amuro Namie and the Politics of Postcolonial Pop) that interrogates the politics of the song “Never End,” composed for the then G8 summit in 2000 and performed by the Okinawan-born singer Amuro Namie. It looks to the inter-East Asian mobility of this song through the artist’s touring activities with an emphasis on Korean-Japanese and Taiwanese-Japanese post/colonial and post/cold war relations and the shifting tides of cultural censorship at the turn of the new millennium. This book ultimately addresses “Never End” as interwoven with the vicissitudes of empire and the necessity of a broader global East Asian reading in order to loosen these knots of the song’s narrative.

My research to date has also informed my practice as a player of the viol (viola da gamba) in a number of performance projects both in Australia and Europe, including the Australian and UK premiere revivals of Mulier fortis, a musical drama about a Japanese Christian noblewoman composed by Johann Bernhard Staudt in 1698.

I currently serve on the Education Committee for the American Musicological Society and as a member of the editorial board for Early Music.