coloured woodcut

The Importance of Being Shamisen

Why do we sing the national anthem before a ballgame and hear the same plucking of the koto strings when a movie is set in Japan? Ethnomusicologist Richard Miller explains.

A female teacher plays the shamisen, a three-stringed plucked instrument. By Yoshitora Utagawa, coloured woodcut, 1866. (Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London)

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