In responde to :
>Stav, I can't say with any certainty how many shakuhachi players
>(accomplished or on the road to being so) there might be in Japan now, but
>I
>can give you some idea. I live in the city of Kumamoto (population 640,000
>or so) which is a fair distance from Osaka or Tokyo. I've been here and
>studying shakuhachi for the past 19 years. I can easily say that there are
>100 or so Kinko and Tozan players here who perform publicly. It's an easy
>bet that there are up to 10 times as many who don't perform but play for
>the
>enjoyment of it or are not ready for performance.
This is actually very intresting. BY your estimates 1 in 6400 people in
Japanese are proficient enough (or just plain extroverted enough) to perform
shakuhahci. And a full 1 in 640 are casual players of the instrument. Or,
in other words - there are in Japan 125 million people, and therefore nearly
20,000 people who are fairly proficient in shakuhachi playing, and around
200,000 who are casual players. Yes? Well, all I can say is that my notion
that shakuhachi playing is a dead art is about as wrong as wrong gets.
And this goes really well with the rest of your e-mail - I am just really
out of touch with what is going on with this instrument in Japan. I thought
the Japanese players that made it here were all that Japan has to offer, but
it turns out that is just not true. The Japanese players who make it to NYC
are just the very few who are are interested in a connection with the
shakuhahci players beyond their borders. It is not that shakuhachi playing
is a dying art, it is just that culturally Japan is just plain old insular.
Seriously - thanks for clarifying this, I really had no idea.
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