Japan

From Taiko to Drum machines, from Koto to synthesizers, many of these instruments have made the history of ancient and modern music recognizable for their unique and immortal sound

Marvin Gaye, Talking heads, RUN DMC, New Order, Daft Punk… an endless list of artists have built their beats and their leads thanks to made in Japan, especially in the contemporary era.

Electronic music that today has spread and mixed in almost every genre owes much to the vision of people like Ikutaro Kekeashi, Tsutomu Kato, Torakusu Yamaha who with their engineering have been able to renew a century-old tradition revolutionizing the history of sound and also the way of making music

Find out more by clicking below on the tab dedicated to Japanese music

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was a Japanese painter and printmaker. An eccentric and meticulous artist, he owes his fame mainly to his prints, although he was also active in the field of painting and graphics. In a career that lasted more than sixty years, he explored various forms of art, experimenting with the production of woodcuts with theatrical subjects, privately circulated greeting prints (surimono) and, in the 1830s, landscape series, as demonstrated by the works Views of Famous Bridges, Famous Waterfalls in Various Provinces, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which partly reflects a personal attachment to the famous volcano. A work linked to this series is the famous Great Wave off Kanagawa.

His works were an important source of inspiration for many European Impressionists such as Claude Monet and Post-Impressionists such as Vincent van Gogh and the French painter Paul Gauguin, so much so that between 1896 and 1914 three biographies of Hokusai were published in French, written by the greatest critics of the time, including Edmond de Goncourt.