Seated at a worn wooden table near the stage of Tablao El Flamenco, a popular dance bar, I have a clear view of the dancers seated onstage. This evening in late August, all five of them have slicked their dark hair into buns secured at the nape of their necks that are adorned with flowers or jeweled combs. The guitarist strums his melancholy chords and in turn each dancer rises to perform, while those remaining seated fiercely clap the song’s beat. A dancer’s graceful arms and flared skirt soften the pounding percussion of her footwork.
Tablao El Flamenco is like any smoke-filled bar in Madrid crowded with people come to catch a flamenco performance while feasting on tapas and red wine. But my view from El Flamenco’s window is not of a Spanish plaza’s cobblestone streets. Instead, the neon lights and concrete high rises of Tokyo’s busy Shinjuku district greet my eyes. Tablao El Flamenco, Japan’s first flamenco bar, opened in 1967 and since then has reigned as Tokyo’s premier tablao (Spanish for flamenco performance space), hosting the most renowned Japanese and Spanish dancers. Yet Tablao’s debut is still nearly forty years after Spanish dancer La Argentina performed in Tokyo in 1929, sparking Japan’s love affair with flamenco.
Tonight’s flamenco show is one of three I will see during my two weeks in Tokyo. I’ve also come to take classes, attend rehearsals, and interview dancers. Having studied this art for the past nine years, in cities such as Boston, New York, Madrid, and Granada, a flamenco-themed vacation is not unusual for me. Yet of all the cities in which I’ve studied flamenco, I believed a trip to Tokyo would be the most revealing. I am an Indian-American from Texas, but I don’t dance bhangra, Bollywood, or even the Texas two-step. Like most of the Japanese women who study flamenco, I have no cultural connection to the dance.
My first exposure to flamenco was ten years ago in Dallas—a performance by the Maria Benitez Dance Company at a local theatre. I was riveted by the dancer’s ferocious footwork and sharp movements, and was immediately hooked on this dance that’s committed to conveying power rather than prettiness. Four weeks later, I started my first class.
Now, in Japan, I’m in the world’s largest flamenco scene outside of Spain, according to Tokyo’s Hirigana Times. It’s a scene that is largely comprised of dancers whose heritage, like mine, is distant from the art. Prominent Japanese women, such as the former First Lady Akie Abe and Miss Japan 2006 Kurara Chibana study “furamenko.” (A linguistic distortion of “flamenco,” this term has stuck and is spelled as it sounds.) So do housewives and college students. In fact, flamenco consistently ranks as one of the most popular pastimes among Japanese women, according to a recent survey conducted by FujiTV (Japan’s largest broadcasting station). Spain’s most important flamenco dancers know Tokyo is an essential stop on tours as well as a lucrative place to teach. Japanese instructors teach over 80,000 students at six hundred different studios, community centers and schools across the nation. Thousands of Japanese women also join organized flamenco tours to Spain each year, visiting prestigious studios in Madrid, Seville, and Jerez.
My search to understand the roots of Japanese flamenco starts with Yoko Komatsubara, arguably Japan’s most accomplished flamenco artist and among the first wave of Japanese dancers to study the dance. Well into her sixties, Komatsubara sits across from me in the office above her spacious studio located off of a congested street in central Tokyo. Though she now teaches only sporadically, instead inviting Spanish artists or local dancers to take over regular classes, Komatsubara still bears the proud carriage that accompanies forty years of dance training.
Classically trained in Japanese dance and ballet, Komatsubara is from a family of artists. She played the shimasen, a traditional Japanese stringed instrument, long before she started flamenco. But in 1959, Komatsubara saw the famous Spanish dancer Pilar Lopez in Tokyo and was so overcome with emotion after watching her performance that she soon left alone for Spain, determined to master the dance.
In Jerez and Seville, Komatsubara spent a decade studying flamenco and the Spanish language. Upon her return to Tokyo in 1970, she founded her own company that toured across Japan, Spain, and the Americas. She still performs with her troupe today, most recently in Seoul, Korea and Singapore, two cities where flamenco is also gaining in popularity.
So that I can observe her students firsthand, Komatsubara leads me downstairs where forty advanced-level female dancers are warming up for the third day of a workshop with Seville-based artist Carmen Ledesma. Before class, I speak to a thirty-something dancer named Yoko Tamura. Slender and with an easy smile that seems at odds with flamenco’s serious nature, Tamura has been performing professionally for seven years. In a mix of English and Spanish, she animatedly explains that flamenco’s accepting nature contributes to its sustained popularity with Japanese women. “Unlike ballet, which requires students to start at a young age, many great flamenco performers start as adults,” Tamura says. The art is also inclusive of a wide range of body styles. “You can be thin or curvy and still learn to dance,” she adds. A look around the room proves Tamura’s theory: the women are indeed diverse in age and body type.
As the Japanese guitarist begins a flamenco tangos, Tamura leaves me for the floor and trades her quick smile for a furrowed brow as she concentrates on turning crisply across the floor. Despite her thin frame, Tamura has clearly mastered flamenco’s earthy movements. She marks the song’s idiosyncratic beat with a sensuous roll of her hips.
Some Japanese flamenco artists move beyond the mastery of traditional Spanish moves to choreograph unique fusion productions. The husband and wife team of Mayumi Kagita and Hiroki Sato run their dance company Arte y Solera from the basement studio of their bright orange house, located in a residential western district of Tokyo. The distinctive house, which I visit one morning in August is decorated with the ceramic tiles and fountains typical of Southern Spain. A few years ago, the duo, known as Mami and Hiro, created a ground-breaking production that used flamenco to tell a classic Japanese Kabuki tale, Sonezaki Shinju, or “Love Suicide at Sonezaki.” It debuted at the prestigious Festival de Jerez in 2004. Mami and Hiro have just returned from Sonezaki’s Japan tour, and they show me a video of the original Jerez performance, which garnered strong reviews from local critics. Mami says: “Traditional Kabuki tales and flamenco lyrics have common themes: love, life, and death, but using flamenco allowed us to communicate emotions more directly than the reserved Japanese dance,” The production is a true fusion: Japanese lyrics accompany flamenco guitar, sumptuous Asian prints replace polka dots, and the staccato tap of flamenco shoes punctuates kabuki’s slow walk. Mami believes that a fusion production was “inevitable” because of Japan’s lengthy obsession with flamenco. The couple is planning a world tour in 2009.
A second generation of young Japanese dancers is studying flamenco, too, a fact that pleases older dancers nearing retirement. Yasuko Sogabe, another first-generation Japanese flamenco artist, was her two daughters’ first teacher. Now in their mid-twenties, they run their mother’s one-room studio, Las Hermanas, near Tokyo Station. Though both daughters recently supplemented their training with three years of study in Spain, Sogabe notes that this was by choice, not necessity.
Japan’s appropriation of flamenco comes with its critics. Some Spanish teachers steadfastly believe flamenco can only truly be performed by the gitano, or gypsy, community. Komatsubara bristles when I ask her about this. “Only a few students, whether Japanese or not, can perform Kabuki or Noh. Mastery of an art has nothing to do with being Japanese or Spanish, but rather the fact that only a few people can ever conquer both the technique and feeling of a stylized dance,” she says. Her irritation is shared by many of the Japanese flamenco dancers I interviewed, some of whom have been called “robotic” or “imitations” of “real” flamenco dancers.
Curious to investigate this tension, I decided to call Dr. Yuko Aoyama, a professor at Massachusetts’ Clark University. Several hundred years ago, flamenco’s founders, a marginalized gypsy class living in Spain’s southern state of Andalucia, created songs whose lyrics narrate their community’s isolation. Soon, gypsy singers and dancers began to perform at local cafes, which were patronized by payos (non-gypsy Spaniard-patrons from higher social classes). By the early 1900’s, after famous Spanish writers like Federico Garcia Lorca romanticized the art in works such as Poema de Cante Jondo (Deep Song Poems) and Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads), many payos began to formally learn flamenco. The gypsy community unhappily confronted this first wave of flamenco consumption by outsiders and witnessed flamenco’s transformation from an intimate gypsy tradition into a Spanish cultural commodity. Thus, for some gypsy families today, Japanese interest in flamenco is painfully reminiscent of this previous appropriation of the deeply personal art.
Like the gitanos, who created flamenco in part as a means of expressing frustration against a repressive Spanish society, many Japanese women view flamenco as a liberating tool for self-expression in a nation facing social change. My host in Tokyo, Rika Lin, who has studied flamenco for five years, says flamenco lyrics describe a frustration with patriarchal society analogous to the feelings of many Japanese women transitioning from home and into the workplace. Aoyama agrees, stating that the Japanese affinity for flamenco stems from the need Japanese women have to “express otherwise suppressed desire, anger, sensuality and experience emancipation from their daily social oppression.” Komatsubara is more practial: “There are those who believe that flamenco’s heart began beating in Spain, so it must stay there in order to remain pure,” she says. “But dance is about movement so it’s natural for flamenco to have anchored somewhere else, and why not Japan?” she muses. “If nothing else, the level of skill in Japan certainly keeps the Spanish on their toes.”
Where to Watch: Catching a flamenco show, particularly in the nation’s capital city, is easy since performances are frequent. Spacious theaters like the National Theater of Tokyo host large-scale productions of many established troupes. For weekly shows in an intimate space, try Tablao El Flamenco, which hosts many Spanish as well as Japanese dancers (the latter perform on Wednesday nights only). Isetan Kaikan 6F, 3-15-17 Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, 81-03 3356 3816.
Where to Study: Studying flamenco in Japan can be a costly endeavor since many studios expect students to pay a hefty fee to join the studio if a student wants to take regular classes, though many studios allow prospective students to drop-in to watch a class first. The cost of a single class varies, though expect to pay at least 2,000 yen (approximately $20) per hour. Monthly cards are available at many studios including Arte y Solera Estudio Flamenco with Mami y Hiro where the couple jointly teaches technique and choreography classes for a variety of levels, from absolute beginner to professional. 2-48-14 Daizawa Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, 81-03-5453-0016; www.arteysolera.com. Also, try Sol de España Ballet of Yoko Komatsubara, a five-minute walk from the Koenji train station. Komatsubara’s studio holds a range of workshops with many of Spain’s most important dancers. Bonus: you don’t have to be a member of Komatsubara’s studio to attend workshops. 4-34-13, Koenji-Minami, Suginami-ku, Tokyo, 81-03-3314-2568; www.komatsubara.com.
The annual U.S. Flamenco Festival hosts Spain's most accomplished singers, dancers, and musicians each February at New York's City Center and then travels to Boston, Washington D.C., and London for additional performances.
This year's show honors the women of flamenco with performances by legendary Merche Esmerelda, Belen Maya, Rocio Molina, and Eva Yerbabuena, and many others. For more information, visit www.worldmusicinstitute.org or www.flamencofestival.org.
Richa Gulati is a freelance writer and practicing attorney based in New York City. Her study of flamenco has taken her around the world for the past ten years and the itch to study dance abroad has struck again—she will spend February dancing in Seville, Spain.
