Government-Mandated Coolness: Education Policy, the Koto, and Music Teacher Retraining in Japan

Abstract In 1998, Japan's Ministry of Education amended the country's national curriculum to require the inclusion of traditional Japanese instruments in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) music education. Over the last two decades, Japanese ethnomusicologists, music education scholars, and performers of hōgaku (musical genres with roots in premodern Japan) have begun to grow a body of literature and pedagogical techniques aimed at helping K-12 music teachers, mostly untrained in hōgaku, fulfill this requirement. In this article, I explore the innovations of this new hōgaku pedagogy and argue that coolness, a concept widely deployed in Japanese economic, political, and media discourse, is central to its understanding.