Keiichi Kurosawa (1903-82), eldest son of a wealthy Japanese industrialist, studied in the 1920s at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was always destined to take over his father’s typewriter company in Tokyo, but he was also a talented musician, and studied cello and ballet at the Royal Academy of Music for a year before going up to Cambridge in 1925 to read Moral Sciences. During the time he spent in the UK there was a resurgence in interest in early music, led by figures such as Arnold Dolmetsch, who founded the International Dolmetsch Early Music Festival at Haslemere in 1925. Kurosawa became particularly interested in madrigals because of their essentially amateur music-making ethos, and founded the Tokyo Madrigal Club on his return to Japan in 1929. Jason James will discuss Kurosawa’s time at Cambridge, and how he and his musical associates played a key role in introducing (Western) ‘early music’ to Japan in the mid-20th century.

About the contributors

Jason James OBE

Jason James is Director General of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation. Having been fascinated by Japan on a choir tour at the age of 13, he chose to read Japanese Studies at King’s College, Cambridge, graduating First Class with Distinction in 1987. After working for many years in the financial industry as a Japan specialist, his interests took a more cultural turn when he became Director of the British Council in Japan in 2007, and then DG at Daiwa in 2011.

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