‘Irish music is fused into Japanese culture’ – a writer and his teenage daughter go in search of Féile Tokyo

With video games echoing Celtic sounds and a thriving branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, Pavel Barter and his daughter Edie visited The Land of the Rising Sun to explore the country’s fascination with traditional Irish music

Pavel Barter and his daughter Edie in Japan

When my daughter decided she wanted to learn to speak Japanese during the depths of lockdown 2020, who was I to argue? Edie had become besotted with anime and manga — cultural touchstones in Japan — and now she wanted to learn the language. So I found her a sensei (teacher) and she eventually attained conversational fluency, a decent knowledge of kanji, hiragana and katakana (Japan’s writing systems), and a GCSE in Japanese in 2023.

During the course of Edie’s studies, she discovered that Irurando no ongaku (Irish music) is popular in Japan. So this summer, Edie (now 15) and I took a journey across Japan to try and understand Ireland’s unusual cultural connection with the Land of the Rising Sun. We recorded our discoveries for a podcast, Shōgun Seisiún — Irish music in Japan.

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