Like so many things Western, Bach’s music first came to Japan with the missionaries. Knowledge of Bach’s name had existed beforehand, in the annals of “Dutch Studies.” These intrepidly curious Edo-era scholars managed to get their hands on and translate European scholarship from the only possible source: the Dutch fleet confined to Dejima island in Nagasaki. (It was a great disappointment, I am sure, when these scholars learned that the language they had labored so hard to learn was of secondary importance among European tongues; fortunately for them, the jump to English was not insurmountable.) But Bach’s music remained abroad.
The famous appearance of Commodore Perry’s “Black Ships” forced the Tokugawa Shogunate (bakufu) to end nearly 250 years of isolation (sakoku, 鎖国 “chained country”). Its trade, military, social class, and currency monopoly broken, Tokugawa hegemony weakened and soon crumbled. The Meiji Restoration of the Emperor followed in 1867–68, its early activity defined by the brief “charter oath,” the fifth clause of which interests us here:
Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule.
Perhaps no large nation in the history of civilization has so rapidly and thoroughly transformed itself—and largely peacefully (the Boshin War and the Satsuma Rebellion notwithstanding). Embassies soon were sent seeking the best the West had to offer; Westerners poured in, keen to profit from the massively populous and completely untapped foreign market. Factories sprouted; railways and new shipping routes quickly grew. In less than thirty years, Japan became Asia’s industrial powerhouse, its modern armies able to beat the Russians and colonize China.
In all this upheaval, the extraterritorial foreign settlement at Yokohama was the focus of most international cultural life. With the foreigners came their Christian churches, particularly British and American Protestants; and with the churches came hymnals and church music. According to Thomas Cressy* it seems likely that the first audition of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music was heard among the worshiping communities of these churches, some of whom were eventually Japanese.
With their hymnals, Westerners also imported instruments and repertoire. Easily importable and impossible to get out of tune harmonia (free-reed pump organs) were soon present, and with them Bach. But according to Cressy:
Through a detailed study of every page of every British Yokohama newspaper between 1860 and 1900, I identified the first performance of Bach that can be supported by hard evidence: a prelude arranged for violin and piano by the wives of the German Club members in the Yokohama Foreign Settlement on 6 November 1869.
In addition,
Music Investigation Committee / Tokyo Acacdemy of Music curriculum and music score purchase records indicate that musicians active in the Yokohama Foreign Settlement taught the Guonod arrangements of Bach’s music to Japanese students; they were highly popular works and regularly performed.
So Bach’s music began circulating among:
“Dutch” scholars
Churches
Salon performers among the ex-pats
It would soon circulate much more widely.
* Much of this is gleaned from Thomas Cressy’s essential article/literature review, “Bach in Early Shōwa period Japan (1926-1945): Historiography and reception,” Transcultural Music History (2021): 183–207.