“I was saved by Bach’s music,” says world-renowned pipe-organ builder Munetaka Yokota, over his bowl of bibimbap. We are seated in the closest restaurant to his Fujino workshop, about an hour’s drive outside of Tokyo. The atmosphere is insistently organic, artistic, and completely home-made: all live-edge tables, bespoke leather benches, and a low bandstand for the local hootenanny. And yes, all the ingredients are locally grown.
Resident journalist Malcolm Foster, musicologist Takumi Kato (host of NHK’s “Enjoying Early Music”), and I are piecing together a story of Bach’s “pipe-organ boom.” From the 1970s through 2000, more new pipe organs were installed in Japan than anywhere on earth, often massive instruments in opulent concert halls. With the economy struggling and buildings falling into decay: what will happen to this weighty cultural inheritance? Our meeting with Yokota-sensei is a sort of denouement to this now well-worn tale of glitzy boom and moldy bust.
Yokota-sensei’s pipe-organ oeuvre is the opposite of boom, and represents one possible “future” for Japanese organ building: faithful recreation of the past. Rejecting an elite education in economics, then disgusted by the internecine spats between the left-wing factions of the student revolts of 1969, he returned to the spiritual balm of his adolescence: the organ music of Johann Sebastian Bach. While a brooding teen he listened obsessively to a 1938 recording of the third-book of Bach’s Klavierübung, made on the Schnittger instrument of the Charlottenburg Palace outside Berlin. “It was an uncertain time; without Bach’s music I could have become… a murderer, drug-addict, whatever, I don’t know.”
To call that album his “favorite” would be belittling. It has become for him akin to scripture, a source of life and light, inexhaustible. Like many Japanese, he was a longtime church lurker; while in the USA he frequented Missouri-synod worship, for its traditional liturgy. For many Japanese faith seems more authentic, as Shusaku Endo has put it, in “silence” (沈黙) rather than open confession. Yokota was eventually baptized in a community church in Sweden. “The music was not so great,” he laments, “but the people were very friendly.”
After his adolescent trials, Munetaka was intent on “creating something beautiful with my hands.” For five years he apprenticed with then Japanese organ master Hiroshi Tsuji, then five more years with John Brombaugh in Eugene, Oregon. Yokota built his first full-sized organ, a period recreation, together with a revolving cast of volunteers at Cal-State, Chico. Of particular importance were the pipes, cast by hand from spent lead ammunition from the Sacramento police firing range. Impurities, he discovered, are vital to the “liveliness” of the sound, and a big reason for the magic he had experienced when listening to classic instruments.
After Chico, he was invited to Sweden, where he lived for over twenty years mostly researching, sometimes recreating the eminent exemplars of the northern German organ “boom” of three hundred years ago. He returned to Japan in 2016, set up shop, and hopes to raise up a new generation of organ builders in Japan. “I just turned seventy yesterday!” he reveals, an age which is a mark of honor in Japan. “I figure I have a couple of good decades left!”
It’s not simply meticulous recreation, nor desire for a legacy that drives him. “I myself was saved. That’s how I know that music has power, for me, and for others. That’s the reason I build.”
Additional sources: The Organ-Building of Munetaka Yokota, The Charlottenburg Organ Reborn