Thought to have originated in the mid 19th Century on the island of Sakhalin, the tonkori arrived in what is now the main Ainu community of Hokkaido after Sakhalin was annexed by Russia after WWII. He has toured internationally – from WOMAD in the UK to the John F.Kennedy Center in Washington DC via festival appearances in Singapore, Australia and across Europe – yet remains fully immersed in Ainu culture and now handcrafts tonkoris himself, helping pass the torch to the next generation of players. OKI’s debut album Kamuy Kor Nupurpe was released in 1996 and since then he has recorded 11 studio albums both solo and with his Dub Ainu Band, as well as producing two albums by Ainu elder singer Umeko Ando, all released on his own label Chikar Studio. For a few years he had a role at the United Nations Committee for Human Rights, promoting indigenous culture, yet eventually decided to concentrate on music.
After returning to Japan he moved to Hokkiado and has lived there ever since. “I don’t want this to sound mythical but when my cousin gave me a tonkori, I felt it was a sign”. Once in Hokkaido a cousin gave him a tonkori – which OKI taught himself to play - setting him on the path that would turn him into a folk music revolutionary and the world’s preeminent Ainu musician. It got me thinking – maybe I should go back to Hokkaido”. I hung out with native Indian rude boys who were the same age as me, riding cars, smoking, shooting rifles, but when the sun went down they climbed the mountains to prey to their spirits. I made lots of Native Indian friends though and visited the Navajo reservation in Arizona.
WALE THE ALBUM ABOUT NOTHING LISTEN TV
I saw great concerts – Fela Kuti, Bunny Wailer, Grateful Dead – yet I worked on TV commercials for McDonalds, Pizza Hut. In 1987 OKI fled to New York to live the “Babylon” life as a director of TV commercials: “New York is love and hate. My mum was also really upset and begged me to stop meeting my father”.
I found his address, went to Hokkaido and met him”.įor the young OKI, initial joy soon turned to confusion: “I was listening to a lot of reggae music at this time which told me to go “back to my roots” so I moved to Hokkaido but it was tough as I didn't feel Ainu. A few years later I came across a book on Ainu culture and inside was a photo of a sculpture by my real father – seeing his name triggered a flashback for me. When I was 18 I received a strange phone call from a woman who said: ‘Are you OKI? Do you know your father is not your real father?’ then hung up.
OKI’s father was Bikki Sunazawa, a renowned Ainu wood sculptor, yet his parents divorced when he was four: “My mum then married a Japanese man and decided to erase her past - she never told me I was Ainu. He is one of only a handful of musicians who play the tonkori, a five-stringed Ainu harp, which is both the pulse of this record and the force that unifies the disparate sounds he introduces: “I’ve never seen a traditional tonkori player”, he says “They were all dead when I started”. Tender tonkori melodies, meditative dub excursions and Ainu folk songs combine on Tonkori in the Moonlight, an 11-track collection of mostly traditional songs performed by indigenous Ainu musician OKI.īorn on the Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1957, OKI is a contemporary of the likes of Haroumi Hosono and Midori Takada, yet as a musician who blends Ainu folk music with international influences his style is singular in the canon of Japanese music though he is quick to point out: “I might travel on a Japanese passport but I am Ainu”.Įmbracing reggae, dub, Irish folk, throat singing, African drumming and music from Central Asia, it is OKI’s openness to international influences that has seen him revitalise Ainu folk music - breathing new life into a musical culture that was on the verge of extinction. “Like nothing you’ve ever heard before” The Wire “Supercool Japanese minimalism” The Observer
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