The Moon over the Ruined Castle: The Global Journeys of Kōjō no Tsuki

In 1978, during their concerts at Tokyo’s Nakano Sun Plaza, the Scorpions interrupted their sequence of hard-rock songs to perform a melody that much of the Japanese audience had known since childhood. Klaus Meine sang the lyrics in Japanese, accompanied by Uli Jon Roth’s guitar, while the spectators gradually joined the performance. The recording appeared on Tokyo Tapes, the German band’s first live album, released by RCA later that year.

The song was Kōjō no Tsuki, “The Moon over the Ruined Castle,” composed by Rentarō Taki at the beginning of the twentieth century. Before entering the repertoire of a European rock band, the melody had passed through the Japanese school system, the dance orchestras of the 1930s and American jazz. At every stage, it changed form, audience and function. It had been a song for students, an orchestral arrangement, an extended space for jazz improvisation and, finally, an instrument of communication between foreign musicians and a local audience.

Its history shows that musical circulation does not consist in the intact transfer of a work from one place to another. A melody may remain recognisable while its meaning, attribution and position within a musical culture are transformed. In the case of Kōjō no Tsuki, the movement did not even proceed in a single direction. The song emerged in Meiji Japan through the appropriation of European musical forms, was reworked by Japanese jazz musicians, reached the United States and eventually returned to Tokyo through German rock.

A Modern Song Becomes Tradition

Rentarō Taki composed Kōjō no Tsuki in 1901, setting to music a text by the poet Bansui Doi. The composition was written in response to a competition organised within the Japanese educational system and was published in a collection of songs intended for secondary-school students. Conceived for performance without instrumental accompaniment, the melody had to be simple enough to allow collective learning and singing.

The lyrics evoked the contemplation of the moon above the ruins of ancient castles. Their images of former greatness, warfare and the transience of power recalled several sites associated with Japanese history, including Aoba, Aizuwakamatsu and Oka castles. Taki’s melody gave these images a memorable form, transforming a poetic reflection on the past into an experience shared by generations of students. The song’s place within the school system was not a secondary aspect of its history. During the Meiji period, musical education contributed to the construction of a relatively uniform national culture. Japanese authorities introduced into schools systems of notation, scales, instruments and teaching methods derived from Europe and the United States. These elements did not simply replace existing traditions. They were selected and adapted to form citizens capable of recognising themselves in a common repertoire.

Kōjō no Tsuki emerged from this process. It was not a song transmitted orally from an undefined past, but a modern composition, written by an identifiable author and integrated into an educational programme. Its ability to appear traditional resulted from its institutional diffusion. The school system made the melody familiar, gradually separated it from the specific context in which it had been composed and transformed it into a component of collective memory. The song’s first journey therefore took place within Japan. Before crossing national borders, it moved from individual composition to school repertoire, from the printed page to the voices of students, and from a historically situated work to the perception of a shared inheritance. Tradition did not precede modernisation. It was partly produced through the institutions of modernity.

The composition itself was already the product of an earlier circulation. Taki had studied at the Tokyo Music School and employed a musical language influenced by European training. In 1901, he moved to the Leipzig Conservatory to continue his studies, although illness forced him to return to Japan soon afterwards. The distinction between a wholly Japanese original and later foreign contaminations is therefore of limited use. From the beginning, Kōjō no Tsuki emerged from the encounter between Japanese historical references, modern educational institutions and musical conventions originating in Europe.

From School Song to Dance Orchestra

At the end of the 1930s, Kōjō no Tsuki entered a very different musical environment. Kōichi Sugii arranged it for the King Salon Orchestra in a recording released in 1939. The brief performance transformed the school song into an orchestral composition and placed it within the repertoire of so-called salon music, a form of production that combined jazz, swing, tango, film music and melodies already familiar to Japanese audiences.

Sugii belonged to a generation of musicians for whom jazz was no longer merely an imported novelty. It had become a language through which different repertoires could be reworked. Born in Tokyo in 1906 and educated at the Imperial University, he was sent to Buenos Aires in 1930 by the shipping company for which he worked. In Argentina, he encountered tango and, after returning to Japan, performed with orchestras influenced by Latin American music. From the mid-1930s, he worked for King Records as an arranger, conductor and instrumentalist. His biography reveals a musical circuit more complex than the conventional opposition between Japan and the West. Tokyo, Buenos Aires, American jazz, Argentine tango, Japanese melodies and the recording industry converged in Sugii’s work. These references were not simply placed side by side. They were combined within cultural products intended for Japan’s urban market.

In his arrangement of Kōjō no Tsuki, the melody remained recognisable, but it was no longer entrusted to the voices of students. It was supported and commented upon by an orchestra, acquired a character closer to entertainment music and became suitable for radio and recorded listening. This transformation did not erase the song’s national identity. On the contrary, it used an international musical language to modernise a repertoire that was already perceived as Japanese.

Jazz did not operate solely as a force of Americanisation. Sugii used it to construct music that could be recognised as both modern and local. The appropriation of foreign forms did not necessarily produce uniformity. It could provide new instruments for reorganising differences and for presenting a national tradition through sounds associated with urban life, the culture industry and international circulation.

There is not enough evidence to claim that Sugii’s arrangement directly influenced the version later recorded by Thelonious Monk. The two episodes should be understood as separate appropriations of the same melody. Their juxtaposition nevertheless remains significant. Before it was interpreted by one of the leading pianists of American jazz, Kōjō no Tsuki had already entered jazz through the activity of Japanese musicians.

A Japanese Folk Song in the United States

Thelonious Monk recorded the song on 10 January 1967 with Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone, Larry Gales on double bass and Ben Riley on drums. The recording appeared later that year on the album Straight, No Chaser. In the original edition of the record, however, the title Kōjō no Tsuki disappeared. The piece was presented to American listeners simply as “Japanese Folk Song.”

The new title produced a significant effect. A modern composition, written in 1901 by a known author and circulated through the school system, became a generic Japanese folk song. The label made its geographical provenance immediately legible, but reduced its historical complexity. Rentarō Taki, the Meiji period, the educational function of the song and the process through which it had become part of national memory all disappeared.

This classification was not necessarily the result of a deliberate desire to erase the song’s history. It revealed instead the operation of the categories used by the culture industry to make repertoires originating in other contexts comprehensible. In the United States, the melody could be recognised as Japanese precisely because it had been separated from its specific history. Attribution to an entire culture replaced attribution to an individual composer. This loss also enabled a new appropriation. Once understood as traditional material, the composition appeared available for reinterpretation. Monk transformed its short, singable structure into an extended jazz performance. The complete version, restored for the 1996 reissue, lasts almost seventeen minutes, whereas the recording originally released on the album had been reduced to slightly more than eleven. Later editions restored both the Japanese title and the attribution to Taki.

Monk did not merely state the theme before abandoning it. The melody continued to re-emerge throughout the performance, subjected to rhythmic variations, pauses, displaced accents and new harmonisations. Rouse’s saxophone emphasised some of its contours, while the piano dismantled and reconstructed it. The composition was not completely assimilated into jazz conventions. It retained a recognisable identity that allowed listeners to perceive the distance between the original material and the uses to which the quartet put it.

The recording also demonstrated that American jazz did not develop exclusively through the elaboration of repertoires produced within the United States. It could incorporate a Japanese melody and include it on an album intended for international distribution. This openness did not eliminate the hierarchies that governed musical circulation. The American recording industry possessed a capacity for distribution and cultural consecration far greater than that available to Japanese orchestras in the 1930s. Monk’s version therefore helped make the song recognisable outside Japan, but initially did so through a category that obscured its composer and modern origins.

The Return through Rock

Eleven years after the release of Straight, No Chaser, Kōjō no Tsuki reappeared within another international circuit. The Scorpions performed it during their concerts of 24 and 27 April 1978 at the Nakano Sun Plaza. Recordings from these shows were included on Tokyo Tapes, released on 15 August. The album documented the band’s growing popularity in Japan and also marked some of Uli Jon Roth’s final performances as a member of the group.

In this case, the song was not presented as a generic exotic melody intended for European listeners. It was performed in Japan before an audience capable of recognising it immediately. The choice allowed the Scorpions to establish a relationship with the place in which the concert was taking place, temporarily suspending the distinction between the band’s repertoire and that of its listeners. The structure of the song remained relatively close to the melody known in Japan, but the electric-guitar accompaniment transferred it into the language of the rock ballad. The performance was more than a formal tribute. The voices of the spectators, audible on the recording, became part of the song. A composition originally created to be sung collectively by students returned to collective singing, this time within a rock concert.

The return did not, however, restore Kōjō no Tsuki to its point of departure. The audience was not gathered in a school, and the song no longer performed an educational function. It had become an instrument through which a West German band could construct a form of symbolic proximity with Japanese spectators. For a few minutes, familiarity with the melody reduced the distance between those occupying the stage and those attending the concert. The performance was then fixed on record and distributed internationally. The song therefore departed once again from Japan, now incorporated into a product of the European rock industry. Many listeners outside Japan encountered it not through Taki, the Meiji school system or Japanese jazz, but as an episode on a celebrated Scorpions live album. The return immediately became a new departure.

Circulation as Transformation

The trajectory of Kōjō no Tsuki cannot be represented as a succession of copies moving progressively further away from an authentic original. Every version intervened in the composition and altered its future possibilities. The school system transformed a recent work into a shared inheritance. Sugii used jazz and orchestral music to make it part of Japanese urban modernity. Monk converted it into material for improvisation, while the American recording industry presented it as an anonymous expression of Japanese culture. The Scorpions eventually brought it back to Tokyo and turned it into a moment of collective participation within a rock concert.

The melody remained sufficiently stable to be recognised in very different contexts. What changed was the network of relationships into which it was inserted. The instruments, duration, audiences, media and categories used to define it were transformed. The relationship between the work and the place with which it was associated also changed. In Japan, it was a school song that had become part of national memory. In the United States, it appeared as a “Japanese Folk Song.” At a Scorpions concert, it became the sign of an encounter between a European band and its Asian audience.

The history of Kōjō no Tsuki therefore challenges the image of musical globalisation as a process produced exclusively through the expansion of Western repertoires. The composition emerged through the Japanese appropriation of European conventions, but subsequently participated in the transformation of jazz and rock. Its movement did not follow a single line from centres towards peripheries. It connected educational institutions, recording industries and musical cultures located in Japan, Latin America, the United States and Europe.

These passages did not take place under conditions of equality. Some versions possessed more powerful means of circulation than others. Monk’s recording and the Scorpions’ album reached international audiences that would have been difficult for Sugii’s orchestra to access. The capacity to distribute music also included the power to rename it, classify it and determine which elements of its history would be remembered. Circulation did not erase differences, but continually reorganised them. Kōjō no Tsuki travelled through the twentieth century because it could be perceived, at different moments, as modern and traditional, national and international, educational and popular. The moon continued to shine over the ruined castle, but the musical landscape observed by each listener was never the same.

Federico Paolini

This article is part of the research project: Music, Power and Global Inequality.