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Fujiko Hemming is a pianist who was born in Berlin during the rise of the Nazi party to a Japanese mother, who was a pianist, and a Swedish-Russian artist father. From her promotional literature it appears that she was a promising student with a promising career who went deaf, moved to Japan after the death of her mother, and was “discovered” there on a local TV documentary in the late 90s. Since then she has developed a large following in Japan. I got tickets to one of her concerts and off we went, in the middle of a major Nor’easter, to Carnegie Hall. It was the large hall, and it was almost sold out.

Well over 90% of the audience was Japanese. If you exclude SoJs (Spouses of Japanese) and ushers, there were probably about 20 non-Japanese people in the hall. The general consensus among the people I spoke to seemed to be that yes, she makes lots of mistakes in her playing, and she is sometimes a bit loose in her interpretations, but that doesn’t matter because she communicates emotions so profoundly…and she likes cats. It says so in the program. She lives with 10 cats.

Anyway, I can’t imagine the opposite situation happening: a classical musician only popular in the US going to NHK Hall in Tokyo and filling it with Americans on a Saturday night.

Some part of this is the relative isolation of the Japanese community here, which (unlike most foreign communities in the US) is not made up of people here in search of a green card. Most come here for a few years. Some stay on, but for most it’s either a chance to pretend to be a student for a few years while partying, or an extension of a career, which means the most important thing is to keep up relations with home. So in a sense (and not necessarily a bad sense) there is a sort of parallel world, which occasionally manifests itself in situations like thousands of Japanese people converging on Carnegie Hall.

PS I don’t think this is a case of Japanese people supporting one of their own. There are plenty of world-class Japanese artists (like Seiji Osawa) who don’t attract such a convergence of the expat community when they appear.

Fujiko Hemming is a pianist who was born in Berlin during the rise of the Nazi party to a Japanese mother, who was a pianist, and a Swedish-Russian artist father. From her promotional literature it appears that she was a promising student with a promising career who went deaf, moved to Japan after the death of her mother, and was “discovered” there on a local TV documentary in the late 90s. Since then she has developed a large following in Japan. I got tickets to one of her concerts and off we went, in the middle of a major Nor’easter, to Carnegie Hall. It was the large hall, and it was almost sold out.

Well over 90% of the audience was Japanese. If you exclude SoJs (Spouses of Japanese) and ushers, there were probably about 20 non-Japanese people in the hall. The general consensus among the people I spoke to seemed to be that yes, she makes lots of mistakes in her playing, and she is sometimes a bit loose in her interpretations, but that doesn’t matter because she communicates emotions so profoundly…and she likes cats. It says so in the program. She lives with 10 cats.

Anyway, I can’t imagine the opposite situation happening: a classical musician only popular in the US going to NHK Hall in Tokyo and filling it with Americans on a Saturday night.

Some part of this is the relative isolation of the Japanese community here, which (unlike most foreign communities in the US) is not made up of people here in search of a green card. Most come here for a few years. Some stay on, but for most it’s either a chance to pretend to be a student for a few years while partying, or an extension of a career, which means the most important thing is to keep up relations with home. So in a sense (and not necessarily a bad sense) there is a sort of parallel world, which occasionally manifests itself in situations like thousands of Japanese people converging on Carnegie Hall.

PS I don’t think this is a case of Japanese people supporting one of their own. There are plenty of world-class Japanese artists (like Seiji Osawa) who don’t attract such a convergence of the expat community when they appear.