Otokoba - Studio of Indonesian Gamelan and Dance

Art Center · Tokyo, Japan

About Otokoba - Studio of Indonesian Gamelan and Dance

A second floor studio inside the Dai2-Yamamoto Building in Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, houses one of Japan's longer-running centers for Javanese performing arts. Otokoba, whose name translates loosely to music workshop, is home to Kartika & Kusuma, a gamelan and dance group founded and long led by Fumiko Tamura, who is credited across multiple gamelan reference sources as one of the people most responsible for establishing Javanese karawitan as a practiced, teachable art form in the Tokyo area rather than an occasional university curiosity.

Japan's engagement with gamelan dates back decades, with early adoption at institutions such as Tokyo University of Fine Arts, Nagoya College of Music, and the Osaka Ethnology Museum in the early 1980s. Tamura's contribution, according to fieldwork published in gamelan studies journals, was to move the practice beyond campus walls: she organized public karawitan workshops at Otokoba starting in the late 1980s specifically so that people who were not enrolled students could learn the instruments and the dance forms that accompany them. That public, walk in accessibility is part of what distinguishes Otokoba from the university ensembles that make up much of Japan's gamelan scene, which numbers around fifty listed groups nationally according to the American Gamelan Institute's international directory.

The repertoire taught and performed at Otokoba centers on traditional Javanese court and village music alongside newer compositions and Javanese dance forms, rather than the Balinese or Sundanese styles found at some other Japanese ensembles. The studio functions primarily as a teaching and rehearsal space with a program of public performances rather than as a walk-in venue with posted retail hours, so visitors and prospective students are generally expected to make contact in advance rather than drop in.

Otokoba is distinct from the Indonesian Embassy's own Rumah Budaya Indonesia cultural program in Tokyo, which runs as an embassy initiative out of Higashi Gotanda; Otokoba is an independently run studio with no formal government affiliation, reflecting a separate, grassroots strand of Indonesian cultural life in Japan that predates the embassy's own cultural diplomacy programming by several decades.

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Contact

• Website: http://sound.jp/kartika/

Category

Indonesian Art Center in Japan

More Indonesian Art Center in Japan

• Rumah Budaya Indonesia Tokyo Tokyo, Japan — Art Center