Only Six Strings to Make Peace

Every country has an export version of itself. The polished version. The version tourists recognize. Then there is everything else. At Japan Society, OKI DUB AINU BAND introduced a room full of New Yorkers to a sound, a history, and a culture that rarely make it into the brochure.

OKI, also known as Oki Kano, is one of the most prominent musicians bringing Indigenous Ainu music to audiences around the world today. With OKI DUB AINU BAND, he blends reggae, dub, African rhythms, electronica, hard rock, and Ainu folk traditions into a genre of music I honestly don't have a name for.

Before his June 4 performance at Japan Society, part of a rare U.S. tour, I spoke with him about his Ainu roots, the loss of language and tradition, official recognition, his deep love of New York, and what music can still do in a world increasingly committed to making people afraid of one another.

"Only six strings to make peace," OKI told me, laughing a little at how seriously he meant it.

We were discussing his tonkori, an Indigenous Ainu instrument that looks a bit like a long, narrow guitar but traditionally has five strings, no frets, and a much narrower musical range. OKI added a sixth string to his own and electrified it. What it lacks in notes, it makes up for with a sharp, metallic, almost hypnotic sound.

So, if you don't have one yet, it's time to hop onto the Japan Society website and snag yourself a membership. At this point, it's better than joining a social club, and honestly, social clubs should be taking notes. Refusing to deliver a flattened, export-ready version of Japan, its programming moves between traditional and experimental art, language, history, politics, and contemporary life.

Which means you might occasionally find yourself in a very clean, comfortable lecture theater dancing at a full-blown rock concert featuring artists with Woodstock-level talent like OKI. As an added bonus, you can grab a glass of wine, order a chicken skewer, and meet the band after the show.

Which is exactly what I did, and I gotta say: it was a blast.

I asked OKI what first inspired him, and he recounted hearing Bob Marley's Survival. Reggae was not simply a sound he admired. It carried a philosophy of returning to the ancestors, of remembering the people a system tried to separate you from.

That idea brought him back toward his own Ainu identity, which Japan legally recognized as Indigenous in 2019.

"A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots," he quoted from Marcus Garvey.

OKI recognizes a common language of return. Ainu history and Caribbean music are not the same story, obviously, but they understand each other across distance. Both know what it means for culture to be pushed down, treated as old-fashioned, and then expected to reappear later as something appealing and consumable.

So I took all this with me, expecting a sort of reggae sound mixed with Ainu musical traditions.

Then the concert started.

Courtesy: Richard Termine

You know that thrilling feeling of being totally surprised? Completely caught off guard, but in a delightful, non-scary way? You have no idea where the evening is going, but somehow you have zero unease about it? That's really the only way I can describe it. I know it's not helpful, but hear me out.

I had no idea what I was listening to half the time, and it was all incredible.

Every time I found a category, the music slipped away from it. One minute I was bopping my head to a reggae beat, all "every little thing's gonna be all right." Smooth, tropical, easy.

Then suddenly, hard rock.

Something that sounded like Incubus was happening, and I was like, fuck yeah, this sounds like Dig. Then I found myself tumbling down a Jimi Hendrix rabbit hole, thinking about his rendition of the national anthem, only to emerge cruising through sun-baked California, golden hills, and doomed exceptionalism.

This all happened within a few lines of one song.

Like... I genuinely don't know how to describe it better than that.

And if that isn't specifically vague enough, then came the mukkuri, an Ainu mouth harp whose low, vibrating twang felt immediately familiar. It reminded me of the berimbau de boca at the beginning of Barbatuques' "Baianá," mixed with that one guy who goes wild on the didgeridoo in Washington Square Park on Saturdays. You know the one.

I can't think of anything else familiar enough to compare it to. That's how absolutely unearthly it was, but in a comfortable, fun, and beautiful way.

And just when I figured this might be some new form of rock music, Rekpo, the band's female vocalist and tonkori player, began singing upopo, traditional Ainu songs built on repetition and hypnotic rhythms. The whole room tried to sing them back and clap along. Some women in front of us, who had to be in their eighties, were absolutely JAMMING.

Rekpo's singing, the enormous bass, fantastic drums, and synths, all driven by the amplified tonkori, made the music feel as though it was coming from inside our own bones.

I kept thinking this was the soundtrack some futuristic director is still waiting to discover for their reimagining of the future. Something like Blade Runner. Or even something comfortable, haunting, and fun like The White Lotus. It felt mysterious, but it was also just a really great time, a chance to rock out while connecting with Indigenous Ainu instruments and sounds.

OKI does not treat mixing Ainu music with modern genres as breaking tradition. He told me Ainu culture has always absorbed influences from the people around it, including Japanese culture and Indigenous cultures across Sakhalin, Siberia, and Northeast Asia.

The music made the usual tidy export version of Japan feel suddenly incomplete.

Japan is not only Tokyo, Kyoto, temples, anime, and empire. It is more than sushi, samurai, ghost stories, cherry blossoms, and cutting-edge electronics. Its history also moves north through Hokkaido, Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and Northeast Asia.

The harder part is what was lost.

OKI said his grandfather's generation chose not to pass down the Ainu language and many cultural practices, largely in an attempt to blend in and remain safe within larger structures. Today, Ainu people often have to learn their own language from textbooks.

That may have been the most painful thing he said.

A language should live in the back of kitchens, the middle of arguments, the front of jokes, and the heart of gossip, songs, and ordinary conversation. A textbook can help bring it back, but it cannot replace the generations in which it should have been spoken without fear.

The 2019 Ainu Policy Promotion Act legally recognized the Ainu as an Indigenous people, but OKI described official recognition as both positive and negative. Cultural support can help rebuild what was nearly erased, but acceptance by the system can also cool the fire that made people fight for it. In a way, finally being accepted can make it harder to keep resisting.

And governments do not only decide which cultures to recognize. They also decide when those cultures are allowed to cross borders.

While discussing an album he has spent five years producing for a reggae band in Hunan, China, he told me about its sudden cancellation. The group was supposed to finish the project with a concert and release party, but those plans were cut amid a wider wave of restrictions on Japanese cultural events in China after Japan's prime minister suggested that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a Japanese military response.

This was not an abstract diplomatic disagreement for the musicians involved and, honestly, had nothing to do with either of them. Yet five years of collaboration were suddenly put on hold, and artists who had nothing to do with creating the conflict became part of how it was carried out.

Music cannot stop a war once it begins, OKI said. But it can make one harder to start by making people seem less abstract and less frightening to one another.

That was what I finally understood by the end of the night.

I still could not neatly explain what I had heard.

"Only six strings to make peace."

And I think I finally heard what he meant.