Up to 84% in savings when you subscribe to The Absolute Sound
Logo Close Icon

Begin typing your search above and press return to search. Press Esc to cancel.

High-End Audio in Japan, Part One: First Impressions

High-End Audio in Japan, Part One: First Impressions

Before I talk about the three master craftsmen whom I had the pleasure of visiting on my just-completed trip to Japan, I’d like to share my first (and I hope not last) impressions of the country itself.

Like Germany or Turkey or the Netherlands or Great Britain or any of the beautiful places I’ve been to, Japan is a distinctive mixture of new and old. In its towns, particularly in the gigantic metropolis of Tokyo, which is the largest city I’ve ever seen, it seems thoroughly and sometimes almost frantically modern. With its millions of flashing neon signs and blazing marquee lights and the hundreds of thousands of buyers and sellers jamming its sidewalks and storefronts, a district like the Akihabara (Tokyo’s huge electronics quarter) could pass for a cross between Times Square and the Las Vegas Strip on a busy Saturday evening. All the towns, even the smaller ones like Hachioji and Kawagoe, have this same dense, festive, unabashedly mercantile look. But that look is deceptive.

Enter any store—no matter how gaudy or plain—and you will invariably be met with a politeness and graciousness that is as formal and characteristic as the slight bow with which you greet and are greeted. No matter what you buy or where, this unstinting courteousness makes your transaction feel like something more elevated than a mere exchange of money for goods, although it is that, too, of course—something more like an exchange of respect, a bond of civility.

Step away from the city streets into the exquisite home of someone like Mr. Taro Hirayama (the view from whose beautiful listening room window opens this essay), and you discover this ancient bond of civility in its purest form. It’s as if you’ve stepped out of the rush of modernity into a time so simple and elegant and formal and beautiful that it is like a sonata turned into manners and morals, into landscape and décor.High-End Audio in Japan, Part One: First Impressions

It is this ancient music, this marriage of commerce and grace, that the three men I’m going to tell you about—Kiyoaki Imai of Audio Tekne, Naoto Kurosawa of Technical Brain, and Osamu Ikeda of Ikeda Sound Labs—have brought to a kind of perfection. None of them is merely offering goods for sale; each of them is also offering you a lifetime of learning and making. I shall not soon forget Isamu Fukumoto saying of Mr. Imai, the author of every piece of Mr. Fukumoto’s fabulous Audio Tekne system: “He hasn’t just made these things for me; he has taught me how to hear them.”

When you buy from these men, you aren’t just buying goods; you are buying all they have to offer—all that they craft and all that they know. High-End Audio in Japan, Part One: First Impressions

Jonathan Valin

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.

More articles from this editor

Read Next From Blog

See all

Adblocker Detected

"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..."

"There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..."