FRIDAY 11.09.2026

One of the last surviving players of the tonkori – a 5-string harp performed by the indigenous Japanese Ainu people – OKI mixes traditional Ainu folk songs with international influences as varied as dub, Irish folk, throat singing, African drumming and music from Central Asia.

Born on the Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1957, he is a contemporary of the likes of Haroumi Hosono and Midori Takada, an explorative folk musician who is one of Japan’s most respected and restless contemporary folk musicians.

It is OKI’s openness to international influences that has helped him revitalise Ainu folk music and he is one of only a handful of musicians who play the tonkori, a five-stringed Ainu harp, which is both the pulse of this record and the force that unifies the disparate sounds he introduces: “I’ve never seen a traditional tonkori player”, he says “they were all dead when I started”.

Thought to have originated in the mid 19th Century on the island of Sakhalin, the tonkori arrived in what is now the main Ainu community of Hokkaido after Sakhalin was annexed by Russia after WWII. The Japanese government had previously passed an act labelling the Ainu as “former aborigines” and with Ainu culture outlawed the Ainu are now almost fully assimilated into Japanese society – in 2011 it was estimated only 300 people understood the Ainu language. “What happened to the Ainu is similar to the Aboriginies in Australia and the Native Indians in America”, says OKI “My grandfather – a bear hunter – didn’t teach Ainu culture to my father”.