The Sound of Summer

The summer is here, and you can feel it everywhere. Schools are emptying out. Families are packing bags. Stadiums are still buzzing from the World Cup. The days stretch longer, and for a few weeks at least, the ordinary rhythms of life give way to something slower and less scheduled.

Every season has its soundtrack, and summer is no exception. There is something about heat and light and unhurried time that makes you reach for music. The genre that hits the right tone for me is jazz — not because it belongs to summer exclusively, but because it contains all of summer's moods at once. The bright, energetic kind that sounds like the last day of school. The bossa nova that turns a humid evening into something worth slowing down for. The more introspective and calming kind that evokes summer as you remember it — a specific afternoon, a particular friend, a place you haven't been back to since, the warmth of grandparents.

This issue is built around that feeling. Films that use summer not just as a backdrop but as a texture. Music that captures the season's energy and, in some cases, helped define what that energy sounds like across Asia. And a photographer who spent four decades documenting the rooms where people went to really listen.

— Yubin

Imagine School of Rock (with the amazing Jack Black) relocated to rural Japan, with the chaos turned down and the dry humor turned all the way up — that is roughly the experience of watching Swing Girls. Thirteen unmotivated high schoolers, stuck in a summer math class, agree to deliver bento lunches to their school's brass band, who have left for a baseball tournament without their food. It is a small, dumb errand. Then it changes everything.

The lunches spoil in the heat. The band gets food poisoning. And the thirteen girls — who know nothing about music and have shown no particular interest in learning — decide that they will become the band instead to avoid getting into trouble.

What follows is exactly the kind of story Japanese cinema tells better than others: not an individual finding glory, but a group finding rhythm and meaning together. Yaguchi, who also made Waterboys, understands that the comedy works because the stakes are very small and the commitment is entirely real. Nobody is saving the world. They are learning to play "Sing, Sing, Sing" by the end of summer, and somehow that becomes enough to root for completely.

The film swept Japan's Academy Prize the following year, picking up wins for Most Popular Film and Newcomer of the Year. There is no romance subplot doing the emotional heavy lifting, no tragedy or drama — just thirteen girls and a swing band born from boredom, bad math grades, and a spoiled lunch box. Decades before Pitch Perfect made the underdog-music-group formula a global franchise, Swing Girls was already doing it better, with a horn section instead of a cappella and a lot less polish.

Stream on Hulu, or rent on Apple TV and Amazon. (Trailer)

Two more films from Asia where summer is the backdrop as well as a mood — one bittersweet, one quietly surreal, neither in any hurry to get anywhere.

The Summer Is Gone (八月) — Zhang Dalei (China, 2016)

Set in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, in the early 1990s, this is twelve-year-old Xiaolei's last summer before middle school — swimming, watching Bruce Lee films, mostly just being bored — while his father's job at the state-run film studio quietly disappears under China's market reforms. Shot in beautiful shimmering black and white, it swept the Golden Horse Awards, winning Best Feature Film, Best New Performer, and the FIPRESCI Prize: a small, exact memory of a country changing underneath a child who is mostly just trying to enjoy his holiday.

Stream on Mubi, or rent on Amazon. (Trailer)

The Taste of Tea (茶の味) — Katsuhito Ishii (Japan, 2004)

A family of gentle eccentrics — a hypnotherapist father, an animator mother, a son falling in love, a daughter pursued by her own giant doppelgänger — lives out an ordinary, yet slightly surreal summer in rural Tochigi in Japan. Critics have called it a psychedelic answer to Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (a 1982 Swedish drama centered around two siblings and their family), though Ishii himself has said he has never actually seen it, and built the film instead from the family comedies he grew up on. Selected for Cannes, it has the rare quality of feeling like a long, warm afternoon you didn't want to end.

Stream on Criterion Channel, or rent on Apple TV. (Trailer)

In 1974, two Tokyo high schoolers named Issei Noro and Tetsuo Sakurai met through a mutual friend and started rehearsing together, trying and mostly failing to sound like the rock supergroup Beck, Bogert and Appice. Their lineup kept changing so often that for a while they didn't even bother naming the band — they just used a different name every time they played a show. That stopped being an option once a magazine refused to run an interview with them unless they picked one. Noro’s mother suggested a constellation. They went with Cassiopeia, simplified the spelling, and Casiopea was born.

By the early 1980s, jazz fusion in America was already being treated as a tired experiment — too slick for jazz purists, too complicated for pop radio. Nobody told Japan. Casiopea spent the back half of the decade doing exactly what their American counterparts had grown tired of doing, except faster, brighter, and with a great deal more confidence.

Mint Jams wasn't supposed to be a landmark album. It started as a compilation, stitched together for Alfa Records' push into Europe. And then someone had a better idea: record the band live instead, then sweeten it just enough in the studio that most listeners can't tell the difference. The shortcut became the masterpiece — fast, precise, played without worries about whether anyone back home understood what they were doing. It worked well enough that the European tour that the album was originally meant to support actually happened with success.

This is also, not coincidentally, the record that helped set off a small wave of fusion bands across Asia — musicians in Korea, Indonesia, and elsewhere who heard what was coming out of Tokyo and decided to try a similar approach with their own local ingredients.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music.

Japan's fusion jazz boom didn't stay in their country only. Once Casiopea and bands like them proved the genre could work outside America, musicians elsewhere in Asia picked it up and started building something of their own.

Light & Salt (빛과 소금) — Vol. 1 (Korea, 1990)

Out of Seoul's Dong-A Records — a small but influential label that led the underground jazz, blues and folk movement during mid-80’s to mid-90’s — came this quietly definitive album. "Shampoo Fairy" (샴푸의 요정) remains its best-known moment from the album: airy synths, a relaxed groove, the feeling of watching a sunset from a coastal road you're in no rush to finish driving. Sophisticated without ever showing off about it.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music.

Pasti — Karimata (Indonesia, 1985)

Formed the same year this debut album arrived, Karimata was part of a small cluster of Indonesian bands — alongside Krakatau and Emerald — who took the fusion language coming out of Japan and started speaking it with a local accent, drawing on Indonesian musical sensibilities rather than simply copying the source. Major labels at home wouldn't release an album without vocal tracks, so half of Pasti compromises with guest singers; the other half doesn't bother, including the instrumental opener "Dahaga." Within a year, the band was playing the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands.

Stream on Spotify, or search YouTube for the original Pro Sound vinyl rips.

A jazz kissa (a shortening of kissaten 喫茶店, meaning a tea shop) is not what most people imagine before they walk into one for the first time. From the outside, it looks like an ordinary coffee shop. Inside, the furniture is arranged not for conversation but for listening — chairs angled toward the speakers, which are sometimes large enough to fill an entire wall. The owner decides what plays. Nobody makes requests. Talking, if it happens at all, happens in a murmur. The music is the point.

Jazz kissa emerged in postwar Japan, reaching their height during the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when imported records were scarce and live American jazz performances were even rarer. These rooms became sites of cultural transmission — places where Japanese musicians and listeners could encounter recordings they had no other way of hearing. Today, about 600 still exist across Japan, around 90% of them still playing vinyl.

Katsumasa Kusunose first walked into one as a high school student in Kochi, on the island of Shikoku, and has been going ever since. He spent his career as a magazine editor — deputy editor at GQ Japan, then editor-in-chief across several titles including Figaro Voyage and Pen+ — before founding JAZZ CITY LLC in 2014 to do something he couldn't quite do inside an established publishing house: document these rooms properly on his own terms. A commissioned guidebook project fell apart when he became ill in 2014. Rather than let the archive of photographs he'd already taken go unpublished, he began posting them on Instagram (@jazz_kissa) in late 2016. His following has grown to 50K since, primarily from outside Japan.

Over four decades he has visited more than 800 jazz kissa. His photographs don't dramatize the spaces — they describe them carefully, the way a good editor describes a subject: with the protagonist in the center and everything else arranged to show you what matters. Vintage speakers. Walls of vinyl. A counter where a regular customer has been sitting in the same seat for thirty years. 

The most recent collection, Jazz Kissa: The Soul of Japanese Listening Culture, was published by ERG Media in 2025 — 336 pages, printed on Japanese paper chosen to recall the texture of vintage speakers. It is both a document and an object, which is appropriate for a subject that has always understood that how you listen is inseparable from where you listen.

Kusunose's work is available at jazzcity.store. The ERG Media book is at erg.media.

The Pritzker Prize — founded in 1979 by the American Pritzker family and often called the Nobel Prize of architecture — is awarded annually to a living architect whose body of work has made a significant contribution to humanity through buildings. It is the field's highest individual honor, and for the first four decades of its existence, it largely reflected the world as architects from Europe and North America had built it.

Then something changed. From 1979 to 1994, North America dominated the prize; from 1995 to 2010, Europe took center stage; and over the past fifteen years, Asia has become the new epicenter, with eight Asian winners since 2010 — five Japanese, two Chinese, and one Indian. Most recently, Liu Jiakun in 2025 and Riken Yamamoto in 2024, and before them — Toyo Ito, Shigeru Ban, Wang Shu, Balkrishna Doshi, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. 

What's interesting is not just the count but what these architects have in common. Very few of them work in the tradition of the Western starchitect — the signature-driven, monument-building figure that defined the prize's early decades. The Japanese laureates in particular tend toward the opposite: buildings that dissolve into their surroundings, handle light as carefully as structure, and treat silence and emptiness as architectural materials rather than lack of ambition. Wang Shu built the Ningbo History Museum partly from salvaged tiles recovered from demolished villages. Balkrishna Doshi spent his career designing housing for underserved people who had never been the subject of serious architectural attention. Liu Jiakun's work is described as growing naturally from Chinese philosophy and local craftsmanship rather than imposing a signature from the outside.

This is the kind of architecture that argues that the most important question a building can ask is not "how does this look?" but "how does this fit?" That argument has been coming from Asia for more than fifteen years now. The prize has been listening. The rest of the world is starting to catch up.

Oblique is a weekly letter for people who discover culture sideways. obliquemag.com